A point made in Alistair Lexden’s piece about the Conservative election manifesto (see below) appeared in TMS, The Times diary column, on May 24 under the heading “Joined to the Past”.
The paragraph in question read: “The Tory party went back to the 1950s last week, in the branding of their manifesto at least. The historian Lord Lexden, the Lionel Messi of The Times letters page, tells me that this was the first manifesto to carry the party’s full name—Conservative and Unionist—since Harold Macmillan’s in 1959. Was this a nod to Nick Timothy’s vast influence on Mrs May? The full name was adopted in 1912 after the Tories merged with the Liberal Unionists, led by Joseph Chamberlain, whose biography was written by the PM’s chief of staff”.