Lord Roberts of Conwy or Sir Wyn Roberts MP is a figure who remains largely unknown
within Welsh and British politics. Wyn Roberts remains an unusual figure within politics as
he was both Welsh and Conservative, two terms oft coined as contradictory.
In his time at the Welsh Office Wyn Roberts was responsible for a plethora of ideas which
helped to radically change the political landscape of Wales, including his most important
achievement of passing the Welsh Language Act of 1993. Whilst Wyn Roberts is certainly
neglected in the British political historiography, he is also is often unmentioned in the history
of Wales. This thesis looks at the life, ideas, and policies of Sir Wyn Roberts to determine his
importance to modern Wales, by examining his career, his Welshness and his British
unionism. It will examine his identity to ascertain what his ideals were, and this thesis will
then explore how this impacted upon Wales. It adds to the growing corpus of Conservative
history of Wales, an area of historiography which contains many lacunas, but is gradually
burgeoning. This thesis will make extensive use of the diaries of Lord Roberts of Conwy in
the National Library of Wales, which contain no less than 18 volumes worth of entries from a
man who spent 30 years at the front line of politics in Britain. His diaries will be used in
conjunction with material from local archives in north Wales and Parliamentary sources to
trace what Wyn Roberts did for Wales and how this resonated with his own ideals. A key
focus will be provided on themes including cultural nationalism, the Welsh language, the
A55 road-construction project, the projection of a ‘global’ Wales and Roberts’s position in
the tumult of the 1990s for the Conservative Party. This thesis contends that there was a
Welsh Conservative strain of thought, dubbed the Blue Dragon, of which Wyn Roberts was a
central proponent. It is largely a political strand which seeks to preserve and foster what it
means to be Welsh, though in a Conservative, and mostly British unionist, context.