BiteBack Publishing

Although he had a profound influence on Conservative thinking in the last century, and was once tipped as a future party leader, the memory of Noel Skelton has quietly faded in British political history.

Born in July 1880, Archibald Noel Skelton was a Scottish Unionist politician, a lawyer, a talented journalist and intellectual, whose early death at the age of 55 deprived the Conservative Party of a reforming and progressive spirit.

The intellectual conductor of a group of young Parliamentarians which included Macmillan, Eden, Boothby and John Buchan, Noel Skelton (with a young Alec Douglas-Home as his PPS) advocated a “Constructive Conservatism”, in which he eschewed the party’s more reactionary elements in favour of a progressive line on traditionally socialist issues such as property ownership and industrial relations.

Despite his near disappearance from the history books, Skelton’s influence on the party during the last century cannot be underestimated. His thinking on property ownership, in particular, became the cornerstone of at first Macmillan’s, then Eden’s, and even Douglas-Home’s policy making on housing in the post-war era.

Indeed, Skelton’s principles – summarised by his memorable phrase, a “property-owning democracy” – can even be traced forward to Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s and beyond. This is the first biography of a man whose quiet influence over political thought since the 1920s has been immense and, until now, under-rated.