Honouring Robert Conquest

One of the perks of working at Downing Street in my day (the mid-to-late 1980s) was that you were invited to propose candidates for the Honours List. You weren’t encouraged to propose too many people, or to do so too often, and there was certainly no guarantee that your candidates would get beyond the hurdle of the first patronage committee meeting. But it was a pleasant—okay, slightly grand—feeling to know that some worthy person might have his worth recognised as a result of your proposal.

I proposed two people. The first was Professor Norman Gash, the author of a classic biography of the great nineteenth-century Tory statesman Sir Robert Peel, and one of the few strong supporters of Mrs Thatcher in the academic world. The other was Robert Conquest, the historian of Stalin’s purges and the forced Ukrainian famine, who died on August 3. He was more than a supporter of Mrs Thatcher; he was her informal but valued adviser on foreign policy.

If asked in advance which of my…