The Vermin Club was an organisation of grassroots Conservative Party supporters in Britain in the late 1940s.
On the evening of 4 July 1948, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health, addressed the annual Labour rally for the North of England at Belle Vue, Manchester, and described Conservatives as 'lower than vermin'. This was at a point when Conservative fortunes were starting to turn and Bevan's Labour Party was facing disillusionment and division. Young Tories took on the description with ironic self-deprecation and set up the Vermin Club.
Members took to wearing 'vermin' badges - a chrome badge featuring a rat and the word VERMIN. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as 'vile vermin'; those who recruited twenty were 'very vile vermin'. Margaret Thatcher, a Vermin Club member, described a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.
Famous quotes containing the words vermin and/or club:
“The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“He loved to sit silent in a corner of his club and listen to the loud chattering of politicians, and to think how they all were in his power—how he could smite the loudest of them, were it worth his while to raise his pen for such a purpose.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)