Conservative History Journal

The story is quite fascinating and puts to pay the notion that somehow politics was a much more gentlemanly affair when it was run by “gentlemen”. The Salisbury/Northcote fight with Churchill was anything but gentlemanly. In the end, Churchill lost not because he was a nicer person but because, seduced by apparent party adulation, he could not envisage anybody outmanoeuvring him as Salisbury did. Lord Randolph Churchill, it seems, believed that he was indispensable – the most dangerous delusion any politician can have.

They tend not to deal with history, which is a pity as the Conservative Party and the conservative movement in Britain and the Anglosphere have a fine history but for all of that we need to congratulate Conservative Home on its 10th birthday. On to the next decade, chaps and, um, one or two chapesses. Perhaps, we could see some improvement in that? Just a thought. Think of all those feisty women in the Conservative Party from the Primrose League on.

Review copies of two books have been received, both seem interesting and will, in due course, be written about. One is by Timothy Heppell, called The Tories and subtitled From Winston Churchill to David Cameron, "a comprehensive and accessible study of the electoral strategies, governing approaches and ideological thought of the British Conservative Party from Winston Churchill to David Cameron". This is not, perhaps, the most exciting of all topics and the book is academic in its language and approach but it has the makings of an important study.

The other one appears to me to be more interesting: A State of Play by Steven Fielding is subtitled British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It. According to the Wikipedia entry, this "sets out the constructivist view that how individuals view politics is constructed by fictional works about politics". There is a good deal to that and I am not sure that is a particularly constructivist point of view. I also think Steven Fielding's website is of some interest.

Now all I have to do is read them and review them.

Not by me as I did not know either of these two men each of whom, in his own way, contributed a great deal to Conservative politics.

First, the colourful and highly opinionated Lord McAlpine of West Green, known for many things such as his euroscepticism and his exceedingly successful fundraising for Thatcher, his sociable habits and his art collection, his writing and, more recently, the new business of running a hotel in Italy. There was also the question of wrongful accusations of paedophilia in 2012 by someone who ought never have been taken seriously and the story of Sally Bercow making an idiot of herself, again.

Here is a selection of articles and obituaries: Wikipedia's long biography, the BBC's reasonably fair obituary, a fascinating interview in the Guardian some years ago, a highly salacious piece in the Daily Wail that lip-smackingly brings up the accusations in great detail while piously informing us that Lord McAlpine got his apologies and damages even from the egregious Mrs Bercow, and, of course, the obituary in the Daily Telegraph.

A somewhat less controversial figure has also died, just a day after Lord McAlpine: Sir Christopher Chataway, former world record holder of the 5,000m, one of the first men to run the 4-minute mile, the BBC's first Sports Personality of the Year, TV journalist, politician, businessman and Chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority. (Have I forgotten anything? Makes one tired just to list his many doings and achievements.)

The BBC, as expected gave a fulsome obituary but even the Guardian said nice things as, naturally enough, did the Telegraph.

During an idle and entertaining re-reading of Harold Nicolson's diaries I found the following entry for June 22, 1930:

I talk to Macmillan. He says that the old party machines are worn out and that the modern electorate thinks more of personalities and programmes than of pressure put upon them by electoral agents. He thinks that the economic situation is so serious that it will lead to a breakdown of the whole party system. He foresees that the Tories may return with a majority of 20 and then be swept away on a snap vote. No other single party will form a Government and then there will be a Cabinet of young men. 

Conservatism is a complex thing. It is either not an ideology at all, or a meld of ideas containing numerous internal contradictions, depending on your preference. What other movement can have absorbed both the driving entrepreneurialism of the industrial revoluion and the romantic opposition to it - simultaneously embracing the progress brought by "dark satanic mills" and the romantic view of the English rural village?

While nowadays Conservatives agonise about how to appeal in the North of England, McElvoy points out that many of the ideas and approaches traditionally associated with small-c conservatism evolved in Northern settings. The broad brush stereotype that the home counties are Thatcherite and everywhere north of Watford is socialist would have horrified 19th century aristocrats who disliked free trade as much as it would have annoyed the skilled, Conservative workers of many a Midlands industrial town.

For Disraeli, the middle class were greedy profiteers, a slim but powerful layer almost as wealthy as the nobility but lacking the noblesse oblige he longed to see restored. He saw the new form of the world as an unjust, binary monstrosity, writing in his novel Sybil of the dream of there one day being "some resting place between luxury and misery".

He was nostalgic for what he believed was the place of ordinary workers in a feudal village that had in the agrarian Middle Ages, something he feared was being destroyed by industrialisation. We may know today that most feudal peasants experienced short, unpleasant lives, but he believed they had lived in relative comfort, with a true place and part to play in their community. What he described was today's middle class - what he thought he was describing was something altogether different.

Few things could better typify the internal contradictions of conservatism than a Prime Minister who worked to create a ladder into the new middle class while believing he was simply restoring a mythical state of feudal yemoanry. He may not have been an enthusiast for suburban terraces funded by factory smokestacks (it was left to his Liberal rival Gladstone to praise booming Middlesbrough as England's "infant Hercules"), but he bolstered a middle class that was inherently tied to both, regardless of his intentions.

Today, as every school child ought to know, is St George's Day, something that, according to Ed West, became a matter for celebration in the 1990s and then for purely commercial reasons. True, to some extent, but a little unfair. The Scouts, for instance, always celebrated the day. St George remains the Patron Saint of several countries and organizations - in fact, he is a very busy sort of saint.

Many Patronages of Saint George exist around the world, including: Georgia, England, Egypt, Bulgaria, Aragon, Catalonia, Romania, Ethiopia, Greece, India, Iraq, Israel, Lithuania, Portugal, Serbia, Ukraine and Russia, as well as the cities of Genoa, Amersfoort, Beirut, Botoşani, Drobeta Turnu-Severin, Timişoara, Fakiha, Bteghrine, Cáceres, Ferrara, Freiburg im Breisgau, Kragujevac, Kumanovo, Lebanon, Ljubljana, Pérouges, Pomorie, Preston, Qormi, Rio de Janeiro, Lod, Lviv, Barcelona, Moscow and Victoria, as well as of the Scout Movement[3] and a wide range of professions, organizations and disease sufferers.

The 1922 Committee derives its name from the fact that it was formed by some MPs who were first elected in 1922. Led by the MP for Lowestoft, Sir Gervais Rentoul, they decided to create a body ‘for the purpose of mutual co-operation and assistance in dealing with political and parliamentary questions, and in order to enable new Members to take a more active interest and part in Parliamentary life’. As new MPs, they had little knowledge of Parliament. There was no party structure, other than the whips, within the House to assist. The new Tory Members showed feelings, in Rentoul’s words, of ‘ineffectiveness and bewilderment’.

A preliminary meeting was held on 18 April 1923, at which Rentoul explained the purpose of having a Committee, and the Members then adjourned until 23 April. At this second meeting, the principles on which the body was founded were agreed and the meeting elected officers and an Executive Committee. Rentoul was elected chairman. It was also agreed to meet each week – on Mondays at 6.00 p.m. – when the House was sitting. The first of the scheduled meetings was addressed by the Chief Whip, Leslie Wilson, who offered his assistance and that of his colleagues. The Committee also set up a series of Sub-Committees, though these were superseded in the next Parliament by formal backbench Committees set up by the Party Leader.

Although Lady Thatcher has been out of action for some years and has not even made any public appearances for the last couple of them, her presence was something many of us took almost for granted and found reassuring. Her death has temporarily united the Conservative party in grief and admiration and somewhere behind that unity are the thoughts that her political "defenestration" in 1990 left a wound that the party has not yet healed. It is a bigger wound than the Maastricht debates and quarrels of the Major years. Will the lady's death finally heal that wound?

Here are a few questions to mull over: Which was the largest popular political organization in this country? Which political organization first ensured that membership was open to all classes and people of all incomes? Which political organization involved public activity by women of all classes and in large numbers? Which political organization first had events, both social and educational, for children and young people? [The picture below is of a group of Headington Buds.] Which political organization set up co-operative funds to help those of their members who were less well off?

As the debate about education and its failings rages and as new attempts are made to counter what is seen as the pernicious influence of various educational theories, it is useful to look back on what was said in the past. David Linden, a Ph.D. student at King's College, London, whose interests lie in the modern day Conservative Party looks at a previous educational debate in the sixties and seventies, when the authors of the Black Papers on Education clashed with the educational establishment.

This comes from David Torrance's Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy and concerns the founding of the 1922 Committee and the death of a coalition.

The Carlton Club meeting of 1922 was integral to the development of the Conservative Party as a more democratic organisation, and to a country struggling to come to terms with the realities of the post-war era. A revolt by a group of junior ministers was the first hint that something was afoot, and in October backbench Conservatives decided to overthrow their leader, Austen Chamberlain, and withdraw from the coalition. Following speeches from Andrew Bonar Law, a Canadian Scot, and Stanley Baldwin, a half-Scots laird who affected a 'man of the people' image, MPs voted 185 to 85 in favour of discontinuing the six-year coalition and filed out of the Pall Mall club to face the consequences. It triggered an immediate general election and marked, in effect, the beginning of modern British politics.

It would be wrong to mention anniversaries and not refer to the assassination by car-bomb of Airey Neave MP on March 30 1979. Tory Historian well remembers the shock of hearing that his car blew up as he was driving it out of the Westminster Palace yard.

Neave was a wholly admirable man, a war hero, the first to make "a home run" from Colditz, who then served in Military Intelligence and took part in the Nuremeberg Trials, flawed though these were. Subsequently, he was a close adviser to Margaret Thatcher, concerned particularly with Northern Ireland and the security services.

Anything like that, inevitably, produces loony conspiracy theories and there were many people on the left and on the right who could not accept that Airey Neave was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a splinter group of the IRA. There were also conspiracy theories about Neave himself.

The Wikipedia entry gives a fascinating list of all those theories and their adherents. It is somewhat disconcerting to find that Tony Benn's reaction when presented with arguments that Neave wanted to have him assassinated were considerably saner than Enoch Powell's who maintained that the assassination had been organized by the Americans or by MI6. Perhaps both.

One of this blog's most faithful readers called my attention to this article in the Guardian about Mrs Thatcher that takes a few snipes at the lady on the basis of what there is on the newly posted private papers. The truth is that even the Grauniad finds it hard not to be overawed by her.

Once we get past all that stuff about her diet (actually, it does not sound all that unabalanced though the lack of carbohydrate makes one wonder) we come to the Guardian's main complaint.

The papers also show that her 1987 "no such thing as society" remark, which for many critics defined the immoral truth of Thatcherism, was not off the cuff but was her view as early as 1979.

Morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom. To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.

Tory Historian merely points out that today is the 205th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli, later Earl of Beaconsfield, first (and so far only) Jewish born Prime Minister of Britain, the creator of the modern Conservative Party, according to some, and the man who distorted Conservative foreign policy, according to others. Tory Historian hopes that readers will weigh in with comments.

December 1, 1919 saw the introduction of the first woman MP to the House of Commons. Needless to say, she was a Conservative. Nancy Astor was not the first woman to be elected to the House - that had happened in 1918, when Constance Markiewicz was elected as a Sinn Féin MP for one of the Dublin constituencies but, in line with party policy, refused to take the oath and was not allowed to sit in the House of Commons. [Both Wiki links need to be read with great care as there are inaccuracies and omissions but the outline of the two stories are useful.]

That was the first election, held in December 1918, after the Representation of People Act, passed in March 1918 that widened the franchise to all men over 21 and women over 30 as long as they were "either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register". Women had been allowed the vote in various local elections since the late 1880s.

Nancy Astor's candidacy and election was not, in the first place, an achievement for feminists though, obviously, it could not have happened without years of campaigning by both suffragettes (whose contribution was often counter-productive) and the suffragists, many of whom had been Conservatives. It was all a deal put together by the local Conservative Association but something of a political risk, nevertheless.

Early in October 1919 the first Viscount Astor (by birth American but a long-time resident of Britain where the entire Astor family assimilated very quickly) died of a heart attack. This made his son, Waldorf, until then MP for Plymouth Sutton, the second Viscount and he had to resign from the Commons. The Association then had the brilliant idea of putting up his wife who had been closely involved in his political career. The assumption was that there would soon be legislation that would allow those who inherit a title to reject it through various legal methods. In fact, the Peerage Act was not passed till 1963 and Nancy Astor remained an MP till 1945.

The picture above is the proclamation of her victory. Naturally, there are no pictures of her being introduced into the House by David Lloyd George and A. J. Balfour.

The secondary blog of the Conservative History Journal is finally in existence. The aim is to post very long pieces on that with shorter links on this, the primary blog. There may well be future technological developments on the site but warnings will be posted.

The first piece on the other blog is a long interview Mark Coalter, a frequent contributor to the Journal, had with Professor John Ramsden in the summer of 2007. The interview has not been published until now. It is now up in its entirety. But just to whet everybody's appetite, here is an excerpt about Professor Ramsden and Lord Willoughby de Broke:

MC: You could always look at Lord Willoughby de Broke

JR: I was responsible for getting Lord Willoughby de Broke’s papers deposited. I was the first person to read them and I went to see the then Lord Willoughby. I said to him, that these are valuable papers which should be deposited somewhere for safety. He asked where, and I took a deep breath and thought where would he like me to say? With one eye on 1911, I suggested the House of Lords’ Records Office as an appropriate place, which he thought a good idea. We then had a discussion about 1911. Bearing in mind that this would have been about 1970 when the conversation was taking place, he engaged me in a long discussion about whether the Parliament Act of 1911 had not, in fact, been a rather bad thing; it would have been much better (he argued) if the House of Lords had retained its power. The Willoughby de Brokes were die-hards unto the very end.

MC: And yet willing to countenance Asquith’s new Peers?

JR: There was a letter in that collection addressed to, I don’t think it was Carson, rather Craig, in Belfast around the time of the so-called Mutiny at the Curragh, in which Willoughby de Broke writes to the Ulster leaders saying that I am at your disposal, I can ride and shoot well and I have many tenants who will come with me. Just like 1642, whereas this was 1911 and he was proposing to raise Warwickshire for the Union! It’s wonderful. I guess Craig’s reply, while it doesn’t quite say calm down, old boy, that’s what it means. Obviously, what the Ulstermen needed was Lord Willoughby riding to the rescue. Instead, they pointed out they could look after themselves in Belfast, as indeed they could.

We have received the following note from Tom Hurst who is working on a thesis on Conservative Party rhetoric:

“Verbal Combat”: The role of Conservative Party rhetoric, 1979-90.

The Ph.D thesis looks at Margaret Thatcher’s public, political rhetoric during the period 1979-90. It is concerned not only with the speeches themselves but also with the process which led to their creation, the manner in which they were disseminated by various media channels and their relationship to government policy.

Any information on the areas discussed above would be much appreciated. Contact: tomhurst06_At_hotmail.com

Comments on this post will be passed on to Tom Hurst as well.

I have to confess to finding Facebook quite useful and interesting but I don’t know what Tory Historian would think of that. The friends and contacts one makes are more varied and, above all, further flung in the world than they would be in the ordinary course of existence. After all, is it any different from those correspondences so dear to the heart of all intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century? Or the pen-pals of one’s youth?

Then there is all the information other people have found out and posted as their status update: all one needs to do is to follow it up. That is what I did with the poster reproduced above. Produced in 1909, it showed very graphically what the Conservative Party wanted people to think of socialism.

My first reaction was a slight surprise: did the Conservatives view the Labour Party in 1909 as the primary enemy? Surely not. It was not even clear that the upstart movement would get anywhere far in British politics, let alone become one of the two leading parties. In the Lib-Lab pact of 1906, Labour was the junior partner.

Somebody (also on Facebook) suggested that perhaps it was fear of ideas and immigrants coming in from Russia. Hmmm. Those immigrants were not in a position to strangle prosperity in Britain.

There was nothing for it but to trace matters back. First of all, through the Conservative Party Archives, I found an excellent source of material, to wit a collection of political posters. One could spend many hours looking at these and working out the details.

Generously but also sensibly the posters are available for downloading and reproduction, as long as it is not done for commercial purposes and proper accreditation is given. I can safely say that no commercial benefit accrues to me from this or any other blog and I always give proper accreditation. As does Tory Historian.

So there we are: this comes from the Conservative Party Archive Poster Collection, to be found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and is number 1909/10-14

The collection starts with a poster from 1883 but comes into its own in the year 1909. Partly this was the outcome of better printing and lithograph techniques but there was also a political reason. Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon say this in “The Conservative Party – An Illustrated History”:

Radical threats have always galvanised Conservatives to mobilise support through the best means available at the time. The great reforming Liberal administration of Asquith and Lloyd George after 1906 provided one such challenge, with the defeated Conservative Party entering one of its most fratricidal periods in opposition, the new ‘legion of leagues’ spared no time in spreading their message to the electorate through a concerted campaign of leafleting and billboard posters. The Budget Protest League thus waged a fierce war of words against Lloyd George’s far-reaching 1909 budget, as well as launching a series of soften witty cartoon posters.

The Conservative Party website is running a Conservative Party history week, which is to be welcomed, as too many members of the party have no idea of where they, as an entity, have come from.

There is a short film about the party's development, concentrating on the progressive aspects, which is an important part of the history.



There are also blogs that deal with various subjects that Tory Historian will probably fisk at some later stage.

Tory Historian recalls this day in 1975 when a major political party elected its first woman leader who went on to become a spectacular (if flawed, naturally enough) Prime Minister. After years of media speculation as to whether Shirley Williams or Barbara Castle were likely to become the first in the woman leadership stakes, it was, inevitably, the genuinely innovative party, as it has been in history, that got there first.

Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party on February 11, 1975 and responded to the question of whether she was going to celebrate in a typically robust fashion: “Good heavens, no. There's far too much work to be done.”

About five years ago Tory Historian happened to be in the lobby of the House of Lords (known as Peers’ Lobby for obvious reasons). Baroness Thatcher walked across the floor and every single head turned to follow her progress. This was not because she is particularly unsteady or because she is gaga (despite all the malicious gossip that swirls round the internet) but because, with the best will in the world nobody can think of anyone in modern politics who can rival her in personality.