There is much speculation as to who he could have been referring to.
Samuel Johnson on the Tory Leadership Ballot
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel There is much speculation as to who he could have been referring to.
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One response to “Samuel Johnson on the Tory Leadership Ballot”
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“…patriotism could be dangerous. It was regarded in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries as a profoundly anti-authority ideology (hence the Tory Dr Johnson’s famous jibe: ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’). Patriots – ‘your prating Patriots’, as one loyalist propaganda organ called them – were people who believed in the defence of British liberties against British governments who were trampling them underfoot.”
(from Bernard Porter ‘The absent-minded imperialists’ (OUP, 2004) p.119. )
Take care in quoting Johnson!
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