Richard Middleton (political agent)

[1] After an appeal to Conservative workers made by Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, in March 1896 Middleton was presented at the Constitutional Club with a cheque for £10,000 and a silver casket for his services to the party.

He shrewdly kept fences well mended with the police and the drink trade, and solicitously cultivated the ‘new journalism’ represented most famously by the Harmsworths and the Daily Mail.

The reputation of Middleton and Central Office...was ‘made’ by the greater achievement in 1895 of gaining a small but telling overall Conservative majority within the Unionist coalition.

Lord Londonderry hailed Middleton on behalf of the National Union as the ‘brilliant agent’, who had done ‘more than anybody else to secure the great victory we have achieved’.

... With the unprecedented ‘double’ of Unionist triumph in the ‘khaki’ election of 1900...Middleton's reputation attained its ultimate lustre.