Take this quiz to find out if you can tell the difference between a real-life, dastardly, moustache-twirling, comic-book Tory and a fictional villain from a Victorian novel:
After you’ve finished, scroll down for more detailed information about the answers:
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- Tory MP when the Public Libraries Bill was first introduced to the House of Commons in 1849
2) “The homeless are what you step over when you come out of the opera.”
- Sir George Young – currently Tory Chief Whip – in 1990
3) ”If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”
- Ebenezer Scrooge – talking about the poor – in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
4) ”No one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others but that is a function of capitalist markets”
- George Osborne – Chancellor of the Exchequer – in 2005
5) ”I won’t claim the workhouses didn’t have their problems, but they were set up by people who cared”
- Former Tory MP Edwina Currie in 1986
6) “I can’t change my habits. I must have my comforts. I wasn’t brought up on porridge”
- George Osborne – the fictional character – in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
7) ”If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers”
- Late Tory MP Alan Clark’s widow on his infidelities
8) ”the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief …” ”cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies…”
- Boris Johnson – Tory Mayor of London – in 2002
9) ”I had the boy caned as an initiation ceremony and informed him that he was now a Highbury Grovian”
- Late Tory MP Sir Rhodes Boyson and former headmaster on how he liked to introduce new pupils to his school
10) “I would guillotine them. These are children you can’t educate. It’s merely a matter of caring for them until they die”
- Tory deputy mayor Owen Lister on disabled children in 2005