The Conservatives: A History

by Robin Harris

The only up-to-date, single-volume history of the Conservative Party available.
 
The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope. But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain's historiographical record.
 
Taking as his starting point the larger than life personalities of the Conservative Party's leaders and prime ministers since its inception, Robin Harris' book also analyses the interconnected themes and issues which have dominated Conservative politics over the years. The careers of Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and Cameron together amount to an alternative history of Britain since the early nineteenth century.
 
This landmark book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in history or politics, or anyone who has ever wondered how Britain came to be the nation it is today.

Genres: Politics, History, British Literature

640 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2011

About the author

Robin Harris studied at Oxford University, won the Gibbs Prize, and obtained a DPhil in modern history. In the 1980s he served in various political and governmental capacities, including as a member of Margaret Thatcher's Number Ten Policy Unit, and in later years turned to free-lance journalism and to writing works of history and biography.

Among his books are Valois Guyenne: A Study of Politics, Government and Society in Late Medieval France (1994), Dubrovnik – A History (2003), The Conservatives – A History (2011), Not for Turning – The Life of Margaret Thatcher (2013), Stepinac – His Life and Times (2016). He now lives in Zagreb and is currently writing a history of modern Croatia.

Reviews

[Manny]

Just wondering if the book contains this interesting story...



PS I am aware that this review is completely below the belt. The fact that a party contains a few paedophile serial killers tells us absolutely nothing about the value of their policies.

PPS What am I saying? I mean, "allegedly contains". These men are innocent until proven guilty, and I would not want it any other way.

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is properly no history; only biography,” so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Robin Harris in The Conservatives: A History has remained true to this dictum, writing what is in effect a biography of the Conservative Party. Thomas Carlyle would have approved, inasmuch as it is an account of the great, and not so great, who have made their mark on one of the most remarkable and enduring political associations in history.

It’s a commendable piece of work, at once scholarly detached and polemically engaged, written by a man who is better qualified than most for the task, both as a historian and as a political insider. The author of an elegant biography of the French statesman Talleyrand, Dr Harris is a former Director of the Conservative Research Department, during which time he acted as Margaret Thatcher’s special adviser and speech writer. He is presently writing a biography of the former Prime Minister, to be published after her death.

It’s a slippery beast, the Conservative Party, almost impossible to define in terms of a core philosophy, anything beyond conservatism, that is, a reverence for established tradition and a suspicion of novelty. Disraeli famously said that England does not love coalitions but the Tories themselves are a kind of coalition of different interests, with the pattern shifting and changing over time. The truly remarkable thing is that what began as an alliance of rural aristocrats, ranged behind the crown, ended as party of the urban middle-classes; from Bolingbroke to Thatcher in several remarkable steps!

The Tory Party is a chameleon; it always has been, paradoxically committed to the way things are yet capable of quite revolutionary adaptations, unlike its great rival the Whigs, once the strongest contenders for the future, now cast well into the past. This is not because it represents some noble and enduring principle, no; it’s simply because it is a pragmatic force built for one thing and one thing alone – to win elections.

In his introduction Harris quotes from the resignation letter of James Purnell, a former Work and Pensions Secretary, sent to Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, full of all sorts of risible and mawkish sentiments in reverence of the Labour Party – “We both love the Labour Party...We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing.” Harris’ comment on this is telling;

No Conservative politician at any stage of the party's history would have written such a letter. No one has ever pretended to "love" the Conservative Party. It is doubtful that even the most sentimental backbench MP would have claimed to "owe" the party "everything". Any serious Tory figure adopting such a pose would incur immediate ridicule. The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power, albeit on a particular set of terms. It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected. It is no better or worse than the people who combine to make it up. It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul.

Harris traces the origins of this ‘institution with a purpose’ back to the great constitutional and religious struggles of the seventeenth century, coming to a head in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Tories were the High Church Party, the party of insiders which, time and again, adopted outsiders as mentors and guides. Evolution and adaptation, that’s the key to a party that was Tory and then Conservative and then Unionist and then Conservative again.

The intellectual foundation of the modern party was laid, irony of ironies, by Edmund Burke, an Irishman, a Catholic-sympathiser and a Whig! Burke reacted against the horrors that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. So, too, from the ministry of Pitt the Younger onwards, did the Tories, reacting against the forms of abstract thought and utopian politics that had brought it on.

But reacting did not invariably mean reaction; it meant embracing change when change was unavoidable, often turning it to conservative ends. After all, it was the Tories, the High Church Party, who introduced Catholic emancipation; it was the Tories, the Party of the Landed Interest, who repealed the Corn Laws. It was the Tories who began by opposing extensions to the franchise only to extend it right down to the urban working classes. In Salisbury, the pessimistic aristocrat who hated the idea of democracy, they had a leader who created ‘villa Conservatism’, making the party a home for the new middle classes, a process from which so much electoral benefit was to be drawn in the course of the following century.

It was the Conservatives, the religiously orthodox, who were so brilliantly led by a converted Jew. It was the Conservatives, outwardly the most ‘sexist’ of all parties, who were to be the first to elect a woman as leader, a woman who went on to become the country’s most revolutionary Prime Minster. Paradox, hard upon irony, hard upon paradox – that’s the story of the Tories.

Harris writes with such brilliant insight. His is a story of personalities, each shaping the party in their own image. I’ve long taken the view that Disraeli’s vicious attacks on Sir Robert Peel after the repeal of the Corn Laws was born of ambition rather than principle, but Harris persuasively argued that Peel had been a bad leader, too remote from his party. To make one major change of direction without consultation – that over Catholic Emancipation - , is a misfortune; to make a second one – that over the Corn Laws – looks like carelessness. The comparison here is surely with Ted Heath, another remote and ill-omened leader.

The author has penetrating things to say about all of the party’s leaders. He’s particularly good on Disraeli, an organisational and political genius whose credentials as a reformer have been hugely exaggerated by posterity. His overriding concern, rather, was for the monarchy, the landed interest and national prestige. His zeal was for the greatness of England, as Salisbury, his successor as party leader, put it in a posthumous tribute.

Disraeli along with Salisbury, the longest serving Tory Premier, and Margaret Thatcher constitutes the author’s triumvirate of greats, a contention with which I have no argument. Winston Churchill, I also agree, is a case sui generis, a political maverick, whose reputation was surely only saved by Hitler! Party meant little to him, even less in the context of his wartime Cabinet, and on so many issues he was just as ‘unsound’ as Lord Randolph, his brilliant but mercurial father, too full of greatness, or a perception of greatness, for his own good.

I also agree with his lows, particularly his assessment of Harold Macmillan, the grossly overrated ‘Supermac’, whose irresponsible economic and social policies were to create a poisonous legacy for the party and the country. Disraeli famously said of Peel that he caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes. The same might be said of Macmillan, only in his case the clothes were those of the Labour Party. Harris writes of him;

By some definitions, and by analogy with Disraeli, he could just about count as a Tory. But, by no known definition was he philosophically speaking a conservative. This, through his legacy to the Conservative Party, was a problem – nor necessarily one that is extinct.

Indeed.

I love the author’s style, his liberal peppering of waspish and mordant wit. Some barbs made me giggle, particularly that delivered at Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Salisbury, his uncle, as party leader and Prime Minister. Balfour said that the Carlton Club, one of the well-springs of modern Conservatism, was a ‘beastly’ place, infested with political bores. Harris writes “When Balfour, or any other Conservative leader, lost the bores, he lost the party.” Similarly his verdict on Stanley Baldwin, the inter-war face of what I think of as Ostrich Conservatism, is absolutely spot on;

Baldwin won huge majorities. He just did not know what to do with them. At a deeper level, undoubtedly he reflected the mood of the times. This, in fact, was the problem. He reflected it too well. In Baldwin the country got what it wanted and, arguably, to stray into more disputed territory, it got what it deserved. But it did not get what it needed.

I wrote at the outset that The Conservatives is both a work of scholarly detachment and polemical engagement, the polemical element becoming ever more obvious as we move towards the present day. The final chapter is headed Cameron’s Party?, with a question mark that does not speak so much as shout! History’s judgement on David Cameron is indeed open – is he Peel or is he Heath or is he still the ‘heir to Blair’? We shall see.

The author is generally fair (his brickbats are thrown elsewhere), though I share his scepticism over the present modernising project, over what John O’Sullivan, writing in the National Review and elsewhere, describes as the “Dianification of Toryism”, promoting all sorts of trendy causes that no ordinary Tory voter gives a damn about. Conservatives will never win elections by pretending to be liberals.

The final paragraph of the final chapter simply soars;

Disraeli, the Jewish outsider who championed traditional institutions, Salisbury, the fastidious aristocrat who won over the bourgeoisie, and Thatcher, the woman who crushed the unions, the Argentinean Junta and most of the Cabinet, and restored the economy to health, are all, in their different ways, completely surprising. It matters to the country that the Conservative Party should retain its capacity to produce surprises, and so harness the eccentric, distinctive qualities of British national greatness.

This is an entertaining, engaging and lively book with so many highs. That only makes the occasional lows all the more irritating. For example, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the fifth Marquis of Landsdowne, who succeeded Salisbury as Foreign Secretary in 1900 (hitherto he had held this post in conjunction with that of Prime Minister), is never properly introduced, with the result that the index, presumably compiled by someone other than the author, conflates him with his grandfather, the third Marquis, a leading Whig politician.

Similarly, when Salisbury resigned from the premiership in July 1902 the author writes that “the Queen took Salisbury’s advice and asked his nephew [Balfour] to head the government.” Can this be Alexandra, wife of Edward VII and queen consort? Edward was indisposed at the time, ill in the aftermath of peritonitis, so I suppose it might have been Alexandra, though I wasn’t aware that consorts had that constitutional authority. It certainly can’t be Victoria, the only other Queen referred to up to this point, who died over a year before!

Once again this is me reading with the eye of an academic, ever attentive to detail, no matter how petty. Set against the overall value of a book that is bound to serve as a standard modern introduction to the history of the Conservative Party it’s of little substance, mole hills beside a mountain.

[Andrew Fish · Rating 1 out of 5]

A history of the Conservative Party is, like almost any political party in itself, always likely to divide opinion. There will be those who come at the book from the angle of its opponents and who thus expect an apologia, or at very least a justification for past policy; supporters will expect an exhortation of a grand institution and a hope for its future. Neither will be satisfied by this volume. As a pragmatist with no party loyalties I have to say I'm not satisfied either. This is history written by someone who appears not to regularly read it.

The form of the book is a series of analyses of the various eras of Conservative Party development. These are not necessarily the individual leaders, rather groups of leaders combined under the banner of the one whom the author sees as defining the period. For the most part this goes without comment, although oddly the author feels the need to justify the decision when it comes to including John Major in the chapter on Thatcher's Party. The last chapter is defined as Cameron's Party with a question mark, as if the author is unsure a future writer would see the present party leader as defining the period from 1997 until whenever that era is seen to end.

The structure is not really the problem, as long as the divisions seem logical. The problem is that the book is more heavily focused on the personality of each leader and his or her various spats with the party and his or her rivals than it is with the history or the actual politics. One could often be forgiven for thinking the opposition, or when the Tories were the opposition, the government, were irrelevant. The history of a political party cannot be told without reference to the broader political movements of its time, but frequently this seems to be beneath the author's notice.

Historical events can also be given short shrift when they are mentioned. A passage may mention the impact of an event such as The Phoenix Park murders without mentioning either where Phoenix Park is (not the Park and Ride in Nottingham, but a park in Ireland) or indeed who was actually murdered (the chief secretary for Ireland and his under-secretary). Other events will be unnecessarily foreshadowed and then dwelt on. It's all a bit amateur.

But the thing which fatally undermines the book is the obvious bias of the writer. All historians have biases, of course, and will frequently cherry pick reports to suit their views or draw conclusions about the outcomes of events which the evidence doesn't necessarily support. What they don't usually do is pass personal judgement on the people whose history they are writing. So, it's fine to say that Macmillan was to the left of his party, but not then to criticise him for it.

Finally, the modern era feels rushed, as if the author were desperate to avoid returning his advance. After dwelling on the 1950s for so long it felt as it were in real-time, the era from 1975 to 2010 is dismissed with alarming speed. This is not because the author feels it too soon to pass judgement on those years - in fact passing judgement is pretty much all he does - but I feel like I learned more about Margaret Thatcher from the Question Time special after her death than I did in her chapter in this history. In the end, anyone interested in the history of the Conservative Party is either going to have to read one of the books exploring the histories of the various leaders or, for the modern years, wait until Dominic Sandbrook catches up with present times.

[Sunil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting account of the conservative party up. The majority is dealt with by historic figures - Peel, Disraeli etc, those in the 20th century are glossed over so a star is lost for that. The author admits at the start he will do this about Thatcher given he is writing a separate book about her.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[David Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to understand something before you can properly criticise it....In that respect this book has been very useful 😋

[Politiker · Rating 4 out of 5]

By Daniel Boomsma (http://politiker.co.uk/2013/02/20/boo...)

"At first sight it does not seem difficult to be a Conservative”, the essayist and journalist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) once wrote. And indeed he was right. But it will occur to those who study conservatism thoroughly that it is only ”at first sight” that conservatism seems a simple way of thinking. Being a conservative is not an easy business. It asks for a different view on politics, one that is not less complex than a liberal or socialist outlook. And above all, it requires a thorough understanding of one’s own history.

In his The Conservatives: A History Robin Harris shows what it means to be a conservative. At the same time his book is an elaborate history of the Conservative Party, though Harris is not particularly interested in organisational matters. Conservatives with a small c, as Harris defines them (though he finds Michael Oakeshott’s definition ”the single best”), are in favour of keeping the country recognizable in its identity and secure in its future, an echo it seems of Edmund Burke who had ”a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve.”

Starting with the Tory beginnings in the eighteenth-century, with the eloquent and ‘philosophical’ Burke – a politician is a philosopher in action, Burke stated – the practical William Pitt the younger, Robert Peel and the consistent Derby, Harris accurately illustrates the rise of the oldest and most successful political party in, arguably, Europe.

The success of the Conservative Party was not self-evident however. By the mid/end of the nineteenth-century, Harris points out, a majority of political commentators were convinced of the fact that the liberals and later the socialists or Labour movement would ultimately be victorious, simply because they ”understood their time better”. The liberals had their democracy, and the socialists a growing working class.

But commentators proved to be wrong. Harris shows that it was because of their great leaders that the Conservative party survived. Indeed, their personalities are the key to understanding the Conservative party, a party that is essentially an elective dictatorship. Control lies fully with the leader. Consultation is really a Labour thing.

Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Baldwin, Thatcher; they all had an appetite to lead and, indeed, lead well. Disraeli set the party on a new path with his one nation politics, the ”fastidious aristocrat” Lord Salisbury achieved real dominance by staying in office for fourteen years, Baldwin, who had ”a kind of magic in his day”, made it the ”natural party of government”, and Thatcher ”rescued and strengthened” the party, re-established the country’s reputation and crushed the unions after a period of stagnation.

So what about David Cameron, one is inclined to ask? Harris ends his book with a chapter on the current prime minister and he is not particularly positive. First of all, Cameron, Harris says, ”owes his leadership of the part to Michael Howard’s patronage, David Davis’s errors and his own talents, in roughly that order. In short: he’s had a lot of luck. Cameron is not like Thatcher or Disraeli; he is too polished and too little a thinker or a strategist. Secondly, Harris thinks Cameron has failed concerning his big idea, the Big Society. It’s ”yet another ‘Third Way’ strategy - in this case, a third way between the Scylla of Thatcherite individualism and the Charybdis of Big Government socialism.”

The Conservatives: A History is well written, elucidating and especially a must read (with John Ramsden’s An appetite for power. A history of the Conservative Party since 1830), for Conservatives (with a capital C that is) who want to understand their party and their politics.

Daniel Boomsma is an Associate Editor of Politiker

[Adam Higgitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a poor book, and that is a shame because as the author notes in his introduction, there are few single volume general histories of the Conservative party. It is an even greater shame because Robin Harris's scholarship is fine and his writing is adequate. The basic ingredients are there and so is the appetite. And yet still, the final meal is hard to swallow and leaves a bad after taste.

That, sadly, is down to the seasoning. Throughout the book Robin Harris adopts a dreadful and clumsy patronising tone. Despite constant references to the narrow scope of the book when touching upon the wider forces that have shaped the Conservatives at key periods, he constantly makes sweeping assertions far beyond his or any serious historian's purview. Nationalisation of coal, we are informed, was "of course, a failure". The Poll tax was merely badly implemented. Baldwin didn't know what to do with power.

[Alasdair Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introductory history of the Conservative Party. As with any book of this size and scope, depth must be sacrificed; nevertheless, Harris is good at conveying the general feel of each era and at discussing the main incidents. I personally felt as if Harris warmed up from the 50s onwards, but this is perhaps understandable given his personal involvement the aftermath of this era. Admittedly, it may also be because I had just finished reading Andrew Roberts' biography of Salisbury and took a while to adjust to the more superficial treatment.

On the whole though, a very enjoyable read; perhaps time to invest in a hard copy!

[David Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, but parts of it read like a chronology, with many references made to grouping and events that were not contextualised or explained, which would be problematic for those without a grasp of British political history.

Overall, a good, strong book, but probably not strong enough to serve as a single authority on Conservative Party leaders.

[Geoffrey Charlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Largely enjoyable though Harris seems particularly dismissive of Conservative leaders he dislikes and glosses over the negatives of those who he likes. Though it is a readable overview of Conservative history which I would recommend to others who (like myself) do not have a particularly deep knowledge of the party.