SCRUTON AND THE ROOTS OF MODERN CONSERVATISM

Roger Scruton’s intellectual journey from Peterhouse, Cambridge, to a London college full of left-wing firebrands, from sophisticated intellectual soirées in Holland Park to a “bohemian blur” in Essex and a squalid Fleet Street pub

Dan Hitchens

IF YOU COULD BE TRANSPORTED BACK 50 YEARS, to the London of 1974, where would you choose to be a fly on the wall? Surely at 52 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, the home of Sir Hugh Fraser — the charismatic war hero, Scottish aristocrat and Tory MP — and his wife Lady Antonia, the historian, writer and part-time society beauty. At a Fraser party, Hugh’s right-wing friends and Antonia’s left-wing ones would socialise with writers, bohemians and arts-world panjandrums. Posh Catholics rubbed shoulders with sweary, shaven-headed actors. And in one corner you might find a quartet laughing, debating and — though none of them would have put it so pompously — fostering a revival of intellectual Toryism. They were a striking group: Hugh Fraser himself, a longstanding critic…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2025

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