Selsdon mann.
Politics.
Used originally and chiefly by political opponents to denote an imagined person or persons believed to be pursuing the policies outlined at a conference of Conservative Party leaders held at the Selsdon Park Hotel 30 January–1 February 1970.
ΚΠ
1970 H. Wilson in Labour Govt. (1971) xxxvii. 759 Selsdon Man is designing a system of society for the ruthless and the pushing.
1971 D. E. Butler & M. Pinto-Duschinsky Brit. Gen. Election of 1970 vi. 131 To Mr. Wilson, these were demonstrations of atavistic Conservative instincts, which he summed up in a phrase he repeated time and again: ‘Selsdon man’.
1974 Times 31 Dec. 12/4 Selsdon man went wrong because it appeared to make the Conservative Party into a set of decimalized economic liberals.
1979 Internat. Jrnl. Sociol. of Law Feb. 102 ‘Selsdon Man’ climbed into office..by exploiting the traditional staple stuff of postwar British electoral politics—prices, unemployment and speculation about the ‘economy’.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1986; most recently modified version published online September 2020).
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n.1970