What to read to understand the Conservative Party

Editor’s note: On October 20th Liz Truss resigned as leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and thus will soon depart as prime minister. The party will hold another leadership contest, its third in as many years, to pick her successor within seven days.

It may be hard to believe, given the shambles of Boris Johnson’s semi-defenestration, but Britain’s Conservative Party is the most successful election-winning machine in history. Other parties rise and fall, victims of a basic shift from feudalism to capitalism or huge changes in the franchise. But the Tories, to borrow a phrase from party leader Winston Churchill, have buggered on regardless for 200 years or so, scattering opponents in the process. In the 20th century they held office for longer than any other party in Britain. How do they pull it off? A relentless appetite for power and a commensurate willingness to change have helped, spiced with a savage streak of political ruthlessness. The following books, biographies, academic studies and diaries explore the DNA of this apex political predator.

The Conservative Party from Peel to Major. By Robert Blake. Faber and Faber; 480 pages; $17.99 and £16

The classic history of the Conservatives by one of their own. Blake was a Conservative peer and the biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, the party’s outstanding leader of the 19th century. This remains the most readable and cogent account of how the party has prospered over time. Policies may have changed since the 1820s, but not, Blake argues, the essential beliefs of a Conservative: that Britain, “especially England”, is usually in the right; that the rights of property should be upheld; and that ancient, independent institutions (such as the monarchy) should be maintained. Equally, Conservatives share a healthy distrust of overbearing government and “doctrinaire” intellectuals—that is, socialists. Belying their name, Conservatives will embrace inevitable change—indeed, it is key to their survival—but only, as Disraeli put it, if it is “carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people”.

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change. By Tim Bale. Oxford University Press; 384 pages; $44.95 and £32.99

A more contemporary, objective and analytical take on the party by a political scientist, first published in 2012. Among several books Mr Bale has written on aspects of the Conservative Party, this is probably the most comprehensive. He runs the rule over the party’s finances, organisation and personnel. His is also a useful reminder that for all the puffed-up pre-eminence of the Tory leaders in parliament, the party is still, to a great extent, run by voluntary membership in local associations. This matters. Mr Johnson’s successor, and thus the next prime minister, will be chosen by the 180,000 or so party members—and they will have decidedly different views on what constitutes a proper Tory prime minister than the bien pensants at Westminster.

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Volumes 1-3. By Charles Moore. Knopf Doubleday; $72; 2,838 pages. Allen Lane; £54.97 (combined)

The exhaustive, but rarely exhausting, official biography of the party’s most revered post-Churchill leader. Lady Thatcher remains a standard reference point for Conservatives, as will be evident in the coming leadership contest. As the high priest of Tory journalism, having been editor of the party’s in-house journal, the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore provides a comprehensive account of the party during the 1980s, arguably its most successful period in office. He also chronicles a traditionally male, private-school party coming to terms with women and working-class leaders. Behind the scenes, the Iron Lady was certainly more malleable than she let on, offering an important lesson for those who believe that strong leadership is all about yielding nothing to critics.

Diaries. By Alan Clark. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 416 pages; £9.99 and Diary of an MP’s Wife; Inside and Outside Power. By Sasha Swire. Abacus; 540 pages; £9.99

Conservatives profess to believe that government is a noble business, requiring the utmost probity and an unselfish interest in the public welfare. Self-righteous twaddle, according to the diaries of Alan Clark, a junior minister in Lady Thatcher’s governments. The first volume of his diaries caused a sensation when it was published in 1993, lifting a veil on the dark underbelly of Tory politics, the petty jealousies, seething ambition and endless back-stabbing. Douglas Hurd was memorably skewered for behaving as if he had “a corncob up his arse.” The philandering Clark also reveals the misogyny and predatory sexual politics of Westminster, on display again during Mr Johnson’s doomed premiership. For an update on Clark, see “Diary of an MP’s Wife”, by Sasha Swire, published in 2021. Written by the wife of a junior minister in David Cameron’s government, this is a slightly less racy account of those years and the subsequent bust-ups of Theresa May’s premiership.

Sybil, or The Two Nations. By Benjamin Disraeli. Oxford University Press; 464 pages; £10.99

If modern Conservatism has a founding text it is this novel, published in 1845 by a young and upcoming Benjamin Disraeli. He gave Tories, fearful of extinction in the new age of industry and democracy, a fresh reason to exist. Where other parties, such as the Liberals (and later Labour), would be sectarian, class-parties, so the Tories would represent the national interest—or wrap themselves in the flag, to use the contemporary argot. The analysis of the new class-based politics in “Sybil” closely resembles that of Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”, published only three years later. But while Marxists sought to sharpen the contradiction between the classes as a prelude to revolution, Disraeli argued that the new duty of the old ruling class was to heal those divisions with paternalistic legislation—hence the mantra of “One Nation” Toryism, still in use today.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took over the UK. By Simon Kuper. Profile Books; 240 pages; £16.99

One common lament about the contemporary Conservative Party is that it has lapsed into the old habit of drawing its leaders from an exclusive cabal of men educated almost entirely at Eton and Oxford. In the 1990s the party boldly experimented with non-traditional leaders such as Sir John Major, whose father was a music-hall performer and gnome merchant. But David Cameron’s government in particular seemed to be run by a well-heeled “chumocracy”. Simon Kuper, a journalist at the Financial Times, was at Oxford with many of several of the chums in the 1980s and has written a withering account of those loci—the Oxford Union debating society, the university’s Conservative club, the dreadful Bullingdon Club—where Mr Cameron, Mr Johnson, Michael Gove and others learned to become “professional amateurs”, in the words of one witness. Will the Tories now learn the lesson and pick a leader from outside the magic circle?

Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain. By Phil Burton-Cartledge. Verso; 336 pages; £18.99

This is the book for ideological opponents of the party, written by a Labour-supporting lecturer in sociology—just the sort of man to get Tory danders up. Mr Burton-Cartledge has a good point to make: one of the reasons for the Tories’ continuing success is that their opponents never take them seriously enough. Left-of-centre thinkers assumed that the Tories would be swallowed whole by the “materialist conception of history”, only to be repeatedly disappointed. Mr Burton-Cartledge may fall for some of the old traps, such as dismissing Tories as merely “self-appointed defenders of privilege”, but at least offers some original analysis. Indeed, he claims to have spotted a reason for the long-term demise of the party in its failure to connect with younger voters. But even he is not entirely convinced. “No one got rich betting against the Tories,” he concludes. Quite.■
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Our correspondent wrote his own book about the Tories in 1995:

Thinking The Unthinkable; Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983. By Richard Cockett. HarperCollins; 416 pages; £25

The book chronicles the fightback by free-market economic liberals against Keynesians and Socialists after the second world war, leading to electoral victories for Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in America. The Conservative Party was transformed in the process, and Britain too.
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