Provocateur
Dermot Gleeson

Dermot Gleeson

Dermot Gleeson (not to be confused with a namesake who is an Irish banker) has been involved in Conservative politics for more than forty years. As will quickly become apparent in the piece, he has always been on the traditional wing of the Party and would be happy to describe himself as a Tory wet. He is also a Europhile, and spent some time in Brussels working in Christopher Tugendhat's cabinet and as a banker. He has also been a Governor of the BBC and made no attempt to close it down, thus confirming Thatcherite suspicions about his basic unsoundness.

That said, he has also been a successful businessman in the construction sector, and there is nothing 'wet' about his zest for life. He enjoys books, ideas, dogs, music and a good dinner: the Outer Hebrides and rural Ireland, with the Guinness and the craic flowing. We hope that he will often grace our pages  

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Politics

Conservativism and Ideology

In the summer of 1975, the new leader of the Conservative party, Mrs Thatcher, presided over a seminar held in the Conservative Research Department. In his book ‘Thatcher’s People’, John Ranelagh, who worked in the Department at the time, recounts how one of his colleagues attempted to present a paper that argued that  the “Middle Way” was the pragmatic path for the Conservative party to take, avoiding the extremes of Left and Right’. However, “before he had finished speaking… the new Party leader reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for us all to see. ‘This’ she said sternly ‘is what we believe’ and banged Hayek down on the table.”

The hapless ‘pragmatist’ was my 25-year-old self. And I still remember the next thing that happened with painful clarity. Mrs Thatcher glared at me wrathfully and said: “Dermot, I don’t know if you believe in Freedom, but I do.” It sounded like a career death sentence.

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Politics

Time for a national government

It is time to recognise that the UK’s approach to the achievement of Brexit, by far the most critical and complex task with which the government of the UK has been faced in many years, is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned.

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