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| Affiliation | Conservative |
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| Name | Robert Rhodes James |
| Address |
, England , United Kingdom |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
April 10, 1933
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| Died | May 20, 1999
(66 years)
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| Contributor | Old LW |
| Last Modifed | Old LW
Feb 27, 2012 11:13pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | British historian and Conservative Member of Parliament. He was born in India and began his education in private schools there, returning to England to attend Sedbergh School and then Worcester College, Oxford.
He was elected to the House of Commons at a by-election in 1976 for the marginal seat of Cambridge, and held that seat until his retirement at the 1992 general election, despite a strong Social Democratic Party challenge in the seat in the 1983 and 1987 general elections. The seat was finally lost to Labour when he stood down. A self-described moderate, 'One Nation' Tory, his views found little favour with Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, and he came to resent his lack of promotion in parliament, never progressing beyond being PPS at the Foreign Office, and dubbing his own political career "A study in failure", borrowing the subtitle of his Churchill biography. During his time in parliament, he wrote two further highly-praised biographies, both of them 'official' works with exclusive access to private papers - a sympathetic biography of the Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and an account of the life of the maverick backbencher Robert Boothby. He was knighted in 1991 and after he stood down from parliament the following year, he lobbied unsuccessfully for a peerage, and held several visiting professorships at American universities.
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