History
Sir Edward Heath, prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974, held this seat and its predecessors from 1950, and announced his retirement at the end of the 1997-2001 parliament; at the age of 85 he was by now the nation's oldest member of parliament.
His successor was Derek Conway, elected as a Conservative Party candidate. However on 29 January 2008 the Conservative Party withdrew the whip from Derek Conway following alleged misuse of funds, and he became an Independent MP. He retired in 2010, and was succeeded by the Conservative James Brokenshire, who had transferred to this seat when his former seat of Hornchurch was abolished in boundary changes.
Read more about this topic: Old Bexley And Sidcup (UK Parliament Constituency)
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“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)