Elie Kedourie

Elie Kedourie (1926-1992) was a British historian of Iraqi Jewish background who specialized in the Middle East. He wrote from a conservative point of view.

Biographical Information

Adviser to Margaret Thatcher

In early 1980 Kedourie was invited by Margaret Thatcher to lunch at Chequers. Thatcher had been advised by the Foreign Office that the Soviet Union did not pose a serious military threat, so she invited Kedourie and other right-wing experts to take part in a committee offering 'independent' advice. Michael Howard, who was also invited, recalls the following in his memoires:

In the USA a group of hawks formed a well funded Committee on the Present Danger, consisting largely of pupils and associates of Albert Wohlstetter, who urged the breaking off of arms-control negotiations and massive rearmament. Mrs Thatcher was temperamentally inclined to agree with them. The Foreign Office was not. Not surpringly, the Prime Minister sought further options...She asked Hugh [Thomas] to set up a small committee to draft independent recommendations for the conduct of British foreign policy consisting of myself, Leonard Schapiro and Elie Kedourie...We put together a totally incoherent document which deserved to go straight into the waste paper basket and probably did. I continued to be invited to Chequers seminars and always found the Prime Minister friendly and courteous. But she was not easy company, lacking as she was in any sense of humour, and increasingly impervious to new ideas.

Howard recalls that Kedourie and Leonard Schapiro "believed the recently concluding Helsinki Accords had been a defeat for the West by 'legitimizing' the Soviet control of Eastern Europe."

Affiliations

• Salisbury Group

Resources

• Martin Kramer Elie Kedourie A formidable and dissident historian of the Middle East. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, accessed 24 October 2008.
• Wikipedia Elie Kedourie, accessed 24 October 2008.

Contact, Notes

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