That first glimpse of the house as you come down the drive from Woodstock has been described as “the finest view in England”. You have the towers of the palace to the left, to the right is the Column of Victory with its statue of the 1st Duke of Marlborough and in front is the great lake with Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge. When George III saw this view he exclaimed: “We have nothing to equal this!”

I have a particular affection for my cousin Sir Winston Churchill who was born here on November 30, 1874. He proposed to his wife Clementine in the Temple of Diana and was buried near Blenheim Palace in the church at Bladon near his mother and father.

We have an excellent exhibition about Sir Winston near the room where he was born. The letters to his father are fascinating.

Winston was a great friend of my grandfather, and my father and mother. He was my godfather and I knew him quite well. He loved Blenheim. One of his biggest works was the four-volume biography of the 1st Duke.

It was very moving that he made the decision to come back here to be buried. On January 30 1965, I was fortunate enough to travel on the train which brought his body from Waterloo down to the station at Long Hanborough near Bladon. It was the most amazing day, nobody has ever seen a day like it.

by Melanie Phillips

Daily Mail, March 29, 2003

The violence swept the country. Windows and street lamps were smashed, the cushions of train carriages slashed, phone wires severed, golf greens burned with acid and buildings razed to the ground. Thirteen paintings were hacked to bits in a Manchester art gallery and bombs were placed near the Bank of England.

Senior politicians were ambushed and assaulted. A package containing sulphuric acid was sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and burst into flames when opened. An attempt was made to burn down his country home.

Even the Prime Minister was a target. On a golf links in Scotland, attackers tried to tear off his clothes and were prevented from doing so only by the intervention of his daughter, who protected him with her fists.

On another occasion, an axe was thrown at the Premier. It missed him, but grazed the ear of an MP sitting alongside.

Britain had never seen anything quite like it. And the most shocking thing of all was that every one of these outrages was perpetrated by women.

They were the suffragettes – a term first coined by the Daily Mail to describe the militant activists who crusaded for female suffrage, or the right to vote, in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Today, these women are widely regarded with uncritical veneration; their cause so manifestly just, and their one-time opponents so manifestly wrong, that their status as modern heroines goes unchallenged.

Last year, Emmeline Pankhurst, their radical leader, was put by BBC viewers near the top of a list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. Her statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament.

But the story of the suffragettes – or at least, the most militant among them – is much stranger than most people realise. Far from being a simple battle for equality at the ballot box, their campaign was driven by a deep-rooted distaste for male sexuality.

Quite simply, the more extreme suffragettes were man-haters, waging what amounted to a sex war. They regarded men as a lower form of life, whose untrammelled sexual appetites were the root of all evil – from physical disease to every kind of moral degeneracy.

For these women, winning the vote was merely a means to an end: the reining in of male lust, which they thought would raise the whole of society to a higher spiritual plane.