Archibald Noel Skelton (1 July 1880 – 22 November 1935) was a Scottish Unionist politician, journalist and intellectual.

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Quick Facts Member of Parliament for Combined Scottish Universities, Member of Parliament for Perth ...

Noel Skelton
Skelton, c. 1924
Member of Parliament for Combined Scottish Universities
In office 1931–1935
Member of Parliament for Perth
In office 1924–1931
Preceded by	Robert MacGregor Mitchell
Succeeded by	Lord Scone
Personal details
Born	1 July 1880 Hermitage of Braid, Edinburgh
Died	22 November 1935 (aged 55) Edinburgh, Scotland
Political party	Unionist Party
Parent(s)	Sir John Skelton Anne Adair
Education	Glenalmond College
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh Christ Church, Oxford
Military service
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Branch/service	British Army
Rank	Major
Unit	Scottish Horse
Battles/wars	World War I Gallipoli Campaign Macedonian front Western Front

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The son of Sir John Skelton KCB LLD, Skelton was born on 1 July 1880 at Hermitage of Braid in Edinburgh and was educated at Glenalmond College, the University of Edinburgh and at Christ Church, Oxford, to which he won a history scholarship. He was placed in the Second Class in the School of Modern History in 1902 and in 1906 he was called to the Scottish Bar and therefore joined the Faculty of Advocates. Skelton was respected as a lawyer, but he dealt mainly with divorce cases and those involving disputed wills. In 1920, he was appointed Junior Counsel to the Post Office and to the Board of Inland Revenue in 1921. In the First World War, Skelton served with the Scottish Horse as a Lieutenant, Captain and latterly a Major in Gallipoli, Salonika and France, where he was seriously wounded in the last weeks of the war.

Skelton first stood for Parliament at the second general election of 1910, but he lost the East Perthshire Division to his Liberal opponent. Despite his defeat, Skelton remained active in politics, speaking frequently from Unionist platforms across Scotland. He was opposed to Irish Home Rule, but he was more progressive on issues like land reform, industrial relations and the use of the referendum. At the end of the Great War, Skelton stood aside and allowed the Coalition candidate in East Perthshire to be elected unopposed. However, he was elected Member of Parliament for the new Perth Division in 1922, although he lost the constituency a year later to a Liberal.

Skelton was a talented journalist and wrote frequently for The Spectator, including four articles in 1923 under the heading "Constructive Conservatism".^[1]: 38 These lively articles set out his political philosophy—chiefly the pursuit of a property-owning democracy, the division of land into small-holdings, co-partnership and share options to improve industrial relations and finally the use of referendums to resolve disputes between the House of Commons and House of Lords—as well as urge the Unionists to compete with Labour on more typically socialist issues like pensions and housing. The four Spectator articles were republished in 1924 as a pamphlet, which had a lasting influence, particularly among younger Tory MPs.^{[citation needed]} Ben Jackson, a historian at the University of Oxford, suggests that Skelton's views may have been influenced by Hilaire Belloc, particularly the views expounded in The Servile State.^[1]

Skelton was re-elected for Perth in 1924 and again in 1929. He quickly struck up friendships with English Conservative MPs such as Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, John Buchan and Oliver Stanley and became the intellectual leader of a parliamentary grouping dubbed the YMCA by cynical older MPs. The group lobbied to make sure that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin resisted the influence of reactionary elements in the Conservative Party and instead implemented progressive legislation. Baldwin was sympathetic and it was soundings with the YMCA that prevented Baldwin backing a controversial Political Levy Bill that would have had disastrous consequences for industrial relations in the United Kingdom. Skelton also wrote several articles for The Spectator, the Quarterly Review and the English Review.

Skelton switched to the Scottish Universities constituency in 1931 and was returned unopposed. That same year he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland with responsibility for health, housing and education.

By 1935 Skelton was terminally ill with cancer and after several weeks in a nursing home he died in Edinburgh, aged 55, on 22 November 1935. The declaration for the Scottish Universities constituency was made three days later and Skelton was re-elected posthumously.

Skelton was cremated and his ashes were buried in Dean Cemetery with those of his sister. A separate memorial lies in the old churchyard in Kinross on the edge of Loch Leven.

Skelton had once been seen as a potential Conservative leader and certainly as a senior Cabinet minister. Although he was quickly forgotten among the wider public, Harold Macmillan wrote in his memoirs that Skelton's influence "on politics and political thinking must have grown steadily year by year". His thinking on property ownership as the fundamental basis of modern conservatism proved particularly attractive and Anthony Eden revived Skelton's phrase "a property-owning democracy" as a political slogan at the Conservative Party conference in 1946. Macmillan then used it as the basis of the house-building boom in the 1950s.

Macmillan's successor as Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, owed his early political career to Skelton, having been his PPS from 1931 to 1935.