Jim Prior may have been doomed to fail but he had plenty of help from the locals
It’s a natural reflex to blame the Brits and indeed, there’s a good case to be made for it time and again. But the career locally of Jim Prior, the senior Conservative who was secretary of state from October 1981 to September 1984, a month before the Brighton Bomb, is stark evidence that the time for conciliation had not yet come and conventional politics was impotent. The best Jim Prior obit is written by the veteran Julia Landon in the …