Horatio Bottomley – how a radical journalist became a right-wing populist MP

The talk will examine the politics of Horatio Bottomley MP.

During the First World War, Bottomley’s magazine John Bull sold two million copies a week. Bottomley addressed huge crowds urging them to wage a war of extermination against ordinary Germans. After the war, he was instrumental in the creation of the Anti-Waste group of MPs – a bloc of right-wing parliamentarians criticising the Conservative-Lloyd George coalition for wasting money on welfare and for privileging the interests of urban working-class voters.

The end of Bottomley’s political career was strikingly different from his beginnings – he was a member of the family of the secularist George Holyoake and had been a close ally of the radical MP Charles Bradlaugh. What were the steps which led Bottomley from his left-Liberal starting point to that destination?

David Renton is a barrister at Garden Court chambers, a Professor of Practice at SOAS, and author of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism