Conservative Party Leadership Strategy and the Legacy of Thatcherite Conservatism, 1997-2005
Conservative Party Leadership Strategy and the Legacy of Thatcherite Conservatism, 1997-2005 A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Richard Hayton Department of Politics, University of Sheffield September 2008 Acknowledgements Doctoral studies are wasted on PhD students. It is a great privilege to spend three (or even four!) years of one's life in academic self-indulgence, an honour not fully appreciated until one re-emerges, slightly bleary-eyed, back into the real world. It is an even greater privilege to get paid for it. For that I am most grateful to the anonymous referees at the University of Sheffield, who deemed a proposal on contemporary conservatism of sufficient value to award me a University Studentship, ahead, I suspect, of much more worthy applications. Sarah Cooke was instrumental in putting together the original funding application whilst I was thousands of miles away, and I am most grateful for her hard-work then and for all of her assistance since. Friends and colleagues in the Department of Politics at Sheffield have helped to make it a most conducive place to pursue postgraduate study. Too numerous to list in full here, those that spring to mind particularly include (in alphabetical order) Craig Berry, Matt Bishop, Dion Curry, Glenn Gottfried, Carissa Honeywell, Olalla Linares Segade, Vas Leontitsis, Robert McIlveen, Tim Montgomerie, Andrew Mumford, Bona Muzaka, Michael Neu, Ben Richardson, Louise Strong, and Adam White. Mike Kenny has been an invaluable intellectual support over the past three years, both directly through his comments on sections of this thesis, and much more widely through the other research projects we have pursued together.
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