A new, comprehensive history of our Party has just been published. It is a profoundly important book.
Its author, Robin Harris, is a highly regarded historian and writer. He has been well-known in Conservative circles since the 1980s when he was Director of the Conservative Research Department. Having, he writes, been ” stressfully on the inside” of the Party organisation, he is now “contentedly on the outside” though contentment is not a quality that those who have worked with Robin Harris readily associate with him.
In some 520 pages of clear, forceful prose he draws on a wide range of (largely published) sources to provide an immensely stimulating, and often highly provocative, account of the Party’s changing fortunes-its triumphs and its setbacks-since the early nineteenth century. It was then that the modern Conservative Party began to take shape, mindful at all times of its Tory forebears and their traditions which stretched back to the late seventeenth century. So the word Conservative joined, rather than replaced, the venerable term Tory in the political lexicon.
There are many fine passages in this beautifully written book. The philosophical foundations of Conservatism supplied by Edmund Burke-ironically not a Tory at all, but an Irish Whig-are summarised incisively. It was from Burke that Conservatives learnt to ” nurture and respect the organic links between the practical circumstances-’ the little platoon’-in which man finds himself, and the greater national and international entities”.
Harris notes perceptively that ” the most effective exponents of Conservative politics have often been outsiders”. No one proved that point more memorably than Disraeli, the exotic Jewish outsider who cast his spell over the Party so profoundly that it continued to grow in strength after his death in 1881, making him the greatest Conservative icon of all time. ” National prestige”, writes Harris, was ” his decisive contribution to the idea which the Conservative Party has of itself”.
After Disraeli, Conservatives never wavered in their belief that their country must always be a leading participant in European and world affairs. In developing our national greatness, Disraeli’s successor, Lord Salisbury, achieved considerably more in practical terms than the remarkable Jewish adventurer. Yet Salisbury rarely gets the recognition he deserves in Conservative Party history. Harris redresses the balance, drawing on Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of Salisbury, published in 1999. The Conservatives were in office for fourteen of Salisbury’s seventeen years as Party leader. ” No Conservative has equalled that record, nor looks likely to do so”.
This book cannot, however, be regarded as a definitive history of the Party. Harris allows his own strong, often controversial political opinions to intrude unduly on his assessments of the Party in the twentieth century. It has been dubbed the Conservative century. The Party was in office, either on its own or in coalition, for some two-thirds of it. Harris finds little merit in most of the leaders who brought the Party success in this period. Harold Macmillan is treated with particular scorn: ” by no known definition was he philosophically speaking a conservative”, he writes of this formidable politician who consistently identified himself philosophically with progressive Tory ideals which have so often assisted the fortunes of the Conservative Party.
Harris believes that Margaret Thatcher’s predecessors should have done far more to get the state out of the economy and promote the kind of liberal, free market policies she pursued so successfully after 1979. That approach would not have brought electoral success before the late 1970s. Throughout the earlier decades of steadily rising prosperity the Conservative Party won its victories by showing that it could extend economic and social well-being throughout all classes more effectively than Labour without resorting to worryingly unorthodox economic doctrines.
The Party’s great twentieth century goal was spelt out by Stanley Baldwin in 1924: ” to make One Nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world”. More Conservatives have been inspired by the One Nation ideal than by anything else; it is not even mentioned by Robin Harris. The twentieth century cannot be understood without reference to it. And, thanks to David Cameron, it is being brought back to inspire Conservatives once again in this century.
The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris is published by Bantam Books at £30. Alistair Lexden is the Party’s official historian. For details of his publications and other historical writings, visit his website: www.alistairlexden.org.uk
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