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Recently the New Statesman initiated a series of articles on “the state of the right” with a piece by historian Robert Saunders entitled “The closing of the conservative mind”.
That title obviously has a conscious resonance of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, denouncing higher education’s failure of democracy in the United States, and John Gray’s essay on The closing of the liberal mind, published in the New Statesman three years ago. There is also, presumably, an implied reference to Russell Kirk’s classic exposition of Burkean conservatism, The Conservative Mind.
Robert Saunders is in command of his brief, as one would expect of a professional political historian, taking his readers on an informative tour of Tory history and thought. He does so, however, with unfriendly intent, as his closing paragraphs betray. Onto an accurate narrative of the Conservative Party’s past he grafts an inaccurate analysis of its present predicament. It would have been jejune of readers to imagine that the New Statesman intended to do Toryism any favours (cf. Sir Roger Scruton).
Saunders spells out his central contention early in the piece: “British Conservatism has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped ‘conserving’; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology.” The first two of those claims are undoubtedly true; the third is more debatable, in its assumptions as much as in the charge it levels. Yet the fact that even the Conservative Party’s most loyal adherents would be compelled, in honesty, to admit the truth of almost all of that comprehensive indictment is testimony to the crisis that now engulfs the Tories.
There goes that word again: Tories. Why does every commentator and politician inevitably find himself reverting to a 17th-century term, supposedly abolished in the early 19th century, after John Wilson Croker coined the term “conservative” – later denounced by Macaulay as “the new cant word” – in 1830? Perhaps because “Tory” was originally a term of abuse (derived from the Irish tóiridhe, with the connotation of “Irish Papist bandit”) employed by the Whigs during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1679-81, making the Tories’ enemies reluctant to abandon the opprobrious name.
In an article in Prospect in 2017 entitled “A strange rebirth of Tory England?” Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote of the enduring popularity of the Tory name: “Chamberlain detested ‘Conservative,’ which he thought a millstone round the party’s neck, and his biographer Iain Macleod always preferred Tory: his 1964 philippic denouncing the way Alec Douglas-Home had just been jobbed into the prime ministership is titled ‘The Tory Leadership,’ and it uses the name ‘Conservative’ only once but ‘Tory’ 14 times.”
If names have tenacity, so have ideas. The genealogy of Toryism is much more ancient than even its chroniclers have usually supposed and long predates the invention of political parties. (This point is made in refutation of Dr Saunders’ claim regarding ideology.) If one asked an intelligent schoolboy what link he could discern (apart from kingship) uniting King John, Henry III, Richard II and Charles I, he might initially be baffled; but if one further asked, in corollary, what King John’s barons, Simon de Montfort, Henry IV and Oliver Cromwell had in common, a pattern would emerge.
Politics in England has long been an antithesis: Court versus Country, later Tory versus Whig. The Whiggish historian Lord Dacre once wrote that “Whig and Tory are perpetual characters”. Two concepts of governance have long striven for mastery, one originally centred on the monarchy, the other on the nobility and property-owning classes. If that enduring confrontation was not ideological, pace Saunders, it was certainly a clash of ideas, of philosophies.
Contending schools of historians have sliced and diced the history of the Tory Party in an attempt to deny a continuum. Yet it is evident that the Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill under Charles II were the sons of the Cavaliers who served Charles I, just as the Petitioners seeking to exclude the Duke of York (later James II) from the throne were the heirs of the Roundheads.
Then came the establishment of parties. The English Presbyterian divine and controversialist Oliver Heywood wrote in his diary on 24 October, 1681: “A gentleman … had a red Ribband in his hat … he said it signified that he was a Tory, whats that sd. she? He ans. an Irish Rebel … I hear further since that … instead of Cavalier and Roundhead, now they are called Torys and Wiggs.”
Sir Keith Feiling regarded what he called the First Tory Party as enduring from 1640 to 1714 and the Second Tory Party from 1714 to 1832. The opening chapter of The Second Tory Party is superbly literary and elegiac in tone, as if the author had consorted in coffee houses with the periwigged politicians, writers and artists of 1714. That is how history should be written.
Feiling’s is a more persuasive interpretation than the claim of Sir Lewis Namier’s school that party identity died in the reign of George III. If it did, nobody had troubled to inform Samuel Johnson who observed in 1778 that “the first Whig was the Devil” – not crude abuse, but a comparison of the 1688 Revolution to the revolt of Lucifer. Jacobitism, Non-juring Anglicanism and other 18th-century beliefs were surely ideological. By 1783, with the advent of Pitt and Dundas, party was back with a vengeance.
There is a demonstrable continuum linking the Cavaliers and even their predecessors, however tenuously, to the Tory Party of today. At certain junctures in its history the Tory Party has resembled that knife in mythology that sometimes was given a new blade and sometimes a new handle, but remained conceptually the same knife.
At each supposed watershed some personnel and most ideas were carried over into the reinvented party, as in 1832-34. Although Sir Keith Feiling, as a scrupulous academic, conceded that the Tory Party did not exist “in the modern sense” during most of the 18th century, he concluded that “there was none the less a continuous tradition and some elementary framework of party and a descent of political ideas…” As Herbert Butterfield expressed it, “a great proportion of the existence of party lies in the realm of human thought”.
So, when Robert Saunders claims that the Tory Party today “has lost its suspicion of ideology” the charge is largely a matter of semantics. “Ideology” is an anachronistic term if applied to the historical Tories, but Non-Resistance, Jacobitism, the Landed Interest, opposition to a Standing Army and Free Trade versus Protection were all fiercely espoused doctrines in their day and the last remains a current bone of contention.
Dr Saunders claims of Toryism: “Its most important inspirations have been borrowed from other traditions: Edmund Burke was a Whig…” Yes indeed, but his Whiggism was pretty threadbare after the French Revolution.
Consider the most lyrical passage from his Reflections on the Revolution in France: “It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision … I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Those sentiments trample upon every article of Whig faith, from the glorification of monarchy to the disdaining of the economics-based polity of the emerging men of business. They are as Tory as Burke’s remodelling of the Whiggish, Pseudo-Enlightenment concept of the social contract into one “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, described as a “contract of eternal society”. It clearly is influenced by the Christian doctrine of the Communion of Saints.
All that is a million light years away from Whiggism, but it is very High Tory in its sensibilities. Where Saunders shows better insight, however, is in his analysis of Margaret Thatcher which is extremely accurate. It is arguable, however, that there was no such thing as “Thatcherism”. The Lady was not an “ism” person: she simply came to power at a time when the country was in a mess and set about redressing the balance of power, away from trades unions and in favour of citizens.
Saunders states no more than the self-evident truth when he writes: “Since the 1990s, the Conservative Party has shown few signs of intellectual life.” With the dawn of the 21st century the Tory Party began a suicidal process of jettisoning all its principles. It seemed gripped by a paroxysm of self-hatred, epitomized by Theresa May’s “nasty party” conference speech in 2002, which heralded the takeover by the “modernisers”. With the advent of David Cameron with his penchant for hugging huskies and hoodies the pace of auto-demolition accelerated.
Saunders’ assertion that the current Conservative Party “has stopped conserving” underestimates the situation. It stopped conserving a long time ago; in recent years it has tried actively to revolutionize society along cultural Marxist lines. The inspiration for Cameron’s “Big Society” fiasco, at its launch, was openly credited to Saul Alinsky, a Trotskyite too extreme for orthodox Trots.
Conservative aggressions against traditional social mores began to drive members out of the party. The campaign reached a peak when Cameron forced through same-sex marriage legislation with the help of Labour MPs, unsupported by the majority of his own parliamentarians. Those who broke with the Conservative Party over that issue were largely regarded as isolated protesters.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, however, in the piece already cited, interpreted it as a tipping point: “Things went horribly awry when [Cameron] provoked a section of [the party] by making same-sex marriage a government measure. It was largely to appease those he had thereby angered that he promised a referendum on Europe…” In other words, because defectors had found refuge in the Cave of Adullam that was UKIP, a party mainly focused on Europe, Cameron sought to lure them back with an EU referendum. That suggests one unforced error led David Cameron into another that was fatal to his leadership.
Saunders complains that under the Conservatives “no institution has been spared the cleansing fire of the market”. In fact, the Conservatives are currently engaged in an orgy of socialist-style commitments to spending, hurling taxpayers’ billions at the NHS, overseas aid and climate alarmism. They have never looked less market-bound, as they enter a bidding war with Corbynista Labour that they can never win.
But where Dr Saunders finally gets it utterly wrong is in his climactic tirade on Brexit, which he claims has burned out the last remnants of that part of the Conservative tradition that Edmund Burke called the “disposition to preserve”. He denounces Dominic Raab’s proposal to prorogue parliament as abandoning Conservatism’s hostility to what Anthony Quinton termed “sudden, precipitate and revolutionary change”.
This is one of the most misleading Remainer canards: the notion that leaving the European Union is revolutionary. The implication of Saunders’ remarks is that Tories should have a “disposition to preserve” Britain’s membership of the EU. On the contrary, Toryism’s responsibility is to preserve Britain. Brexit represents a return to the status quo ante, to national sovereignty and cultural identity, rescued from the imminent embrace of further EU integration. Patriotism is a key conservative principle.
But there is a further consideration, ignored by Dr Saunders. A genuine Brexit has been mandated by 17.4 million voters in the largest democratic consultation in British history. How could anyone claiming a Tory heritage ignore that imperative, the supreme exemplar of Lord Randolph Churchill’s exhortation to “Trust the people”?
The Tory Party is on the brink of dissolution after 338 years. If, as is likely, it fails to deliver a clean Brexit by 31 October then no human agency can save it from annihilation. It might be that, in those circumstances, a faction would break away and combine with the Brexit Party to generate another rebirth as in the past. What has brought it to this pass is not, as Robert Saunders claims, an obsession with the market, an uncharacteristic embrace of ideology or a “revolutionary” break with the EU.
On the contrary, it has been brought down by the sense of entitlement of “socially liberal” careerists, a culpable ignorance of its own history and the abandonment of cherished principles honoured over centuries. This week a YouGov poll revealed that 54 per cent of Tory members would accept the destruction of their party in order to achieve Brexit. They are right: a political party exists to translate ideas into policy; once it fails in that function, no matter how venerable or once-loved an institution it may be, it is of no further use and must be discarded.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.