"Something is happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or a transformation; nobody is quite sure which." -- Ferdinand Mount
Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet (born 2 July 1939), known simply as Ferdinand Mount, is a British writer and novelist, columnist for The Sunday Times and commentator on politics, and Conservative Party politician. He was head of the policy unit in 10 Downing Street in 1982-83, during the time when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and wrote the 1983 Tory general election manifesto. He is regarded as being on the One Nation or 'wet' wing of the party.
He attended Greenways Prep School in Wiltshire, and was later educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1993 he succeeded his uncle as 3rd Baronet, but he does not use the title.
For 11 years (1991-2002) he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Today, he is a regular contributor to Standpoint magazine.
He has written novels, including a six-volume novel sequence Chronicle of Modern Twilight centred on a low-key character Gus Cotton; the title alludes to the sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson, and another sequence entitled Tales of History and Imagination.
He lives in Islington. He inherited the Mount baronetcy from his uncle William in 1993. His son Harry Mount is also a journalist and his cousin Mary Cameron is mother of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party.
According to 'Experience' by Martin Amis, Mount gave up the title in the 1990s.
"A majority in all parties do, I think, want to see local government recover its old vigour and independence.""According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.""All the research shows that being married, with all its ups and downs, is by far the most effective way of making young men law-abiding and giving them a sense of purpose and self-worth.""America slept because most Americans preferred it that way.""Defenders of the status quo will argue that this system has served us well over the centuries, that our parliamentary traditions have combined stability and flexibility and that we should not cast away in a minute what has taken generations to build.""For all its terrible faults, in one sense America is still the last, best hope of mankind, because it spells out so vividly the kind of happiness that most people actually want, regardless of what they are told they ought to want.""For the first half of this century, High Court judges have been cautious to the point of timidity in expressing any criticism of governmental action; the independence of the judiciary has been of a decidedly subordinate character.""I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing.""In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor.""It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.""No constitution is or can be perfectly symmetrical, what it can and must be is generally accepted as both fair and usable.""Of course great politicians are always liable to be wrong about something, and the more people tell them they are wrong, the more stubbornly they defend their error.""One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.""Sexual relations, of course, have existed, exist, and will exist. However, this is in no way connected with the indispensability of the existence of the family.""The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.""We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.""We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.""We want a system that will improve consistency and steadiness in the quality of government.""What the world needs now is more Americans. The U.S. is the first nation on earth deliberately dedicated to letting people choose what they want and giving them a chance to get it."