Who was the most right-wing man in history?

The recent death of Michael Wharton, aged 92, raises the interesting question: who was the most right-wing person who ever lived? Many thought he was. I am not sure he did himself. The last time I saw him, when he was already very old, I asked him how he saw himself and he replied, ‘Moving to the right.’ He said this as if regretting a life of obstinate radicalism, though as the honorary editor-in-chief of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald for more than half a century it was always difficult to get to the right of him (I tried) in any issue on the political agenda. On other matters he resembled Gilbert Pinfold (or his creator, Evelyn Waugh) and ‘abhorred … everything that had happened in his lifetime’.

Wharton’s own hero was Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorpe (1783–1855), MP for many years for Lincoln, a borough represented previously by his elder brother, father, great-uncle, great-great-uncle, and after his death by his eldest son. He served in the Peninsular war, in the 4th Dragoon Guards, and inherited Canwick Hall and the family estate in Lincolnshire; by his wife, Maria, heiress of Ponsonby Tottenham, he acquired another estate in Ireland. The DNB says, ‘He belonged to the ultra-Tory and ultra-protestant party, and was the embodiment of old-fashioned prejudice.’ He was one of the diehard group of 53 Tories who censured free trade in 1852. His one parliamentary success was to get the proposed grant to Prince Albert reduced by half on the grounds that he promoted ‘foreign influence’, and he opposed the Great Exhibition for the same reasons. Otherwise he sounds pretty tame, though one would like to know what was meant by the statement, ‘His appearance was extraordinary and his dress attracted attention.’