a grand old party - k. minogue

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BooksMarch 2012

A grand old party by Kenneth Minogue

Political parties are strange, introverted organizations. Their business is to reflect the democraticpulse of the people and advance good public policies. But politicians arent like the rest of us. Vanity,obsession, and, above all, the will to power have been honed to a fine point. Some even hold a belief in

their own personal destiny to lead. The result is that a political party is rather like an underwater

environment from which the most remarkable creatures at times emerge to rule us, blinking and

tottering as they try to adjust to the scrutiny of ordinary people and to the realities of public life.

Britains Conservative Party is an especially distinctive case. Western civilization is passionate

about the change that nurtures the hope of better things, but here is an organization promising the

people of Britain that it will try to keep things, in essence, the same. In democratic terms, its against

nature! Political parties usually hoist attractive though illusory banners at the masthead

democracy, liberty, justice, and other motherhood abstractions. Conservatism as an aspirationdoesnt rate, and I cant think of any other country where conservatism is much more than a term of

ab useexcept, p erhaps, the United States under Reagan, and in that case the heroic martyrdom was

done a generation before by Goldwater. The remarkable thing, then, is that the Conservative Party has

dominated British politics for most of the last two centuries and has even been regarded as the natural

party of government.

Political parties are bureaucracies, and the only interesting thing about a bureaucracy is the

personality of its leader. A history of parties must then focus on personality, as Robin Harris, a former

speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, has done in this revealing history. He certainly brings out the

strange character of some of the remarkable people who have led the Party, according space in

proportion to the influence he thinks these leaders have had. Few will take issue with the pantheon

that results.

Winston Churchill, for example, was clearly in the top rank; however, he was doubtfully a true

Conservative at all. This is part of the reason why he was widely disliked and mistrusted by his

colleagues. The key to success in politics is to live at a moment when your particular talents are
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needed. To be outstanding, as Churchill certainly was, is a bonus. But Churchills merits earned him

the top position only in the later stages of a long career. He was sixty-five before he became prime

minister. As an earlier Conservative once said of the battle of Waterloo, it was a damned near-run

thing.

One of the formative personalities in Harriss account of the Conservative Party is Benjamin

Disraeli, a Jewish Anglican, and a man of the worldan adventurer, as his many enemies called

him. Like Churchill, he was a maverick in Conservative terms. It was his brilliance and charm, and

perhaps his very oddity, that helped Conservatives (as the party of the landed gentry) adapt to the

slowly emerging democratic features of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The Party needed an

organization that could reach out to the newly enfranchised, and Disraelis cynical and often detached

personality helped to supply it.

In 1867, he had dished the Whigs by adopting the Liberal Reform Bill of his opponents, thus

doubling the franchise. The immediate result was that the Conservatives suffered a heavy defeat in the

1868 election. Gladstone and the Radicals in power, however, alienated much of their support, partly

because of their supposed hostility to the monarchy, and Disraeli suddenly found himself popular

again. People cheered him, and he loved it. One speech he gave in Manchester lasted three and a half

hours; today such verbosity would lose any leader an election, but Disraeli was returned to power in

1874.

Like Churchill, Disraeli came to power almost too late, and many detested him. But he could

charm opponents, just as he charmed the Queen. Harriss book is full of explorations of the

eccentricities of political life, and, in the case of Disraeli particularly, we understand how antipathies

in politics are more intense than in most other social spheres, but must be, and are, concealed, so that

government may be carried on.

Nineteenth-century politics was invariably an arena in which political actors had to back their

hunches. Opinion polls were yet to come, but in the wider politics of Britain, Disraeli was sensitive to

new developments, including the emerging middle class in the suburbsa class that was discovering

the benefits of Conservatism. It was also during this time that another strange political creature began

to surface in Britain, a figure so contrary to conventional political wisdom that he was to cause great

confusion for Marxist interpreters of modern British politics. This was the Tory workingman. What

were these strange people doing voting Tory, wondered a whole bemused class of political scientists,

when their business was to be struggling against bourgeois oppression?

It is part of the fascination of political history that judgments never stay long in one place. Mostpolitical parties in real democracies are, of course, coalitions of one kind or another, and the

Conservative Party has been no different. It allied diverse groups, from believers in free markets to

Tory Radicals keen on implementing social legislationand Disraeli did in fact pass a great deal of

social regulation. Indeed, political judgment is so fluid that even today some conservatives look back

to the Liberal Gladstone as a leader the Conservative Party might have had.

A t the intellectual center of Harriss account of the Conservative Party is the crucial and little-known


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figure of the Marquess of Salisbury. He was probably the most recognizably and intelligently

conservative leader the party has ever had, remarks Harris, who goes on to make the point that its

leaders are by no means always philosophical conservatives. Salisbury was deeply pessimistic about

the future of Britain, and broadly religious in his view of life. One element of his fame results from a

remark reported by his wife when, casually coming into the family drawing room after a morning at

his desk, he said he did not understand what people meant by the burden of responsibility. One

makes ones decision in terms of the materials available, he said, and not in the least upon the

magnitude of the results which may follow. With the results I have nothing to do. The point being

that those who fret about the burden of decisions think that the outcome has been directly caused by

what they have chosen to do. Salisbury, however, thought in terms of contingencythe world is so

complicated that uncontrollable responses begin to multiply from the moment of action.

Salisburys pessimism was essentially philosophical rather than temperamental. He enjoyed life

and was amused by it. Even so, Salisburys grasp of the essence of politics is so solid that one of

Harriss chapters on him is a brilliant essay on political wisdom. Some of Salisburys remarks still

resonate strongly today. Writing his last journalistic article in 1883, he observes, Half a century ago,

the first feeling of all Englishmen was for England. Now, the sympathies of a powerful party areinstinctively given to whatever is against England.

But what is one to make of more recent leaders? Churchill and Salisbury came from central

casting as leaders of Britains Conservatives, but with Edward Heath, prime minister from 1970 to

1974, we were in a different world. Shy, arrogant, and charmless, Heath moved to the Whips office

from the moment he was elected and quickly learned the art of keeping MPs in line; a couple of good

speeches at the right time gave him a place in the public eye. Harold Macmillan was ill and had to

resign, but his control of the Party was sufficient to get Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was in fact the

fourteenth Earl of Home, moved from the Lords to the Commons, and made leader of the Party. But it

soon became clear that in an aggressively democratic atmosphere, Douglas-Home could not last, and who could have been a more striking contrast than the graceless low born (as Harris puts it)

grammar school boy, Heath? Of such strange combinations of events is the world of politics made.

Heath seemed a safe pair of hands and, while no more a real Conservative than Disraeli or Churchill,

he was hardly a political operator. He believed in experts and consensual policies. His one immutable

belief, however, was that becoming involved with the European Union was the way to solve all

Britains problems, whatever the cost. We live with that mistake to this day.

In addition to her own merits, another sequence of accidents was needed to install Margaret

Thatcher, the grocers daughter from Grantham, as leader. Sharing a staunch belief in the power of

the free market, she was a close ally of Sir Keith Joseph, but Thatcher became the standard bearer of

this new line of thought after Joseph ruled himself out of contention with an incautious speech laced

with eugenic overtones. Poor vain Heath did not think Thatcher was a serious threat to his leadership,

and after failing to win the vote, spent the rest of his life sulking at the outcome. Thatcher may not

have been a real Tory, but she was certainly made of the right stuff, and the critic Shirley Robin

Letwin, in a brilliant attempt to understand the principle of Thatchers rule, certainly judged her to be

properly conservative. Thatcher, Letwin argued, wanted to restore the balance of virtues in Britain


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MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

away from current sentimentalities such as compassion and towards the vigorous virtues of courage

and enterprise, characteristics which Thatcher herself showed in abundance when dealing first with

her own colleagues, and then in responding to the Argentine take-over of the Falklands, and beyond,

into her battle with the Union of Mineworkers.

Here then is a witty and concise account of the figureheads of perhaps the most influential

political tradition in the modern worlda tradition that has generated not only the American

Constitution, but also liberal democracies all over the world.

Kenneth Minogue was Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 30 March 2012, on page 73Copyright ! 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.comhttp://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-grand-old-party-7316
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