Robin Harris (author)

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Dr. Robin Harris (born 22 June, 1952) is a British author and journalist. He has written for The Daily Telegraph and Prospect. He has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University.

Harris was Director of the Conservative Research Department from 1985 to 1988 and a member of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit from 1989 to 1990. He helped draft the Conservative Party manifesto for the 1987 general election.

It was initially thought that Mrs. Thatcher's record in government should be recorded by Harris and John O'Sullivan in a political biography covering her premiership titled Undefeated.^[1] What eventually happened was that Mrs. Thatcher hired Harris to write most of her memoir The Downing Street Years. In that memoir Mrs. Thatcher wrought that Harris was "My indispensable sherpa in the enterprise of writing this book" and that "Without his advice and help at every stage, I doubt that we could have reached the summit".^[2] Harris also helped Mrs. Thatcher write her book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World and continues to advise Mrs. Thatcher.

Harris courted controversy when he wrote a pamphlet (A Tale of Two Chileans) in 1999 defending General Pinochet's coup d'état against the Marxist President of Chile Salvador Allende. In an interview with fellow journalist Andy Beckett in 2000 Harris says: "It was a polarising thing. I was on the Right, and I thought it was a bloody good thing it had happened".^[3]

In March 2006 he attacked Conservative leader David Cameron in an article for Prospect for what he sees as Cameron's repositioning of the party to the Left. He favourably compared the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to Mrs. Thatcher and claimed both are "immensely able, a workaholic, driven by values from a Protestant upbringing" but that in an election against Brown, Cameron "may look unprincipled and insubstantial".^[4]

[edit] Notes

^ Alan Watkins, A Conservative Coup: The Fall of Margaret Thatcher (Duckworth, 1992), p. 209.
^ Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993), p. xiii.
^ Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's hidden history (Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 179.
^ Robin Harris, 'Spoiling the party', Prospect, March 2006.

[edit] Publications

The Conservative Community: The Roots of Thatcherism - and its Future (Centre for Policy Studies, 1989).
A Tale of Two Chileans - Pinochet and Allende (Chilean Supporters Abroad, 1999).