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Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War
The untold story of how Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party envisioned Britain's post-war future
We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't.
This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world.
From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back-to-the-land, Blue Jerusalem reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as their Labour and left-wing opponents in their wartime plans for a post-war world.
Bringing these alternative visions of Britain's post-war future back to life, Blue Jerusalem restores politics to the centre of the story of Britain's war. It demonstrates how everything from the weapons Britain fought with, to the theatres in which the fighting took place and the allies Britain chose were the product of political decisions about the different futures Conservatives wanted to make.
Rejecting notions of a 'people's war' that continue to cloud how we think of World War II, it explores how the Tories used their control of the home and battle front to fight a deeply Conservative war and build the martial, imperial, and Christian nation many that many of a Conservative disposition had long dreamed of.
A study of political thinking as well as political manoeuvre, Blue Jerusalem goes beyond an examination of the usual suspects - such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain - to reveal a hitherto lost world of British Conservativism and a set of forgotten futures that continue to shape our world.
We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't.
This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world.
From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back-to-the-land, Blue Jerusalem reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as their Labour and left-wing opponents in their wartime plans for a post-war world.
Bringing these alternative visions of Britain's post-war future back to life, Blue Jerusalem restores politics to the centre of the story of Britain's war. It demonstrates how everything from the weapons Britain fought with, to the theatres in which the fighting took place and the allies Britain chose were the product of political decisions about the different futures Conservatives wanted to make.
Rejecting notions of a 'people's war' that continue to cloud how we think of World War II, it explores how the Tories used their control of the home and battle front to fight a deeply Conservative war and build the martial, imperial, and Christian nation many that many of a Conservative disposition had long dreamed of.
A study of political thinking as well as political manoeuvre, Blue Jerusalem goes beyond an examination of the usual suspects - such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain - to reveal a hitherto lost world of British Conservativism and a set of forgotten futures that continue to shape our world.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published December 12, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 17, 2025
I could never run in my whole life, my wife and kids were always disappointed with how slow i was. When i played this audiobook i ran to get up and throw the speaker in the water my family loves me now.
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November 29, 2024Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol (Oxford) is a remarkable history of the Conservative Party during the Second World War that explores the lengths wartime Conservatives were willing to go to in order to imagine a Tory future for the postwar nation. Kowol shows that radical and utopian visions of postwar construction were not just the preserve of the Left, and that in spite of their crushing defeat in the 1945 election Conservatives could be just as visionary and creative.
Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Francis Young is author of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press)
Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Francis Young is author of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press)
May 28, 2026
We all know the story. The Second World War witnessed a profound shift in society, where everyday men and women fought a ‘people’s war’ against the blight of fascism and Hitler. Society came together for the common good, evidenced not only through the small boats rescuing the stranded Tommys at Dunkirk but also through the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the person in the street. Different communities worked with each other, forging new, egalitarian bonds in the fires of war, sharing everything as they huddled in air raid shelters and underground stations, on the Home Front and on the battlefront. With the Labour Party shaping the state’s wartime domestic policy, their victory in 1945 and the social and economic restructuring thereafter were thus inevitable points on a continual line of progress, from a conservative, traditional, and tired past to the bright hopes for a better and more equal future.
This is the foundation myth of our modern social state. It explains everything from the National Health Service to the modernisation of the countryside, from the welfare state to the country’s international relationships. But as Kit Kowol decisively proves in his book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, it is also fundamentally wrong.
Across six carefully constructed chapters, Kowol picks apart the accepted narrative by arguing from a simple position: wartime Conservatism was not a spent force, an arid desert littered with the weathered, dry bones of dynamism and inspiration bleached to insignificance by the blazing Labour sun. Instead, it was a lush and fertile plain, fed by the many streams of Conservative thought. Across every area of foreign and domestic policy – agriculture, trade, welfare, warfare, education, religion, international relations – the Conservative landscape was awash with ideas. Indeed, the problem was not that the Tories were experiencing a drought, but the opposite: they were, simply, flooded by different solutions – not just for the present, but also for the postwar future. This was the reason why the Conservative manifesto for the 1945 general election was so weak: it wasn’t from a lack of sustenance, but from a surfeit of meat. In a nutshell, there were too many directions from which to choose.
Implicitly, therefore, Kowol offers a warning to our current political parties, both – and most obviously – the Conservatives, but Labour as well. The huge Tory losses at the 1945 election were not the result of an assumed Labour monopoly of the Home Front during the war – Kowol has illustrated beyond doubt that this is a mirage caused by an excess of hindsight – but instead were thanks to an inability to agree on a direction going forward. There was energy, there was motion, but no vector. The broad church of Conservatism that included ‘modernising industrialists to aristocratic landowners, the great City trader to the small-scale rentier’ had benefits but, when it came to determining policy, also significant dangers. When no thorough manifesto could be agreed upon, these dangers became realised in Labour’s landslide. Firm direction, given impetus by strong and unwavering leadership, is needed for electoral success. The Conservatives lacked that.
Leadership is, therefore, critical to this story. But despite the honourable mention in Blue Jerusalem’s subtitle, Churchill remains very much on the periphery – just as he did in many of the Conservative’s wartime domestic policy debates. There was, and is, method to this. Churchill the man looms large in popular readings of Britain during the Second World War, but his focus often was not on the domestic minutiae at home. This allowed a flowering of contradictory opinions, a bloom of radical ideas, that gave the Party such an invigorating, vibrant intellectual and philosophical burst. By removing Churchill from centre stage, Kowol allows these aspects to come to the fore. When so much focus continues to rest on Churchill, this is a bold move – and one that works. Nevertheless, it will not satisfy the Churchill obsession.
To those wishing to understand the dynamics of wartime Conservatism, Churchill’s almost cameo role shouldn’t matter. Kowol has done an outstanding job of proving that the Conservatives of the Second World War were not just about their leader. He has shown that, instead, the Party was teeming with radical ideas for a better future: about ways to rebuild Britain physically, socially, and ideologically, and about how to restructure the fractured global relationships to forge a new world. But he has also shown that, unless a leader is willing to take those disparate ideas and mould them into a cohesive, organised whole, then the best and grandest of intentions will be for nought. Politicians of today take note.
This is the foundation myth of our modern social state. It explains everything from the National Health Service to the modernisation of the countryside, from the welfare state to the country’s international relationships. But as Kit Kowol decisively proves in his book Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, it is also fundamentally wrong.
Across six carefully constructed chapters, Kowol picks apart the accepted narrative by arguing from a simple position: wartime Conservatism was not a spent force, an arid desert littered with the weathered, dry bones of dynamism and inspiration bleached to insignificance by the blazing Labour sun. Instead, it was a lush and fertile plain, fed by the many streams of Conservative thought. Across every area of foreign and domestic policy – agriculture, trade, welfare, warfare, education, religion, international relations – the Conservative landscape was awash with ideas. Indeed, the problem was not that the Tories were experiencing a drought, but the opposite: they were, simply, flooded by different solutions – not just for the present, but also for the postwar future. This was the reason why the Conservative manifesto for the 1945 general election was so weak: it wasn’t from a lack of sustenance, but from a surfeit of meat. In a nutshell, there were too many directions from which to choose.
Implicitly, therefore, Kowol offers a warning to our current political parties, both – and most obviously – the Conservatives, but Labour as well. The huge Tory losses at the 1945 election were not the result of an assumed Labour monopoly of the Home Front during the war – Kowol has illustrated beyond doubt that this is a mirage caused by an excess of hindsight – but instead were thanks to an inability to agree on a direction going forward. There was energy, there was motion, but no vector. The broad church of Conservatism that included ‘modernising industrialists to aristocratic landowners, the great City trader to the small-scale rentier’ had benefits but, when it came to determining policy, also significant dangers. When no thorough manifesto could be agreed upon, these dangers became realised in Labour’s landslide. Firm direction, given impetus by strong and unwavering leadership, is needed for electoral success. The Conservatives lacked that.
Leadership is, therefore, critical to this story. But despite the honourable mention in Blue Jerusalem’s subtitle, Churchill remains very much on the periphery – just as he did in many of the Conservative’s wartime domestic policy debates. There was, and is, method to this. Churchill the man looms large in popular readings of Britain during the Second World War, but his focus often was not on the domestic minutiae at home. This allowed a flowering of contradictory opinions, a bloom of radical ideas, that gave the Party such an invigorating, vibrant intellectual and philosophical burst. By removing Churchill from centre stage, Kowol allows these aspects to come to the fore. When so much focus continues to rest on Churchill, this is a bold move – and one that works. Nevertheless, it will not satisfy the Churchill obsession.
To those wishing to understand the dynamics of wartime Conservatism, Churchill’s almost cameo role shouldn’t matter. Kowol has done an outstanding job of proving that the Conservatives of the Second World War were not just about their leader. He has shown that, instead, the Party was teeming with radical ideas for a better future: about ways to rebuild Britain physically, socially, and ideologically, and about how to restructure the fractured global relationships to forge a new world. But he has also shown that, unless a leader is willing to take those disparate ideas and mould them into a cohesive, organised whole, then the best and grandest of intentions will be for nought. Politicians of today take note.
May 22, 2025
Latter half very useful for reconsidering the narrativization of the 'people's war' and complicating what is taken to be the reconstruction 'focus'/'consensus' on welfare in the coalition government. Like David Edgerton, there is an argument for seeing the period's politics as focused on (usually economically determined) social organisation and planning, as opposed to the actively pursued provision of welfare. Also reiterates how Beveridge's reforms were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things - to the point that the Tory's adherence to them post-1945 (election pending) was unproblematic and even cohesive with their agenda (focus on family, responsible individuals, combating 'laziness'.) It was one of the few things this actually very sectional party could agree on. Whilst Labour won the election, the continuity in the social order was remarkably C/conservative, despite not in the way anticipated or hoped for by all the splinter factions/interests the book covers. For all the beef the argument takes with accounts like Addison's and Calder's, the general implication of a (retrospectively) largely unaltered social order is shared between them. I guess Kowol is getting at the fact it shouldn't have been a retrospective admission of shock/realisation etc.
'As is often the case in British politics— and which in 1944–45 applied to Labour as much as the Conservatives— what kept parties together was their opposition to one another, not policy. The question of nationalisation, and what kind of nation Britain was, became the key divide during the 1945 general election, not welfare.'
'As is often the case in British politics— and which in 1944–45 applied to Labour as much as the Conservatives— what kept parties together was their opposition to one another, not policy. The question of nationalisation, and what kind of nation Britain was, became the key divide during the 1945 general election, not welfare.'
January 17, 2025
MY dad disowned me not for being gay cause he heard me reading this book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews