MPs: Right Honorable Historians

The current House of Commons is notable for the number of members who are also historians. Will Robinson welcomes this trend, while reminding us of Parliament’s sometimes troubled relationship with its own past.

Etching of the House of Commons in the 19th century

Readers of History Today need no reminding that the result of last May’s election was historically peculiar. It gave us the first hung parliament in over a generation, the first peacetime coalition in almost a century and the youngest chancellor of the exchequer since Winston Churchill. Yet in the deluge of commentary and political gossip that has inevitably followed an arguably more significant fact has hardly been examined at all: the contest returned the largest cohort of serious historians in living memory.

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