Tribunes: The Personality of Democracy

Abstract

One important moment in Winston Churchill’s return to the Conservative party after World War I was the 1924 by-election he fought as an independent candidate for the Abbey division of the borough of Westminster, later characterizing the contest as ‘one of the strangest and most remarkable in the world’.¹ As Chapter 1 revealed, Westminster had a long history of attracting remarkable personalities. That list included the rake-cum-reformer Charles James Fox in the 1780s; the early nineteenth-century patrician radical Sir Francis Burdett; the Victorian philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill; the enterprising capitalist W. H. Smith; and Churchill himself—soldier, adventurer, journalist, first a Tory, later a Liberal who held seven different cabinet posts after 1905 but whose political career seemed to have stumbled when he lost the Abbey by-election in 1924 by 43 votes out of almost 23,000 cast.

The comparative effects of local manners and relative condition [are] always influencing, and sometimes forming the very nature and character of the subject.

James Field Stanfield, An Essay on Biography (1813)

Mr. Smith is one of those men whose rise to high power in the State is as difficult to account for as it is creditable to themselves and to their country.

H. H. Asquith, Fifty Years of British Parliament (1926)

To betray you must first belong.

Kim Philby (1967)