Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Peter Cruddas Affair is Nothing New
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and writer.
Just over a hundred years ago, the Conservative leader was a rich, languid, superficially intelligent Etonian – those were the days – whose party claimed to represent the Empire and the Union, British greatness or even, in the guise of "Tory democracy", the welfare of the patriotic working class. In truth, if it represented anything at all, it was money, property and the interests of trade – or, more precisely, "the trade".
From the 1870s until after the great war, the Tory party was a partly owned subsidiary of the liquor business. If anyone knew this it was the Tory leader AJ Balfour. For 20 years he sat in the Commons as the member for Manchester East, where the chairman of his constituency committee was the local leader of the trade, and the seat itself was effectively in the gift of Manchester brewers.
Although the side-splitting grossness of ex-fundraiser Peter Cruddas (where does the modern Tory party find them?), with his "hundred grand isn't premier-league", and his offers of dinner at Downing Street, may have highlighted the problem, the conjunction of politics and money has been around a long time...