Noel Skelton - Skelton's Influence

Skelton's Influence

Although Skelton died at the relatively young age of 55, he had once been seen as a potential Conservative leader, and certainly as a senior Cabinet minister. And although he was quickly forgotten among the wider public, his influence, as Harold Macmillan wrote in his memoirs, 'on politics and political thinking must have grown steadily year by year'. His thinking on property ownership as the fundamental basis of modern conservatism proved particularly attractive, and Anthony Eden personally revived the phrase as a political slogan at the 1946 Conservative Party conference. Macmillan then used it as the intellectual basis for the 1950s house-building boom, while his successor as prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, owed his early political career to Skelton, as his PPS from 1931-35.

Margaret Thatcher's first government and her popular policy of giving council house tenants the Right to Buy while promoting share ownership among the public sector workforce, not to mention her emphasis on the individual, perhaps saw Skeltonian principles at their height. And even today, with the focus having shifted from a 'property-owning democracy' to 'affordable housing', Skelton's influence is still profound.