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

Ramsay MacDonald’s second minority Labour government had brought forward a Bill to authorise the introduction of AV. Churchill proceeded to tear it to shreds.

He denounced it as ‘the worst of all possible plans. It is the stupidest, the least successful and the most unreal [of systems]…The decision of 100 or more constituencies, perhaps 200, is to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates…An element of blind chance and accident will enter far more largely into our elected decisions than ever before, and respect for Parliament and Parliamentary processes will decline’.

Churchill’s words remain as true today as they were eighty years ago. He exposed the folly and danger of creating circumstances, for the first time in our history, in which the votes of fringe eccentric or extreme candidates at the bottom of the poll could decide the outcome of constituency contests. Such votes would have greater weight than others. The historic principle by which Britain’s electoral system had been shaped progressively since the Great Reform Act of 1832—that votes should have equal value-would be overturned.

Under an AV system, the votes for a mainstream candidate who comes top of the poll have no further effect: the order of preference they indicate for other candidates is totally disregarded in the further round(s) of counting that ensue. But the votes obtained by the least successful candidates at the bottom of the poll who are knocked out are redistributed in accordance with their subsequent preferences.

If AV were adopted, it would introduce into our national parliamentary elections the grossly unfair proposition that one elector’s vote could be worth five or six times more than another’s, depending on the number of counts that take place. This is the crucial point that Churchill highlighted dramatically with his reference to ‘the most worthless votes given to the most worthless candidates’.

In 1931,when Churchill issued his stark warning to his own generation and to posterity, Britain had just completed the long political journey, begun a century earlier, from monarchical and aristocratic government to full democracy. The process had ended in 1928 with the extension of the right to vote to all adult women.

Throughout the nineteenth century the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Parties rejected with derision all suggestions that Britain should set aside its historic practice of awarding victory to the candidates who came top of the poll. Gladstone led the way in dismissing the case for proportional representation which from the 1860s enjoyed some support (AV was then unheard of).

During the First World War both PR and AV were proposed by a Speaker’s Conference. Bitter and futile wrangling ensued in both Commons and Lords from which nearly everyone emerged convinced that alternatives to first past the post would never secure widespread support. The collapse of Labour’s AV scheme in 1931 reinforced the point.

The lessons of history must not be forgotten in the weeks leading up to the 5 May referendum. We are fortunate that Churchill encapsulated them for us so memorably.

Alistair Lexden is the official historian of the Conservative Party, a position that he took up as Alistair Cooke before his elevation to the Lords as Lord Lexden in January. He was one of the 26 historians who signed a letter published in The Times on March 11 warning that the introduction of AV would pose a threat to democracy.

The results of a huge amount of research are incorporated in John Ramsden’s very readable, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830. Anyone who wants a very full account should turn to what is known as the Longman history of the Party which consists of six volumes written by leading experts. The most recent and attractively presented survey is The Conservative Party: An Illustrated History by Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowden published in 2005.

But it seemed to me that something else was needed. Not everyone will want to read a lengthy book. So two years ago I published a brief history of under forty pages with plentiful illustrations. I have just updated it to cover the first six months of David Cameron’s government.

The theme of my brief history is change. Over the centuries the Party has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, looking forward not back.

Emerging towards the end of the seventeenth century as the Tory Party, it was put on a new basis in the 1830s when the word Conservative first started to be used.

Disraeli reminded the Party in 1867 that it operated ‘in a progressive country’ where ‘change was constant’. To succeed it had to combine its Conservatism with a readiness to carry forward big changes in political and social life. Modern progressive Conservatism was born.

In his foreword to my brief history, David Cameron refers to the way in which successful Conservative leaders’ applied the distinctive British Conservative tradition of progressive change in their time – and I am doing so again today’. He continues: ‘Conservatives take pride in their history. This useful publication will help us understand our history better’.

The new updated edition of Alistair Cooke’s A Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives with a foreword by David Cameron is a Party publication and costs £5. To order a copy, go to our shop email Louisa.Watts@conservatives.com

Lord Danby, King Charles II’s chief minister (the office of Prime Minister had not yet been created) was impeached by Parliament and sent to the Tower of London where he remained for the next six years. A new term of political abuse, Tory, began to be hurled around. It meant thief or brigand in Gaelic, a language then universally regarded as totally barbaric. Curiously, those on the receiving end of the new insult did not reject it angrily: on the contrary, they embraced it warmly and started to use it as their own preferred name.

So too did those on the other side of the sharp political divide, now described rudely as Whigs, another Gaelic word meaning sour milk. In this way the political vocabulary acquired two of its most prominent words – forerunners of Conservative and Liberal, which did not make their appearance until the 1830s, some one hundred and fifty years later.

No one found a way of calming the extraordinary political turmoil, which gave birth to the Tories and Whigs. Throughout Britain there remained ‘an atmosphere of cruel panic’, as Keith Feiling, the first academic Conservative historian, put it in his History of the Tory Party 1640-1714, published in 1924. The reason why there was such turmoil was that a so-called ‘Popish Plot’ had been uncovered.

Though there was no real substance to the plot, people became absolutely convinced that Britain’s minority Roman Catholic community was in league with France, the great external threat in the late seventeenth century, which was planning to conquer the country, undo the Protestant Reformation and re-impose Catholicism by force. Every Catholic was suspected of being a traitor.  ‘Many innocent Catholics were executed amid the howls and curses of frenzied mobs’.

The heir to the throne, Charles II’s brother the Duke of York, was a Catholic .The new Whig party in Parliament sought to make itself the dominant force in politics by championing legislation to bar the Duke of York from the throne. For that purpose it introduced a number of Exclusion Bills between 1679 and 1681. The Tories fought hard and successfully to stop them, believing that any tampering with the monarchy would turn the existing acute instability into total anarchy.

For a time at the beginning of the eighteenth century the first Tories carried all before them, winning elections and running the government. Then disaster struck. The Whigs ruthlessly exploited the start of a new monarchical dynasty, the Hanoverians, to gain a monopoly of power, which lasted for the rest of the century. But there was a much deeper significance to what happened 340 years ago. It created momentum for change that was to transform the character of British politics. Winston Churchill described it eloquently in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘The collective mind of England was moving forward from the ravines of religious entanglement to broader if less picturesque uplands…To the sombre warfare of creeds and sects there succeeded the squalid but far less irrational or uncontrollable strife of parties’. This above all is why the Tories’ 340th birthday should be remembered.

Alistair Cooke, the Party’s official historian, has published a fuller account of the birth and development of Toryism is his Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives (2008). His most recent book, Tory Policy-Making: The Conservative Research Department 1929-2009, was published last month. Copies of both works can be ordered by emailing lucy.absolom@conservatives.com.

Over the holiday period read more of Alistair Cooke’s snapshots of Conservative history on the history section of the website.

They might not seem very likely pioneers of the Conservative Research Department, Britain’s first think-tank of the right. Nevertheless, eighty years ago today Ball, Longford (a staunch Tory until he was struck on the head in 1936) and three colleagues brought the Department into existence. Until 1979 it functioned as an autonomous section of the Party’s organisation under its own Chairman outside Central Office: since then it has been a department of the central headquarters. It is a relief to find that Guy Burgess was never admitted, though he flitted dangerously in its shadows.

The Department had a clear purpose. Its first Chairman, Neville Chamberlain, saw to that. During the 1930s Ball’s unorthodox little team worked out a set of proposals designed to enable Chamberlain to kill socialism in Britain for ever by showing that the Conservative Party could relieve poverty and distress more effectively. A draft manifesto prepared for an election in 1939 or 1940 (before war pushed it off the agenda) heralded better pensions, family allowances, technical schools and comprehensive health insurance.

After the war CRD, as it is widely known, entered its glory days. It expanded greatly, recruiting a staff of fifty including many brilliant secretaries to cope with a huge amount of typing. In addition to policy work, it started to turn out vast quantities of briefing material for Parliamentary debates and election contests. Its Campaign Guides, produced for every election since 1950, are regarded as ‘blue bibles’ by  the Party’s candidates. Involvement in its policy work and massive briefing operations has provided useful training for many of the Party’s rising stars, starting with Reggie Maudling, Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod in the late 1940s.

As the current Chairman of CRD, Oliver Letwin, has put it, ‘the Department has been one of the ports of call in the careers of so many of the most serious politicians’ — himself included, in the early 1980s. A few years later, another rapidly rising star arrived: David Cameron. People tell me that I said then: ‘that boy will be in the cabinet in twenty years’ time’. I should have made an even bolder prediction.

The current Director, James O’Shaughnessy, has described how the eighty year-old is going about its work now, unimpeded by the effects of age.’ It is today playing a central part in David Cameron’s preparations for the next election. The Department endures not only because it fulfils a function that is always required by a modern political Party, but because it fulfils that function better than any other body could do’.

How has it celebrated its birthday? In the only possible way, of course: by having a huge party last night for its past and present members. David Cameron attends many functions where he is greeted with warmth and affection — but never more so than last night when CRD hailed its most distinguished graduate maxima cum laude.

Read more about what CRD has done, and the colourful people who have worked in it over the years, by ordering a copy of a new book about it which I launched at the party (follow the link for details). Tory Policy-Making: The Conservative Research Department 1929-2009 can be obtained by sending a cheque for £12.50 (free postage and packing) made out to the Conservative Research Department to Lucy Absolom, CCHQ, 30 Millbank, London SW1P 4DP.

Alistair Cooke, now the Party’s official historian, was Deputy Director of the Conservative Research Department from 1985 to 1997.

The victory was undoubtedly one of the great highlights of Harold Macmillan’s long political career. It was the fourth successive General Election in which the Tories had increased their number of seats.

Anthony Eden’s victory at the 1955 Election had been assured, but largely uneventful. The Labour Party was deeply divided and, at the age of 72, Attlee, fighting his fifth campaign as Labour leader, was no match for Eden’s glamour and promise.  In 1959 Macmillan faced a much harder task.  Although the ghosts of Suez had largely been exorcised and the special relationship with America successfully re-established, the Tories faced a revitalised Labour Party under Hugh Gaitskell, and a resurgent Liberal Party under the attractive leadership of Jo Grimond.  Macmillan was equal to the challenge.

When Macmillan helped Dr David Butler of Nuffield College on his book on the 1959 Election (a series that began with the 1945 Election and which continues to this day) he explained that the victory was the result of a combination of progressive policies and a glorious summer.’ There were even porpoises in the North Sea’, he told Butler. Furthermore, Macmillan was seen as a figure of substance on the world stage. Earlier in the year he had made a much publicised visit to Russia to meet Khruschev.  Then in August Macmillan had invited Eisenhower to visit Britain during his European tour.  The two men met like the old war-time buddies that they were. Television showed the two leaders live in Downing Street before dinner, talking about international problems.

Gaitskell had no answer to such aplomb. Although the Labour Party made the early running, on 28 September in a speech in Newcastle Gaitskell made an error which psephologists have always considered the fatal turning point. He pledged that there would, under Labour, be no increase in income tax in normal peace-time conditions. The next day this error was compounded by Morgan Phillips, Labour’s General Secretary, at the daily Transport House Press Conference, when he stated that the Labour Party would not increase purchase tax either. Macmillan knew at once what a mistake it was for Labour to turn the election into an auction. He ensured that all his speeches had been carefully checked beforehand by the Conservative Research Department and all relevant departments for both absence of errors and clarity.

The 1959 Election was predominantly a national rather than a local affair and television played a prominent part.  In 1955 40 per cent of the population had a television. By 1959 that proportion was over 70 per cent. Macmillan’s final TV broadcast on 6 October has long been regarded as a classic of its kind, though Peter Cook was later to parody it mercilessly in ‘Beyond the Fringe’.  Macmillan had been advised to deliver his address standing, moving between a desk on which there were letters and a large globe.  These proved to be telling props as Macmillan referred quite naturally to various points in the letters. But the enduring image was the globe which Macmillan turned with his hand as he spoke of the international situation. The symbolism was a stunning example of the latest techniques of the advertising world, what had been memorably called ‘the hidden persuaders’. Indeed the Conservatives had pioneered the use of sustained advertising with a lengthy poster campaign run by Colman, Prentis and Varley. Macmillan’s only reservation in the use of this new technique was to ensure that public relations were not a substitute for policy.

The Conservative slogan for the election was ‘Life’s better under the Conservatives – don’t let Labour ruin it.’  It was a potent message at a time of increased prosperity and full employment.  Even Gaitskell had admitted (in the Daily Mail of all papers) that ‘compared with pre-war, most people are a good deal better off.’ In the wake of Labour’s defeat the veteran Hugh Dalton told James Callaghan that he had heard of a young voter in Cardiff saying, ‘All right Dad, Labour may suit you, but I’m voting Conservative this time.’  It was a trend that was seen around the country. As Patrick Gordon Walker admitted during Labour’s post-mortem, ‘The simple fact is that the Tories identified themselves with the new working class rather better than we did.’  Ray Gunter, a future Labour Cabinet Minister, declared that Macmillan was the most skilful politician he had ever seen.

Election night itself was a triumph for the Tories from the very start. The polls closed at 9 p.m. in those days. There was always a great race to be the first constituency to declare, a race won in 1955 by Billericay, which was then a perfect demographic microcosm of the country. Just before 10 p.m. the High Sheriff of Essex, Major Geoffrey Hoare, declared the Billericay result.  In 1955, the Tories had won a majority of 60 seats nationally, with the Billericay majority being 4,200. Major Hoare read out the result. The Billericay majority for the Conservatives had increased to nearly 4,900. There were still 629 seats to be declared, but Gaitskell, who was in Leeds awaiting his count in the Town Hall, turned to his aides and admitted, ‘We’ve lost by 100 seats.’  When the final result was declared at lunchtime on 10 October (Jo Grimond’s constituency in Orkney and Shetland), the Tory majority was exactly 100 seats.  It was one of the few things during that overwhelming Macmillan triumph that Gaitskell got right.

D. R. Thorpe is the biographer of Selwyn Lloyd, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden.  His new life of Harold Macmillan will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2010.

Thatcher was different. And something different will be done with her files. We are aiming to put them online, free to all, at her Foundation’s website, copyright and other practical stuff permitting. It will take time, but most of what you read about in the New Year press will magically appear on the Internet during the course of the year.

No historical figure that I can find has ever received this kind of treatment – not Churchill or Callaghan, Reagan or Roosevelt, Mao or Mitterrand.

Almost everything Margaret Thatcher ever said in public is on the site already. There are also film, audio, still images, and masses of documents, from archives across the world.

In 2003 she became the first British ex-Prime Minister to open any of their papers during their own lifetime, releasing everything up to May 1979. From 2010 on the story will begin to be completed, progressively, year by year.

The site has incredible power and is very fast. The Seattle people who built it, and maintain it still, also created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation site, and he is a demanding customer whose coat -tails it is a good thing to ride. Not only will this material all be available free to anyone, anywhere; you will be able to search the documents in much greater depth than can possibly be done with paper files.

I don’t think Margaret Thatcher has ever used a computer. I’m a long-term employee of hers – since she started her memoirs in Jan 1992, in fact, the poor woman just can’t get rid of me – and occasionally I have worked on the machine in her study at Chester Square. The first thing I always do is dust the keyboard. (Joke: the keyboard is dusted frequently.) Once an apostle of secrecy, she believes that when the time for that is over, you should tell the story. The web is unquestionably the best way to do that, for archives as important as this. “Get it out there” is the guiding philosophy now, and we live by that on www.margaretthatcher.org.

You can sign up for email alerts as the material goes online: update@margaretthatcher.org.

Back then in 1909 the older delegates would have recalled a remarkable, sudden surge in Conservative support in the Lancashire constituencies forty years earlier which had ended a long period of Liberal domination and greatly increased the Party leadership’s interest in the politics of the north-west.

Disraeli himself, who rarely spoke outside Parliament, journeyed to Manchester in April 1872. Sustained by two bottles of white brandy poured into an ordinary water glass, he addressed a vast meeting in the Free Trade Hall for over three hours at the age of sixty-eight.

Then, as now, the Tories were in opposition facing a government that was visibly disintegrating. ‘Extravagance was being substituted for energy by the Government’, Disraeli said, before launching a famous attack which resonates today. ‘The ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest’. By contrast a new Conservative government would know where its duty lay:’ the first consideration of a minister should be the health of the people’.

Disraeli did not return to address the first Party Conference held in Manchester four years later, but it followed exactly the course that it would have wanted during its one-day proceedings held in the Town Hall on 25 October 1876. Disraeli’s policies for better health and other welfare measures were designed to strengthen the Conservatives’ position as the Party representing the whole nation. The first Manchester Conference sent him most encouraging news about ‘ the enormous development of Conservative feeling in the ranks of the working men, which has led to the establishment in all parts of the country of vigorous organisations formed and conducted by artisans’. The Conference noted that, since Disraeli’s speech in 1872, the total number of Conservative associations had more than doubled to nearly 800 with new working men’s associations making a healthy contribution to the total.

In those days the annual Party Conference was almost always held in one of the great industrial or urban centres, again emphasising the Party’s one nation stance which brought it support from all social classes. Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in industrial Lancashire where at the 1885 election the Conservatives won 38 of the county’s 58 seats, including all but one of Manchester’s six constituencies. They remained well entrenched in the heartland of the cotton industry when the Conference returned to Manchester twice in quick succession in 1902 and 1909; though on the second occasion the Party’s fortunes in the area were in temporary eclipse.

Hopes were high, however, that ground would be recovered at the imminent general election, precipitated by the clash between Commons and Lords over Lloyd George’s so-called ‘ People’s Budget’, denounced by the Tories as a flagrant example of class warfare since it introduced a new super tax on the rich and set the scene for a land tax. The forthcoming campaign dominated the minds of the delegates– some 1,000 of them–during the two-day Conference at the Midland Hotel. They were told that ‘millions of leaflets, pamphlets, posters and cartoons’ had already been sent to constituencies.

That pre-election Conference one hundred years ago closed with a rousing speech from a Mr Howell, a local Manchester delegate. He called on the Conference to ‘ pledge itself to a democratic and national line of policy…it was now for the Party to prove that it was above all Parties the Party of the British people’–sentiments that were greeted with ‘ loud cheers’ and ‘ much enthusiasm’. It is on the basis of Disraeli’s definition of Conservatism as an unending campaign to unite all sections of the community that the Party’s success has always been built.

View a selection of archive material in the Flickr gallery.

Alistair Cooke is the Party’s official historian. He recently edited Conservative History Week, inaugurating the new history section of the Party’s website.

This article draws on material in the Party’s Archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Visit the Archive’s Stand at Conference where Jeremy McIiwaine, the Party’s dedicated Archivist, will have a range of interesting items–including posters and mugs–on display. Copies of Alistair Cooke’s recent publications will be on sale at the Stand.

Politics is so often so obsessed with the here and now that we forget about what the past can teach us.

Alistair Cooke has done an important service in bringing together so many excellent articles about the development of our party. And I’m delighted that from now on there will be a new History Section on the website, celebrating the huge part that this party has played in this history of our country.

In his introduction to the History Week, Alistair Cooke quoted Disraeli. “In a progressive country change is constant.” I think that’s a good way of thinking about the Conservative Party – its past, its present, and its future.

Take the past. What really stands out when you look at our history, and what’s striking about some of the articles posted this week, is that our Party has served Britain best when we have understood the pace of change in our country and pursued progressive conservative ideals.

That was Peel’s aim in the Tamworth Manifesto. That’s what he put into practice by repealing the Corn Laws and bringing cheap bread to everyone. It was what Disraeli meant when he spoke out about the deep rift in nineteenth century society, of a country divided into two nations, the rich and the poor.

The same spirit of progressive, inclusive change was there with Stanley Baldwin through the tough years of economic depression and social strife. It helped Eden and Macmillan as they solidified a property-owning democracy. It drove Margaret Thatcher forward as she refused to accept decline and gave people unprecedented power over their economic destiny.

And as we rightly remember this week, it was the way Winston Churchill thought about Britain. He adored history but, as Michael Dobbs wrote in his article, he saw it as an inspiration for the present and a guide to what the future could be.

It’s that rich, progressive legacy which drives the Conservative Party today. We want a country that is safer, fairer, greener and where opportunity is more equal. And we have said that we will achieve it through Conservative means – decentralising power and strengthening the institutions of civil society like the family.

I believe that it’s our faith in progress that will determine the success of the Party in the future. Conservatives should never try to turn the clock back. Our history teaches us that we succeed when we are the party of everyone – respecting our past, seizing the present, and confident that the best is yet to come.

David’s post is part of Conservative History Week on the Blue Blog. This is the final day of articles looking at various aspects of the history of the Party. Find out more on the history section.

On the economic front, these post- ERM years saw the development of the inflation- targeting system for the Bank of England – a discipline which had already anchored low inflation back into the UK well before 1997.

Some of the tightest years of public spending constraint ever were imposed with great skill and determination – still allowing spending on health, for example, to continue to grow in real terms. 

As a result John Major’s Government bequeathed an emerging public sector surplus which underpinned its successor’s spending largesse for almost 10 years. The alternative Conservative plans, if followed, would have kept the public sector below 40 per cent of GDP with continuing reductions in the tax burden – establishing the UK as one of the strongest and most competitive enterprise economies.

Reforms to the public services were beginning to take hold. The spread of ‘grant maintained’ schools was creating a new generation of state- funded education, free from the interference of central and local government. 1996 also saw the first radical experiment with education vouchers to allow parents freedom to procure nursery education from a supplier of their choice. Both were stopped and reversed by the new Labour Government in its early years. 

The same happened in health where the development of NHS Trusts and GP fund holder practices with wider purchasing discretion was abandoned by Labour at first, reversing the impetus for NHS reform and restructuring until the re-emergence of foundation hospitals and private sector procurement several years later.

Shortly before the 1997 election, Major’s Government also proposed a particularly radical and innovative policy to tackle the growing pension’s crisis. Based on proposals from Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State for Social Security, the ‘pension plus’ scheme would  gradually have shifted the working population from the current unfunded state pension to a new pension entitlement based a pot of  pension funding built up over a lifetime. Again this was abandoned by the new Government, leaving the problem of under-provision to grow to the point where a solution is far more difficult to envisage.

The energy behind this new thinking was encouraged by a massive policy consultation project across the Party – under the heading ‘Our Nation’s Future’ – which was itself a major innovation for its time.  Up and down the country Party members gathered together in halls and conference centres to debate the themes of renewal and development, with Cabinet Ministers acting as eyes and ears to listen and contribute to the debate. 

Of course, in the end the manifesto that emerged and its bold vision of a new phase of Conservative government did not materialise. The tide was running out for the Conservative Party, and nothing at that stage could turn back the mood of the public for new faces and a fresh start. Nevertheless, much of the policy thinking that emerged from John Major’s Cabinet in those years has proved remarkably far-sighted and enduring, providing the basis of much of what re-emerged centre stage in the public policy debate over a decade later.

Norman Blackwell was Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit from 1995 – 1997.

Lord Blackwell’s post is part of Conservative History Week on the Blue Blog running through to Monday 7th September. There will be posts every day on various aspects of the history of the Party, to coincide with the launch of the new history section.