Carlton Club

Boner Law, who'd retired from the party leadership because of ill health, reappeared on the political stage.

At a famous meeting at the Carlton Club in London, he helped persuade Conservative MPs to break with Lloyd George.

The coalition collapsed.

Lloyd George resigned.

But he was in Mrs. Thatcher's cabinet.

And one of these overheard conversations in a, probably in a gentleman's club, not very far from here, you know, in the Carlton Club or something, he was overheard saying that to sign them.

I think it was the Maastricht Treaty back in 1985.

Or was it? No, sorry, 1992, I think.

But really interestingly, I think it's been like it's unofficially the home of the Conservative Party as a kind of members club.

There's the Carlton Club,

which was the original home of the Conservative Party, which is still there as well.

It was in the Carlton Club in 1922 that the Tories decided to ditch Lloyd George because of the coalition.

Ah, okay.

So I could

Now, my question is, the heatwave.

Yeah.

Two days later, Fox Strangways had resigned, in fact, from the club.

It then says, and this is quite flattering to the Carlton Club, This is in the Daily Telegraph.

He then nominated for the equally exclusive and equally Tory Carlton Club, but surprisingly withdrew his nomination before the committee met to consider it.

So I think Fox Strangways ended up having to hang his head in shame in club land just a little bit.

But this was arguably the great battle between the vermin and their nemesis.

The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this, that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible slum landlords, while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate.

Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club.

If you mention poverty to him, he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice, something that is conjectured to be, do him good.

Nor is Hodge more happy, for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray pointed beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom.

But how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard? The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and poetry.

But how can he, unless the fountain, like other fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy? A house where the woman is out working and the man isn't, and the child is forced by law to think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's.

No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly.

If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an anthill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects.

I should like, if I might be permitted, to read the passage which appears extremely relevant to the question now before the House.

Writing from the Carlton Club on the twenty-second of December, 1886, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in resigning his office, wrote to Lord Salisbury, who had pointed out the desperate state of Europe and the possibilities of immediate war, very much in the same way as he has done recently.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer replied as follows: The great question of public expenditure is not so technical or departmental as might be supposed by a superficial critic.

Foreign policy and free expenditure upon armaments act and react upon one another.