Vermin Club

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The Vermin Club was an organisation of grassroots Conservative Party supporters in Britain in the late 1940s.

In a speech in July 1948, Aneurin Bevan described Conservatives as 'lower than vermin'. This was at a point when Conservative fortunes were starting to turn and Bevan's Labour Party was facing disillusionment and division. Young Tories took on the description with ironic self-deprecation and set up the Vermin Club.

Members took to wearing 'vermin' badges - a little blue rat. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as 'vile vermin'; those who recruited twenty were 'very vile vermin'. Margaret Thatcher, a Vermin Club member, described a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.