Monday Club
He joined the Conservative Monday Club in 1971. He was a member of its Hampshire branch before 1974, sometime its Vice-Chairman and elected Chairman in July 1987. He was co-opted onto the Club’s National Executive Council in 1984, where he remained until 1993. When Dr Mark Mayall stood down as Chairman at the Annual General Meeting in 1994, Michael Keith-Smith unsuccessfully stood for election to that post, losing to Lord Sudeley. In 1995 he stood as National Club Political Meetings Secretary, again unsuccessfully, somewhat surprising for someone who had sat on the Club’s executive for a decade. In his 1994 nomination statement circulated to the membership he said:
"The Club’s decline in numbers and influence will be reversed under my leadership as we join with like-minded Conservative Party pressure groups and Parliamentarians to fight the EU threat to British sovereignty. Our opposition to all forms of 'political correctness' and a commitment to the re-introduction of Capital and Corporal Punishment will spearhead a massive membership drive commencing immediately."
He was subsequently involved in "Tories Against Sleaze".
In 2001, the Monday Club's links with the Conservative Party were suspended because of its anti-immigration policies, which nevertheless had not changed for decades. After attempts by the Monday Club hierarchy to re-establish links with the Conservative Party, Mike Smith proposed three motions at the Club's Annual General meeting in April 2002, reaffirming the its opposition to mass immigration, empowering Club officers to institute legal action against the Conservative Party, and calling for the sacking of former Monday Club member John Bercow, then shadow Chief Secretary, and now Speaker of the House of Commons, for "hypocrisy". The first two motions were passed, with the one on Bercow being narrowly defeated.
Read more about this topic: Michael Keith Smith
Famous quotes containing the words monday and/or club:
“I have yfounde in myn astrologye,
As I have looked in the moone bright,
That now a Monday next, at quarter night,
Shal falle a rain, and that so wilde and wood,
That half so greet was nevere Noees flood.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)