Howard and Son - Rebels of a Kind

The political career of Howard Gritten took off with the unseating of a powerful millionaire MP after a petition to Parliament exposed election shenagigans like those of Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers. Howard himself became an MP despite the express order of his party leader not to stand and Conservative Central Office supporting his opponent. Explicit details of his bizarre domestic life, unknown to his far-away constituents, are also revealed in this remarkable story by his son.

Howard and Son tells of a life which ranges over seven decades from the Franco-Prussian war to the middle of the Second World War and the tenure of at least eight British Prime Ministers with whom Howard was in contact at some stage of their careers. Because he was often at loggerheads with the leadership of his party and the whips, he remained a back-bencher for his eighteen years in Parliament.

He maintained that none of his contemporary MPs had stood anywhere in the UK nine times for the same constituency, eight of them hard-fought contests, including three in the same year; that he was the first MP to hold for his constituents what have long since been known as 'surgeries'; and that he was the first to represent Britain's millions of cyclists in Parliament. At an early age John Gritten found his father's views, especially his incorrigible anti-Semitism, didn't tally with his own experience; in adolescence he acquired independent views and as a young man chose a left-wing orientation.