The Conservative Party and the nation: Union, England and Europe 9781526101389

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Conservative Party and the nation Union, England and Europe ARTHUR AUGHEY

The Conservative Party and the nation

Series editor Richard Hayton

The study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interest and importance, and is also of great significance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for a variety of reasons the study of conservatism and conservative politics was traditionally regarded as something of a poor relation in comparison to the intellectual interest in ‘the Left’. In the British context this changed with the emergence of Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party and its ideology, and a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. New Perspectives on the Right aims to build on this legacy by establishing a series identity for work in this field. It will publish the best and most innovative titles drawn from the fields of sociology, history, cultural studies and political science and hopes to stimulate debate and interest across disciplinary boundaries. New Perspectives is not limited in its historical coverage or geographical scope, but is united by its concern to critically interrogate and better understand the history, development, intellectual basis and impact of the Right. Nor is the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original research from a plurality of perspectives. Consequently, the series will act as a voice and forum for work by scholars engaging with the politics of the right in new and imaginative ways. Reconstructing conservatism? The Conservative Party in opposition, 1997–2010  Richard Hayton Conservative orators: From Baldwin to Cameron  Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines The right and the recession  Edward Ashbee The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales  Alan Convery David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation?  Edited by Gillian Peele and John Francis Rethinking right-wing women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present  Edited by Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb

The Conservative Party and the nation Union, England and Europe

Arthur Aughey

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Arthur Aughey 2018 The right of Arthur Aughey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 0137 2  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Prelude: Conservatives and Conservatism 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Conservatism and the party Conservatism and the nation Conservative nation revisited Conservatism: class and nation Conservatives and the British Question Conservatives and the English Question Conservatives and the European Question

page vii 1 21 42 63 84 106 128

Postscript: Conservatism confounded 150 References 159 Index 185

Prelude: Conservatives and Conservatism

Students of Conservative politics are well served today by a talented generation of scholars who have produced an impressive body of work on the party. The Political Studies Association’s Conservatives and Conservatism Specialist Group, through able leadership past and present, has encouraged this research as well as providing a useful forum for its discussion and dissemination. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the diversity and the range of contemporary publications, the study of the Conservative Party has been transformed. As the references in the following chapters demonstrate, this book is heavily indebted to the scholarship which has preceded it. Its subject is a particular one, the idea of the nation in Conservative Party politics. Though the concern is particular, that subject has general implications for the character of the party, its sense of political purpose as well as for positions taken on the constitution, on Europe, on the British and on the English Questions which, considered together, involve the party’s traditional Unionist vocation. Today, when students are overwhelmed by the immediacy of online commentary and the abundance of diverse sources, the contribution which academic study brings to political understanding is an appreciation of historical association or, to adapt a phrase of Michael Oakeshott’s, an awareness of the flows of sympathy between past and present. One can recognise patterns and traditions of thinking and this appreciation also reveals – to adapt another of Oakeshott’s phrases – that those patterns are neither fixed nor finished. So, while Tories may remain Tories, they are never just ‘the same old Tories’, as their political opponents claim. This book represents an attempt to make sense of the way in which flows of sympathy from the past help to shape the changing patterns of Conservatism in the present; it does so by examining one of the party’s preoccupations: its claim to be the ‘national party’. The first three chapters are concerned mainly with flows of sympathy within Conservatism, the currents of which still can be traced today. Chapters 1 and 2 explore respectively the character (or political culture) of the Conservative Party and the significance of the nation in its self-understanding. Both chapters establish the conceptual lineage through which one can interpret contemporary debates. Chapter 3 considers the interconnection of party and patriotism by revisiting one of the key texts for a previous generation, Andrew Gamble’s The Conservative Nation (1974).

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That book captured the party at a moment which today seems very familiar, a party struggling with the challenges of Europe, nationalism in Scotland and pressures for constitutional change. However, its assumptions about Conservatism, the party and the nation require revision even if the idea of the ‘Conservative nation’ remains a useful one. The following four chapters are concerned mainly with the way in which those flows of sympathy now issue in different patterns of politics in the Conservative Party. Chapter 4 assesses the changing influence on party competition of class and nation, especially how this influences the Conservative Party’s electoral identity. The next three chapters reflect the impact on the Conservative nation of the British, English and European Questions. A postscript considers the impact of the 2017 general election and makes some final reflections on the party. Every book has its history. This book was conceived in early 2015 at the point when David Cameron delivered a surprise electoral victory for the party; it was written after the equally surprising EU referendum result in June 2016; and it was revised in the months immediately before and after the even more surprising election result of June 2017. If the author can admit to experiencing serial re-examination of his expectations about the Conservative Party, he can concede that British politics, while disturbingly unpredictable, are far from boring. Apart from those intellectual debts already mentioned, I would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues at Ulster University, especially Professors Carmichael, Fee and Gormley-Heenan. As ever, members of the library staff on the Jordanstown campus were unfailingly helpful. All at Manchester University Press were equally accommodating and efficient, though I would like to express my thanks particularly to Rob Byron and especially to Tony Mason, who has provided consistent encouragement over the years. Professor Michael Kenny provided the inestimable service of a very close reading of the original draft. His insightful observations and suggestions improved the text significantly though, of course, all interpretations, judgements and conclusions are mine alone. Finally, I am also grateful to Sky Aughey for her comments throughout the writing of this book, especially on the politics of the Cameron–Clegg relationship, and to Sharon Glenn for taking every opportunity to challenge my assumptions about both Conservatives and Conservatism.

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When he reflected on the rights of men, Edmund Burke (1969: 153) observed that they are in a sort of middle ground, ‘incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned’. Something similar can be said about the word ‘Conservative’. That judgement does not invest the Conservative Party with a mystical character; it is merely to observe that any simplistic formulation of its politics or of its identity would not do justice to its institutional and historical complexity. The word Conservative contains wide varieties of expression and mood, used by a range of people, from philosophers and historians to politicians and publicists. Moreover, a problem which often confuses students (but not only students) is this: though it is possible to speak intelligibly about ‘conservatism’ and about the ‘Conservative Party’, the relation of the first to the second is far from clear. Reflection on the first may lead one to believe that political principles are fixed and settled, a conclusion which fits very uneasily with the experience of the second in all its historical modifications of policy. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s political culture – for want of a better term – is distinctive and that, for example, the party’s annual conference has a very different quality to that of the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats. It is also possible to ‘discern’ the meaning of ‘Conservative’ – as a relationship between ideas, institution and purpose in the history of British politics – according to another of Burke’s expressions: that a party is best understood ‘in balances between differences’ and in the compromises attending any political enterprise. According to one Conservative politician (Norman 2013: 222–5) who has reconsidered Burke’s contribution to understanding political behaviour, feeling and emotion inform any public reasoning and what binds a party together – but which can also divide it – is affection, identity and interest. While critics often credit the party’s distinctiveness to a ruthless quest for power (Davies 1995), Conservatives have traditionally argued that the party’s character can be attributed to a very different principle: patriotism. Engagement with that patriotic self-understanding – one necessarily linked to the quest for office – is the subject of this chapter. The first part reflects on the relationship between conservatism as a term historically associated with the nation and with Conservative as a political practice (for these are not necessarily joined). The second considers the identity or

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culture of the party as a representative institution. The third examines the purpose of Conservative politics according to Burke’s ‘balances between differences’ – in this case between ideas and practice. The conclusion draws out more explicitly the idea of the nation in the history of the party in anticipation of a more thorough examination in the following chapter. What’s in a name? It is tempting to assume that the durability of the Conservative Party is related to a correspondence between the conservative character of the nation and the institution of the party. There is no necessary relationship. ‘Party names are more often hypnotic than illuminating,’ wrote the Conservative MP Kenneth Pickthorn (1951: 49–50). ‘They implant an excess of assumptions, often unconscious and still more unexamined, about the virtues of the parties most agreeably labelled and, by contrast, and often even more effectively, about the vices of their opposites’. If politics were a sweepstake, he thought, to draw the name ‘Conservative’ would not on the face of it strike you as being a winning ticket. That reflection on the electoral utility of the party’s name has its historical precedents. In 1912, at the height of the Irish Home Rule crisis, the leadership wanted to drop the word Conservative altogether and rebrand the party exclusively as Unionist (which had been in common usage since the first Irish Home Rule crisis in 1886) not only to demonstrate the party’s constitutional and patriotic purpose but also to integrate the associated Liberal Unionist Party. In the 1930s, the heir to the latter and later Conservative prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, wanted a ‘National Party’ in order to ditch what he thought to be the ‘odious title of Conservative which has kept so many from joining us in the past’ (Lexden 2012: 48). And following the landslide victory of Attlee’s Labour Party in 1945, Harold Macmillan proposed that the Conservatives should change their name to the ‘New Democratic Party’ to be aligned better with the post-war mood. There have been subsequent suggestions. One of David Cameron’s former speech writers (Birrell 2016) proposed the ‘One Nation Party’, and the reason appeared as self-evident to him as it had done to Chamberlain: ‘Few people really see themselves as conservative, trapped by tradition and averse to change. The word implies fearful resistance to innovation and modernity’. Former deputy chairman, Robert Halfon, suggested the ‘Workers’ Party’, the spirit of which, if not necessarily the title, appealed to Theresa May (2016a), who has spoken of her commitment to achieve ‘a truly meritocratic Britain that puts the interests of ordinary, working class people first’. Clearly, the relationship between the ideological category ‘conservative’ and the institution of the Conservative Party is not a necessary but a contingent one. The reason for the periodic return to the matter of name has to do with one key concern: the concern that the party has lost touch with the nation. Then there is the other side of Pickthorn’s reflection. ‘Conservative’ can implant an excess of assumptions,

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often unconscious and still more unexamined, about the party. Unfortunately, those assumptions may not be agreeable, can accentuate, by contrast, the virtue of the party’s opponents and focus all attention upon Conservative vices. The ‘toxic’ image of the party after 1997 is a case in point, where it risked becoming identified as anti-national. As Pickthorn admitted, at such times it is far from self-evident that the word Conservative conveys an appropriate patriotic image of the party. That there should be some relationship, given the historical lineage, between being ‘conservative’, or what is often called ‘small c’ conservatism, and the party organisation, or what is often called ‘large C’ Conservatism, is something we assume must be true. As Pickthorn (1951) conceded in a judicious expression, conservative does ‘not unfairly’ indicate the historical identity of the party even if it conveys only a ‘hypnotic rather than illuminating’ association with its practice. There are two alternative readings which follow from this. The first is that when we talk of ‘conservatism’ as a set of ideas we are talking of the purposes of the Conservative Party as an institution, such that its meaning at any one time is given by the interests of the party. This involves a creative act of politics which brings into being a broad constituency of support – at least if it appears that the national interest and the party interest coincide. Elie Kedourie (1984: 38), for example, thought that conservatism ‘is the outcome of activity in normal circumstances and over a long period of the Conservative Party, an abridgement, and so to speak a codification of this activity’. The meaning of conservatism followed – it did not precede – the activity of the party and was thus ‘a natural attempt by a body with a long continuous existence to articulate and make intelligible to itself its own character’. The real measure of conservatism – rather, Conservatism – is its practice, not its philosophy, a proposition which almost matches Herbert Morrison’s view that socialism is what Labour governments do. In this case, the national interest is what Conservative governments do. The second reading is to consider the party as merely the vehicle for the achievement of conservative principles which exist independently of it. It is these principles which call into being the institution of the party, and the politics of the party express, or should express, pre-political sentiments of the nation. Unfortunately, the Conservative Party has been too often tempted, as T.E. Utley thought (Moore and Heffer 1989: 73–4), by ‘a kind of sophisticated timidity’ whereby politicians preside elegantly over the destruction of those same principles, making the process as painless as possible, saving only what they can from the wreckage. Negatively the recurring criticism has been that for all its presumed identity with the nation – possibly because of it – the Conservative Party can confuse its own self-interests with the interests of the nation and ‘put party before country’. If the first of these readings can tend towards the cynical and the second towards the disillusioned, both of them find their place in Conservative Party politics. Lord Salisbury, who was both cynical and disillusioned, warned that ‘the dangerous temptation of the hour is that we should consider rhapsody an adequate compensation for calculation’ (cited in Roberts 1999: 2). Rhapsodic principles (in patriotic voice)

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and the calculating requirements of party advantage (what do we need to say to get elected?) are two sides of the Conservative Party and the reckoning of their claims has never been straightforward. Even Kedourie (1984: 46) was conscious of the problem: defining conservatism as merely what the party says it is means that what Conservatives will come to understand by its principles was far from clear. Though it is of advantage to politicians pressed, as they always are, to make compromises, this approach may strike some supporters as betrayal of both party and the country (as some thought of Edward Heath’s commitment to Europe). For example, Maurice Cowling’s influential work (1971) interpreted such principled rhapsody that is found in political speeches and programmes by Conservatives (or indeed, by any politician) to be mainly strategic manoeuvres, within and between parties, in the search for position and precedence. Patriotic rhapsody is useful but the important thing is calculation, for it is that very practical political intelligence which is required for success. In other words, Conservatives should be cautious about confusing rhapsody with calculation. To formulate ideas and proposals in such a manner as to be both persuasive (rhapsodic) and ambiguous (calculating) is profoundly challenging, albeit part and parcel of the political craft. Not to acknowledge their necessity and therefore fail to become proficient in both rhapsody and calculation is, in terms of Cowling’s political realism, to lack seriousness as a politician. Vagueness, elusiveness and allusiveness are necessary not only to attain self-interested ends but also to avoid potentially destructive – or self-destructive – political failure. The Conservative Party has experience of both self-interest and self-destruction in its history. This implies, nevertheless, a real and not imaginary relationship between party and principle, if only because it is a question which also keeps recurring. For example, Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby presents its hero searching to find an answer to the questions: what are Conservative principles and what do they aim to conserve? A century and a quarter later, Andrew Cooper (2005: 38) asked similar questions: ‘What does the Conservative Party stand for? What is its vision?’ And though Disraeli was concerned to recover traditional Tory values and Cooper to modernise the Tory message, they both touch on a contentious issue: the relationship between conservatism – an attitude to life – and Conservatism – the purposes of the party (O’Hara 2005: 27–31) and the party’s ability to convince a democracy that both are ‘national’. One philosopher who engaged with the conundrums these questions raise and whose contribution helps to clarify the issues involved was Michael Oakeshott. Although he has been revered in the abstract as ‘Mr Tory Philosopher’ (see Casey 2007), the truth is that he was, and remains, a little too unworldly (or rhapsodic) for most Conservative politicians. Nevertheless, Conservatives seeking an intelligent defence against socialism often look to Oakeshott for support and find much of value. His celebrated essay ‘On being Conservative’, for example, is frequently read as a concise statement of the conservative ‘disposition’, one which informs the fundamental sensibility of Conservative politics. Commentators have been seduced by his poetic

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depiction of conservatism as a preference for the familiar to the unknown, ‘the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss’ (Oakeshott 1991: 408–9). Sometimes there is a failure to look beyond that descriptive rhapsody or to note this was only the first part of the essay and not the most significant. Even those tasked with promoting the party’s electoral interests often explore no further, albeit conceding, as any sensible politician must, that Conservatives cannot be only traditionalists in that manner (Herbert 2014: 30). Indeed, Oakeshott went on to argue that this disposition – which Herbert celebrated mainly because it infuriated opponents – is actually inappropriate ‘in respect of human conduct in general’. Conservatism, he thought, does remain appropriate in one respect of activity – government – and this is all the more necessary in a society that puts much store by its individualism, its dynamism and its many enterprises. Government ought to be a specific and limited activity and the main qualification for office was ‘coming to be at home in this commonplace world’ of practical activity, something for which a person of conservative disposition was, so Oakeshott believed, well suited (1991: 196). In other words, the political world is the practical world and that ought to favour those most in tune with its realities and most sympathetic to its inherited character – those in tune with the nation, in other words. It is a claim Conservatives like to make, of course, expressed as their being the ‘natural party of government’. One could even argue that the title of Andrew Gamble’s description of ‘Thatcherism’ as The Free Economy and the Strong State (1988) – if not necessarily its practice – is intimated in Oakeshott’s essay. What is involved is a distinctive understanding of the relationship between historical identity and political change, one which at first glance seems very un-conservative or which begs the question: is it liberal conservatism or conservative liberalism? Oakeshott could be categorised both ways, as could the party. It is worth pursuing this relationship a little further because it helps to make sense of enduring debates about the party’s patriotic identity. Oakeshott identified two ideas of historical identity (1993: 65–7). The first is an argument according to foundations, ‘the theory of identity without difference, the theory by which difference of any sort destroys identity’. The second is an argument according to ‘unchanging substance’ which assumes an authentic core which persists through change. While both of these ideas about identity have their articulate advocates, historically they are unsatisfactory. Identity can be discovered in history but not as some original or in some unchanging substance. ‘Identity, so far from excluding differences, is meaningless in their absence, just as difference or change depend upon something whose identity is not destroyed by that change.’ In politics, perhaps more than any other activity, identity is maintained ‘not in spite of, but because of, differences and changes’. To assume, for example, that the identity of conservatism or the Conservative Party exhibits an original state (if that could be found) or an authentic core (if that could be known) is really ‘to deny its nature’. Either the wish

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to re-state foundational principles to which the present generation can anchor itself or the aim to return to an authentic set of values is understandable but they are really unattainable political objectives – John Major’s ill-fated and much-misinterpreted ‘back to basics’ campaign springs to mind (Redwood 2005: 205). As Oakeshott later observed (1991: 61), a tradition (like the Conservative Party): is neither fixed nor finished; it has no changeless centre to which understanding can anchor itself; there is no sovereign purpose to be perceived or invariable direction to be detected; there is no model to be copied, idea to be realized, or rule to be followed. Some parts of it may change more slowly than others, but none is immune from change. Everything is temporary.

If, on the one hand, Oakeshott appears to undermine the traditional ‘certainties’ which Conservatives ‘on principle’ hold dear, on the other hand his essay suggests that, in a world of constant change, we do have one certainty: the institutions, laws and practices of the nation. Insofar as the Conservative Party can persuade voters that it possesses – to paraphrase another of Oakeshott’s images – superior political seamanship, is familiar with the capacity of the ship of state and knows how to get the best from its crew, then it has hope of success. This is especially so if the party can persuade people that it embodies the patriotic interest, and not just a sectional purpose. Of course, to argue that there is neither firm foundation to which a party may anchor itself nor authentic form to which it may return does not mean that both are not useful, persuasive and persistent forms of argument for politicians to deploy. To argue that politics is so radically about change that everything must be considered temporary is not to deny that arguments in favour of continuity remain powerfully attractive. To think that there is no ultimate model or doctrine to follow is not to ignore the utility of proposing, or the comfort of believing in, those very things. Politics is indeed a practical activity, not a philosophical one, and the rhapsody of such rousing themes has an obvious value for the Conservative Party – the ‘good cry’ which Disraeli acknowledged. This does not mean that Conservative leaders act in bad faith, saying one thing and meaning another. Rhetoric is part and parcel of the political craft and though it may be vague, elusive and allusive, it is not merely (or always) an instrument to attain self-interested ends. Political leaders, like their party members, share many of the same national prejudices (in Burke’s sense of moral intuitions) and instincts but they may have come to the conclusion that they are not possible to legislate for. It is notable that, despite recurring arguments for changing the name, the party has remained the Conservative and Unionist Party. This does say something significant about its self-understanding and the importance placed on the evocative, as well as the historical, associations of the word. To be ‘conservative’ does not mean necessarily that one supports the Conservative Party (as Disraeli recognised); and to be a supporter of the Conservative Party does not mean necessarily that one is conservative (as Cooper acknowledged), but the two are

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not entirely unrelated. As Burke might say, there is a middle where a Conservative identity can be discerned. That middling territory, always changing as Oakeshott recognised – where liberalism and conservatism meet – has been the idea of the nation. Perhaps the word ‘belief ’ captures this aspect of Conservative politics which was often thought to distinguish it: an aversion to mere ‘ideas’. It was once succinctly expressed by Lord Hailsham (1959: 7), who wrote that, for Conservatives, ‘an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory’. The implication is that being in sympathy with the national inheritance is worth more than any theoretical knowledge. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset thought the difference between the two lies in this: we have ideas about the world but we live on our beliefs. Indeed, Ortega y Gasset’s distinction struck Alfred Sherman (2005: 25; see also Moore 2013: 391) as describing perfectly Margaret Thatcher’s leadership when, for the first time, commentators thought that the party had been gripped by an ideology and was putting more faith in theory (Thatcherism) than in practice (national unity). Sherman thought that Thatcher was ‘a woman of beliefs, and not of ideas’ and by this he meant that insight of Burke’s: her emotions were invested in patriotic identity. If Margaret Thatcher’s beliefs were not universally shared either by the country or by the party, it can be said that they were well understood as an expression of the Tory mentalité (Coleman 1988: 4). Yet how do we explain that Conservative patriotic ‘mind’? Is it to be understood narrowly or expansively? What’s in the party? W.H. Greenleaf – who was influenced by Oakeshott’s thought – identified the difficulties involved in understanding what makes the party tick. On the one hand, one can try to elicit ‘a single set of key concepts that must be called the core of this doctrine’ (Greenleaf 1973: 178–80). He thought it was possible to abstract a character of this ‘fixed’ sort according to a few essential ideas but this could be done only at the expense of excluding too much by way of beliefs and too many by way of writers and practitioners. On the other hand, one can look instead ‘for a range of lineaments linked in more diverse resemblance’. Greenleaf thought that this latter was the more profitable procedure and we ‘must accept and somehow embody in our characterisation the fact of diversity and contrast, the recognition that an ideology is not a single thing at all but a range of ideas and reactions’. Yet ‘somehow or other it has, nevertheless, all to be linked together whatever the level of articulation involved’, and he was convinced – rightly – that there is little value in considering ideological arguments without placing them in historical context. Conservatism, when understood in this historical manner, ‘is supremely a matter of reacting to contemporary problems and issues as seen through the distorting spectacles of prejudice, ambition, tactics, interest and doctrine’. To which one can add ‘beliefs’ of Margaret Thatcher’s sort. Greenleaf concluded on a deeply sceptical note. Even though it is asserted that there must be ‘common characteristics in conservative ideology of a meaningful and distinguishing

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kind’, he felt that the party’s unity – insofar as it did remain unified – must be found ‘elsewhere than in its doctrines’ (1973: 208). Strangely, Greenleaf was sketchy on the idea of the nation which was the party’s self-proclaimed unity. Subsequently, Michael Freeden thought (2005: 255–6) that a party’s character is constantly being rewritten ‘because its producers inherit that creative task from generation to generation, even from month to month, as the lifespan of ideology-formulating groups extends beyond that of their individual members’. Politics involves a ‘necessary attempt at the stabilization of a fluid set of relationships among political concepts and ideas’ and when related to particular historical moments can cast light on ‘actual conceptual combinations, and on the reasons for the attainment by some of them of temporal longevity and for the failure of others’ (Freeden 2006: 16). Historically it is even difficult to say which are lost and which are found, which fail and which are successful (see the discussion of Enoch Powell’s ideas in Chapter 7). For example, Sir Ian Gilmour (1977: 144) wrote that the party is rather like an archaeological site on which successive political generations have left layers of structure and remains, each being slightly different from the others yet at the same time having common characteristics. Moreover, the face the party displays officially to the public ‘provides only a very indifferent representation of its whole’. What leaders present authoritatively at any one time as Conservatism is shaped by what one scholar called ‘political contingency, ideational pragmatism, multiple traditions and a significant degree of “ideological cross-dressing” ’ (Kerr 2007: 64). And the reason for this was put succinctly by Nigel Harris (1972: 14). If it is not only to be successful but also to survive, the Conservative Party (like all parties) has to make itself the voice of the new as well as the old. This is where the rhetoric of noble purpose, principle and fidelity to origin play an important role in sustaining the confidence of the old identity while providing an induction rite for the new, or at least attempting to do so. Change is not an option but a necessity (as Oakeshott argued) and, as Harris concluded, the ‘most traditional party had to be, within certain very definite limits, the most opportunistic’. Of course, mapping those ‘very definite limits’, specifying the stability of those fluid elements or mapping the boundaries to which party unity is confined assumes that there is a recognisable Conservative institutional identity to begin with. Perhaps the paradoxical expression ‘elective affinities’ gets closest to conveying its meaning: identifying arguments about party policy and its direction which are conducted in a shared language of principle but also involving competing calculations of group self-interest, individual ambition and contrasting personalities. On the one hand, there is an obvious elective dimension in that individuals choose to join the Conservative Party or to vote for it and, for any number of reasons, may also choose to leave it or to change their electoral preference. On the other hand, being Conservative can come to appear either natural or self-evident, as if there is no choice involved – what is often called the ‘tribal’ aspect of its politics. Elective affinity also calls to mind Oakeshott’s (1991: 61) description of a tradition of behaviour as one which reveals ‘a flow of sympathy’ between individuals and groups whom

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‘chance and choice’ have brought together. Together choice (or election) and chance (or affinity) suggest a conceptual space which allows for interesting reflection on the ways one can relate together intelligibly necessity, ideology, interest, commonality and difference as ‘flows of sympathy’. And the channel along which that sympathy flows in Conservative politics is called the nation. Elective affinity incorporates both elements of conviction and convenience and draws attention to the fact that, in most historical instances, to stress only one to the neglect of the other is often to misinterpret the political subject. If one side of elective affinity suggests instrumental politics and the other affective politics, it is important to avoid either a one-sided utilitarian or a one-sided ‘hearts and minds’ interpretation. It is another example of making rhapsody rhyme with calculation. The Conservative Party is an artifice, certainly, but most members and supporters generally do not think of it either as artificial or merely as a political marriage of convenience. It is a relationship in which to be ‘affined’ means to affect one another mutually and in which potentially antithetical elements – liberalism and traditionalism, for example – can combine to achieve common purposes. Here is a recognisable political persona – the Conservative Party – which has a recognisable identity (later to be called ‘brand’) which is capable of sustaining the loyalty of a diverse range of people and which has its own distinctive character. And, like any other ‘personality’, it is capable of periodic nervous breakdowns, self-harming and potential death. If this gives the impression that the party is a rather rickety construction, liable to fall apart and to suffer from periodic identity crises, then that is not too far off its historical experience, as the aftermath of the 2017 general election confirmed. Otherwise why would there be those periodic suggestions for a change of name? Nevertheless politicians and activists, like everyone else, like to feel that there is principled certainty, that there is meaning, despite what philosophers or historians may tell them. Conservatives, when they engage in arguments about the party, equally like to claim that their interpretation does indeed represent the authentic form. And what they assume they represent is the real interest of the nation which is the heart and soul of its body politic: that is, the still point in all the historical and political flux. Crisis for the party can be defined similarly: when the British public seems to have moved beyond that Conservative ‘still point’ and rejected its interpretation of the national interest. For example, that dark night of the Conservative soul after 1997 was one such crisis and for which, after 2005, David Cameron’s liberal style was considered by some to be the answer. The relationship between principle and practice can involve some shape-shifting in the priority accorded to each. Enoch Powell (Utley 1968: 8) once wrote that he understood Conservative principles to be merely an abstraction from ‘the way in which the Conservative Party views society and life and acts in politics in the history of this country’; and yet he later told South Kensington Young Conservatives – but only after he had left the party to become an Ulster Unionist MP – that all his life he thought the party to be ‘a body of persons who hold, advocate, and desire to bring

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into effect certain political principles’ (Berkeley 1978: 94). That there is a tension here can be stated quite dramatically in the case of Sir Keith Joseph. He made the memorable confession (Joseph 1975: 4) that he had only become a real Conservative in April 1974 despite having been an MP since 1956, a remark reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s (1924: 2) that on or about December 1910, ‘human character changed’. Here was an experience that something substantial and important had taken place, that a shadow line had been crossed between one sensibility and another, and that the world was different now. That everything had indeed changed became the leitmotif of the Thatcher years which followed Joseph’s conversion and which his conversion helped to bring about. Here was an explicit rejection of Conservatism as only what the party says it is. Joseph’s argument is a good example of that urge to return to the ‘authentic’ and the ‘original’, even though it elicited a pointed response from one colleague: there is some incongruity in a party which gives intellectual speculation a lower place in politics than do its opponents and which believes politics grows out of the needs, fears, hopes and wishes of the people and out of the demands of the time, coming to the conclusion that it has been intellectually in error since 1945. (Gilmour 1977: 12; see also Sherman 2005: 53)

Fifteen years later Gilmour (1992) ironically had reversed positions and now claimed that, while he had remained true to original Conservative principles, the party had danced too long with the dogma of Thatcherism. Such disagreements over ‘beliefs’ – for they concern not only what the party should do but also what the party is – illustrate both the diversity of its composition and the wagers the party must make on what is electorally attractive. One can conclude that the Conservative Party is a coalition of interests in continual debate about principles – but those principles are not much good without a Conservative Party that can articulate them and defend them or a Conservative government that can implement them. Conservatives may become doubly disillusioned and face a choice. In which case, Disraeli’s alleged admonition to Bulwer-Lytton, ‘Damn your principles! Stick to your party’, can be understood not as a statement of political cynicism but as sensible advice to stay the course, if only because the wheel of fortune may turn and provide the party with another ‘principled’ opportunity. Times change, the membership of the party changes, political leaders change, the balance of interests in continual debate change and all these changes will affect not only the policy but also the image of the party. A sentimental commitment to the old will be always in tension with the new and it may be difficult to reconcile the two. Indeed, the articulation of Conservative principles may deny the possibility of a government capable of defending them. For every Lord Coleraine (1970: 63), who, following in the tradition of Lord Salisbury, thinks the problem was never that the party would prove too reactionary but that all it would offer would be ‘a reformulation of the fashions of the day’, there is a Theresa May (2005: 105) who complains that

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the party is out of touch with the times and must show how the party’s core beliefs ‘fit today’s world and provide all Britons with promise of a better future’. Indeed, May’s own transformation in fortune and opportunity in 2016 provides a good example of the wisdom of Disraeli’s advice to Bulwer-Lytton. And her discomfiture in 2017 provides a good illustration of Powell’s maxim about failure. On the one hand, Conservative office-seeking can appear a demoralising experience which prompts the question: what is the point of being Conservative at all? On the other hand, what is the point of being Conservative if the outcome is only defeat and irrelevance? ‘Stern and unbending Toryism’, according to Lord Blake (1998: 411), ‘has never paid dividends to the Conservative party, nor in practice when in office has the party ever taken that line.’ The effective and profitable rule of thumb has been to look after Conservative interests ‘by round-about ways’ (Coleman 1988: 206), an approach which some chose to call Conservative realism (Minogue 1996) and others would describe as ‘the art of the possible’ (Butler 1971). Rather like Bagehot’s reflection (1963: 59) on the British constitution, the Conservative Party always needs to be mindful that ‘every generation inherits a series of inapt words – of maxims once true, but of which the truth is ceasing or has ceased’. Empire, for example, central to Disraeli’s definition of the nation, disappeared after Macmillan; Europe came in as a replacement; global Britain has come to replace Europe. It is, of course, important to maintain some ‘flow of sympathy’ in at least two directions, not only with the party’s past but also with current popular sensitivities. This politics can be understood otherwise as part of a national ‘conversation’ about past, present and future (see Aughey and Berberich 2011). Conservative Party politics can be understood as such a conversation, an imaginative engagement having its own linguistic etiquette about the country’s history, culture and society, where what is conversed about, explicitly or implicitly, is the meaning of Conservatism. The conversation changes over time but there is discursive continuity as well, such that one can speak intelligibly of a tradition of Conservative politics. And abstracting from that broad tradition, what concerns this book in particular is the party’s conversation about the nation. What is the party for? Conservatism can be said to have as its starting point an assumption that there is – or there ought to be – harmony between the life of that nation and the political life of the state, or harmony between what the French would call the pays réel and the pays légal. This assumption satisfies a wish to arrest the disturbing uncertainties of modern life and to maintain stable political institutions which are not only authoritative but also the embodiment of customary freedoms. This is nothing other than a ‘common sense’ intuition rooted in the ‘pre-political’. At its very basic, Roger Scruton (1980: 191) thought it holds that the best reason for any social and political practice is that no reason need be given. Unfortunately for Conservatives, the harmony they wish for exists only within Conservative thought and not in reality, and this creates

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The Conservative Party and the nation

the first conundrum. As Scruton went on to acknowledge, once Conservatives have been compelled to engage in politics they have set themselves ‘apart from things’ and helped to ‘instil the world with doubt’. Having struggled to be articulate, the ‘common sense’ of Conservatism is to ‘recommend silence’ about what cannot be adequately put into words, a view which echoed Angus Maude’s view (1963) that the part of Toryism ‘that is not articulate is by far the best and most enduring’ since most of the rest is ‘meaningless sloganising’. Quiet patriotism, in other words, is the ballast of the party – so long, that is, as the party is viewed by the electorate to be the ‘national’ party. To engage in politics, however, is to accept that silence is no longer an option and, if what is best and most enduring for Conservatives is the nation, its defence needs articulation. If only silence provides ultimate emotional satisfaction it is unlikely ever to deliver political security for, as Lord Salisbury admitted, the Conservative Party is rather like a policeman. If there were no criminals around, there would be no need for it (Smith 1972: 92). Unfortunately, there be criminals, and this is because others do not feel at home and experience the world very differently from Conservatives. Even then, the party cannot guarantee to protect a way of life for all time but at least it does provide an opportunity to preserve some of it for a time. If asked what the party stands for, Gilmour (1971: 88) thought the answer could only be as the epitaph on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren: ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’. The party stands for ‘the country at any given moment, for society as present constituted, for all the various relationships and institutions which make up the body politic, and for the religious, political, economic and social structure of the nation’. To try to sum it up in a slogan would be like trying ‘to codify the mystery of life’ (as Maude suggested). This is a concise expression of the ‘origin’ of Conservative thinking, one which gives a poetic gloss to what would otherwise appear a set of entirely unreflective and incoherent prejudices. And when compelled to forgo silence there is a tendency to rely on romantic language, the sort of ‘poetics of the civil life’ at which Oakeshott (1993: 3) excelled. Those institutions, customs and pieties to which the Conservative is characteristically attached cannot, of course, ‘be reduced to matters simply of association, nostalgia or the aesthetic’ (Casey 1978: 85). The Conservative ‘adheres to them not merely as a beachcomber, or as an antiquarian, or as a fool, but as in some sense a political being’, regarding them ‘as deserving allegiance, as having authority’. If change is to happen it should happen in the manner which Hailsham (1959: 15–16) described as ‘natural’; that is, change according to the acquired and inherited character of a nation. It is perhaps surprising how often this staple, initial, proposition of Conservative reflection – that the social and political orders do harmonise and that the party is the necessary representative of that reality – has been conceded by their critics. In an interesting acceptance of the party at its own mythical estimation, one critic ( Johnson 1985: 234–5) thought that national culture was one in which Conservatism ‘swims like a fish in the sea’. The Conservative Party is a ‘necessary

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embodiment of the central core of this Tory culture’ and ‘there are some ways in which it exists more as this embodiment than it does as a political party’. Though admitting that the conservative argument is not the only one to present itself in such a manner, another commentator (Finlayson 1998: 109) argued that it does so very effectively. Conservatism can appear to be not one ideological choice amongst many but to be essential, a premise in which Conservatism ‘presents itself as the spiritual representative of the soul of the nation’. Conservatives would like this to be so, but if this ‘representation’ is the romantic starting point, it is certainly not the political end point. To paraphrase the French thinker Charles Peguy, everything Conservative that begins as mystery ends up in politics. And politics is about practice and not about reverence. The tranquil disposition is always under threat simply because the enchanted world it expresses already has become disenchanted, as Scruton knew. Conservatism is actually a recognition that, when people do look around them, they may not appreciate Wren-like magnificence but only see instead Shelley’s Ozymandias, nothing but a colossal wreck. And those people are not necessarily the party’s opponents but, more significantly, Conservatives themselves who feel that the country is going to the dogs. The enchanting and sentimental descriptions of life in Conservative Party literature cannot avoid conjuring up this other contentious and hostile present. More often than not, Conservatives feel they are losing and not winning the political battle and that they are at odds with the strongest currents of national life. This sense of marginalisation from the popular mood was true of the Blair years – and the original Blair intent was to replace the Conservative century of the twentieth with the progressive one of the twenty-first. The self-understanding of the age often makes Conservatives feel distinctly uncomfortable. More often than not, it is this discomfort with the present, rather than respectful piety for it, which informs their political argument. This might be described as its Daily Mail tone and, far from feeling themselves insiders, Conservatives often feel themselves to be outsiders, observing things changing – often to their disadvantage. Conservatives frequently feel that their views are institutionally marginalised such that, far from there being a harmony between the political order and the ‘real’ nation (which they think they embody), the public doctrine of the day is antagonistic to their sentiments. Hence the common anxiety about ‘political correctness’ or the feeling, to paraphrase T.E. Utley, that the party is only the refuge for ‘ghetto Conservatives’ (Filby 2015: 323); or that it is all too prone, as Michael Portillo put it (Snowdon 2010: 160), to be dismissed as expressing the ‘Victor Meldrew’ style of politics. On the one hand, Conservatives may not be persuaded that the things they value will stay the same and their instinct may be either to hold on as long as possible or to concede change as gracefully as possible. This was formerly described as the choice between being a ‘diehard’ or a ‘ditcher’ (Behrens 1980). Such fatalisms either of resistance or of concession are familiar, though not universal, Conservative traits. On the other hand, a very different response is imaginable. As Casey (1978: 87) argued, one can imagine a style which licenses political practice that is much more sweeping

14

The Conservative Party and the nation

than that suggested by the word ‘conservative’. If political institutions ‘take their vitality and validity from some sort of consonance with the expressive possibilities of an age – its possibilities of thought and feeling – it may well be that what is conservatism in one age will be different from and opposed to what is conservative in another’. To be Conservative in politics, then, could well mean ‘an imaginative and active opposition to the status quo that will normally be thought of as radical’. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Casey’s proposition appeared just as Thatcher was cautiously preparing the party for such a radical departure from the status quo. That radicalism – which may be framed in the language of liberalisation – is also understood as a return to true national values. Defence of the status quo, then, is an inadequate understanding of what the party is for, and many feel that it is their opponents, and not Conservatives, who swim like fish in the sea of public culture. This is Conservatism in country party mode. By this is meant, of course, not a party of the countryside, though the Conservative Party has a claim to be the party most in tune with the interests of rural communities; nor even a party of the ‘shires’, though the Conservative Party can claim that designation and interest too; rather, it means a mentality which expresses the solid virtues of the true-born, freeborn subject against the self-interested, perhaps ‘anti-national’, codes of those in power who claim for themselves some superior wisdom, often described as ‘liberal elitism’. This alienation can also be personalised. Rod Liddle (not a Conservative) joked that one can detect ‘Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti’. He put it thus (2017): ‘Choose an institution — quango, regulatory body, BBC board, whatever — and you will find it is run by the same tiny coterie of middle-class left-liberal people.’ At first sight this may appear at odds with the normal association of Conservative politics with a presumption to superior (practical) wisdom. It is, however, the other side of the same coin. William Hague, for example, pitted his Common Sense Revolution against ‘the patronising elite who think it is small minded to believe in our country’, though he failed to convince the electorate of its virtue (Bale 2010: 103). The reality evoked here is not actuality. It is what the nation would be like if it were true to its (natural) Conservative self, a very different proposition; and it lends itself to association with populist thinking, an association which found distinct expression in and after the European Union referendum of 2016 (see Chapter 7). This is not new, for in 1945 Oakeshott (2014: 315) asked himself a question: ‘How does it come about that a policy (party or national) acquires a sort of moral halo?’ He was referring in this case to the socialism of the Labour Party. Though he thought there was no substance in such claims to moral superiority, he did accept that it would be difficult ‘to disperse this false moral sanctity’ especially since Labour intellectuals believe ‘they have the corner in ideas’. Indeed, it has proven difficult to knock that moral halo and to dispel the sanctity, false or not, from Conservative opponents. This has required of the party a different emphasis, identifying not only with the solid bulk of the nation’s institutional inheritance but also claiming a distinctively practical,

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not theoretical, ability to conduct the affairs of state and economy – patriotism and competence. Those ‘practical’ virtues were formerly thought to explain the electoral success of the Conservatives, their claim (Heppell 2014: 163) to have ‘a set of cultural norms that made them well equipped for the demands of government’. They were understood as ‘a party characterized by first, unity and loyalty; second, they were a pragmatic party that avoided ideology, and third, they were the natural party of government, a claim which reflected their superior governing competence’. It is quite remarkable how successful that appeal has been, against all the odds in a democracy which, as Oakeshott thought, seemed stacked in favour of those who claimed not practical knowledge but the moral sanctity imparted by a ‘corner in ideas’. One of the reasons why it has been successful as a political institution, not only surviving but also prospering, can be attributed to a halo with which the Conservative Party has adorned itself. That halo is the halo of patriotism, one which the party has claimed to be peculiarly its own and something which is considered fully in the next chapter. Here one can note the intersection of two Conservative claims: to be both the ‘national party’ and the ‘natural party’ of government. Conservative success appears in need of explanation because to resist the claims of democracy – made in the name of moral sanctity and with equality being the most prominent of its ‘halos’ – may be understood as an offence against the modern age. The Conservative Party has always faced an enormous challenge to rebut that accusation of prejudiced self-interest, put so brilliantly and memorably by George Orwell (1994: 149–50): that if the nation to which the Conservatives are patriotically devoted resembles a family, it is one in which power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts who thwart the prospects of the young; a family which requires kow-towing to the rich and powerful; a family which sits horribly upon its poor relations; and a family which tries to keep silent about the source of its inherited wealth. It is, in short, a ‘family with the wrong members in control’ – Conservatives. Equally, Conservatives struggle to defend themselves against left-wing philosophers who conclude that ‘selfishness is the rationale of their politics, and they have no other rationale. They stand without the support, the legitimation, of any recognizably moral principle’. It is in this exclusively self-interested style of politics that ‘they are distinguished fundamentally from those who are opposed to them’ (Honderich 1990: 238–9). Such accusations echo Hazlitt’s (1936: 104) condemnation of the ‘good-natured’ man for whom there ‘is no villainy to which he will not lend a helping hand with great coolness and cordiality, for he sees only the pleasant and profitable side of things’, or the recent experience of one Conservative woman whose friends thought that she was surely ‘too nice to be a Tory’ (Nadler 2003). What these views share is a presumption which has a modern reference: that the Conservative Party is the ‘nasty party’ made up of the irresponsible, the rich and the powerful, a party which sits on the poor and keeps silent about inherited wealth and which always means the ‘wrong members in control’. In short: it is not the national party and it is not patriotic.

16

The Conservative Party and the nation

Yet for all the criticism of their lack of moral virtue, their self-interest and their desire to maintain the privileges of an unequal society, Conservatives have been very successful in convincing the electorate that their party should be in control and that they are the right people to be stewards of the nation. So it has been something more than an empty boast historically to claim that the Conservative Party is the ‘natural party of government’. If they are self-interested, their interests have been associated with a sufficiently wide constituency of support to make the party an effective democratic force; and if the attitude to inequality most clearly distinguishes Conservatism from social democracy (Hickson 2009) this was not necessarily to the party’s disadvantage. As Cowling (1978: 9–10) noted, there are many who, while themselves not at the top in terms of wealth and status, acknowledge that inequalities exist and that somehow they ought to, not least in the ‘national interest’. Therefore, winning elections depends on whether Conservatives can convince people that they are on the side of ‘hard-working families’, the ‘aspirational’ or whatever term the party may use to evoke a common, if inequitable, good but one which is worth supporting precisely because people assume it is in the national interest. The party’s historical achievement in doing so has been the topic of scholarly interest because it did seem so democratically counterintuitive. It is only counterintuitive, however, if one expects voters to be enthusiastically radical and to understand equality, always and everywhere, to be an unalloyed good. Raphael Behr (2016a) considered this to be the abiding illusion of the British left. Conservatives, he thought, are persuasive when they promise ‘to handle politics for people who would rather be doing something else’. This retails a Conservative wisdom as old as Burke, who distinguished between radical grasshoppers, which make a lot of noise, and the contented cattle, which chew quietly under the great oak. This description does not suit contemporary democratic dignity, yet for Conservatives the latter are more numerous and more biddable than the former – as well as being more patriotic. Here the image conjured by The Times in 1883 has enduring relevance, describing how Disraeli discerned in the inarticulate mass of the newly enfranchised, ‘the Conservative workingman as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in a block of marble’ (cited in McKenzie and Silver 1968: i). It was a form of words which set the title for an influential academic text about the electoral adaptability of the party. Angels in Marble (McKenzie and Silver 1968) examined an important elective affinity – that of working-class Conservatism – one politically mobilised as a democracy which voted Tory. It was a popular elective affinity, complementing the party’s ability to attract support amongst the urban middle class, or ‘villa Tories’, in defence of property and the established constitution. The authors expressed their astonishment at the chutzpah of those in a party of aristocratic origins and culture, competing in a democratic marketplace, who could claim in all seriousness that, because of their devotion to the interests of the country and their inherently superior governing skills, they alone should rule (McKenzie and Silver 1968: 73). The old term used to define that relationship was ‘deference’. That deference did work to the advantage

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of the Conservative Party was the theme of McKenzie and Silver’s book and they defined its two characteristics. The first was deference to the institutional inheritance of the country, political and cultural, and the second was deference to those who claimed best to embody that inheritance – the national and the natural, if you like. McKenzie and Silver observed, with a mixture of wonder at the presumption and yet admiration for its enduring vitality, the Conservative Party’s insistence on its unique responsibility for the maintenance of the country’s institutions and its unique role as custodian of the patriotic interest. Traditional Conservative causes, the party had discovered with some surprise, could still triumph if presented intelligently and in popular terms (Pugh 1985: 6). Indeed, the continuity of those institutions and the political culture those institutions sustained provided the context for ‘the survival of deference long into the age of the universal franchise’ (McKenzie and Silver 1968: 251). What it implied was not only the existence of a governing class but also a code of elite behaviour which could be emulated by the people, albeit a governing class and a set of institutions ‘best observed from a distance and through an autumnal haze’ (Scruton 2014: 179). Up close, that image is likely to be dispelled – and this is precisely what modern media exposure has done to all parties and to the Conservative Party in particular. It implied something else as well, and that something was the exceptional character of the Conservative Party. Another word which might help to explain this sense of exception is ‘providence’. In a very insightful reflection on that theme, Bill Schwarz (1999: 184) wrote of the distinctive way in which the Conservative Party, from the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, associated its own political vocation and its own self-image with the popular notion of Britain’s ‘peculiarly providential history’, not merely as a record of past glories but also as its guarantee of future prosperity. The purposeful destiny of the country was appropriated to the political purpose of the party and, ironically, the Tories were more adept beneficiaries of this Whig interpretation of history than their opponents. And if, according to Grainger (1986: 53), the people thought providentially of themselves as something more than ‘just another nation’ then this imaginative transformation of chance into destiny made the Conservative Party feel that it too was something more than just any other party. Not only was this heart-warming and inspirational for party members, but it also provided a powerful rhetorical resource for the party leadership. Moreover, it had a useful effect on voters, convincing enough of them that the Conservatives did represent something more than mere politics. Even though it has been attributed to luck and the electoral system (Norton 1996a: 13–14), one could argue that providence helps those who help themselves and that is what the Conservative Party has done better than others. It certainly summed up concisely Margaret Thatcher’s view (1995: 554–5) of the party’s vocation. Traditional Tories have always known this. For instance, Peregrine Worsthorne (2005: 70) stated succinctly the myth which animated this style of Conservative politics: ‘manners (or rather civility) makyth man, not only socially but politically

18

The Conservative Party and the nation

as well’ and that the secret of political deference was convincing the people that it was from Conservatives that derived the manners (or leadership) which should make the country. Worsthorne also understood the value of providence and the party’s close association with the country’s unique sense of greatness. Yet he had predicted in 1959 that the former would look foolish and the latter would look tacky when related to a declining second-class power (Gamble 1974: 62). Today Worsthorne is in no doubt that the myth has been dispelled, that the old order has gone, and he is clear about what delivered their demise. It was not socialism, for the old Tory myth had been useful for the smooth running of the welfare state (see Chapter 3). Rather it was the ‘triumphant capitalism’ and suspicion of ‘establishment’ of the Thatcher years which had little interest in anything other than economic efficiency. In a prescient aside, Worsthorne believed (2005: 211) that the laudable objective of modern Conservatives, in tune with the new public sensitivity, to abolish class politics was ‘in danger of ending up as a movement to abolish class conscience’ and, along with it, the legitimacy of those institutions with which the Conservative Party has been traditionally associated. He echoed the caution of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (Lord Stockton) who, at the high point of Margaret Thatcher’s political success in the mid-1980s, warned that the party was short-sighted to abandon the paternalism which emanated ‘from its very roots’. Its ‘great authority’ would be lost if a large class of people thought that their ‘natural leaders’ no longer cared about them (Evans 1998: 26). That was the surest way for the party to lose its patriotic association, its aura of providence and to confirm its identification as Honderich’s selfish and nasty party. That assumption of benign wisdom on the part of political and social elites, of course, is no longer believed. Max Hastings (2016a) thought this was a curious development, given that today’s political class is generally more intelligent, better educated and possibly less venal than the old order. However, more is expected of politicians, they are subject to much greater public scrutiny, and the media, which report their activities, have not only abandoned a respectful approach but have also encouraged the public to treat every political pronouncement with deep scepticism. It suggests an inarticulate but widespread belief that democracy does not function by mediation through representative politics but by direct responses to felt needs and that failure to respond accordingly weakens the authority of political institutions. Here is yet another irony. This belief is an extension of the consumerist ideal of the market to the conduct of government which Conservatives have championed for the last half-century. Perhaps the public has caught up with Albert Einstein (cited in Heath-Wellman 2001: 223), who once remarked: ‘I regard allegiance to a government as a business matter, somewhat like the relationship with a life assurance company.’ That may be a category error, yet perhaps it is more difficult to see the distinction as parties engage in corporate-speak or feel obliged to launch constantly new and improved ‘concepts’ like the ‘Big Society’, concepts with limited shelf-life and even shorter credibility. Peter Oborne (2007: 329) has called this ‘manipulative populism’,

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and its apparent self-serving function has tended to promote alienation amongst voters (see Chapter 4). Certainly David Cameron, according to one insider (d’Ancona 2015: 402), was convinced that ‘the old paternalism–deference equation was gone for good’ and he struggled with ‘the popular suspicion that the Tories still believed they were born to rule, that the country is simply better off when the Conservatives are in charge’. Cameron, of course, believed the second proposition, as did most Tories. ‘But he had learned the hard way that this was emphatically not the default position of the British electorate.’ Indeed, Cameron had been instrumental in trying to engineer an inversion of the deference formula. If the old one assumed that the Conservative political class should set the standard for the country, a top-down view of acceptability, the new one (which was also the May vision) assumed that the party should ‘be more like the country’, a bottom-up view of aspiration. Conservatives had grasped this quite early, choosing as leader middle-class politicians like Heath, Thatcher and Major. Nevertheless, the wealthy and privileged character of the parliamentary party (at least) remains an anti-national allegation difficult to refute and which Conservatives try to avoid (Hill 2013: 88). The irony of Cameron’s modernisation is that his legacy became open to derision as ‘posh boys with vanity projects’ (Sheffield 2016). If Worsthorne’s lament may be dismissed as an elegant but patrician elegy; if Stockton’s portent of loss seems like a voice out of time; if Hastings’ assessment is thought to be overdone; and if Cameron’s demise taken as a product not of fate but of miscalculation, it is interesting to consider all of these in the light of the remarks of the philosopher, John Gray. Gray has argued consistently that Conservative politics can no longer rely on social deference, can no longer refer unproblematically to national tradition and can no longer assume the authority of institutions in a less reverential age. It can no longer do so because Conservative policy in the 1980s and 1990s promoted or accelerated trends which have helped to dissolve the old bonds of deference, tradition and authority (as Worsthorne believed). The irony is that when the Conservative Party – in the name of individual liberty, private property and the free market – defeated socialism it also defeated Conservatism. Generations of Conservative politics had bound the party to ‘institutions and interests central in the life of the nation’ and these networks of support were linked to the authority of government. If deference sustained the Conservatives as the natural party of government it was also the case, Gray thought, that the party ‘stood on its successful construction of a Tory Britain’. However, the effect of two decades of Conservative hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s, the adoption of its policies by New Labour and the vast changes of globalisation ‘has been to blow over that construction’ (Gray 1997: 158). Or, to put that otherwise: in winning the economic argument, Conservatives retreated from the battlegrounds of constitution and national culture. Thus Gray concluded his review in 1997 with a familiar, Disraelian, question: what, in these new circumstances, will the Conservative Party be for? At the beginning of the new millennium it appeared to be a very good

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The Conservative Party and the nation

question and without a very satisfactory answer as the party languished in opposition for thirteen years. This was a period when historical ‘ends’ were in vogue and the end of Conservatism seemed as credible as the end of history. It remains a constant nightmare, only partially displaced by periodic electoral success and, following the general election of 2017, it has returned to haunt the party. Conclusion In the Irish playwright Arthur Murphy’s 1758 farce, The Upholsterer: or What News? the character Mr Pamphlet concluded that ‘the People of England are never so happy as when you tell ’em they are ruined’ (quoted in Potter 2016). Some Conservatives were happy to confirm Gray’s news that they were ruined because it gave a fair wind to that call for the party to wake up, ‘smell the coffee’ and to get in touch with ‘the country as it is today’ (Ashcroft 2005: 5). Rather than being the ruin and the end of Conservatism, of course, it heralded yet another shift ‘in balances between differences’ within the party, confirming scholarly judgement that ‘Conservative MPs can be led into unfamiliar territory if they have been convinced of the electoral benefits of doing so’ (Hayton and Heppell 2010: 442). Cameron’s modernisation became the new mantra, exciting some, dismaying some, others reserving judgement, and yet it revealed the capacity of the party to adapt and to refashion. And that capacity to change again was shown even more clearly after June 2016 when Cameron’s mantras were put in the dustbin and the former moderniser, Theresa May, presided over another shift in balances. Through all recent and previous changes, however, one constant has remained at the rhetorical centre of Conservatism, and that is the venerable Disraelian claim that the Conservative Party is the national party or it is nothing. This has been the refrain of this chapter – but what is the nation to which the party has laid, and does lay, claim? Why should its interest be represented naturally by the Conservative Party? How have Conservatives related nationhood and the institutions of Union? These questions are addressed in the next chapter.

2

Conservatism and the nation

In his speech at Manchester Trade Hall in 1872, Disraeli had declared the Tory Party to be nothing if it is not a ‘national party’. Though this is often taken to be the origin of that Conservative insistence on its unique custodianship of the national interest – which still astonished McKenzie and Silver (1968) almost a century later – Disraeli was actually consistent in this contention. In his one work of political theory, Vindication of the English Constitution, published in 1835, he had labelled the Whigs the ‘anti-national party’ and his justification for doing so has an interesting contemporary echo, one explored later in this book. The reason, argued Disraeli, was that the Whigs relied on Scottish and Irish votes and lacked a natural English majority (Vincent 1990: 24). If Pickthorn thought that the word Conservative was not a natural winner, Disraeli’s biographer Lord Blake (1985: 362–3) believed that the party’s appropriation of the patriotic card – at least when it could be played with any relevance – certainly was a winner. It enabled the Conservative Party to assume its own ‘halo’ of political virtue such that in democratic politics the ‘national’ cry and the ‘constitutional’ cry were ‘assets hard to challenge’. That linking by Blake of the words ‘national’ and ‘constitutional’, not as alternatives but as associates (another elective affinity) is significant. As a very perceptive observer of the party (Ostrogorski 1982: 122) noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, in politics a name can be often of greater importance than the thing it purports to represent. The previous chapter considered this truth when applied to the word ‘conservative’ but it also applies to the word ‘nation’ and was well illustrated by the ‘national’ garment with which Disraeli had clothed his party. Though it is the commonplace of commentary to identify Disraeli’s contribution as fitting the garment of the nation to the body of the party, this was no self-evidently Conservative asset (Cunningham 1986: 283). For a party with its aristocratic lineage – for which status, rank, property, hierarchy and therefore inequality had been indelible elements of its character – the popular connotations of the nation, with its intimation of equal citizenship, did not automatically register as naturally compatible with Conservative purpose. This chapter considers the distinctive character of the nation in Conservative political thinking and examines three intimately related aspects of the party’s claim to be uniquely ‘national’. The first is the notion of the ‘constitutional people’ which the Conservative Party has

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The Conservative Party and the nation

defended. The second is the effort to reconcile the party’s English and its British identities in national discourse. The third is the historical vocation of Conservatives to maintain the Union. A constitutional people If Disraeli’s great achievement was to make patriotism natural Conservative property (Evans 2009: 112) and so to deliver for it Blake’s winning card, the substance of Ostrogorski’s point is that for Disraeli and for the Conservative leadership patriotism was neither democratic nor popular but constitutional. It was an understanding of the nation which Edmund Burke would have recognised, one in which the interests of all were represented virtually and not directly in the institutions of state – especially Parliament – which had but one interest, that of the whole. For Burke, of course, the ‘nation’ when understood politically was not the ‘people’ (as a multitude); rather it was those great aristocratic families whose station and duty in life was to conduct the affairs of state. As that exclusive understanding became less sustainable as the country was transformed socially and economically throughout the nineteenth century, the Conservative idea of the nation changed with it, as it has continued to do in the twenty-first. Disraeli’s celebrated Manchester speech was a recognition of that changed character and constituted an intelligent Tory response to it. The nation continued to be defined by its established institutions, albeit the active genius of the former was held to be embodied in the durability of the latter. That genius of the nation was confirmed, at least as Disraeli (1872: 4) flattered his audience, by the wisdom of its forefathers who had ‘placed the prize of supreme power without the sphere of human passions’. So, despite the battle between parties, and all the passing excitements of public issues, it was to the constitution which all classes could rally, the constitution ‘which represented the majesty of the law and the administration of justice; which was at the same time the guarantee of all our present rights, and which was the fountain of honour’. Therefore, according to Disraeli, the programme of the Conservative Party should be to maintain the constitution ‘popularly known as Queen, Lords, and Commons’. In this view, the secret of the country’s greatness, as well as its liberties, lay in the disassociation of popular passion from political practice, a view that was not confined to Conservatives alone. For example, Lord Acton’s influential article on ‘Nationality’ (1985: 425) had identified two different political forms of the nation, ‘the right of national unity which is a product of democracy, and that claim of national liberty which belongs to the theory of freedom’. They corresponded respectively, he argued, to the French and to the English systems. They were connected in name only and were ‘in reality the opposite extremes of political thought’. In the French model, nationality was founded on the principle of unity whereas, in the English model, nationality tended to ‘diversity and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity; because it aims not at an arbitrary change, but at careful respect for the

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existing conditions of political life, and because it obeys the laws and results of history’. That lineage of Whig thinking also finds its place in the party along with the Tory version: that constitutional order should sustain the rights of property and of status. Together, Conservative politics proposed that civic freedom required order and stability. Here the ‘people’ were elevated into the constitution rather than against it and their corresponding duty was to maintain it as the guarantee of liberty, law and estates. It was a constitutional order founded on suspicion of popular enthusiasm and it was certainly not committed to equality. That same suspicion was a powerful refrain in the Benthamite tradition too, a tradition of which the romantic in Disraeli otherwise disapproved. For example, Dicey (2008: 329) firmly believed the absence in England of all popular romantic traditions was the secret of economic prosperity and constitutional liberty even if it were a regret to poets and patriots. If there was a prevailing Conservative view of what constituted the political nation, it was the country’s institutions and their ‘settled’ principles (at least as Disraeli expressed them). Historians have surveyed Britain’s constitutional stability with a more cynical eye, judging that the purpose of Conservative politics was ‘to pump up pride in those institutions without cultivating too far the people’s pride in themselves’ (Mandler 2006: 23). Indeed, radical historians have read Conservative constitutionalism with a mix of lament and admiration, acknowledging it as a seductive method to contain the surge of popular ‘freeborn identity’ provoked by social changes of the Industrial Revolution. It was a politics which advised people ‘to make do with a rather elitist version of constitutional growth for their history and a rather mysterious device called “Crown-in-Parliament” for their representation’ (Colls 2002: 51). Here was a politics of allegiance captured succinctly by Leo Amery’s later formulation (cited in Marquand 1993: 218): ‘government of the people, for the people, with but not by the people’ and implied that Conservatives, contra Orwell, were best fitted to provide that government. The contrast with the rest of Europe helped to confirm a belief in its exceptional quality. As one twentieth-century constitutional expert concluded (Beloff 1998: 182), the British subject ‘as Amery could still remember him, could look with pride upon his own relative freedom of action and with contempt upon the web of regulation and form-filling and official interference which were the lot of his neighbours across the Channel and North Sea’. Echoes of that sensibility were to be revealed again in the vote on European Union membership in 2016 which some understood as an opportunity to recover those traditions of constitutional distinctiveness which had been attenuated since 1973 (see Chapter 7). However, as Julia Stapleton’s (2005: 175) history of the relationship between citizenship and patriotism argued, traditional allegiance to the constitution, rooted in both patriotism and a strong national culture, had become increasingly displaced in the twenty-first century (especially under New Labour) by the politics of multicultural ‘difference’ and constitutional experiment. Many Conservatives, though not all, found uncongenial that sort of patriotism, if only because what it decreed appeared to be abstracted from

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the country’s history and the people divorced from their cultural roots. It pitched the liberal tendency of the Cameron leadership – which thought it necessary to accommodate the party to new times – against traditionalists, defensive about the old. As Stapleton (2005: 178) went on to argue, the obstacle to ideas of citizenship as ‘multicultural, European, cosmopolitan, and associationalist’ was a ‘visceral patriotism’, rooted in an older tradition of the constitutional people and their customs. It explained the intent of that renowned Conservative election poster of 1983 which had a photograph of a black man along with the caption: ‘Labour says he’s black, we say he’s British’. Here nationality trumped ethnicity and it assumed that the latter should always accommodate itself to the former, what critics later dismissed as ‘assimilation’. It was also in large part this distinctive sort of patriotism which responded to the message of ‘take back control’ in the European referendum of 2016. This was not a uniquely Conservative message, of course, but what seemed ironic at first glance – that a romantically populist campaign could be mobilised to recover Colls’ ‘elitist’ version of ‘Crown in Parliament’ – is explicable in terms of British political experience and is not without precedent in Conservative Party history. The Conservative claim has been this: the party’s instincts, principles and policies are in tune with those of the people, and only when the pays légal is in the party’s trust can the pays réel rest secure. No wonder McKenzie and Silver (1968) professed astonishment at such enduring hubris. The party has depicted itself as more than a mere partisan coalition of the privileged or the aspirant privileged; its self-understanding as the natural party of government was and is a demonstration of its sympathy with, and its responsibility for, the fabric of patriotism and the (providential) British way of life. That is what it meant to be ‘nothing if not the national party’ and to adorn oneself with ‘the national garment’. In Conservative political history, then, the nation was given real substance in the country’s established institutions. This understanding has been concerned not so much with the intensity of national feeling as with the source of national feeling. Conservatism locates true nationhood in the inherited practices of a way of life which it is the duty of the party, where possible, to sustain. If this is sometimes expressed in the language of nationalism, traditionally Conservative politics has been concerned either to limit or to channel nationalist sentiment. Though commenting on the United States, Harvey Mansfield Jr (1983) captures this objective well when he writes of institutions displacing the sovereign people with the constitutional people (which is more or less a theoretical gloss on Colls’ historical reading of the process in Britain). As the masses began to jostle the classes for their voice to be heard in politics, the Conservative conceit was that constitutional politics educated the many in the responsibilities of government, in particular in the need to exercise restraint in order to enjoy liberty. And for the few it had the inestimable value of helping to secure the rights of property. Nationalism, with its tendency to deny constitutional constraint in the name of the people, was considered to be just as potentially subversive of good government as any other species of radicalism – which is not to deny that

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there are elements of populism in Conservatism or that Conservative politics has avoided jingoism. There are; it has not; and this is normally justified as speaking to natural ‘prejudices’, or it is called ‘Tory democracy’, to use Randolph Churchill’s term (Shannon 1992). For Conservatives (following Burke) prejudices are those pre-political affections, such as national belonging, upon which constitutional order depends, but is dangerous if it escapes the political discipline of Conservatism – which was the very problem with the UK Independence Party (UKIP). What is presupposed is some form of natural unity which is naturally Conservative. According to Roger Scruton (1990: 53–4), ‘unity is, in the normal instance, social rather than political, and ought to be national’. From that ‘pre-political’ perspective it is easy to understand why some Conservatives are uneasy (to say the least) with immigration, multiculturalism and universal human rights – issues which can challenge that unity. This perspective may be distinguished from other forms of right-wing politics mainly because of the respect it retains for the conventions of traditional institutions. Of course, the social unity which is assumed to be national is far from being universally subscribed to by liberal elements in the party. Moreover, the evocation of a pays réel can provide opponents with an easy target: that the party promotes a nostalgic longing for a world that has gone, a unity more imaginary than real. Conservative leaders have a double task of managing these counter-currents – traditionalists imagining a past and liberals imagining a future. On the one hand, they need to avoid identification with the party wanting a ‘better yesterday’, especially if that is understood to be a resurrection of former privilege. It explains why, for example, the grammar school issue has been particularly contentious, likewise foxhunting, both to the consternation of liberal Conservatives in the party manifesto of 2017. On the other hand, they need to avoid alienating that Conservative constituency, often called its ‘natural voters’, who are indeed concerned about ‘threats to national identity’ and which is why the emergence of UKIP proved so challenging. In sum, the Conservative constitutional tradition can be stated thus: though the ‘constitutional people’ is an artificial ‘person’ it is artificial only in being ‘second nature’ – in the Burkean sense of the necessary institutional expression of the nation – and the operation of this second nature on the first is the basis of the political order which the Conservative Party exists to conserve. For example, one of the common criticisms of Margaret Thatcher, especially from some within her own party, was that she too willingly succumbed to populist temptation (or political first nature). Yet, as one her confidents (Sherman 2005: 156) explained, Thatcher had too much respect for constitutional proprieties to give full articulation to that mood, ‘at least not consistently and consciously’ and not least because she was a Conservative. It was a truth to which her critics were never sensitive, if they were aware of the distinction at all (Moore 2015: 635–8). The translation of that potentially disruptive ‘first nature’ of the nation, its popular emotions, its romantic fancies and its prideful assertions – never mind its potential challenge to freedoms and privileges – into the stable ‘second nature’ of established

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institutions illustrates another defining Conservative conceit. It is that the personality of the party and the personality of its leadership are consonant with the personality of the nation. Again, Colls (2011: 578) proves an excellent guide in this matter. If you want to make sense of British national identity, he thought, it is best to start with the idea of the law, the constitution and history, not with values. Doing so provides an insight into that link between the Conservative claim to competence, noted in Chapter 1, and the associated claim that the party is authentically national in a way in which its political opponents are not. As Colls (2007: 524–5) elegantly explains, academic authorities were accustomed to defend the constitution as a ‘personality’, and insofar as national identity was bound up with its constitution, so the nation had its own ‘personality’ through, not against, its institutions. One consequential step, then, is to assume that in Britain, ‘the people who practice the constitution are the constitution. If their practice is incoherent, so will identity be seen as incoherent’ (and that may be the situation today). The Conservative presumption has been that only those personalities who lead the party have the practical knowledge to govern in the interests of the nation; and that only they are politically competent to secure the ‘personality’ of the constitutional people and maintain harmony between the legal order and the nation. To be faithful to the national interest, what people vote for cannot be separated from who they vote for. For a time, Blair disordered that Conservative sense, but it returned with greater intensity under Theresa May. And that implies another consequence, a not uncontested one within the party as the previous chapter noted: that the Conservative Party being in office and having power is more important than the specific details of what the party does in office or with that power – the venerable ‘Tory men and Whig measures’ syndrome. Vernon Bogdanor (1996: 183) argued that this Tory conception of government could only survive when two factors are present. The first is the perceived ability of the rulers to achieve their political objectives and the second is the existence of a stable national identity. It can be said that both these factors have become more uncertain than ever. Trust in politicians, confidence in the ability of policies to deliver and the legitimacy of established institutions are all seriously questioned and the consequences of this change are discussed in subsequent chapters. Nevertheless, the endurance of these two factors in public life depended on that other capacity of Conservative politics which its publicists have been keen to claim for the party: its capacity to absorb, and in that absorption, to balance what is best in the national inheritance. According to A.J.P. Taylor (1976: 21–2) British history, like the British constitution, was often conducted ‘on the principle that Whig plus Tory equals eternal truth’. Once it had absorbed the Whigs at the end of the nineteenth century (and stolen their clothing), it became possible in the twentieth century for the Conservative Party to declare that it embodied uniquely that eternal truth of the nation, both of its history and of its constitution. It also captured the character of a party that incorporated both liberal and conservative dispositions. It is a claim that continues to be made about

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the absorptive capacity of the party to speak for the nation as a whole. As a party political catechism was confident enough to declare a generation ago (Conservative Research Department 1976: 7), ‘nothing that’s bad for Britain can ever be good for Conservatives’. Of course, it is possible to reverse that statement and remain true to its intended purpose: ‘nothing that’s bad for Conservatives can ever be good for Britain’. For the Tory ‘tribe’ that is certainly a truism. The political forces in the country which the party seeks to balance are familiar, if paradoxical, and they remain those which William Cobbett had observed in 1820: a country which wanted not only ‘great alterations’ but also ‘nothing new’ (cited in Ward 2000: 251). If Conservatives might have difficulties with the first, alterations were acceptable so long as it could be argued that the old was also retained. Here was yet another relationship of Burkean quality, such that what is changed is never wholly new and what is retained never wholly obsolete. The electoral value for Conservative politics of association with the dignity of the constitution and with the continuity of national institutions helped to reconcile these two public moods of ‘great alteration’ and ‘nothing new’. Indeed, that paradox was noted already in Oakeshott’s understanding of being conservative. Traditionally, the capacity of Conservatives like Disraeli to draw on the belief that no other land has had such enduring institutional stability – Crown, Lords and Commons – has been a useful element of permanence in a world of constant change, creating the impression that present institutional practices are as old as the nation itself. It is a political belief which complements Oakeshott’s judgement that, in respect of government, such a disposition is appropriate to a people in love with great alterations in other things, even those who like to understand change in terms of progress. That point was made in rather different fashion by Dicey (2008: 421), who noted a paradox: though France is often thought to be the land of revolution and Britain of Conservatism, a glance at the latter’s legal history and constant legislative activity would lead one to the opposite conclusion. It is the settled constitution of Britain, unlike France, which makes possible, politically and socially, the process of change (see also Colley 2014: 35–8). Significantly – though it is often forgotten – the same point was made forcefully by Disraeli at the Manchester Trade Hall. In the passage referred to already, where the wisdom of forefathers was recruited to the settlement of the constitution, he explicitly linked that wisdom to the achievements of which his audience in that city were proud: ‘there is no country in which there has been so continuous and such considerable change’. And Disraeli (1872: 4) proceeded to outline – in language which might fit any present-day speech by party ‘modernisers’ and evangelists of the market – the very practical benefits which attend a country fortunate enough to have a well-adjusted constitutional people: It means the continuous enjoyment and exercise of human ingenuity; it means the unbroken application of scientific discoveries to your welfare, and the comfort and convenience of men; it means the accumulation of capital; it means the elevation of labour; it means those fabrics of invention and power which cover the districts in which you live, and which supply the requirements of the world.

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A century after Disraeli, Oakeshott (2014: 458) confided to his notebooks an interesting remark on what he believed to be true of national identity. He thought that each nation seeks a great historical wrong in order to govern its destiny. What distinguished his own country, he thought, was that it never had found such a convincing wrong, although some attempts had been made to come up with suitable candidates, like the Norman Conquest. Happy is the nation that, on the whole, ‘has come to terms with its memories of wrongs’. This seemed to be so in the British case, where the national story (at least until recently) could be understood still in Disraeli’s terms, as one of great social and economic transformation as well as one of great institutional continuity. The Conservative Party, by accommodating the former in terms of the latter and accommodating the latter to the interests of the former, could satisfy not only its own desire for balance but present itself to the electorate as the only party capable of securing it. That is a very convenient abridgement of historical experience but it has served its purpose well. It was never inevitable – and did not seem that way in years of Liberal hegemony in the nineteenth century and New Labour hegemony at the beginning of the twenty-first – but the party quite ruthlessly made itself the main character of this benign political narrative. Moreover, it helped to bind together those two sides of Conservative politics: on the one hand a sentimental attachment to the historical romance of Westminster and on the other an unsentimental attachment to political office and the exercise of power (discussed further in Chapter 3). Of course, not everyone took Conservative constitutionalism at its own estimation and Conservatives themselves were never fully convinced that their story of the constitutional people would be successful. In particular, Conservative intellectuals (Minogue 1996: 4) continued to worry about the sort of subversive thinking which Oakeshott had called ‘rationalism in politics’, fearing that the character of the constitutional people would be progressively sucked out such that they will ‘decline into ideological poster-people’. These ‘eviscerated subjects’ would then become the subject of state manipulation, to be persuaded or cajoled ‘into the plans of their rulers’. Even the best efforts of Conservative governments would find it hard to avoid the old order being replaced by ‘the deracinated cornucopia State’, as Sherman (2000: 10) called it – and it can be said that this anxiety, which was directed at Brussels for a generation, was the leitmotif of Conservative Leave campaigners in 2016, with faith in its resolution now invested in Brexit. Conservative constitutionalism was comparatively successful because it has been sufficiently persuasive to those who were never part of the Tory tribe. An insight into why this has been so can be found in Scruton’s view (2014: 37) that the story of the constitutional people is the product of shared loyalty and not its creator. The loyalty does not come about because such national stories are believed. Rather, ‘the stories are believed because the loyalty needs them’. The Conservative story tapped deeply, if not exclusively, into that patriotic loyalty. The constitution it evoked, both as institutions but more importantly as an identity, was widely shared and, as Colls (2002: 28) remarked, it ‘could turn

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conservatives into radicals and vice versa, and this too was said to be a people’s story’. And so it was. England and Britain So far these reflections on Conservative thinking about the nation and the constitution have indulged in a terminological sleight of hand. There has been an attempt, where possible, to avoid using either ‘England’ or ‘Britain’, ‘English’ or ‘British’. The caution points to a real problem, raising once more the question of: what’s in a name? Today what might be called terminological inexactitude about national identity is considered not only to demonstrate popular confusion about the country but also to illustrate the ‘forged’ character of what used to be called, in a taken-for-granted manner, ‘national’ or ‘British’ politics. One of the most influential contributions which challenged that ‘taken-for-grantedness’ was Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992). Though Colley subsequently warned against the uncritical assumption of ‘authentic’ nationalities (like English) versus ‘artificial’ nationalities (like British), the subtlety of her argument was easily lost. And the problematic connection between the nation and the constitution, which haunted the previous section of this chapter, was identified succinctly by one scholar (Holmes 2007: 536) when she remarked that ‘Westminster tends to speak “for the country” – forgetting which country they mean’. Although that comment was addressed to the effect of devolution on departmental responsibilities at the centre, it is not a new problem. Rather, it is a problem the significance of which changes according to political circumstance. In 1913, for example, at the height of the Irish Home Rule crisis, Leo Amery confided in his diary that the great failure of British statesmanship had been its inability to invent a single name for the United Kingdom as a whole. He believed that such a name could have put to rest all of the constitutional debates about nationhood (cited in Robbins 1985: 289). A similar problem has returned in British politics to challenge the present generation of Conservative politicians, and they too struggle to find a convincing answer. Of course the relationship, and the possible tension, between ‘English’ and ‘British’ has special significance for the Conservative Party. Its areas and sources of electoral strength today would not, Blake (1985: 361) suggested, come as a surprise to a ‘Tory Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in 1840’. The long decline in Conservative support in Scotland after its high point in 1955, the marginal strength of the party in Wales and the absence after 1972 of a committed electoral ally in Northern Ireland (apart from one brief exception in 2009–10) not only confined, but also anglicised, the party’s appeal. Therefore, T.E. Utley was not being completely mischievous when he wrote that ‘there are absolutely no authentically Conservative Scotsmen, Irishmen or genuine Welshmen’ (in Moore and Heffer 1989: 76). John Biffen (1978: 164) conceded quite early that the coalition of interests which traditionally had sustained the old British-wide support for the party was eroding: ‘The link with Ulster was

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The Conservative Party and the nation

severed. Losses in Scotland were severe. In England support was lost in major cities, and the party driven back to the heartlands of the shires and suburbia’. If viewed from ‘one aspect’, Blake (1985: 361) thought the Conservative Party ‘could be regarded as the party of English nationalism’. From the 1970s it appeared that even the party’s English base was shrinking in geographical extent and back to its origins, though it was interesting that Blake should continue to express the Conservative Party’s electoral strength in England according to the language of Disraelian constitutionalism: that it was because it had experienced great social, economic and technological change in the course of two centuries that England remained ‘profoundly conservative – with a small ‘c’ – as regards its institutions, usages and habits’. Yet as Chapter 1 has argued, that ‘small c’ conservatism is not necessarily the property of the Conservative Party, for its interests – for example, security of employment or possibility for advancement – could well be delivered by others, which was New Labour’s great electoral insight. Blake’s view was confirmed recently by another historian (Tombs 2015a), who commented that the Conservative share of the vote in England in 2010 bore a remarkable similarity to its share in the decade of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. In England ‘regional political patterns have been very consistent: areas of Anglican dominance shown in the 1851 census (the only one to record religious affiliation) are similar to the strongholds of the modern Conservatives’. For the Conservative Party, here was another challenge to achieve ‘balance’, in this case between thinking of, and relying on, England while governing Britain. Some (Crick 1991: 104) pointed to the old governing wisdom of Conservative leadership which not only contained rhetorically the Englishness of the country’s power, resources and population but also used the English ‘gentlemanly’ cult of leadership to great deferential and integrative effect across the kingdom. Crick also believed that matters of state were wisely distinguished by traditional Conservatives from matters of English self-regard. His judgement involved a large element of nostalgic rose-tinted thinking as well as a political point (like Gilmour): that Thatcherism in the 1980s had led the party off its normal national and Tory tracks. Yet it does identify a sort of split in the mind in the Conservative Party between the claims of Englishness and the claims of Britishness which is worth exploring further. One good example of this ‘split in the mind’ is provided by the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore (1995: 5). He wrote that the word ‘England’, on the one hand, is ‘an immensely powerful and poetic one that resists clear definition’. The word ‘Britain’, on the other, ‘has different overtones’, more official because, he argued, it is ‘fundamentally a political word’. Unlike England, the word Britain ‘does not evoke so much a series of pleasing sensory images, like well-mown lawns or warm beer or whatever your particular fancy may be, but rather a way of running things, or to be more exact a whole collection of ways of running things, an intricate network of institutions’. Moore differentiated the poetic and emotional, almost sensuous, nature of Englishness (his pays réel) from the institutional and political character of

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Britain (the collective pays légal). Of course, from Moore’s Conservative perspective, the two are not contradictory but complementary and to be British – the identity Moore was trying to explain – involves allegiance to British constitutional practice built upon the sentiments of his Englishness. He was echoing here, possibly selfconsciously, Stanley Baldwin’s wish (1926: 1) that he could use the word ‘English’ in his speeches without someone at the back of the hall always, and annoyingly, interjecting the word ‘British’ (though one suspects that today the reverse would be true at Conservative public meetings). Like Moore, Baldwin in his famous speech to the Royal Society of St George in 1924 defined England according to the images which came to him through the senses. Again like Moore, Baldwin was celebrating England not in order to disparage, but in order to praise, Britain. Here was a good illustration of Oakeshott’s idea of a political ‘flow of sympathy’ – not only across time but also between ideas of state and nation. If this split in the mind – national sentiment and state institutions – appeals to the self-understanding of someone who is Conservative, its explanatory value can also persuade someone who is not. In his brilliant study of English identity, Colls (2002: 43) argued that there have been two connecting wires running through the history of the United Kingdom. The first of these wires is ‘being British’ and because this is not particularly ethnic, ‘it was the nearest the United Kingdom got to a concept of citizenship’. The second of these wires is being Scottish or English, Welsh or Irish, identities with powerful and possibly divisive emotional or ethnic meanings. ‘It was vitally important to the United Kingdom not to get the wires crossed’ and for Colls the fact that those in power were generally successful in keeping the wires apart demonstrated that there is more than one way to be national, ‘even in the same nation’. Citizenship and patriotism were two counterpoints (strings in this case, not wires) which could be identified separately but together, when played properly, contributed to the great melody of British politics, as Stapleton (2005) argued. A further Conservative Party conceit was that it believed, and continues to believe, itself to be the great melodist. That strict split in the mind, though, can lead to conclusions which raise as many questions as answers. Richard Rose (1982: 29) famously proposed that ‘England is a state of mind, not a consciously organised political institution’. Put that way, his description was quite accurate. And yet from the preceding discussion of Conservative constitutionalism one suspects that it cannot be the whole truth. For Rose prefaced his well-known observation with the remark that there is ‘no agreed use of the term England differentiating it from Britain’, which explains Moore’s efforts a decade later to provide one. However, Moore’s solution – the split in the mind between the two – may lead to contradictory conclusions. One of these can be found in Krishan Kumar’s important and influential study The Making of English National Identity, which appeared in 2003 and which developed Rose’s central point. Kumar engaged with the supposedly arrogant habit of the English to assume that England is Britain. He argued that this is an illusion and actually hides the truth that very few institutions are clearly English as opposed to British: ‘This is

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true of Parliament, the monarchy, the law courts, the civil service, the armed forces, the broadcasting system and practically every other important national institution’ (Kumar 2003: 256). Kumar’s reading would confirm Moore’s understanding of things as well as the opinion of one non-Conservative political weekly (New Statesman 2015) which editorialised that England is the largest nation in Europe without its own political institutions. Intellectually, Kumar keeps the two wires apart and the institutional whole is not confused with the national part. Strictly speaking, this is an accurate rendering of British constitutionalism. Indeed one might call it the ‘snakes in Iceland’ syndrome, from the intriguing reference to English government by Old Hammond in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (2009): ‘If you ever make a book out of this conversation,’ he tells his interlocutor, ‘put this in a chapter by itself, after the model of old Horrebow’s Snakes in Iceland.’ Niels Horrebow’s eighteenth-century study The Natural History of Iceland has been appreciated by many because of its seventy-second chapter, ‘Concerning Snakes’. This chapter consists of one sentence: ‘No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.’ Morris’s ironic and playful appropriation in this case distinguished the people of England as being ‘very well off as to politics – because we have none’. This was also the view of former Conservative minister David Willetts (2009: 54), who defined the English Question – insofar as it was a ‘question’ – thus: there are British political institutions but no English ones. If the significance of the constitutional people is taken into account, within Conservative politics especially, that interpretation becomes less convincing. Indeed, it is possible to invert it. England certainly has remained ‘a concrete reference’ for poets, artists and even gardeners but England also did become Britain in terms of its size and its power, as its economic strength drew to it Irish, Scots and Welsh and as its cultural force field radiated outwards. In the process it became an ‘absorptive patria’ (Grainger 1986: 53–5) and, indeed, the other side of the truth is conceded by both Colls and Rose. Thus the former notes (Colls 2002: 53) how English parliamentarians, when they spoke of the country, spoke of an English constitution and supposed it to be the more important part of the national story. This singularity of ‘Crown in Parliament’ became ‘the English constitutional way of seeing the nation whole’. The latter (Rose 1982: 29) also observed how the tensions generated by any split in the mind were resolved, from an English point of view at least, by treating the United Kingdom as if it were a ‘single homogenous nation’. And because this seemed to work for most of recent history, with the exception of Ireland, there was little reason to question its validity. The English in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, could afford to be complacent about these matters for most of the twentieth century – the word Rose (1982: 214) used was ‘indifferent’ – not because there was any popular aversion to things British but simply because most people in England did not feel obliged to give it much thought. Anyway, Rose was certain that the centrality of Westminster in British politics meant that ‘what is important for England will never be overlooked’.

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Insofar as there was any distinctively Conservative and English ‘public doctrine’, it could be described as self-congratulation about the parliamentary system (Cowling 1985: 310). And because it was distinctively English, its appropriation by the Conservative Party was not coincidental. Here was an understanding of England precisely as a way of running things with its own distinctive network of political institutions, one which it beneficently shared with the Scots, the Welsh and the (Northern) Irish. A good illustration of this specific Conservative understanding was another speech to the Royal Society of St George, this time Enoch Powell’s address in 1961. Though his speech is generally taken to illustrate a romantic evocation of Englishness – like Baldwin’s (1926: 7) celebrated ‘tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill’ – this was only peripherally his subject. If Powell’s address shared anything in common with Baldwin’s, it was that he told his listeners about a real transformation which, for Baldwin, was only a cloud on the horizon: what would remain of England if the Empire perished? Powell (1969: 339–40) spoke to make it known that the Empire had perished but that England remained England because its domestic institutional heritage was intact. It was not England’s rural imagery which concerned him but the enduring spirit of England’s political life. These were the real sources of England’s identity and Powell’s rhetorical flourishes only served to stress this central point: that it is the tradition of ‘government and lawgiving’ which binds the nation and which reflects back to the nation its own genius. Institutions ‘which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned’. The word ‘almost’ is important for it is not nature but ‘second nature’, or political artifice, which sustains these institutions and makes people accept ‘the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it’. Monarchy, argued Powell, for all the multinational leeks and thistles and shamrocks that had been grafted onto it, remained English: ‘The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England’s history’ (for a similar judgement, see Tombs, 2014: 330). In this reading of Englishness in the light of Conservative constitutionalism the centre of gravity is not in doubt for Powell, the convinced unionist. If parliamentary sovereignty is for Conservatives the cornerstone of the nation, it operated according to ‘English norms’ (see Bogdanor 1996: 184–6). So there is an interesting and fundamental double-speak which can be found in Conservative thinking. On the one hand, a rigorous operation of Moore’s Conservative split in the mind would confine the English within G.M. Trevelyan’s (1945) celebrated definition of social history as ‘the history of a people with the politics left out’ and it would confine the meaning of ‘British’ to conditions of citizenship. On the other hand, Powell’s Conservative institutionalism brings the politics back in as constitutive of primarily English, and only by enlargement, of British identity.

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Of course, it is possible to argue that there is a hidden or not so hidden great English chauvinism at work here of which the Conservative version is only one example. Thus A.J.P. Taylor (1965: v) stated provocatively in his Preface to English History, 1914–1945 that although the use of the word English, except for a geographical expression, brought the usual protests – perhaps he had in mind Baldwin’s fellow at the back of the hall – he intended to use it anyway as an all-embracing explanatory term for things British. This provocation was widely criticised by many historians, most notably by J.G.A. Pocock (1975) in his landmark essay ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’. As Pocock (1975: 602–3) observed of Taylor in that essay, there are parts of the world in which men are killed for less. He was prepared to admit that, given the pre-eminence of English history, no true history of Britain had yet been written and the purpose of his essay was to propose that one should be written. Taylor (1975: 622–3) was given leave to comment on Pocock’s article and he responded by arguing that it did not make sense to imply that there is ‘something called British history that is different from English history’. Similarly, he argued that everyone knew the important political institution in history and politics was Parliament, ‘which can be called English or British according to choice’. The difference between English and British in this context, he claimed, was trivial and of interest only if people wanted to ‘have a row’. Provocative indeed, if not worthy of a death sentence, and yet there is a perfectly non-chauvinist defence of his argument from a consistently British (and Conservative) position: that it is only those who are intent on having a row who want to differentiate absolutely what belongs to the English and what belongs to everyone else and vice versa (even if one has to admit that, in Taylor’s case, it involved some deliberate coat-trailing). That would be the principal Conservative justification for their ‘double-speak’. Taylor was not, of course, a Conservative but his view illustrates not only the problem of balancing English and British but it also intimates the practical solution. If there was and remains intellectual muddle in the party about England/Britain, the thing to avoid is having a row about it, whatever one’s view of the matter. And the operative assumption of Conservative politics has been that it is the United Kingdom which continues as a sufficiently robust polity such that these questions of national identity are, or should be, confined to the trivial and not serious category – which, hitherto, has been a very English way of looking at things. Whether that can remain the case is considered in subsequent chapters. What, then, is the Conservative idea of the Union? Union When Theresa May (2016b) delivered her first statement as prime minister before entering 10 Downing Street, she reminded the country that the full title of her party continues to be the Conservative and Unionist Party, announcing that the word ‘unionist’ is ‘very important to me’. In doing so, she was placing herself in line of inheritance with her predecessors. For May it meant that the party believes

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in the Union, ‘the precious, precious bond between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’. In addition to that territorial understanding of Union she added a complementary civic meaning, one ‘between all of our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and wherever we’re from’. It was interesting that this restatement of the party’s full name and its rededication – as a ‘belief ’ – to the party’s unionist vocation, territorially and civically, came at the beginning of the speech and not as a rhetorical afterthought. The effect was very much like the reaffirmation of a vow, of keeping faith with the sacramental rites of party tradition, confirming a ‘flow of sympathy’, even the enunciation of ‘elective affinity’ and authenticating leadership succession, at least back to Disraeli. This ‘belief’ in the Union will be held in the party with different levels of passion. There are the true believers; there are others who profess it more intensely at some moments than others, not unlike David Cameron’s remark (Daily Telegraph 2014) that his religious faith matches reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: ‘it sort of comes and goes’; and then there are others, a minority for sure, who could possibly be put into the category of ‘unbelieving believers’, who go through the motions of ritual obedience simply out of habit but not out of serious conviction. If belief in the Union is a ‘Tory orthodoxy’ as Biffen (1978: 165) thought, it is not one which requires subscription to definite articles of faith. It is ‘established’ in Rose’s sense of a political taken-for-granted premise. It was very Anglican and very Conservative. How do we explain this premise? The focus here is on the first element of the Union, a territorial or national understanding, and the civic (or social) understanding is examined more closely in the next chapter. Perhaps in this case again Virginia Woolf (1974) can supply some surprisingly useful insight on Conservative politics. She once proposed that certain words seem to ‘belong to each other’. Though dictionaries list and define words separately, she was certain that ‘words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind’. Words are like experience itself, resistant to ‘anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change’ such that when we abstract one word from its belonging to others we are in danger of making it ‘unreal’. That is ‘because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that’. Though words are, of course, individually stored with meanings and memories, some words have also contracted ‘many famous marriages’. Applying that thought to politics, one can argue that Conservative and Unionist is one of those famous marriages and Theresa May’s statement on the steps of 10 Downing Street can also be restated as a kind of vow to love and to cherish all the parties to it. The label ‘Conservative and Unionist’ communicates a recognisable historical and political association – one which, like enduring personal relationships, is based on difference as well as similarity. Words, according to Woolf, are ‘full of echoes, of memories, of associations’. Like any other political belief, the association of Conservative and Unionist is full of echoes and of memories as well as carrying along with it intimations of past and future disruption. Even famous marriages can break up and the marriage of Conservative and Unionist

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may do so too. It involves chance and choice, tradition and change, affection and detachment, and it is subject to the test of time. To use that cliché of marital counselling, either party may feel that the other partner is not the one they first knew. One part of the Union, southern Ireland, has already left, a departure which was to have important consequences for party politics and one which is mentioned briefly in the conclusion to this chapter. It is tempting to substitute English for Conservative, British for Unionist, allowing ‘and’ (adapting from Bagehot) to be the constitutional buckle which fastens, the hyphen which joins, the parts of the Union together. To put that another way and more accurately, the angle of vision on the Union is important and it depends on whether one is looking in to England or whether one is looking out from England. The perspective of the first angle of vision – those looking in to England from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – involves consciousness of the diversity of the Union, not presuming that everyone and everywhere has the same identity. To adapt once more the idea of ‘elective affinity’, one can say that from this angle of vision the component nationalities of the United Kingdom elect to remain in constitutional relationship with one another and that this relationship exhibits affinities giving continued substance to the word British. Elective affinity also captures well the intersection of self-understanding and self-interest in the history of the Union, taking the form of shared institutions, formal and informal arrangements, similar policy objectives and common commitments, all of which involve a sense of ‘election’ or choice. That election is not a mere idea, but is expressed literally and directly by the representation of all parts of the country in the House of Commons, where Conservative constitutionalism and British unionism meet. It also involves an attendant ‘affinity’ with the life of the state, not only politically, but also socially and culturally (more ‘flows of sympathy’). This also acknowledges a common good, or what has become known recently in discourse on the Union as ‘solidarity’. Above all it requires a feeling of membership and a sense belonging. Because there was never a formulation of that common good into a set of principles or a pledge of allegiance, it is often supposed that it does not exist and is either ‘inauthentic’ and ‘forged’; or that the ‘affinity’ is too thin ultimately, in the absence of a thick nationalist ideology, to support the Union indefinitely, a view which can trace its current form to the work of Tom Nairn (1977). If there is no ‘absolute original’ or no ‘authentic core’ to the Union – just as there is not to the Conservative Party as Chapter 1 argued – how can we make sense of its affinities? Perhaps Woolf ’s friend and fellow-writer Vita Sackville-West (1973: 341) captured something of what is meant when she described the coronation of George V at Westminster Abbey in 1911. In this ceremony, she observed how ‘words and their associations marched in a grand chain, giving hand to hand’. These words for her ranged in a long list from ‘England, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, London’ to ‘O’Conor Don, the Lord of the Isles, Macgillycuddy of the Reeks’. Hers, of course, was a very Anglo-centric list, albeit with references to Ireland and Scotland, and it underlines Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s acknowledgement (1998) that the

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Union has always been ‘a partnership rather than an absorption, albeit a partnership of unequals’. That England should be unequally represented in Sackville-West’s grand chain of affinity is understandable because she was ‘looking out’ from England and she expressed a truth about the cultural pre-eminence of things English from that vista. Those looking in to England would probably lay the stress elsewhere, with a different set of references. Or they might not, for there is no necessity for them to think of things English as not belonging to them (unlike Taylor’s ‘nationalist cranks’, of course, who would indeed think that and look for a ‘row’). Take, for example, the view of one young Northern Ireland journalist, Newton Emerson (2016). A long-standing criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s view of Northern Ireland has been that, in her Conservative Englishness, she could think only of it in terms of her own constituency, Finchley. Yet for many unionist families in Northern Ireland, thought Emerson, life was indeed like growing up in Finchley – what one watched on TV and how one thought about the world would have been very similar. When he went to university in England, Emerson never felt that he was anywhere else but in another part of his own country: ‘It was as familiar as a Tuesday evening BBC sitcom.’ That was not and is not an unusual experience, and probably applies to Welsh and Scots as well, though things may be changing today. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown provides one good example of those things changing. When he tried to define in a series of speeches the patriotic purpose of the ‘British way’, nationalist critics pointed out that most of his historical references and quotations were not British at all but English, thus conflating Englishness with Britishness. The criticism in this case was not from without England as it normally is, but from within, and Simon Lee (2011: 160), for example, took it to illustrate the ‘negation of England’ in British politics. From an elective affinity perspective that criticism is beside the point, for what is ‘theirs’ can also be ‘ours’ and vice versa – if one so chooses. Otherwise, from a unionist viewpoint, you are just looking for a row. There are four features in lists such as Sackville-West’s which continue to appeal to Conservatives, as the original did to David Willetts (2009: 54). First, the things on the list are concrete, rather than abstract, references. They may be random but they are not without meaning. Secondly, the relationships are implicit rather than explicit, assuming a command of relations which allows one to belong even if one is ignorant of a large part of the whole, or if a large part of the whole is English and not Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Thirdly, if individual references do change, continuity of association is also evoked over time. Fourthly, what remains the same is the sense of personal connection with, or standing-in-relation to, others in the Union. As J.C.D. Clark (2000: 275–6) felicitously put it, affinity in the Union seldom meant ‘demanding of its members a deeper acknowledgement of kinship with their neighbours than they were willing, informally, to give’. Indeed, Clark’s intricate and subtle argument was a direct challenge to those who considered the Union to lack both depth and substance. The general pattern, he thought, displayed the resilience of diverse identities rather than the rigidity and shattering of a unitary one, as critics like Nairn believed: ‘This

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produced a polity with strengths and weaknesses; although it could not mobilize an ethnically homogenous “people”, it had the strength of accommodating regional differences in a system which imposed on England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales no novel, abstract formula’ (Clark 2000: 275–6) – hence the importance for Conservatives of the ‘constitutional’ people. Nevertheless, those strengths could also become weaknesses if, or when, those same affinities atrophied. Conservatives, because of their predominant Englishness, generally see the Union from the perspective of England out. Contemporary nationalist critics would amend that and claim that Conservatives are looking out mainly for England. As Rose had observed, an English habit when speaking of the Union was to suppose it to be one nation; or England with appendages. That Englishness of the Conservative Party, its potential to be dismissed as the party of English nationalism, has compelled a British defence. For example, addressing the party’s Scottish conference, Margaret Thatcher (1989: 244) – like Theresa May – felt obliged to reiterate the Conservative Party’s unionist credentials. The response to people when they say the party is not Scottish, she said, is that neither is it English, Welsh or Irish: ‘We are a party of the whole United Kingdom. We are the Conservative and Unionist Party. And we will always be a Unionist party.’ However, this transcendent unionist vocation is politically ambivalent. It is a strong card to play insofar as the older affinities sustain the choice to remain ‘stronger together’ (as it was argued during the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014). Difficulties arise if being a unionist party can be presented as somehow anti-national – then Conservatives do have a problem and it was that very problem which Thatcher was addressing in Scotland. It was something to which she returned in her autobiography (Thatcher 1993: 624). If the English interest was pre-eminent in the Union, she thought, it was simply a consequence of its size. If other nations wanted special treatment they would have to make a good case on its merits, especially to England. She conceded that it was understandable that these sorts of hard truths would be resented but that had nothing to do with her Englishness. It had to do with party politics. Yet that was the issue – the association of Conservatives with Englishness. The relationship could be reversed at some stage. In this case it would not be the Scots who had problems with Conservative unionism and wanted ‘a row’. It would be the English at some point who might have a problem with the Union, and that could threaten the Conservative Party itself. Therefore, doing justice to what is separate and to what is shared in the Union has always been a delicate enterprise for the party. Like the line in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The importance of elsewhere’, the object is to ‘prove me separate, not unworkable’. It was interesting that in his response to Brown’s attempt to define Britishness, Cameron (2007) did not take the line of English nationalist criticism which we find in Lee (2011). Instead Cameron contrasted Brown’s emphasis on abstract, universal values such as fair play, liberty and openness, with concrete Conservative references to history and institutions, in particular ‘respect for parliament’. And it was also interesting that he was at pains to remind Conservatives of the need, like fidelity in marriage,

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to put the Union before neat solutions promising constitutional symmetry: ‘Better an imperfect Union than a broken one. Better an imperfect Union than a perfect divorce’ (Cameron 2007). Perhaps unconsciously, Cameron was repeating Disraeli’s aphorism that the country is governed not by logic but by Parliament; or perhaps he was, also unconsciously, repeating the wisdom of his former tutor at Oxford that asymmetry is the price England pays to maintain the Union (Bogdanor 2014). The important thing is not to indulge the ‘separate’ such that you make things ‘unworkable’. Indeed, it is possible to detect a distinct echo of Oakeshott’s view (2014: 464) that to understand a nation’s politics is like understanding its language. There are some very general principles, yes, but language and politics ‘are concrete, “historic”; the so-called anomalies which logic detects are not “anomalies” but what in fact is the case’. The historic ‘value’ of the Union, however anomalous to theorists, has been to secure a stable political order where national differences do not conflict with the achievement of common purposes and it is to this historic ‘belief ’ that most Conservatives either subscribe or feel obliged to subscribe. Cameron (2008) also argued that the Union is a home with common foundations in which distinctive national identities are not at odds with but complement a common political allegiance. The political building may be ‘constructed’ (which state is not?) but those who live within it have feelings of shame, pride and dignity about its condition (see Canovan 2003: 144). One of the criticisms of Cameron’s premiership was that he forgot the delicacy of that formulation when he spoke after the result of the Scottish referendum in the morning of 19 September 2014. It is a criticism which is considered more thoroughly in Chapter 5. Conclusion Writing one year after the party suffered its worst general election defeat since 1906, David Willetts (1998: 115–16) was certain that Conservatives continued to have answers to popular needs because they best ‘understand the tribal drumbeat of national identity’. He distinguished the deep rhythms of the country from the detached concerns of metropolitan intellectuals and claimed that the party continued to express those ‘parts of our national identity which are not appreciated in the drawing-rooms of Islington’. Willetts here was anticipating by two decades David Goodhart’s (2017) distinction between Somewheres and Anywheres and putting the party firmly on the side of the solid virtues of the nation against the dubious sophistication of a radical elite. At the same time, Willetts restated the self-confident Disraelian proclamation: Conservatism’s unique appreciation of ‘Britain’s robust individualism within a stable constitutional framework’. Remarkable hubris, one might suggest, after such a dramatic defeat and from a politician not known for arrogance. Clearly, the party had not heard the drumbeat of the nation in 1997 – New Labour had. And the nation had not considered the party capable of delivering what Willetts (1998: 169) thought it wanted and which had been

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the basis of Conservative national success hitherto: the fruits of economic success and social stability. For 1997 was a stark reminder of the historical vulnerability of the Conservative Party’s claim to be ‘national’ and perhaps Willetts’s reaffirmation was a measure of that vulnerability. What he disclosed are two enduring sides of the Conservative claim to be ‘national’, irrespective of the electoral evidence. On the one hand, Willetts restated the argument that the Conservative Party’s naturalness as the party of government remains its knowledge of the nation’s practical business: competent administration and delivery of policy derived from understanding how power really works. On the other hand, and drawing on the language of the ‘country party’ tradition, he reasserted the Conservative conceit that the party understands best what was once called the ‘character of the people’, reconciling elitism and populism and unifying the nation as a constitutional people. Intimated in that resolution of the two sides of political life is the justly celebrated thesis of Andrew Gamble’s influential book The Conservative Nation (1974): that Conservative politics is about adjusting the ‘politics of support’ in the nation to the ‘politics of power’ in the state. The meaning of the nation in this interpretation of the Conservative Party has a social, rather than constitutional, expression. It concerned almost entirely Disraeli’s other famous rhetorical flourish: the party’s concern for the ‘condition of the people’ or the party’s delivery of material prosperity and public welfare. McKenzie and Silver (1968: 242), along with other scholars at the time, had identified a transition from ‘deferential’ support for the party based on Conservative identification with constitution, union and nation to ‘secular’ support, a conditional, pragmatic judgement of the party’s ability to deliver material benefits. Conservatism in the old sense of simple defence of the Union, argued the Spectator in 1922 (cited in Evans 1998: 24–5), was no longer thought sufficient. It must mean something more and that something more should be ‘maintenance of the moral, political and commercial fabric of the nation’ in opposition to all forms of potential subversion, in particular of socialism. The party ought to stand on the essential principle of ‘the union of forces and of hearts at home for the internal welfare of the nation’. As Evans (1998: 24–5) so neatly put it, this shift from a geographical to a social expression allowed the party ‘to become a means of reconciliation in a class-based polity’. It was not that constitutional matters were no longer important, rather it was that they no longer seemed to be of primary importance. Maurice Cowling (1971) had established the significance of the change in his influential study The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924. The subtitle of that book made the argument that this was The Beginning of Modern British Politics. In large part this change in twentieth-century British politics had to do with the effect of Lloyd-George’s ‘conjuring’ the Irish Question out of existence. For example, the historian G.M. Young (1947: 86) observed that until the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Union with Ireland had been the great exasperator of politics. After 1880 it became the great preoccupation. After 1921 it was the great unknown. There was a different political atmosphere, especially after the Second World War,

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as the country set about building a welfare state. This was the era of ‘unthinking’ unionism, not just within Conservative politics but British politics as a whole (see Rose 1982: 67), and the integrity of the state, with the Irish Question gone, could be taken for granted. When it returned in the form of the recent Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, the great issues of nation, Union and constitution no longer fitted the template of Modern British Politics in which the ‘real’ issues were social and economic. Class was now its active spirit and ‘one nation’ its mantra, and this social expression of the nation – which absorbed the interest of scholars of the Conservative Party for much of the last century – requires attention.

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Conservative nation revisited

The constitution and the nation have been central ideas in Conservative politics. Yet, as the previous two chapters have argued, these ideas are unlikely to have remained unmodified. In what ways have these things, and academic interpretation of them, altered? In the years just after the end of the Second World War, George Kitson Clark (1950: 40) observed that the constitution had come to mean something very different for his generation from its meaning for previous generations. Today ‘the constitution which our forefathers so earnestly believed in, toasted after so many dinners, celebrated with such pompous oratory and called the palladium of their liberties, has been reformed out of all knowledge’. Here Kitson Clark was recalling the constitutional people at play, yet in the course of the twentieth century the constitution had come to mean not the limitation of power but ‘the concentration of power’. Kitson Clark’s view that the constitution had changed ‘out of all knowledge’ reflected a wider Conservative anxiety about the terms of trade in post-war politics. If the ‘impact’ of Labour (Cowling 1971) after the First World War had been to introduce a new ‘duality’ into British party politics – Conservatives as the anti-socialist party and Labour as the anti-Conservative party – that duality of Conservatism versus socialism had consequences for how both the nation and the state were conceived. Rather than being dominated by the question of the composition of the state – Irish Home Rule, the House of Lords and women’s suffrage – debate now concerned the role of the state – the appropriate degree of public control of industry, the distribution of income and capital and economic policy (Bogdanor 2016a). That it was commonplace to think that the constitution now meant ‘the concentration of power’ and that there was a choice to be made between liberty and power, helps to explain, for example, the combative vigour of the early essays in Oakeshott’s influential collection Rationalism in Politics (1991). In an article published originally in 1949 (one which was frequently to be cited by Conservative critics of Labour’s state controls in the 1970s), Oakeshott had described that concentration of power as ‘collectivism’, which he understood to be a comprehensive organisation of society ‘in which all loose ends are tied up in the interest of the whole’. Labour’s socialism required not only the centralisation of control but also the application of discretionary authority.

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Oakeshott (1991: 398–9) thought collectivism could only be imposed upon a society with a tradition of liberty like the United Kingdom by appearing to maintain continuity of form – Crown, Lords and Commons – while radically changing its substance (he too used the expression ‘concentration of power’). He also pointed to the equally threatening tendency of ‘syndicalism’ or trade unionism, described as ‘a contrivance by means of which society is disposed for a perpetual civil war in which the parties are the organised self-interest of functional minorities’ (Oakeshott 1991: 401). The effect of syndicalism would mean that ‘the community as a whole pays the bill in monopoly prices and disorder’. Though Oakeshott argued that collectivism and syndicalism were antithetical, the first requiring a strong state and the second a weak state, Conservative criticism of socialism combined the two: Labour was the party of the big state (collectivism) and, as the creature of the trade unions (syndicalism), employed the power of the first to deliver the demands of the second. This concentration of power in government, it was argued, meant casual indifference to all elements of freedom as well as the loss of many, often conceded by proxy to the ‘power of the trade unions’. Such dangerous constriction of the liberties of an existing ‘manner of living’ should be the duty of the Conservative Party to oppose. Three decades later, Hailsham (1978) was to describe the emerging concentration of power as an ‘elective dictatorship’, though one which promoted self-interested anarchy on the part of trade unions. What Hailsham thought to be strikingly different was really a restatement of the choices that Oakeshott had identified and a rephrasing of that concentration of power about which Kitson Clark had warned. Though rhetorically critical of the association of collectivism and syndicalism, one problem for the Conservative Party was differentiating itself from its practice insofar as it – and not Labour – had been in office for most of the post-war period. It was Margaret Thatcher who set in motion the politics of differentiation, in the process attempting to discern afresh the ‘national’ identity of Conservatism. In Chapter 1 it was noted how Oakeshott criticised left-wing intellectuals who thought they had ‘the corner in ideas’ and worried that socialism had acquired a ‘moral halo’ against which even his eloquent arguments would possibly come to nought. Seventy years later, and only slightly tongue in cheek, the journalist Bruce Anderson (2016) could marvel still at the confidence of those on the left who assumed, despite all the great changes that had taken place in the last forty years, that history was still on their side and who continued to think they occupied a position of moral superiority. This was a complacency which Conservatives could only envy. Indeed, here was a very real but apparently paradoxical insight: that Conservatism is by instinct and disposition as much counter-cultural as it is piously conventional, as much against the tide as it is with it. Yet, as Chapter 1 also noted, there has been acknowledgement by their critics, especially on the left, that Conservatives have been very effective defenders of a ‘manner of living’ and have been very adept at presenting the party as the ‘soul of the nation’. Indeed, it has often been the concern of academics to explain the latter (Conservative electoral success) despite the former

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(the party’s uncomfortable relationship with modernity). This chapter engages with that paradox and with explanations of it. It does so by considering the meaning of that protean notion of ‘one nation’ Conservatism; the character of ‘the Conservative nation’, as Andrew Gamble (1974) so neatly described it; and the idea of politics which informs both conceptions and how it might be changing. One nation When she launched her leadership campaign in Birmingham on 11 July 2016, Theresa May (2016b) – ironically, anticipating Labour’s 2017 general election slogan – committed herself to fostering a society that works for everyone and which brings people back together – ‘rich and poor, north and south, urban and rural, young and old, male and female, black and white, sick and healthy, public sector, private sector, those with skills and those without’. Here was a profession to ‘make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few but for every single one of us’. So much, so predictable, one might say, because which prospective leader would ever openly propose a society which works only for the few? The rhetorical connection with Conservative history of that brief passage was made explicit when May later became prime minister. She stated that her predecessor, David Cameron, had led a ‘one nation’ government, ‘and it is in that spirit that I also plan to lead’ (May 2016c). This was another declaration of Conservative apostolic succession. It was Disraeli in his novel Sybil, originally published in 1845, who had spoken of those ‘two nations’ between which there was no sympathy or understanding, the ‘rich and the poor’. Creating a society that works for everyone and which brings people back together, especially ‘rich and poor’, identifies the Conservative Party with a benign and defensible democratic mission. In his excellent and insightful study, David Seawright (2010: 24–5) considered ‘one nation’ to be the true ‘ethos’ of the Conservative Party. Here he adopted Henry Drucker’s term, originally applied to the Labour Party, to describe that ‘normative canopy’ which shelters debates about direction and policy and which associates the interest of the Conservative Party in particular with the interests of the country in general. One nation, in Seawright’s expression (2010: 29–33), is ‘a core concept of prodigious elegance and longevity’ and the aim of its usage has been to make the party’s name ‘either synonymous or interchangeable with the term “national” or indeed “Britishness” ’. Conservative deployment of the term serves a number of important political purposes. As Theresa May’s statement confirms, it establishes a virtuous lineage with the historical achievements of the party and with those leaders who realised them; it provides continuity of language as well as implying continuity of purpose; it serves to erect the party’s own ‘moral halo’ above whatever policy progamme it describes; and it is useful shorthand to describe the vocation of a uniquely patriotic party. It confirms Hailsham’s dictum (1978: 35) that political traditions are more easily taken over than created and in this case the fidelity has been remarkable such that this Conservative ethos, in all its prodigiousness and elegance,

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is often emphasised by capitalisation: One Nation. Of course, ‘one’ does not mean ‘equal’, at least in what Conservatives used to call the ‘vulgar’ sense of everyone being, or having, the same. As Disraeli’s speech at Crystal Palace proposed (cited in Kebbel 1882: 523–55), ‘national’ is a description of all classes, alike and equal before the law, ‘but whose different conditions and different aims give vigour and variety to our national life’. It is the palladium of liberties because ‘the great body of the people of this country have enjoyed a personal right and liberty not enjoyed by the population of any other country; but of late years political rights have been largely and gradually, therefore wisely, distributed’ (in Kebbel 1882: 523–55). Burke could not have put it better, or more grandiosely. As Burn (1959: 47–8) observed, Disraeli established thereby a tradition capable of transformation, one which could adapt to the times and yet remain comfortable in its familiarity. And the proposition that the vigour of national life depends not upon uniformity of condition (equality) but upon its variety (inequality) continues to provide a useful polemical distinction between Conservatism and its opponents over the social character of the nation. For example, the journalist Melanie Phillips (2016) chastised Theresa May for appearing to concede the shibboleth of equality in her proposed ‘equality audit’ of public services. Phillips’s point was that Conservatives should be concerned with entitlement to equal respect and opportunity but not with uniformity regardless of behaviour or circumstance. In an echo of both Oakeshott and Anderson, she believed that the prime minister had been seduced by the ‘left’s false view of itself as inhabiting the moral high ground’ (Phillips 2016). Their mantra of equality, Phillips argued, represents nothing other than the ‘negation’ of one nation Conservatism. In the passage of almost 150 years between Disraeli and Phillips the language and the tone have changed but the essential meaning is retained. There is a ‘manner of living’, real and rooted in the history of the nation, which is Conservative, whereas egalitarianism is abstract and soulless, the typical emanation of Burkean ‘philosophes’. It is the former which secures the condition of settled liberty while it is the latter which requires either the concentration of power or syndicalist interference by vested interests. The political value of one nation is that it associates the Conservative Party with a further proposition, that the party which represents ‘one nation’ is also the ‘natural party of government’. This helps to explain why Labour leaders from Harold Wilson to Ed Miliband have tried to appropriate the idea of one nation for the Labour Party. It was, for example, one of the first declarations made by Tony Blair as leader: ‘Now the mantle of one-nation politics no longer fits the Tories. It is draped rightly and properly round our shoulders’ (in Timmins 1995) and, of all Labour leaders, it fitted Blair most comfortably. Ostragorski (see Chapter 2) would have appreciated Blair’s intent. That simple demonstration that ‘one nation’ was, and is, capable of being contested shows that is it not necessarily Conservative property and that it can have different meanings. Contestation over the meaning of ‘one nation’ lies in the significance of class in British politics. The main programmatic concern of modern politics has involved

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either degrees of equity (if one was Conservative) or degrees of equality (if one was not) because class, as Peter Pulzer (1967) most famously and succinctly professed, was the basis of British politics and all else was embellishment and detail. As such, class constituted the model of British democracy for both intellectuals and politicians, a model that appeared to simplify and to clarify electoral choice. Now that older divisions about religion, region and nation seemed to have gone, only class remained electorally salient and was taken to be the marker of political modernity. Though apparently simple and clear, class as a sociological category did not have any certain political conclusions. Understood under the classic Marxist designation of ‘antagonistic’ social relations, ‘class struggle’ necessarily pitched the minority against the majority, the propertied against those without property, rich against poor. That radical opposition, if it were to become the substance of democratic politics, was recognised to be fatal to the Conservative interest. According to Lord Hugh Cecil (1912: 128), Conservatism ought not to be the cause of the rich; rather it should be ‘the defence of property against unjust treatment’ and ‘property’ here was defined not as a particular possession of the few but as the universal birthright of every member of the constitutional people. One nation Conservatism became the patriotic alternative to class antagonism, appealing to the nation in the language of historical birthright. As the originator of the term ‘one nation’, Stanley Baldwin put the Conservative case neatly in a speech to the House of Commons in 1925 (in Speck 1993: 155). He announced that his party stood for ‘stable Government and for peace in the country between all classes of the community’. Class reconciliation, not conflict, was the message of one nation Conservatism. There was another popular sensibility with which it was sometimes confused. This other sensibility was far more challenging to Conservatives – which is why they did their best to sow the confusion – because it found expression in the parliamentary politics of the Labour Party. It involved a different politics of class contested on the ground which Cecil thought to be natural Conservative territory: just treatment and personal value, a politics which threatened also to occupy the Conservative heartlands of history, tradition and nationhood. Colls (2011: 571) illustrated this alternative narrative. If it was the general assumption of modern politics that ‘the native genius was for class struggle’, the construction of history and nation need not be the one established according to the conventions of Conservatism. In this transposed story, justice involved a sense of national worth incompatible with being a slave, a pauper, or without a vote: ‘The Tolpuddle Martyrs – six Dorset labourers who believed themselves “freeborn” – had a difference of opinion with the Dorchester magistrates as to the true course of English liberty’. That ‘difference of opinion’ about the nation constituted a lively constituent in the ethos of Labour politics and, though it was reformist and not revolutionary, the reforms it envisaged through state action often threatened that ‘manner of living’ which Conservatives wished to preserve. And in contemporary politics some on the left argue that it is vital to recover that constituent language of patriotism in order

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for the Labour Party to speak to and for the nation once more, although in this case the country is likely to be England rather than Britain (Denham 2015). There is certainly an irony in the fact that the Conservative Party has always been at its most vulnerable when its opponents challenge credibly its right to narrate the people’s story. It is why the presentation of an alternative national lineage for radical politics has been thought by some to be the essential requirement for defeating the Tories. That history from below, charting the ‘long march of everyman’ (and woman), was thought to be a necessary complement to the ‘history is on our side’ view of modern politics. This was not Trevelyan’s social history with the politics taken out, rather it was political history with the social or popular put in. It was a challenge to a culture in which the majority – to adapt Dodd’s judgement (1986: 22) – were ‘spectators’ of a national manner of living ‘already complete and represented for them by its trustees’. That Conservative ‘trustees’ have to make the most of one nation and are obliged always to repeat that dedication is an indication that their trusteeship is far from secure. Indeed, insecurity about which party has trusteeship of the nation fostered a countervailing Conservative populism, touched on in Chapter 2, and which is perhaps most succinctly expressed by criticism of left-liberal ‘oikophobia’. This is the Conservative version of Orwell’s analogy of the nation as a ‘family with the wrong members in control’. Scruton coined this term to describe an elite disdain for the lives of ordinary people. This was a restatement of Conservative identification as the party embodying the ‘prejudices’ of the nation against an unrepresentative metropolitan elite. In this case the disharmony is held to lie in a cultural gulf between those who set the standards of public acceptability and those who find their way of life constantly disrespected by those standards. Thus for Scruton (2004: 36–7) the instinctive loyalties and outlook that people believe should be reflected in national life ‘is constantly ridiculed or even demonised by the dominant media and educational system’. Oikophobia is the repudiation of inheritance and home and he believed it had found its niche in public institutions like the universities and the BBC that offer oikophobes (think, in this case, of Guardian readers) ‘the power base from which to attack the simple loyalties of ordinary people’. Oikophobes persistently assault national values and national identity and it should be the task of Conservatives to resist and to reverse their inroads into public taste. Indeed, one criticism of the Conservative Party under Cameron was that it failed to accept that responsibility and so facilitated the emergence of populist tendencies outside its control which, in the shape of UKIP, came to threaten the party’s national credentials. Some then criticised May for taking the opposite course of action, something addressed in the final chapters of this book. In the ‘social’ tradition of one nation, argument between and within parties tended to revolve around the meaning of the one – in Bogdanor’s terms, about the degree of nationalisation, the extent of income distribution and the control of capital – and until recently the meaning of nation was assumed to be self-evident, as in the National Health Service (NHS). Though this emphasis is now changing, it is important to reflect on

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the legacy which that change modifies. That one nation has served the Conservatives so well as a ‘normative canopy’ suggests that it is more than a mere slogan and that it corresponds in some measure to how people, and not just Conservatives, experience the world. What may offend the spirit of egalitarianism has been reasonably successful in maintaining a spirit of class tolerance. Here Conservative understanding of one operates under the pragmatic designation of a modus vivendi, which presupposes a sort of rubbing along together of the classes, at times comfortably, at others less comfortably, but mainly predictably and peacefully. In rather mystical terms, George Santayana (1922: 27) – who was to become popular amongst some theorists of conservative thought at the end of the twentieth century (see O’Sullivan 1993) – conveyed this wisdom when reflecting on his brief experience of living in England. He defined ‘a distinctive society’ (or nation) in terms of a people who ‘are at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities, irrelevance, misunderstanding, vanity and propaganda’. But, ‘being naturally akin’ – there exists a sort of elective affinity between the classes – it was possible for different people to ‘soliloquize in harmony’ if only because culturally ‘their hearts are similar’. Here was the basis for society’s ‘friendship in the spirit’ which might achieve agreement across ‘the void of separation’. Santayana believed that the many voices did in fact ‘harmonise’ and that even frantic poses and argumentative voices tended to ‘neutralize one another and do no harm on the whole’. Here was a version of Stanley Baldwin’s country before its rhetorical appearance as one nation Conservatism and it evoked poetically that ‘underlying unity’ about which Hailsham (1959) wrote at the pinnacle of the party’s post-war success. And its translation into statist terms, the terms by which Kitson Clark believed the modern constitution operated, was best conveyed by R.A. (‘Rab’) Butler, who argued that the purpose of the Conservative Party is ‘to wield the power of the state to balance the interests within in it’ (in Garnett and Hickson 2009: 36). In other words, the tradition of one nation provided a justification to support some of that ‘concentration of power’ which Kitson Clark had detected, at the same time insisting that individual liberties ‘should not be entirely eviscerated’ (in Dorey and Garnett 2015: 72) by the collectivism and syndicalism which Oakeshott had feared. Importantly for the Conservative Party, it helped to secure a new modus vivendi between the classes, one providing important opportunities for it to win and hold power. One can argue – and certainly opponents of the party do argue this – that the normative canopy of one nation is merely a vision of the Conservative Party at prayer, confessing its faith in ritualistic terms, a confession which often bears little relationship to Conservative practice, which is about maintaining privilege and protecting inequality. At the same time there are members of the party who understand one nation similarly, but with a very different emphasis: that it is the voice of political conscience restraining those animal spirits of Conservative politics which are likely to be self-destructive. At one of the low points in the party’s fortunes the journalist Matthew Parris (2001), formerly an aide to Margaret Thatcher and Conservative MP,

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wrote that one nation is not the driving force within the party but is best understood as a ‘defence mechanism’. One nation Conservatism is the voice of restraint which shifts the party’s visual horizon, compelling it to take notice of those who are outside its ‘tribe’ and who do not share its particular passions or obsessions. It acts as a shield against rash assumptions about what is politically acceptable and functions as the party’s warning device. Fear is not what drives a one nation Conservative, Parris concluded, ‘but fear is what drives his party to take notice’ of it. And that fear – of electoral marginalisation and political powerlessness – became the party’s lot between 1997 and 2010. And why was this? It was because New Labour whistled the tune of one nation more convincingly than the Conservatives and the public was no longer listening to the party’s own version. It appeared then that a ‘progressive majority’ was emerging at last, an enlightened and radical nation, multicultural, tolerant, European, the belief in whose existence had comforted and consoled the left during those long periods of Conservative government. The reason for Conservative defeats in this period have been attributed mainly to the abandonment of one nation politics by Margaret Thatcher; by the failure to listen to those ‘outside the tribe’; or to what Gray (1994) and others called political ‘hubris’ – a disabling of Parris’s one nation ‘defence mechanism’ leading to the ‘undoing’ of Conservatism. Yet how fair is that familiar assessment? In the introduction to the first volume of her autobiography, Margaret Thatcher (1993: 8) remarked that the ‘final illusion’ of the ideology ‘that state intervention would promote social harmony and solidarity, or in Tory language, One Nation’ – the Conservative Faustian pact with concentration of power – had collapsed during the public sector strikes of 1978–9. This period, known popularly as the ‘winter of discontent’, was understood by Tories as Labour’s Faustian pact with syndicalism. This is the only reference to that ‘Tory language’ in the whole volume about her period in office. There is little doubt that Thatcher believed one nation Conservatism, or at least a version of it, to be complicit in the post-war policies required by ‘collectivism’ and which she rejected. Her biographer Charles Moore (2013: 398) noted that during the ‘winter of discontent’, Thatcher resisted the media advisers who were telling her to take a conciliatory tone: ‘You’re going to try to sell me a One Nation message, aren’t you?’ However Moore (2013: 399) also recounts how, in her party political broadcast at the time, she ‘cast aside her earlier anxiety about the phrase’ and told the public that if the country did not learn again to be one nation, ‘one day we shall be no nation’. It was a form of words which appealed to her and she was later to use it when speaking about the European Union. In defence of Margaret Thatcher, Shirley Letwin (1978: 56–7) argued that ‘conservative individualism’ was a tradition she enabled the party to recover. It ‘can only be found in an order that rests on tradition and authority’, a proposition that only appeared novel because when it flourished originally – and it echoes Disraeli’s Manchester speech – it was ‘unselfconsciously taken for granted’. For Letwin – like Kitson Clark – post-war politics had transformed debate and meant that those who tried to defend that older tradition lacked the proper language to do so. There had

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been a weakening of national ‘character’ and a decline in the ‘vigorous virtues’ of independence (Letwin 1992). Therefore, Thatcher’s urge to end the ‘dependency culture’ promoted by the collectivist state was not, as her critics frequently claimed, alien to the party’s history. It is possible to argue hers was the true breath of that history. Margaret Thatcher also believed in the natural conservatism of people – the ‘people’ in this case defined as the growing middle and upper working classes – who owned their own homes, had some investments, provided for their own pensions and wanted choice in public services. These were the Conservative individualists about whom Letwin (1978) wrote, those who love their country, want to be independent and be responsible for their own lives. Indeed, Moore (2004) thought that if ‘the Conservative Party cannot tell their story, there is no point to it’. Here was ‘the basis of a non-socialist British political, social and economic order’ (Harris 2004) which should be the object of Conservative policy and a riposte to the oikophobes. Indeed, in that same article Harris provided not only an excellent summary of this Conservative faith but also a prophetic conclusion. The party, he thought, is ‘doomed to flourish’ but only so long as it remains true to itself: ‘It is the middle-class party in a country where the nation is increasingly middle class and increasingly resents an expensive and intrusive state. It is the patriotic party at a time when the British are increasingly keen to determine their own destiny.’ One nation was not rejected – it was redefined as a people of aspiration sustained by, and sustaining, a self-confident patriotism. Critics inside as well as outside the party still argue that the deployment of one nation in this case remains merely decorative, a familiar incantation of harmony to mask a very different, novel, and divisive, political strategy. In doing so, though for very different reasons, those critics help to sustain the mythology of what became known as Thatcherism, namely that it had changed everything. Richard Hayton’s analysis (2012: 6–11) of the literature has managed to bring a sharper perspective on that myth, contextualising the party’s strategy and providing a corrective to its novelty. In particular he filleted perceptively the arguments of those, like Gilmour, for whom the party’s trajectory from the mid-1970s onwards had been informed by an illegitimate philosophy. Or in the words of Lord Stockton in 1985: ‘I have long realised that the great figures in my old party have long ago given up Toryism and have adopted Manchester Liberalism of about 1860’ (cited in Evans 1998: 26). As Hayton (2012: 28–9) observed, these criticisms are rather one-eyed and they abstract too neatly from what is a more complex political tradition. The idea that Conservatives would fall victim to a foreign doctrine ‘is ultimately inadequate’ and in that judgement he underlined the subtle interpretation of Seawright. Seawright (2010: 95) pointed out how it had become part of received wisdom that one nation was the exclusive property of the left in the party and that somehow it attached exclusively to a statist approach of the sort which had caused anxiety for Kitson Clark and Oakeshott. In their interpretation, both Hayton and Seawright avoided the defects which Coleman (1988: 3) detected in earlier works on the Conservative Party which were the product, he thought, of post-war academics who found it hard

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to celebrate anything in the past unless it could be depicted as ‘progressive’. This tendency was compounded by an ‘in-house history’, written by sympathisers who needed a sanitised version of the past ‘which conformed to mid-twentieth-century assumptions about the purposes of politics’. No wonder, then, that Margaret Thatcher’s style caused a disordering of the intellectual senses. Nevertheless, history shows that both statist and market thinking were always bound together in one nation politics. As Robert Walsha’s study (2003: 95) of the membership and publications of the One Nation Group of Conservative MPs concluded, to think of the ideas which became associated with Thatcher as a brand fundamentally at odds with Conservative thought ‘is oversimplistic and flawed’. Yet there is some justice in the traditional ‘distinctiveness of Thatcherism’ thesis because it was responding to a mood for change within the party as well as in the country. It is explained in part by the other half of the Parris (2001) article referred to earlier. If one nation Conservatism is a ‘defence mechanism’, Parris (2001) did not think it could ever be the entirety of what the Conservative Party stands for. In the contemporary era, Conservatives feel that they are the party defending or advancing the interests ‘of talent, of energy, of ambition, of hard work, of privilege acquired and privilege striven for’. It is the party for the ‘aspirational’ as well as the ‘privileged’, but ‘the aspirational and the already privileged parts of society are not the whole nation. They may be a minority, or no more than a bare majority.’ The first-past-thepost electoral system – perhaps more than being the ‘national party’ – has been an important factor in that Conservative minority/bare majority securing office and power. This is not a simple division of working class versus middle class but cuts across its boundaries. As Parris (2006) later conceded, Margaret Thatcher did tend to divide the nation into ‘our people’ and the rest, but ‘in her own person and origins she did much to distance the Conservative party from its association with toffs and their interests’. In a nutshell, here is another Conservative conundrum: how are the interests of the ‘aspirational’ and ‘privileged’ or ‘our people’ to be promoted without dividing the nation? To put it in a more partisan way: how can the common interest of the nation be represented in terms of the specific interests of ‘our people’? This is a delicate exercise with no certainty of success and Thatcher’s success surprised most of her contemporaries both in the party and outside. The problem for the party was that the ‘hubris’ of the Thatcherites let down the gates of the party’s one nation ‘defence mechanism’. One Conservative leader who failed to deal subsequently with this image problem was well aware of the problem. Echoing Oakeshott’s remark about the opposition’s ‘moral halo’, Iain Duncan Smith’s political rule of thumb (Nelson 2016) held that voters assume that the heart of Conservative opponents is in always the right place. Unfortunately, ‘Conservatives get the opposite: yes, you may be competent but we question your motives.’ Consequently, Conservatives can never assume that the electorate will judge them to be well-intentioned reformers rather than ‘ice-hearted hatchet men’. And this ‘ice-hearted’ disposition – which their partners in coalition

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government claimed to experience – is thought to be the true soul of Conservative practice. Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg claimed (Hattenstone 2016) that when reports from focus groups revealed that ‘voters they wanted to appeal to’ (those aspirational groups) were critical of welfare spending, the Conservative response was to play to such ‘prejudices’ irrespective of ‘the human consequences’ (see also Clegg 2016, especially ch. 5). Whether his is an accurate portrait of Conservative sympathies or not, it confirmed at least Duncan Smith’s rule of thumb as well as the problems in claiming to represent one nation. In other words, there is always a danger that the party’s one nation ‘halo’ will not only slip but fall off altogether, threatening its popular bona fides. Andrew Gamble (1974: 204) believed that Conservative leaders have always been uneasily aware of the fragility of the political raft upon they sail on democratic waters. To adapt Oakeshott’s famous metaphor, their enterprise has been to keep the party afloat and to convince the nation that it knows best how to govern in the common interest. The fact that the Conservative Party not only managed to keep afloat in a democracy but also enjoyed the spectacle of their rivals periodically capsizing, prompted Gamble’s important and influential study of the Conservative nation. By this combination Gamble did not imply that the nation was naturally Conservative, only that the party had been able to construct a solid, if contingent, association of its interest in power with the welfare of the people, an association which had delivered consistent electoral success in the twentieth century. Conservative nation Though it was written over forty years ago, Gamble’s The Conservative Nation (1974) remains full of compelling insights into contemporary Conservative politics, in particular revealing the truth that the ‘naturalness’ of the party’s claim to government is not natural at all but constructed, just as the ‘Conservative’ nation is not natural either but equally constructed. Gamble explored with subtlety how these two mutually supporting ideological constructions – the national/patriotic and the natural/competent – were sustained in the era of democratic politics. Though the book concluded with the observation that if electoral politics is not determined by class struggle, it is not unaffected by it, Gamble (1974: 234) expected that a ‘new settlement’ was possible, predicting that the creature of the Conservative nation might soon find its way ‘into the museum of Fantastic Zoology’. One could say that the argument of The Conservative Nation represented a classic application of the Pulzer thesis, albeit from a Marxist perspective, and made assumptions about class politics and the state which, as the next chapter examines, are no longer as certain as they once were. Gamble’s task was to chart the ways in which the common interest of the nation had been translated ideologically by the Conservative Party to represent the specific interests of those with power. In short, it was a deconstruction of one nation Conservatism. To use a 2017 expression, the thesis was that socialism was en marche and that Conservative defences would finally be overrun.

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Gamble (1974: 3–5) began with the proposition that modern politics is a product of the separation between state and nation – though both combined in the ‘nation state’ as the basis of sovereignty – a distinction similar to the one made in previous chapters between the pays légal and the pays réel. Two styles of politics emerge from that initial distinction. These are the ‘politics of power’ which reflect the priorities of state and the ‘politics of support’ which flow from the wants and hopes of the nation. Another way of putting this would be to differentiate between the priorities of the state and the priorities of the nation. According to Gamble, the priority of power is (above all) concerned with the defence of property – or ‘the capitalist mode of production’ – and the ‘realities’ which that mode imposes upon social life and class structure. Conservatism cannot be reduced wholly to the defence of property, nor is it entirely confined by class struggle, but its purpose (to use again that term of Burke’s) may be discerned in them. The priority of support, by contrast, involves competition in the electoral market and at any one time requires multi-dimensional calculations by Conservative leaders: to keep the support of the party in Parliament, to manage expectations of the party membership effectively; and to win a majority of votes in the country. This is not an easy task and politicians in the electoral market, according to Gamble (1974: 7) need to ‘express it, mould it, lead it, frighten it, deceive it, dazzle it and persuade it’, employing their rhetorical skills to secure office and control. The Conservatives have proved adept at this task historically and one of the reasons is that Conservative principles and values are ‘a ragbag drawn from almost every conceivable intellectual tradition’ (Gamble 1974: 7). Gamble believed that the party had the advantage of flexibility, albeit within limits, since the consistent feature of Conservative politics has been the priority of the state (capitalist property relations) according to which the national interest (support) is defined. Since ‘the politics of power has always come first for Conservatives, the politics of support is generally interpreted in terms of its requirements’ (Gamble 1974: 9). The practice which connects different periods of the party’s history resides in its ‘attempts to reconcile the politics of support and the politics of power, and to make the Conservative nation a reality, by finding a majority in the nation to support the Conservatives’ claim and evident desire to manage the affairs of the British state’ (Gamble 1974: 15). Here was a sophisticated academic interpretation which acknowledged and yet qualified a very basic argument (Davies 1995): that the Conservative Party is interested only in power. The meaning of one nation Conservatism was protean enough to facilitate this. Gamble (1974: 62) astutely identified part of the success in constructing that Conservative nation to the party’s self-conscious association with the country’s providential past, an association which also redescribed the party’s history as the vehicle of national greatness. This was a ‘halo’ of another sort, one which elevated to national destiny the mundane business of party politics and sanctified the exercise of power. It was a declaration that the values of Conservatism are of the same warp and weft as the fabric of national character. By implication, then, the weakening in

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political culture of that idea of providence, manifest destiny or exceptional national experience was likely to have the corresponding effect of dispelling the Conservative entitlement to be its exemplary embodiment. This was true if only because the party’s unique claim to reconcile the politics of power and support implied in large degree the grandeur of that providential vision. Indeed, it can be argued that one of the problems for the Conservative Party in the twenty-first century has been that, in these disillusioned times, it is seen by voters as a mediocre political party, led by career politicians, in just another run-of-the-mill country. Writing twenty years after the publication of The Conservative Nation, Gamble (1995: 24) did think that this moment of disenchantment had been reached, such that the ‘spectacle which the Conservative Party presents at the end of the twentieth century is of a force whose ideological tradition has become exhausted’. With the end of its hegemony, he thought, would come the decay of the Conservative nation and there was tentative confirmation of this prediction at the time in Philip Lynch’s important study (1999: 167) of what he called Conservative ‘state patriotism’. Lynch argued that the party’s disastrous defeat in the 1997 general election could be read as the loss of its role ‘as a responsible national party in tune with the instincts and values of the British people’. As Conservatives approached the twenty-first century, the risk Lynch identified was that the ‘key weapon in their armoury’ – Disraeli’s ‘national’ appeal – had ‘finally lost its ability to convince’. Here, possibly, was the end of an old song, especially because of Disraeli’s conclusion that if it were not national, the party would be nothing. In such an eventuality, not only would Conservatives have lost their patriotic exclusiveness, becoming just one political sect amongst many, but the nation in its instincts and values would no longer be Conservative. This threatened a return to a future before Disraeli’s mythic transformation, when John Stuart Mill could describe the Conservatives as the ‘stupidest party’, one out of touch with the main currents of liberal Britain and representing in its politics a world that had gone. That the period of New Labour dominance did present an intimation of the party’s decline – if not as an institution, then as a serious party of government – was a view that was widely shared. This was especially the case amongst some on the left for whom the historical success of Conservative politics had been viewed with a mixture of fascination, almost admiration, but mainly dismay. One of the most incisive critics of the party (Schwarz 1999: 215) thought that the novel politics of the new millennium made people look ‘more sceptically on the deepest truths of the conservative nation’ perhaps because the past impressed itself on the present less than ever before. Conservatism in Britain appeared ‘to know neither a past, nor a future’ now that ‘the intoxicating idiom of the conservative nation’ had worn off (Schwarz 1999: 184). In other words, there was something of a consensus – a variation on Gray’s argument (1997) about the ‘end’ of Conservatism – that the party was ‘out of time’ in two senses. First, its exemplary patriotic pretension had run its course as the party retreated into its core, ageing and declining, English constituency. Secondly, the party was at odds with the spirit of

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the new century which no longer breathed the fusty air of tradition but was open, multicultural, diverse and progressive. Therefore, the act of reconciliation which Gamble believed to characterise the Conservative nation – adjusting the demands of electoral support to the requirements of political power – no longer functioned effectively. The party had lost touch with power and no longer spoke for, or even to, the nation. The reason was that the electoral ground on which to achieve its purpose, as well as the emotional materials to which the party could appeal, appeared to have narrowed substantially in the new millennium. The irony lay in this. Having seen off the socialist alternative in the form of collectivism and syndicalism – Gamble’s ‘new settlement’ which did not happen – the Conservative Party had secured definitively the interests of power, but written off its affinities with the nation. The challenges to be met on its narrowing ground of support were not unusual, however. Was the electoral perspective of the party attractive to voters? Was the act of voting Conservative an affirmation of a widely shared patriotism? Was there correspondence between the mood of the country and the arguments of party leadership; or was the culture of the party itself, along with the beliefs of its members, at odds with the general sentiments of the majority of voters? In short, to paraphrase the foundational conundrum to be found in Disraeli’s Coningsby and one appropriate still for modern times: if one is to support the Conservative Party, what does the party aim to conserve? What – and whom – does it represent? In order to answer these questions persuasively the party, as ever, has had to look within itself – to reassess Conservatism – and also without – to reconnect with the nation. These questions have returned in the aftermath of the general election of June 2017. The Conservative Nation was also a reflection on and informed by what had become known as the post-war consensus. As the previous section of this chapter discussed, the dominant electoral perspective of the Conservative Party in this period was that a social expression of one nation, founded on class compromise – an adjustment to some concentration of power, to some collectivism and a workable accommodation with limited syndicalism – was a necessary (albeit contentious) accommodation to the new politics of power. While consensus was a seductive index of the common ground in British politics, it did not adequately measure the differences between the parties, except to assume that ‘traditional’ (or ‘real’) Conservatism was now inappropriate. For Gamble, traditional Conservative views could not adapt to the priorities of state after 1945 and so were ditched by the leadership. The value of individual freedom (which we find in Oakeshott) and the evils of centralised control (which we find in Kitson Clark) ‘only made sense if the party were preparing to cut back the new state in a drastic manner’ (Gamble 1974: 57). Gamble thought that Conservatives had no such plan, nor could they, because the leadership’s commitment to the post-war settlement, rephrased as one nation, ‘was too deep to permit otherwise’. There is an irony, of course, in that Gamble’s book was published on the eve of another moment of change. Things were to look very different after 1979, when Gamble wrote another

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influential study of the new order of ‘Thatcherism’: The Free Economy and the Strong State (1988). The Conservative nation had taken on a different character and one nation a different meaning. According to Margaret Thatcher in 1986, the purpose of Conservatism was to enable more and more people to own property: ‘Popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. We Conservatives are returning power to the people. That is the way to one nation, one people’ (in Wiseman 2015). This was both a reaction against the post-war settlement and – in Gamble’s terms – a resumption of those traditional beliefs he thought had been discredited in 1945. It involved reversing the advance of ‘syndicalism’ and addressing the ‘evils’ of the big state. The paradox was this: Thatcherism heralded a new world in terms of recovering the virtues of the old and, in the attainment of which, succeeded in ‘undoing’ traditional Conservatism (Gray 1994). In the new millennium, the reaction against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatism identified it with the very thing Lord Hugh Cecil had cautioned against a century earlier: the party appearing to be only for the rich and caring little for the nation. Here were the Conservatives (Martin 2016a) as the men in red trousers shouting at the rugby, the heartless bosses and bad bankers in sports cars. ‘The powerful myth of Tory sheer awfulness’ is easy to caricature but very hard to dispel and the ‘nasty party’ image was fatal to Conservative electoral prospects. That this image endured and became ‘toxic’ was unfairly attributed to John Major’s premiership, and the equally unfair judgement that his period in office demonstrated the party’s un-naturalness for government (incompetence) was also evidence of putting party before nation (sleaze) – though this judgement has been revised substantially (see Hickson and Williams 2017). Unfortunately, this was indeed where Conservatives found themselves after 1997 and there seemed to be no certainty of them ever finding a way back to success in Gamble’s ‘electoral market’. Three new leaders – William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – had been unable to restore the party’s credibility with voters sufficiently to challenge for power. The wager placed on David Cameron’s leadership in 2005, then, can be seen as yet another moment in which the party encountered a similar balance of probabilities between tradition and change as it had when adjusting to the post-war settlement after 1945. Like then, the challenge concerned the party’s political culture: it was thought necessary to get in touch with the modern world, in Lord Ashcroft’s felicitous call to ‘smell the coffee’. In this view, the problem facing the party was not only, or necessarily, Conservative policies: it was Conservatives themselves. One could call this the ‘Maude sanction’. In 2005 at the party conference Francis Maude, then chairman, revealed polling evidence to show that ‘the Conservative brand was so contaminated that it drove voters away from otherwise appealing policies’(d’Ancona 2013: 10–12). The post-1945 analogy is misleading in one sense. Then the Tories were adjusting to a new Labour consensus. Blair’s successful strategy of ‘triangulation’ – beyond left and right, above all national and centrist – had made Labour

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acceptable again to ‘middle England’ outside its normal strongholds, thereby adjusting to ‘Thatcher’s Britain’. Yet because Blair had convinced the mainstream of support in order to consider itself ‘progressive’, it left the Tories appearing ‘regressive’, their image tarnished and the party’s claim to be ‘national’ in disarray. Cameron’s leadership was a gamble to refresh and resell the Conservative one nation message by recalibrating popular assumptions about the party. The objective was to dislodge New Labour’s appropriation of ‘naturalness’ and ‘national’. The question for the party can be expressed as a question of precedence. Is the task of leadership to mediate between the nation and the party, re-interpreting the values of the Conservative Party in conformity with the spirit of the times, at least as it understands that spirit? Or is the task of leadership to transform the spirit of the times, as far as that is possible politically, in accordance with the values of the Conservative Party? In short, does Conservative make the nation or the nation, Conservative? That is a very rudimentary way of putting the choice but it does capture something of the real drama of politics (see Chapter 1). If it is true that the historical practice of the party is more nuanced, moving with the times while continuing to influence them, then it is the balance between winning over opinion and staying connected to roots which provides much of that drama (Harris 2013: 3). The Thatcher critique of one nation was, at source, that it involved moving with times that were being set by others while losing touch with Conservative roots. It was not a critique exclusive to her or to her times but is an enduring part of Conservative politics. If Margaret Thatcher’s response to the times was combative, with the purpose of changing both the consensus and the nation, in Cameron’s case the response was adaptive, with the purpose of recovering the national inheritance as modified by New Labour. The Cameron alternative in opposition has been discussed comprehensively by scholars (notably Bale 2010; Hayton 2012), yet it is worth reflecting on one form of words he deployed in his quest to revive the Conservative nation. In a speech to the think-tank Demos, Cameron (2009a) tried to summarise his approach and to re-state for the times those two great Disraelian objectives of the party: a commitment to progress, yet progress according to Conservative principles. The guiding philosophy of his leadership, he claimed, was ‘progressive conservatism’. In 1872, Disraeli had attempted to convince his audience in Manchester not only that Conservatives were in touch with the spirit of the age but also that the party’s principles were more appropriate to the age than those of the Liberals. In 2009, Cameron made a similar pitch: although the ‘ends’ the party campaigned for – a fair society, based on opportunity and security – were widely shared (a nod to the achievements of New Labour), ‘Conservative means are the best way to achieve those shared progressive aims’. And also like Disraeli, the programmatic means to achieve those ends was left sufficiently vague for it would be ‘profoundly un-Conservative’, Cameron argued, to turn any philosophy into a set of ‘hard and fast rules’. The message was clear enough, more so for the party than for the voters. It was that the texture of everyday life had

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changed – the nation now was different and the party would have to catch up. As one of his confidants later put it, ‘there was no future in karaoke Thatcherism’ (d’Ancona 2013: 348). Therefore the judgement of Seldon and Snowdon (2015: xxxi) was apt: if there was something of Baldwin about Cameron, it was his belief that the party must be more like the country not vice versa. Or, one could say, Cameron’s Conservative nation was to be more national than Conservative, a different order of preference from that of many of his party members. By national, Cameron implied socially and morally, not just economically, liberal. That is why a substantial proportion of the ‘party in the media’, as well as a minority of his parliamentary party, were always uneasy about the Cameron ‘project’, thinking it made too many concessions to liberalism. Indeed, the very proposition that Conservatism is merely a means to achieve progressive ends was rhetorically imaginative but it struck many Conservatives as indefensible. What of those who want to achieve Conservative ends and do not think of the party as a mere means; or who, to adapt another of Disraeli’s terms, do not want to have Tory men and women implementing Whig measures; or who want something recognisably Conservative and who do not want to adjust to the times if those times are liberal? They would consider Anthony Giddens’ announcement (1994: 49) of the Blair’s Third Way – ‘We should all become conservatives now’ – as a declaration not of support but of subversion, merely adopting bits of Conservative thought to shape a radical political programme. This programme is what they suspected Cameron had signed up to. Such concerns were manifest throughout the Cameron era, when his approach suggested to his critics that the party was an instrument for modernisation and not, as they considered it, a living institution with a political culture of its own which expressed the ‘soul’ of the nation. One issue which demonstrated this better than all others was Cameron’s determination, when prime minister, to legislate for same-sex marriage. One survey (Montgomerie 2012) found that nearly 60 per cent of party members were opposed while another detected significant discontent amongst constituency chairmen as well as MPs (Watts 2013). In other words, Cameron’s view on moral matters did not correspond with the party’s mainstream (Heppell 2013: 350–1). For Edward Leigh (Seldon and Snowdon 2015: 280), the purpose of the Conservative Party must be to protect the country’s institutions and cultural heritage. Otherwise what is the Conservative Party for? It should not be for changing those institutions and heritage, betraying the Conservative nation according to the whims of unrepresentative metropolitan elites. One of the divisions which this criticism highlighted was one which became prominent in political debate in the new century: the division between London, sometimes known as the ‘Westminster bubble’, and the rest of the country. While novel in its geographical expression, that view was not new in its ideological character, for this division between ‘court and country’ has been encountered frequently in Conservative politics. Cameron’s leadership endured persistent criticism accordingly and it revealed a tension in the Conservative nation between power and support.

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Here the question of precedence – Conservative/nation or nation/Conservative – becomes personal as well as political. It is possible to suspect – and in the history of the party this is not confined to Cameron’s experience – that the ‘electoral perspective’ of the leadership may be read by party members as a rebuff of their support. In short, that was the substance of the external critique of UKIP, and its challenge to the Conservatives, but it had also an internal significance too. It was colourfully expressed in the words alleged to have been uttered by the party’s co-chairman Lord Feldman (d’Ancona 2013: 350–51) – that Conservative activists are mainly ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and not to be trusted. This is another familiar trope of British politics – ‘extreme’ members (support) and ‘moderate’ leaders (power) – which partly complements Gamble’s interpretation. As recent research on the attitudes of party members’ reveals, this view is unfair (Bale and Webb 2013). On the one hand there was certainly a general feeling among members that Cameron was ‘too much of a metropolitan liberal for his own or his party’s good’ but on the other hand there was an acknowledgement that he was doing a ‘good job’. The conclusion must be that members are far from being loons, swivel-eyed or not, but generally subscribe to that old Conservative wisdom in which ‘pragmatism trumps pie-in-the-sky’ – well, so long as it is electorally successful (see also Webb, Poletti and Bale 2016). In other words, if there is no ‘hard and fast’ rule about Conservative policy, as Cameron conveniently asserted, then there is no hard and fast rule either about deciding whether the mood of the party corresponds to the mood of the nation (or an election-winning proportion of it) or whether the former must accommodate itself to the latter (Green 2011). The critics of Cameron’s leadership indulged both internal and external perspectives. For those critics looking within the party there were distinct echoes of Disraeli’s criticism of Sir Robert Peel: that those joining the Conservative Party would discover that Conservatism did not stand for much apart from achieving power for its leadership. Here was a politics conforming to Cowling’s idea of ‘high politics’ but judged to be ultimately vacuous. According to one of the ‘new identity’, Tim Montgomerie (Tatler 2012), many in the Conservative Party did ‘not feel that they have someone at the top table’ and thought accordingly that their views were not heeded. That simple disconnection explained the steep fall in membership and party’s substitution of money for members (Montgomerie 2017). There was an irony here. The objective of Cameron’s modernisation had been to make the party more like the country but, argued Montgomerie (Tatler 2012), this was driven by a party leadership that ‘doesn’t look like the rest of the country’. Cameron was ‘representative of a group of people at the top of the political class’, perfectly adapted to a certain political climate but, without deep philosophically conservative roots, one that will wither when times change. Here was intimated that anti-elitist mood which ended Cameron’s leadership four years later. And looking without, one of the ‘old identity’, Peregrine Worsthorne (2007), believed that natural Conservatism, which had been the ballast of the nation or its second nature, had been replaced by a confected liberalism. Now tradition increasingly meant ‘liberal tradition; authority, liberal authority; dogma,

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liberal dogma; the status quo, a liberal status quo’. Unfortunately for Conservatives, it seemed that established wisdom and liberal piety had become more or less the same thing. Both perspectives shared with radical critics of the party the same sense of an ‘end’ to Conservatism, accepting (even for polemical reasons) that the nation was no longer Conservative and that the Conservative Party was no longer Conservative. This was a deadly ‘double whammy’ and it was a lament that was frequently heard, though, in its fatalism, one without any definite course of action. And yet, despite its rhetorical power, these criticisms found it hard to make sense of Cameron’s ability to deliver support, to get into office in 2010 and to win outright in 2015. In what Cameron supporters (d’Ancona 2013: 349–50) viewed as an early leadership pitch, Theresa May – the original moderniser – observed that while Conservatives are at their best when not trying to recreate the past but adapting to the needs of the day (so far so Cameron), policy should be rooted in traditional values (so far so un-Cameron). The working-through of that idea suggested yet another possible Conservative accommodation of power and support, later to become called Mayism, and it is considered further in later chapters. Conclusion Of course, to write of ‘one nation’ or the ‘Conservative nation’ is to make large assumptions. As was also the case in Chapter 2, reflection so far on the Conservative nation has indulged in a further terminological sleight of hand. Perhaps terminological anachronism might be a more appropriate term. Nation has been used as if its meaning remains self-evident and similarly with the use of the term state. In The Conservative Nation, for example, state, class and nation are deployed and discussed as if their status were clear. In so doing, Gamble was not alone. As J.C.D. Clark observed, most scholars writing on post-war British history and politics, well into the 1970s and certainly beyond, did assume that nation and class were bound in an uncomplicated manner to the state, such that expressions like ‘one nation’ or ‘Conservative nation’ could be used straightforwardly. Students of politics then also ‘assumed a secure national identity as a corollary’ of the modern idea of the state; and if states had functional origins, it was thought that ‘identities could be left to look after themselves’ (Clark 2000: 252–3). Until quite recently, according to Clark, the nation state – understood as a geographically bounded sovereign territory along with the people therein – had appeared unproblematic and generally taken for granted in most academic research and journalistic commentary. Those interested in ‘high politics’ focused their attention on Parliament and the tactical manoeuvres of political elites; those interested in popular politics looked mainly at the mechanisms of state power on everyday life; Marxist scholars were interested in the strategic functions of the capitalist state and the role of ideology; and conservative writers looked to those traditions which either supported or threatened order and stability. Because both nation and state were taken for granted, the problem of national identity was

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considered as intellectually old hat as the pre-war notion of national ‘character’ about which Ernest Barker (1927) had written so eloquently. Chapter 2 closed with reference to what may be called the ‘politics of amnesia’ (Aughey 2001). Once the issue of Irish Home Rule no longer dominated British politics, it was convenient for Westminster to behave according to what Rose called ‘unthinking unionism’ and correspondingly for academics to indulge in unthinking statism. If there has been a conceptual shift in scholarship in the last quarter-century it is this: unthinking unionism and unthinking statism are deemed inadequate to contemporary British politics. Engagements with the problematic nature of nationhood and statehood provide agendas for research in the new millennium. In short, the nation was back. Therefore, terms like ‘one nation’ or the ‘Conservative nation’ – though they may still be found circulating in party politics – are of dubious explanatory weight unless they have important qualifications, and they involve contested meanings. Assumptions about a timeless nation, an enduring state and the ancient constitution, all implying the solidity and stability of nation statehood, no longer correspond satisfactorily to current political experience. To take but one example, Seawright (2010: 119) shifted attention halfway through his book and asked: ‘One Nation, but Which?’ He laid out the difficulties for the established ethos of the Conservative Party as it responded to devolution, divisions on Europe and the requirement to deal with the English Question, challenges which have called into question both the (British) nation and the (UK) state. As one scholar observed, these challenges have promoted a crisis of political confidence, ‘brought about by a declining faith in the viability of pre-existing understandings of constitution, nation and territorial governance’ (Kenny 2015a: 36). Changes in national consciousness affect the state and changes in the state affect national consciousness. As a consequence, it is the oneness of one nation and the unity of the state which no longer appear self-evident. These challenges coincide with another change which commentators have identified, one which weakens another of the pillars of the interpretative modernism of Gamble’s Conservative nation. It has become commonplace to challenge the absolute certainty of Pulzer’s thesis that class is the basis of British politics and all else embellishment and detail. This would not have surprised more astute historians like Colls (2011: 577), who were well aware that it was mainly through their myths of national origin that people became class conscious and that this history differed in Wales, Scotland and England while it was often almost absent entirely in Northern Ireland. Clark (2000: 256) had also noted the irony that this change in thinking was driven by those mainly on the left (like Gamble). Class became increasingly a token presence in the new thinking which now turned to ‘identity’ in response to its diminishing explanatory value. If the state-centric certainties which informed the politics of power and the class-centred certainties which informed the politics of support have been changing, if there is indeed now an ‘age of disunification’ rather than of ‘one nation’ (Diamond, Liddle and Richards 2015), Conservatives are compelled to modify their thinking about

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party, nation and state. In 1924 – when Cowling and others suggested that modern British politics really began – Oakeshott (2014: 72) wrote in his notebook that political identity is more than mere governance. He asked: ‘How far, for instance, has the English constitution remained an identity? And how far does this question affect the identity of the State?’ The nature of the constitution, the English Question, the future of the British state, its relationship with Europe and its very survival are matters with which the present generation of politicians must grapple. They are questions that seemed marginal to the post-war idea of one nation or to a text like The Conservative Nation but would have been familiar to an older generation of Tories. The next chapter examines those changes in British politics which together form the new context for the challenges the Conservative Party must confront.

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Conservatism: class and nation

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph (Wallop 2015) shortly before the 2015 general election, the eminent psephologist Sir David Butler was asked who would win. For the first time in seventy years he was unwilling to make a prediction because, he conceded, there were too many possible outcomes. This admission of doubt captured well a moment when previous assumptions about British politics no longer appeared adequate to explain either motivations or events. Butler, along with his co-author Donald Stokes, had written one of the classic studies of electoral behaviour in Britain (Butler and Stokes 1974) and his uncertainty identified not the beginning but the continuation of trends which challenged that book’s analytical model: political choice based mainly on the predictability of class-with-party identification. It should be said that Butler’s reluctance to guess was only partially a result of the confusing picture painted by opinion polls. This was not a temporary condition; it was, rather, the condition of the times in which uncertainty was generalised – and if 2015 proved challenging, 2016 was to become the annus horribilis of traditional polling forecasts. The general election of 2017 only reaffirmed the unsettled state of British politics. In sum, there was ‘an imperfect understanding of what the most important changes have been and how the different elements of the party system relate to each other’ (Quinn 2013: 379). So Butler’s reluctance was understandable. If British politics now appeared more uncertain, the difficulty defining current trends meant that it was also harder to predict future outcomes. Indeed, if the Conservative electoral victory in 2015 had not been expected by most commentators – and not even by the leader of the party (see Ashcroft and Oakeshott 2015: 518) – even fewer imagined the remarkable events in the two years to follow. Nevertheless, one scholar was remarkably prescient about the questions which needed to be addressed as well as the political circumstances in which those questions would be asked. In a superb and concise analysis which is a key text of the times, Bogdanor (2016a) wrote that the election of 2015 had answered – albeit surprisingly – the question of who would govern. Cameron had delivered for the Conservative Party the outright victory which had eluded him in 2010. And yet some fundamental questions had been left open, two of which were intimately related and which have important implications for the Conservative nation. ‘It left open the question of whether there

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will still be a United Kingdom to be governed. It also left open the question of whether Britain will remain in the European Union’ (Bogdanor 2016a: 45). If an answer was given to the latter, the former is still open. Bogdanor thought that elections are like a mirror which reveal (some may think in caricature) the relationship between the people and their representatives. What was disclosed in the 2015 election, he argued, was something of a ‘defeat for the ideologies of social democracy and liberalism, for believers in liberal internationalism, for those who believe in an open society’. This was a large claim to make. It appeared to be an exaggeration to suppose that the values which major parties had stressed hitherto, such as ‘individual autonomy, self-realisation and internationalism’, now only emphasised the significant gap in conviction between large swathes of voters and their elected representatives. One popular contemporary trope, according to Bogdanor (2016a: 44), was to think of those values as well as the conviction as ‘metropolitan’, the property of those who had benefited from globalisation but who did not respect sufficiently what might be called rooted beliefs, those of ‘national identity, stability and community’. This intimated a gap which has been discussed in previous chapters, one between the pays légal and pays réel, or the provincial and the cosmopolitan. It was later to be described as a divide between Anywheres and Somewheres (Goodhart 2017). That it was not only a phenomenon of the right was revealed by the extent of the vote for Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2017. If this was a contentious proposition in 2015, it was to become an important journalistic explanation for the dynamic in British politics after the referendum on European Union membership on 23 June 2016 (Hastings 2016a). The tendency appeared to involve a strengthening of identity sentiment along with a further weakening of class/party allegiance and this raised for the Conservatives – but not only for them – fresh opportunities as well as new problems of political management. As Gamble (1974) had shown, the success of Tory politics lay in balancing both dimensions of power (as well as the constraints of international affairs) and of support (directed to domestic needs). Bogdanor believed that addressing the new gulf between open and closed perspectives provided a defining test for Conservative politics. His was a prophetic insight into things to come that identified the challenge of fashioning a newly successful Conservative ‘statecraft’ (see Bulpitt 1983; and Hayton 2014). Indeed, in the aftermath of the European referendum, there were dramatic claims that things had changed, and changed utterly, if only because one of the central planks of British political statecraft no longer seemed to hold. One breathless commentary by an editor of the website ConservativeHome announced that: ‘Old political assumptions have been fundamentally challenged, new priorities and terminology dominate the headlines, common expectations of what the future looked like are in tatters, millions of voters are potentially up for grabs, the Government has changed, and with it the personnel and policies of the state’ (Wallace 2016). Here was the world transformed beneath the feet of the nation, an unconscious repetition of Virginia Woolf ’s remark

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(1924: 2) mentioned in Chapter 1. Of course, even if one can detect such ‘moments’ of transformation, they are not merely transformations of the moment but trail their own preceding intimations. As Bogdanor’s article suggested, if traditional ideological tunes seemed to have lost much of their popular resonance, the reasons for this have a history. The idea that the politics of class had been transformed (voters up for grabs) did not mean that class was no longer an electoral battleground. It meant that the en marche of liberalism or progressivism could be assumed no longer. It meant also that the relationship between party, class and nation had become more fluid. This chapter looks at the reasons for the emergence of this new (or perhaps, older) style of politics. In particular, it considers claims about the modification of class politics, the return of the nation and the challenges presented for the Conservative Party. Party, class and patriotism Peter Jenkins’ study of Margaret Thatcher’s first two governments was called Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: Ending of the Socialist Era (1989). It was the subtitle which best conveyed the significance of the ‘revolution’ his book claimed had taken place. When Gamble’s The Conservative Nation was published in 1974, the argument was framed within the intellectual expectations of that ‘socialist’ era and it was plausible to imagine, on the basis of Gamble’s rigorous analysis (1974: 234), that a reordering of the power relations between ‘the ruling interests of property’ and the majority of working people was now possible. Gamble was not so incautious as to proclaim that the working class was finally entering into its inheritance but there was implied in the argument that a general election at some point could influence decisively the ‘struggle between the classes’. In other words, it was a study from an engaged, and influential, academic perspective informed by the expectation of socialism en marche. Rather than the ‘wrong’ Tory members of the national family continuing to be in charge (as Orwell had written), it was possible to envisage their replacement by the ‘right’, socialist ones. Twenty years later and things did look remarkably different and much as Jenkins had contended. One recent study of class and British society (Biressi and Nunn 2016: 13–15) observed that by the mid-1990s class appeared to have been displaced as a useful model of analysis for power relations. This argument did not necessarily mean that Gamble’s conclusion would not come to pass – given the experience of 2017, the Conservative nation could yet find its way into his museum of ‘Fantastic Zoology’ – for the question was (and is) upon which ground and according to what issues would party politics be fought? Moreover, it appeared to be an ironic consequence of the end of the socialist era that it was not the Conservative Party but Tony Blair’s New Labour which had moved more adeptly to identify and to articulate a distinctive politics of national identity and social inclusion. Indeed, New Labour theorists were nothing if not ideologically inventive and enfolding of difference.

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As the previous chapter observed, Anthony Giddens (1994: 49) proposed that everyone should become conservatives now – ‘but not in a conservative way’. If political division was really beyond left and right – at least in those terms formerly delimited by the socialist concept of class – then Conservative ideas could be appropriated usefully for the purposes of the New Labour Nation. Here was a (small ‘c’) conservatism which could advance the cause of progressive change while, at the same time, New Labour retreated from radical change. If this adjustment to the Thatcher revolution was intended to set the reforming, modernising, terms of debate, it had also the added value of disordering the senses of the Conservative Party. And New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 appeared to confirm both of these achievements. In the words of Douglas Hurd’s former speech writer, Maurice Fraser: ‘The right has won the argument, but lost the electoral battle’ (cited in The Economist 1999) and the Conservative Party in opposition could only observe its own arguments redefined and turned against it. Or, as many Conservatives thought, Thatcherism had won the economic war but the left was winning the culture war – and its cultural victories were turning the country into a ‘foreign land’. If the twentieth century had been the ‘Conservative century’ (Seldon and Ball 1994), the twenty-first beckoned as the century of the progressive majority. As Chapter 3 argued, the Cameron leadership was committed in turn to adapting to New Labour’s repositioning in the electoral market, with Cameron as the self-ascribed ‘heir to Blair’ (McAnulla 2010) – a comment which he came to regret. Yet if it were true that the successful Blairite electoral ‘triangulation’ served to diminish the old politics of class, surely this was the natural territory of the Conservative Party rather than of their opponents? Had not the class basis of British politics made Conservatism appear at odds with the march of history? If the ‘grand narrative’ of class politics was no longer persuasive on its own, should not the traditional Conservative discourse of patriotism, nation, institutions, limited government and property (Norton 1996b: 82) come into its own? If culture and community mattered, and the definition of them was the stuff of politics, a successful Conservative response, connecting patriotism, social reform and effective government (the familiar ‘national’ and ‘natural’ claim to power), intimated a possible renewal of electoral hegemony. However, was there any evidence to support such hope? In his introduction to an academic collection reviewing the ‘end of class politics’ thesis, Geoffrey Evans (1999: 1–2) wrote that from being the motor of history and the basis of modern democratic politics, class had come to seem more of a ‘folk memory’. Where formally it had been essential to an understanding of party politics, class had now become peripheral and it appeared that ‘the debate over the political consequences of class is becoming – even has been – resolved in favour of those who would declare it redundant – or at least in terminal decline.’ Here was another ‘end’ in British politics, though one which the book set out to challenge. John Goldthorpe (1999: 81–2) in his chapter on British electoral experience was reluctant to draw any definitive conclusions about the underlying pattern of class and party affiliation.

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The source for his remark was the impact of New Labour’s victory in 1997 and he thought it possible that the decline of class voting might be the exception rather than the rule. Move forward two decades and another important study concluded that the Conservative victory in 2015 should indeed be read as a failure of the old model of class, at least the simplistic, if lingering, one ‘based on the distinction between middle class and working class’ (Savage et al. 2015: 391–2). According to this model, Labour had the allegiance of mainly working-class voters and the Conservatives of mainly middle-class voters. If this was something of a caricature, even in 1992 it had remained a broadly accurate description of electoral behaviour. This was no longer the case (and 2017 appeared to upend it entirely). However, Savage et al. were at pains to point out that they did not think that class itself was dead, only that it was necessary to rethink the categories of class and the changing relationship between class and politics. Savage et al. (2015: 401) insisted that it continued to be important ‘to treat cultural and social processes – not just economic ones – as fundamental to the way that class operates in the present’. That seems correct. If society had changed, it did not mean that class had somehow disappeared, only that its influence had been modified. Politically, then, it is the cultural process which required attention insofar as one can track the effect of the changing social structure mediated through the party system. And if ‘culture’ serves to translate ‘class’ into ‘nation’, or at least partially, then the capacity of parties to adapt to this patriotic equation – as they seek to express (or to avoid expressing aspects of) this translation in their respective politics – becomes equally significant. As Bogdanor (2016a: 40) argued, this is an important test – not only but especially for the Conservative Party – because a populist movement like UKIP, which puts national identity ahead of economics, had been threatening to outflank it on the question of public ‘values’. UKIP asked the questions: ‘Who are the people?’ and ‘Who serves their interest?’ In Britain, as in much of Europe, thought Bogdanor, the former political certainties of party identification were being displaced by a growing popular anxiety about answers to questions now framed in the language of national identity. That too seems correct. Of course, the traditional claim of the Conservative Party was that it provided the appropriate answers to these questions but in the new millennium struggled to be convincing. It had been assumed by scholars that in the post-Thatcher era party competition mainly involved issues of valence, or leadership competence about means, rather than issues of ‘position’, or ideological choice about ends. This certainly implied that the matter of class, at least as a politics of socialist – en marche – transformation, had lost traction. As Jane Green (2007: 630) elegantly described it, valence politics indicates a political convergence which reflects electoral ‘consensus on the key left–right dimension of British politics’. A new consensus, coupled with the convergence on this dimension by the major parties, appeared to lead to competition ‘on valence issues instead of position issues. The consequence is that parties are judged on competence in place of ideological differentiation.’ Moreover, as the parties converge, ‘it appears that voters

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have in turn converged, reinforcing this trend’ (Green 2007: 652). Green went on to admit that this ‘trend’ should not be pushed too far because the evidence remained ambiguous – especially for which of the drivers was the primary cause – and because on some other issues, for example on Europe, the trend appeared to be reversed. ‘Parties may respond to their voters’ positions in the immediate term’, thought Green (2007: 652), ‘but they may be responsible for those positions over time.’ Again, valence would seem to speak to that old Conservative trope of the natural party of government. Yet here too the Conservative claim to competence was no longer persuasive and the party struggled to find ‘permission to be heard’. Ambiguity and interpretive caution also informed the distinctive argument advanced by Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley (2012: 963–4). The common explanation for the decline of class politics, they noted, has been the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society. The distinctive cultures of the organised working class and the professional middle class had been either blurred or in some cases extinguished altogether – not only in those heavily unionised, Labour-supporting occupations like shipbuilding and coal-mining but also in those middle-class professions which experienced Margaret Thatcher’s ‘revolution’ as well. Consequently, the ‘pronounced ideological convergence between the two main parties’ had been interpreted as a reflection of the changing character of British society. As Evans (1999: 1) had put it earlier, the 1990s was an age of ‘postisms’ – from post-modernism to post-materialism – a condition which had influenced reversals and repositioning on the part of Labour under Blair and later by the Conservatives under Cameron. However, Evans and Tilley (2012: 974) proposed that the declining significance of class in politics was as much a political decision as it was a social change, coming from the top down as much as from the bottom up. It was party organisation and professionalisation which had begun to put less emphasis on redistribution and inequality as parties surveyed an electoral market now apparently, as Giddens had argued, ‘beyond left and right’. In short, Evans and Tilley argued that the decline of class politics was in large part the consequence of a self-conscious movement by the parties to a novel common ground. The politics of support and the politics of power had adjusted accordingly, resulting in ‘a weakening of the left–right ideological signals sent to voters by the two main parties and a consequent decline in the impact of voters’ positions on inequality and redistribution on their party choice’ (Evans and Tilley 2012: 974). At the same time, ‘the relationship between class position and values remained relatively unchanged: the latter simply mattered much less for party choice’. Evans and Tilley also pointed to the shifting size of Britain’s social classes as one key change rather than those classes changing their political views. What had produced the shift to the political centre was again political. ‘The Labour party found it could no longer base its electoral success primarily on working-class support, and the Conservative party responded, eventually, in part by targeting this same centre-ground’ (Evans and Tilley 2015). Here was intimated one potential route to recovery for Conservatives: if the party could get its message across clearly, and

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somehow differentiate its position from Blair’s on that centre ground, then possibly it could turn the tide against New Labour. That was Cameron’s objective, but how could the Conservative Party find a persuasive national expression again in this changing class environment? Class and the Conservatives Writing about the party’s survival, Andrew Gimson thought that very few people understood the Conservatives. Explaining their enduring presence to a general left-wing readership, his argument was really an entertaining variation on Davies’s theme (1995): the whole purpose of the Conservative Party is to maintain unity as a condition for achieving power. The virtue of pragmatism as a principle (if that paradox is allowed), thought Gimson (2017a), is that the party avoids becoming trapped in an ideological dead end ‘where it maintains the purity of its beliefs at the expense of becoming detached from events’. There is no inflexibility in policy commitment if only because what ‘works at one time becomes a perilous liability at another’. From that brief summary of Tory wisdom it is clear why Blair had so unsettled his opponents. Gimson could well have been describing New Labour and its dedication to seeking and maintaining power on the principle that what matters is what works. Blair had stolen the Tories’ pragmatism and turned it against them. Conservatives were confined by their opponents as a party committed to purity of beliefs at the expense of detachment from the popular mood and written off unfairly under Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard as being marginal to the national interest. Finding the formula to get out of that position was to become the Conservative Holy Grail. Cameron’s strategy was to move the party from the margin to the centre ground because experience obliged him to believe that winning those voters was the key to power. If an alternative constituency existed, either it did not vote or did not vote in sufficient numbers to ensure victory. According to d’Ancona (2017a), who had chronicled Cameron’s leadership, these centrist voters needed constant reassurance ‘that the Conservatives’ motives are decent, and that it has not reverted to its old mantra of “cruel but competent” ’ – or Theresa May’s ‘nasty party’. It was a struggle, but Cameron and George Osborne dedicated their leadership to the message with Blairite rigour. That was Cameron’s ‘valence’ objective after 2005: a ‘compassionate Conservatism’ according to its supporters in the party, or ‘post-Conservatism’ according to its critics. One of the scholars prominent in addressing the recent changing patterns of ideological politics has been Michael Kenny, who, before the general election of 2010, anticipated subsequent alterations in the character of British party competition. As a historian of ideas, Kenny (2009: 347–8) expected that the lingering ‘end of history’ atmosphere (or ‘postism’) which had informed British politics in the previous two decades would dissipate in the same way that the ‘end of ideology’ assumptions had done in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a worldview that is ‘now regarded as the product

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of a particular moment in our political history, not an accurate harbinger of further political development’. The post-Thatcher period was likely to be viewed through a similar lens and, in a metaphor which recalls Oakeshott’s portrayal likening public affairs to being adrift ‘on a boundless ocean’, Kenny thought that as the assumptions and policies of this era faded, political leaders would also come ‘more and more to resemble lost mariners’. Significantly, he concluded with a comment which evoked the uncertainties which were to attend Cameron’s Conservatism. As the party tried to occupy lost ground and ‘grope towards a grander moral narrative – Cameron’s increasing emphasis on the virtues of responsibility for example – it is tempting to wonder if the politics of the ever-more-crowded centre is on the way out’ (2009: 348). It is a speculation to which this chapter returns. As a preliminary observation, it is important to avoid a one-dimensional reading of the Cameron period, one read through the lens of the post-EU referendum period. It is seductive to read the Cameron years as simply a blue-tinged version of New Labour preoccupations: metropolitan, internationalist and socially liberal; to perceive an undue focus originally on niche issues like the environment designed for the wealthy and social policies designed for the poorest; or to interpret the leadership as never really connecting with the bulk of the provincial English electorate (Frayne 2017). As the director of the think-tank Policy Exchange (Godson 2017) argued in a subtle assessment, it has been convenient for ‘Team May’ to propose a rather schematic reading of recent events which has the ring of plausibility but which puts words into the mouth of history. This revisionist view holds that Cameron had a dual approach to change (see Montgomerie 2005 for the original categorisation). It was based on combining ‘Notting Hill modernisation’ – the ‘metrosexual’ issues of importance to the London elites – and ‘Easterhouse modernisation’ – associated with Duncan Smith’s experience of that impoverished part of Glasgow and focused on the needs of the poorest. These modernisations were only the ‘first phases’ back to electoral victory, ones ‘necessary for the party to get the metropolitan media monkey off its back’ (Godson 2017). Now, under May, the ambition is much larger, rebuilding the Conservative nation in all its dimensions. Yet this elite/poor ‘modernisation’ – meaning that the Cameron leadership ignored the ‘middle’ – is a partial reading of the Cameron years and it is not how the party’s experience in government after 2010 is necessarily recalled. For example, in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2007/8, Evans and Tilley (2012: 975) thought that the Conservatives could take advantage of ‘class divisions in a form that differentiates a larger middle class from a smaller working class’ – at least ‘should they choose to do so’. If Conservative metropolitan modernisation was symbolised by the commitment to ring fence international aid and if Easterhouse modernisation was symbolised by NHS spending, the party’s pitch to middle England was welfare reform. One of the most perceptive of commentators on Conservatism, Matthew Parris (2006), had picked up on this Tory temptation before the economic crisis of 2008.

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Despite all the renewed talk of one nation, he thought that Conservatives were oriented to a rather different political space in which: there is some kind of a mental watershed between those millions who in their imaginations suspect that they are paying in more than they are getting back; and those millions who suspect that they would be worse off without the state to send their way jobs, benefits or services they could otherwise not afford.

Conservative electoral success – despite talk of Notting Hill and Easterhouse – would depend on the relative numbers in either category but, modernisation notwithstanding, Conservatism favoured the interests of the first and not the second. This was not quite the language of ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’, but after 2010 did become the language of ‘strivers’ and ‘shirkers’ (Hayton 2014). The politics of welfare during austerity highlighted that deeply rooted political division in modern Britain. For instance, during their research, Biressi and Nunn (2016: 197) noticed a car sticker in 2012: ‘Work harder, those on benefits rely on you!’ The voice of victimhood in that equation had obviously shifted from those on benefits to those who paid for them and that voice was not ignored by Conservatives in their retrenchment of the welfare state between 2010 and 2016 (Ashbee 2015: 136–43). Kenny’s reading of the ever more crowded centre could be reformulated in this way: the parties may have congregated in the centre but they had occupied only one narrow part of it. And the question became: which party could maintain the vote it possessed already (for example, those voters who were persuaded by Cameron’s modernisation) while redefining what constitutes the centre or middle ground of politics (thus opening up the possibility of broadening support) – and in what circumstances could it do so? This revisits a question raised in the previous chapter: should Conservative Party values adapt to fit with the times or should the times be modified according to the values of the Conservative Party? Does the Conservative Party ‘make’ the nation or does the nation ‘make’ the party? The ambiguity which scholars have identified in electoral politics between party push and social pull suggests at least some room for imaginative politics – as well as for difficult choices. The opportunity is certainly available but it requires two things: first, linking the opportunity presented by class fluidity with the historical traditions of the Conservative Party; and secondly, accepting leadership risk in order to make a pitch beyond the ‘ever more crowded centre’. After 2015, with Jeremy Corbyn taking Labour to the left and the EU referendum in 2016 revealing a novel configuration of voting, the parties did move beyond that narrow centre ground. Theresa May believed that she had read the times in that regard. The first part – linking opportunity with Conservative traditions – can be stated quite simply. There was potential to release a contemporary version of those Conservative working-class ‘angels in marble’ which The Times in 1883 had attributed to Disraeli’s political vision, but it was to be Joseph Chamberlain whose ideas were

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revisited under May. After June 2016, there was a chance to make fresh inroads in traditional Labour strongholds in the north of England, to consolidate or extend the party’s strength in the south outside London and to work the party back into constituencies in Scotland and Wales. If successful, this would constitute a significant reinvigoration of the Conservative nation. The prospect was the establishment of a new elective affinity, one potentially more extensive than that between the skilled working class and middle class which had provided Margaret Thatcher with her winning electoral coalition in the 1980s. It was a prospect but not a certainty and it would require not only intelligent political sculpting but also quite a bit of political good fortune. That good fortune seemed to have been gifted in part by failures of Labour leadership, compounded by the divisions between the Parliamentary Labour Party and the party membership. Of course, the Conservatives needed to avoid their own divisions over what could become either an electoral opportunity or a very toxic responsibility: Brexit. As far as the second is concerned – imaginative leadership – a thorough review of the empirical evidence by Oliver Heath (2016: 18) concluded that, while it is true that class divisions do not structure electoral choice as once they did, the reason is that class had been marginalised by parties in the competition for votes: ‘Whereas previously the middle class and working class were divided on who to vote for, now they are divided on whether to bother voting at all.’ Heath concurred with Evans and Tilley that there was no reason why this trend could not to be reversed. Declining participation in elections is not fated and could be recovered as 2017 showed. In particular, he identified a large ‘pool of working-class voters who are electorally available and other parties may seek to court their vote’ (Heath 2016: 18). Hitherto, these voters had proved to be fertile territory for UKIP’s populism, which had ‘found a way to connect with the disenfranchised working class’. The opportunity for an imaginative Conservative leadership lay in challenging UKIP for that pool of working-class voters and in channelling populism into traditional constitutional politics. It is a shift which would come with dangers but the possible rewards could be substantial if the language of class dared to speak its name again in a Conservative tone. The impact of UKIP The experience of the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2005, when it had appealed to voters on issues of sovereignty, nationhood and immigration, was hardly promising. It had retreated and not advanced. As Lord Ashcroft (2010: 9) put it succinctly, in response to the Conservative Party’s election campaign slogan in 2005 – ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking? – which had emphasised immigration control and sovereignty, the electorate had given the answer ‘no’. The Cameron project – and it is sometimes forgotten that it proved to be a successful project – was to stop ‘banging on’ about matters (Europe was one, immigration another) which appeared to be

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neither popular priorities nor electorally attractive. Eleven years later and the irony was that Cameron lost to those who did bang on not only about Europe but also about immigration. The impact of the June ‘events’ of 2016, then, has challenged the Cameron perspective but one of its central justifications has not been removed. It became fashionable, once he left office, to dismiss the process of ‘detoxification’. Yet detoxification meant trying to change the public’s perception of the party as hard-hearted, pitiless and obsessed with ‘a better yesterday’ and to accommodate Conservatives to what d’Ancona (2015: 40–3) described as ‘the unprecedented plurality of the modern world’. If this project has yet to be disproved, it was noticeable how the message adjusted after June 2016 once Cameron was no longer prime minister. One is tempted to adapt Cowling’s famous thesis (1971) of the ‘impact of Labour’ in the 1920s and write here of the ‘impact of UKIP’. The impact is not the obvious one of creating the conditions for Brexit (see Chapter 7) but the effect on the politics of party competition. If the impact of Labour was the beginning of ‘modern’ British politics as Cowling claimed, then the impact of UKIP was the beginning of current British politics, the lineaments of which are still emerging. The Cameron leadership was dogged not only by the fact that some of its ‘natural’ voters and activists were deserting to UKIP but also that the allegiance of some sitting MPs was no longer certain either (two, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, did join UKIP). D’Ancona (2017a) captures best Cameron’s view: that UKIP was composed of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ but that its voters were mainly traditional Tories who could be won back. Cameron’s promise of a referendum on EU membership was therefore a concession on two fronts. It was designed to address those critics within the party and it was designed to win back Conservative voters who had shifted to UKIP. This view ignored a larger more complex truth: the growth in UKIP support was as much a response to globalisation, immigration and cultural transformation as to the EU. Here was a threat to Labour too which, as Mellon and Evans (2015) conceded, was a product of Blair’s move to the ‘liberal consensus’ on immigration. Moreover, Evans and Tilley (2015) highlighted what can be politely called a ‘lacuna’ on the part of the liberal left: a wish to ignore or to misrepresent popular suspicion of multiculturalism and mass immigration. Of course, those in the Conservative Party who were critical of Cameron’s leadership believed that he held a similar view of those in his own party who expressed concerns on these matters as he did of UKIP (d’Ancona 2013: 350–1). The significance of Kenny’s reference to the narrow centre ground becomes clear. It suggests that the imaginative resources of the ‘liberal consensus’ which informed both party positions in 2015/16 were insufficiently sensitive to the possibility of widening that narrow ground. To simplify: the impact of UKIP actually revealed the fluidity of political attitudes and the potential to mobilise support across the shifting left/right, working/middle class divide. Here was an opportunity for a Conservative leadership willing to take the risk to widen the electoral ground and link together

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national identity, patriotism, community with those ‘valence’ positions of economic and financial competence. The result of the EU referendum appeared to allow for a refashioning of the party message as well as the opportunity to reverse New Labour’s triangulation and to invert its effect. If Blair had connected the traditional Labour vote with provincial middle England in order to marginalise the Tories, the ‘May effect’ was intended to reconnect Tory middle England with traditional working-class voters in order to marginalise Labour. That this was a possibility is what Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin (2014: 173) discovered in their ground-breaking study of UKIP supporters: they are ‘blue-collar, socially conservative, and conflicted – their “heads” are Labour, as this is where their economic interests lie, but their “hearts” are often with the social values of the Conservatives’. The difficulty which weakened the modern Conservative Party’s national party aspiration was simple: UKIP’s ability to attract the conservative-minded working class meant that Cameron’s party seemed ‘even more dominated by educated and affluent middle-class voters than previously’ (Ford and Goodwin 2014: 170). Yet if the party could present itself as delivering the interest of that blue-collar constituency and address its heartfelt concerns there might be potential to ‘re-align the right’ (Goodwin and Cutts 2017). Class could become a Conservative resource, provided it could be translated into the patriotic language of a post-Brexit one nation. For example, the Spectator (2016) argued that UKIP had given a voice to those ignored by party political debate which had become (as Kenny had argued) ‘overly centrist’. Its editorial proposed that it was the time for Conservatives to make a new pitch, not one based on a caricature of what the elite thought UKIP voters wanted, but on the traditional appeal of Conservative patriotism. Political opportunities, it argued, ‘don’t come much bigger’ than that. Thus in her first speech to conference as Conservative leader and prime minister, Theresa May (2016c) restated the mission of her party: ‘It’s why when I stood on the steps of Number 10 for the first time as Prime Minister 84 days ago, I said that the Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the rich and powerful, but by the interests of ordinary, working class people.’ In her speech, the term ‘working class’ was used on seven occasions and with obvious deliberation. And that was not all. Echoing Robert Halfon’s view (see Chapter 1), May promised that Conservatives could be trusted to deliver because they ‘are the party of the workers’. As one well-informed journalist noted (Rifkind 2016), Cameron, like Blair, was averse to the old class-based rhetoric, if only because it reminded people how privileged he was. By contrast, May ‘has responded to our newly tribal age by embracing class politics more wholeheartedly than any Tory in a generation’ (Rifkind 2016). Yet it is important to note that this reinstatement of the language of class was firmly framed within the traditional Conservative language of patriotism, the sort of popular patriotic language which, according to May’s speech to conference (2016c) – along with views about immigration, crime and job security – the liberal-left elite (as well as her former leader) had found ‘distasteful’. More importantly, it was clear that the

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speech represented an attempt to redefine the meaning of that ‘centre’ in a very Conservative manner. This may seem like Red Tory revisited, a return to those ideas of cultural conservatism, localism and anti-market progressivism made fashionable by Phillip Blond (2010) at a time when the Cameron leadership was searching for its ‘big idea’. The senior editor of The Economist, Anne McElvoy (2016), thought that the elements of Red Toryism had been revived as an electorally useful mandate grab for ‘swing Labour voters who are not going to embrace Corbyn’s far-left ideology’. Since Thatcher the Conservative Party had ‘produced populists who weren’t popular’ although it had produced in Cameron ‘a moderniser popular enough to get elected’. In Theresa May it now appeared to have a ‘convincing champion and a leader instinctively in touch with the fears and aspirations of working-class and lower middle-class people outside London’. This, of course, was not necessarily a winning formula but another throw of the Conservative nation dice. The challenge was to deliver what Bogdanor (2012) considered the working-class really wanted: a better life for their children, better housing and more fulfilling jobs – in sum not very different from what Cameron had promised. The difference was that this aspirational platform would be draped in the patriotic garments of a government delivering what the majority of the electorate had demanded in the EU referendum – Brexit. Here was the potential prize, as Iain Martin observed, for May to build a new winning coalition by taking as much as possible of the Leave vote: ‘This explains why she positioned herself in her speech simultaneously on the illiberal Right, populist parts of the centre-ground and the working class centre-left’ (Martin 2016b). This was hardly a straightforward objective but if successful it would certainly redefine the middle ground of British politics. It provided the possibility of addressing that dilemma which for Hayton (2014: 20) remained the one ‘left unresolved in 13 years of opposition, namely how to reconstruct conservatism to entice a sufficiently broad-based constituency of support to deliver a new era of Conservative electoral ascendency’. But what was to be its social bedrock? In what was a prescient policy paper, the former director of policy and strategy at the think-tank Policy Exchange, James Frayne (2015: 5–6), contended that it was crucial for political parties, but more particularly the Conservatives, to reconnect with those whom he called the just-about-managing classes: those C1 and C2 ‘middle-class’ voters who constitute about half of the population. Social stability and security rested heavily upon their prosperity, Frayne argued, and politicians should respond imaginatively to their needs, not least because, in both the private and the public sectors, they are the people who ‘make the country work’. He distinguished their collective character quite sharply from the metropolitan image of the well-to-do (perhaps with a nod in the direction of that celebrated group of Tories who had masterminded the Cameron project, the ‘Notting Hill set’). ‘They are not privately educated; they do not live in large homes in leafy suburbs; they do not drive new so-called “Chelsea Tractors”; and they do not take expensive annual skiing holidays.’ They are ‘just managing’

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because their aspirations, for themselves and for their children, strain to the limit their incomes and resources. They get by each month but their ‘resilience to economic shocks is not high’. They live across the boundary of public and private, not only in terms of occupation but also in terms of depending on the state while living (as much as possible) independently of the state. An intelligent Conservative politics would be identified with addressing its concerns. Frayne thought that this was the very opportunity which had been let slip after 2010. While the Conservatives only gradually began to evolve policies more attractive to these voters when they were in coalition, the political rhetoric of the Cameron modernisation project tended to focus on the top and bottom – ‘on the needs of businesses, or on those families that depend on welfare’. According to Frayne’s analysis, the important thing was to emphasise neither the needs of business nor the interests of those on benefits but the aspirations of the vast and variegated ‘just about managing’ (later popularised as the acronym JAMs). If the ‘just about managing’ demonstrated a cross-over between public services and private provision, they also revealed an ideological cross-over between nominally right- and nominally left-wing positions – a traditional Conservative position on crime, immigration and welfare reform and a traditional left-liberal position on the NHS, public services and the taxation of big business and the wealthy (Frayne 2015: 62–3). It is easy to note here the correspondence with Ford and Goodwin’s assessment of UKIP’s ‘head’ and ‘heart’ cross-over (see also Mellon and Evans 2015). In other words, these voters did not possess the tribal instincts of either cultural Conservative or cultural Labour politics and were not aware that the positions they adopted were ideologically contradictory but assumed that they were perfectly rational. Frayne was convinced that, whatever label might be put on the combination of their attitudes, the just about managing could not be described as ‘centrists’, at least in what he thought of as ‘the genuine sense of the term’. And the reason for this was that they tended not to ‘take a moderate line on any of the big issues’. Frayne (2015: 64) thought that this required of any party the following response: the language ‘needs to explicitly focus on family, fairness, hard work and decency’; and politicians ‘need to make it clear they want to create a country where these values are rewarded – and a country where those that reject these values will not get ahead and will be punished where appropriate’. Here was Gamble’s Conservative nation redescribed in rather different terms – in terms of those who would identify with that car sticker: ‘Work harder, those on benefits rely on you!’ A year later, with Theresa May now leader, Frayne (2016) could detect an ambitious two-stage plan unfolding. The first part involved a shift towards the just-about-managing classes – or what May chose to call ‘hard-working families’. He thought this shift put the Conservative Party ‘bang in the middle of political debate for ordinary people’. Important as this repositioning was, it was relatively easy in terms of traditional Conservative discourse. As this chapter has noted (despite Frayne’s thesis), this was

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Cameron’s territory too. The second part presented itself as much more demanding, addressing what Frayne called Conservative ‘structural weaknesses’ – mainly the absence of the party from former industrial heartlands and from the centres of many British towns and cities. UKIP, he argued, had begun the fracturing of the Labour-voting habits of this electorate and now the opportunity was there for Conservatives to take advantage. The obstacles that stood between conception and achievement – and Frayne’s conception did read too schematically – remained formidable, not least that of delivering prosperity and well-being while outside the EU. Nevertheless, the opportunity was there for the Conservative Party to construct a national coalition built on both working- and middle-class votes and one which could keep it in power for decades. It was perfectly imaginable even on the eve of the 2017 general election. To this point, consideration of the just-managing middle class and the UKIP-voting working class has left unspecified its national character. This needs to be addressed, for Frayne as well as Ford and Goodwin had a definite national constituency in mind. It was English. According to Frayne (2015: 5–6), those he described are ‘provincial English families’. The constituencies in which their votes are vital ‘are disproportionately found across provincial England’. Moreover, Frayne thought (2016) that those former Labour voters who could be enticed from UKIP towards the Conservative Party lived in England or, to be more precise, the ‘heartlands of Northern England’. Ford and Goodwin (2014: 19) also detected in the imagery of UKIP campaigns the ‘symbols of an idealised traditional England’. Clearly, in giving these interests voice, there was a danger that the Conservative Party would express more deeply and loudly the concerns of England and the English. In other words, refashioning a cross-class one nation English Conservatism might have the effect of straining its traditional one nation British unionism. Consider, for example, the description by the journalist Alex Massie (2016a) of Theresa May’s first party conference speech as prime minister. He thought that its pitch to the patriotism of the working class and just-managing classes sounded like ‘White Van Conservatism remade for an age of uncertainty’. If one dismisses the hauteur of that remark – White Van Conservatism was exactly the sort of pitch which Frayne and others were recommending – Massie, a Scot, considered the source of its patriotic energy to be very particular in tone. It came across to him as ‘unashamed, preachy, and very, very English’. That comment identifies the stress point of the Conservative nation – which nation? –and will be addressed systematically in the next three chapters. Here was a very obvious Conservative temptation. In a grand tour d’horizon about current developments in politics, Colin Crouch thought that no ‘political family’ could look very comfortably to the future. However, he identified another major, if unexpected, result of the changes which had taken place over the course of previous decade: ‘that the old predominant conflict axis around inequality and redistribution is itself becoming interpreted through nationalism rather than through class politics’ (Crouch 2016). One could argue that here is an imaginative reversion – rather than

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ideological reaction as Crouch is disposed to read it – which provided new mobilising space for any major political party to occupy, and not only the Conservatives, as proved in 2017. Nevertheless, and with good reason, scholars (for example, Jennings and Stoker 2016: 377) assumed that this national bias was congenial territory for Conservatives who ‘appear to be both more adept and pragmatic in their willingness to provide targeted and focused appeals to a wider variety of constituencies’. Moreover, there was a further assumption: that when it comes to ‘speaking for England’, such rhetoric rises more readily to Conservative lips than it does to either Labour or Liberal Democrats (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 121). Conservatives take it for granted that, as the subtitle of John Redwood’s blog diary proudly announces, they are already and always ‘speaking for England’. This conundrum is quite simple to state. The Conservative Party proclaims a British and Unionist vocation and yet there is always an English temptation which, as Chapter 1 discussed, lies at the very heart of Conservative history. Today, as in the past, the currents of popular and unionist Conservatism do not necessarily pull in the same direction. It would require an intelligent statecraft to manage the potential disharmony, even if the English bias of Conservative thought and practice can be sometimes overdone (Roberts 2007: 407–8). Scholars working on the modern party have returned to that tension between vocation and temptation and they have identified one of the fault lines which could attend any attempt – like the plan attributed by Frayne to May – to restore the dominance of the Conservative nation. For example, English, Hayton and Kenny (2009: 344) have written that a resurgence of a distinctive English nationalism would at first glance seem likely to find a natural home in the practice of the Conservative Party, given its history and its traditional base of support. Yet the counterweight to that initial thought is the reverence which Conservatives have for those institutions – like Crown and Parliament – that have ‘transcended Englishness’. Consequently, they thought that in present times ‘the Conservatives face a conundrum’ (English, Hayton and Kenny 2009: 355–7). Given the changed social and cultural circumstances which those like Bogdanor, Crouch and others have identified – such as the challenge of nationalism in Scotland – should not Conservatives try to profit from, rather than to suppress, their English temptation? By presenting themselves as the bulwark against the Scottish National Party (SNP), outflanking Labour patriotically and destroying UKIP popularly, the party might win handsomely in England. That victory, however, would come at the expense of damaging the Union. On the other hand, should the Conservative Party try to preserve an asymmetrical Union, there was a risk of its ‘being positioned as the opponent of a rising current of English populism’ (Mycock and Hayton 2014: 260). The May leadership believed that it was possible to maintain a dual strategy, one which brought British unionism in Scotland into alliance with provincial middle England (and Wales) as well as the English working class. What would reconcile them would be a revived ‘one nation’, post-Brexit, patriotism. This belief is examined more thoroughly in the next chapters. However, it is important to establish a historical

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lineage for this latest expression of the Conservative nation which in 2017 ‘Team May’ was confident was a winning formula. Chamberlain Toryism Nick Timothy, at the time joint chief of staff to the prime minister and long-time trusted adviser of Theresa May, had been consistent in his argument that the Conservative Party must always govern ‘with the interests of ordinary people at its heart’. He continued, ‘history shows us that such an approach would not just be right, it would be electorally successful’ (Timothy 2016). It was Oakeshott’s view that a tradition is always swerving back to make the most of the elements of its past; the Conservative Party, as a political tradition, is no exception. For Timothy, the part of the Conservative tradition he believed most relevant to contemporary challenges was not Disraelian but that associated with Joseph Chamberlain. What was interesting about that choice – if one discounts Timothy’s local patriotic sympathies for Birmingham – is that Chamberlain never joined the Conservative Party but always remained a Liberal Unionist. The ‘odious title of Conservative’ never appealed to him, nor to his son Neville (see Chapter 1). In his book on Joseph Chamberlain, Timothy (2012) accepted that, as Enoch Powell believed, all political careers end in failure. Chamberlain’s failure on two great causes – opposition to Irish Home Rule and the campaign for imperial unity – did not diminish his contribution of making social reform a Conservative issue and this association permitted the party, against some of its basic instincts, to appeal to all classes in the country. Like May, Timothy was conscious that the basic instincts of some party members were at the heart of the ‘nasty’ image which always threatened the Conservatives electorally. As he put it colloquially, the party always needs to be conscious of the suspicion that it does not ‘give a toss about ordinary people’. Yet, who are the people? They are the same people about whom Frayne wrote. They depend on state education and cannot opt out to private schooling for their children. Nor can they choose private health care but must rely on the NHS. They are vulnerable to economic downturns, to pay freezes, to interest rate and tax. They have modest means, work hard, and they appreciate the independence which comes with steady employment. These people, Timothy (2016) believed, ‘are natural conservatives for precisely the reason that the stakes they have are small. They want stability, certainty, and steady leadership by politicians who have their interests at heart.’ They are naturally suspicious of radicalism in politics because ‘radicalism means risk, and they know they are the ones who lose out when radicalism turns to rot’. If the party is committed to modernisation it should ‘be called Erdington modernisation’ (after the working-class area of Birmingham from which Timothy comes). In short, the Erdington option would mean the Conservative Party adopting ‘a relentless focus on governing in the interests of ordinary, working people’. Scholars have written of ‘villa Toryism’ in late Victorian Britain, a constituency which was suburban, respectable and aspirational

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and one important aspect of Conservative popular support. Timothy’s version was described as Aston Villa Toryism (Goodman 2016). It was good joke but also implied that the constituency appealed to is much broader – and more party politically transgressive – than the traditional image of middle England Conservatism. These views had been already articulated by Theresa May. In a speech to ConservativeHome (Montgomerie 2013), the future prime minister set out her blueprint for the modern Conservative nation. She identified three pillars of Conservatism: security, freedom and opportunity. It was interesting to note – if perhaps understandable given her long experience as home secretary – the emphasis given to the first of these pillars. If in his Manchester Trade Hall speech 150 years previously, Disraeli had related freedom and opportunity to the secure constitutional settlement of Crown, Lords and Commons, May related them mainly to the domestic security of everyday life. Security, as the first pillar, required trust not only on law and order, immigration and defence. Conservatives needed to offer people security from the other things they worry about: ‘everyday risks like falling ill, or losing your job’. Therefore, when it came to the second pillar of freedom it meant freedom from the state (a traditional position) ‘and, yes, big business’. The delivery of opportunity also required ‘reforming capitalism’ and being prepared to take ‘on vested interests in the private sector. Where businesses abuse their market position to keep prices high, we should be prepared to make sure the market works in the public interest’. If the conclusion was the obviously banal one that the strongest position is when ‘anyone and everyone can feel the Conservative Party is for them’, the tone was rather distinctive. The impact of the result of the EU referendum was to give to May’s Conservative nation a further distinctive patriotic quality which is considered in the following chapters. It is worth identifying here the reference to immigration as central to the security which Conservatives needed to deliver. Here was a further party connection to the (Powellite) Midlands of England. Evans and Tilley (2015) thought one advantage of the Conservatives, gifted by their opponents’ inattention to its significance, was the effect of immigration upon political attitudes. They highlighted an omission on the part of the liberal left; that is, a wish to ignore or to misrepresent working-class suspicion of multiculturalism and mass immigration: ‘the professional left have never really wanted to believe that the group they champion can hold such “unenlightened” positions’. Of course, those in the Conservative Party who were critical of Cameron’s leadership believed that he too shared a similar view on these matters, despite his commitment to bring net immigration down to the tens of thousands (d’Ancona 2013: 350–1). However, the problem which has hung over Conservative politics for two generations has been Enoch Powell’s voicing of public anxieties about immigration in the late 1960s. His was an intervention which remains an example of political self-destruction, one which has served as a warning for generations of MPs. However one chooses to label Powellism – patriotic, nationalist, racist, right-wing populist – it threatened to

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disorder the existing code of British politics because it appeared to tap a reservoir of sentiment which established parties preferred not to articulate. It was challenging because, as one journalist (Utley 1968: 172) who was sympathetic to Powell wrote, it offered the Conservative Party ‘a rare chance to achieve a permanent and solid foothold in areas of society which are assumed to belong by rights to its opponents – in other words, among the working classes’. Both the political subject (immigration) and the political object (challenging the partisanship of party competition) were suspect here. Though Utley’s was not a proper rendering of the composition of support for the Conservative Party even then – about one third of its electorate being working class – it did convey reasonably accurately the assumption of strictly demarcated boundaries and hermetically sealed views (dockworkers supporting Powell, it was thought at the time, should not march to a Tory tune and should not put national prejudice before class solidarity). The possibility of Conservatives achieving a solid foothold in areas assumed to belong to their opponents was the opportunity which ‘Erdington modernisation’ also intimated. Nevertheless, it is possible to acknowledge the necessity of addressing such toxic issues – and immigration has certainly been a toxic issue – without conceding that any or all methods of doing so are equally legitimate. A responsible party of government is required to channel popular anxieties about immigration into constitutional politics, if to ignore them otherwise leaves the field open for irresponsible politicians to exploit – an implication of Evans and Tilley’s remark about the contemporary left. Cameron’s problem after 2015 was that his party was committed to lowering immigration but was incapable of delivering (as May knew all too well), an inability which was to damage spectacularly his efforts to keep the UK within the EU (see Chapter 7). Was it possible for Theresa May to channel popular anxieties about immigration into constitutional politics and be true to the one nation tradition of the party? In advance of the 2017 general election, Timothy was reported (Parker, Wright and Mance 2017) to have had a meeting with Lord Glasman, the original advocate of ‘Blue Labour’. When launched at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury, Glasman described Blue Labour as ‘a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity’ (Stratton 2009). The concern of Glasman and those who thought like him was that the cosmopolitan multicultural identity of New Labour had distanced the party from the values of its working-class voters and that its policies needed to reconnect with their traditions, interests and concerns. And one of those concerns was immigration and its effect on working-class communities (Geary and Pabst 2015). In a wide-ranging reflection on the historical depth of this idea in Labour politics, Sandbrook (2011) noted that one of the great figures in the party’s story, Hugh Dalton (in an echo of Aston Villa Toryism) admitted to being a ‘Joe Chamberlainite’ at school and observed too how immigration in white working-class neighbourhoods had weakened the view that the party of today was on the side of its own core support. It was tempting,

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then, for commentators to assume a common Chamberlainite sympathy, connecting Timothy’s ‘Red Tory’ assumptions with the ‘Blue Labour’ message of Glasman. However, as Goodman (2016; see also Pabst 2017) correctly put it, albeit with a different emphasis, both Timothy’s and May’s ‘so-called Red Toryism’ is not as bright a hue as sometimes claimed: ‘The red spray is mixed with blue paint.’ Nevertheless, here was the issue which had agitated many liberal Conservatives since Cameron’s fall. Mixing blue and red gets you purple – which is the party colour of UKIP. If the electoral strategy of the Conservative Party after June 2016 was to scoop up UKIP support, what impact, asked d’Ancona (2017a), would that have on the Conservative cause? Reviving working-class conservatism (those neglected angels in marble) was a laudable objective; so too was the objective of extending the middle ground of politics in order to build a successful national coalition; and so too was the pitch to govern in the interests of hard-working families. Nevertheless, all of this came with a serious health warning. ‘Beating UKIP should not in any sense mean becoming UKIP’, thought d’Ancona. The risk was that attracting its support could be like the effect of a ‘facehugger from the Alien films, affixing itself to the Tory party’s skull and implanting its unlovely ideas’. To be concerned about immigration, in other words, should not transform the Conservatives into an anti-immigrant party. d’Ancona captured that liberal anxiety concisely. His was a warning against ignoring the hard and painful experience of the Blair years and the Cameron project: ‘It is unfashionable in these polarised times to mention centre-ground voters, but there are still millions of them, and they remain essential to the acquisition and retention of power in this country.’ Building not only a winning coalition but a morally defensible coalition ‘means protecting its pre-existing components’ – in short, it meant not discounting the liberal appeal of Cameron’s politics. That was very good advice, for it would be certainly ironic if, one quarter of a century after her famous declaration to conference that the party’s base was too narrow as were, at times, its sympathies, May re-established in the popular mind the image of Conservatives as the nasty party, however much its constituency of support was broadened. An assessment of the strategy is made in the final chapter. Conclusion The possibility of reconstructing the Conservative nation by consolidating Cameron’s coalition, attracting back to the party those who had migrated to UKIP and by extending the reach of the party’s appeal into traditional Labour heartlands was opened up by the fluidity of class identity which this chapter has discussed. The general election of 2017 would test all of the assumptions and speculations about class and party identification. This chapter began with Bogdanor’s observation that, despite the Conservative victory in the general election of 2015, it was uncertain whether the UK would survive. For the best part of a political generation doubts about the capacity of the Conservative Party to defend and to secure the UK have informed

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commentary on the state of the Union. The reason for these doubts can be specified easily despite the party’s proud proclamation of its one nation fidelity. Generations of Conservatives have claimed that defence of the Union is the fons et origo of the party’s purpose. It is, of course, a presumption that Conservatives are more in tune with the institutional traditions of national life than others but it is a presumption that has endured. Its rhetoric of stability, continuity and order associates the party with knowledge of the practice of parliamentary government (pays légal) and the character of the country (pays réel) which its rivals do not have. Gamble’s conception of the reconciliation of support with power captures this best. If the practical evidence for the party achieving that reconciliation remains questionable at best, the ideological endurance of the belief is remarkable. While Conservative rhapsody about the Union has continued, such language often seemed inadequate compensation for serious calculation about how to secure it – or even whether some in the party really wanted to secure the Union at all. The next chapter looks at the British Question – maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom – and considers how the Conservative Party has tried to answer it.

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Conservatives and the British Question

Michael Oakeshott (1991: 61) thought that a ‘tradition of behaviour’ is a ‘tricky’ thing to get to know. National identity also can be taken as a tradition of behaviour and is an equally tricky thing to get to know. The Conservative Party, as Chapter 2 noted, has claimed a privileged comprehension of that tradition – what was called, in a previous age, ‘national character’ – mainly because it understands itself to be a natural part of the warp and weft of the country. Yet that chapter also identified how the Conservative Party’s self-declaration as the ‘national party’ involved a number of ambiguities – in particular, its English electoral base and its British claim to govern – which generally were left unspoken. Politically, the thing to avoid was having a ‘row’ about those issues such that questions of national identity should be avoided in case they threatened to disturb the unity of the country – though it was convenient to think of Northern Ireland as the exception to that rule. Instead, governing competence or ‘valence’ – the Conservative Party as the ‘natural party of government’ – and patriotism – the Conservative Party as the national party – were the important considerations in politics. One thing did remain constant, however: the Conservative Party believed itself to be the exemplary embodiment of Britain’s providential distinctiveness. So, while proudly professing their patriotism when necessary, Conservative leaders could also rely on its quiet assumption by customary and historical association – that presumption which McKenzie and Silver (1968; see also Chapter 1) observed even in the mid-1960s. Though describing a disposition more widely held than Conservatism, Bogdanor (2009: 108) captured this with his usual perceptiveness: ‘Too much self-consciousness, after all, is as bad for a nation as it is for the individual.’ What appeared to serve the party leadership well, especially when it was in government, was what Rose (1982: 5) once called ‘unthinking unionism’ or what Colin Kidd (2008: 302–3) later called ‘banal unionism’, a ‘form of casual and unquestioning silence’ on questions of British identity. Too much self-consciousness, Conservative leaders feared, at least if not properly channelled by themselves, might give unwelcome voice to the ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ about whom Cameron spoke (Taylor: 2006), the very ones in UKIP, and possibly within his own party, who came to dog and then to wreck his career. So there is something of a paradox: here is a party which is comfortable about

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wrapping itself in the Union flag, to bang the patriotic drum and yet it is a party hesitant to be too nationalistic because it potentially raises the difficult question: which nation? Crick (1989: 33), for example, thought that this reluctance was part of the collective Tory memory about what happens when beliefs are taken ‘out of proportion’ as they appeared to have been with Irish Home Rule; as Major believed they had been over Europe; and as Remain Tories believed was the case during the EU referendum. Neither unthinking unionism nor banal unionism have fared too well over the last thirty years and this has presented significant difficulties for the party, for whom belief in the Union has been a ‘Tory orthodoxy’ (Biffen 1978: 165). Indeed, there has been a remarkable shift in Conservative thinking in the course of these years, all the more remarkable since it involves the transition from one distinctive understanding of Britishness to another. After 1997 what once was held to be an unshakable conviction, has been very swiftly ditched and – with an assured pragmatism later to be redescribed as principle – the party now holds another unshakable conviction. From being a fundamental opponent of devolution, the party became in short order a defender of it. That transformation would confirm the assessment of one party publicist that it is the party’s ability to adapt which is the key to understanding its longevity. In short, the ‘willingness to challenge oneself to face political reality as it is rather than as one might prefer it to be is an admirable quality which has served us well when we have stayed true to it’ (Wallace 2016). Only when Conservatives have ignored that admirable quality have they lost, Mark Wallace thought, and ‘deservedly’ so. The transition can be measured when one considers the difference between the territorial politics of John Major and that of David Cameron and Theresa May. This chapter explores the Conservative understanding of the United Kingdom – called here ‘a certain idea of Britain’ – which was maintained throughout the twentieth century. It considers the consequence of the decline of that idea and the response of the party in the new millennium. The ‘British Question’ is one of many parts (Aughey 2013) but, as a Conservative question, it can be understood in terms of the decline of that ‘certain idea’. In short, the secure identity that ‘certain idea’ once provided has become the uncertainty and insecurity of the Union today, challenged not only by the constitutional activism of New Labour but also by the centrifugal forces of nationalism. The argument is that three tendencies have been detectable in the Conservative Party’s adaptation to both. The first is ‘high unionism’, a rhetorical commitment to the integrity of the Union and a celebration of those affinities which hold the country together. The second is ‘continuity Conservatism’, which, despite the effect of devolution on the practice of government, has operated as if Westminster politics had been left intact. The third is ‘discontinuity Conservatism’, which has been much less sentimental than the first about the Union and much more critical than the second about devolution. The chapter concludes with some reflection on the balance between these tendencies in the party.

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In an article published at the beginning of Major’s premiership, Burch and Holliday (1992: 398) argued that the Conservative Party could embrace change on the grounds of both principle and necessity, the latter point, like Wallace’s definition, ‘often being summed up in the pragmatic injunction that it may at times be essential to change in order to preserve’. They supposed that the Conservative government at the time could draw on the party’s ‘incrementalist tradition’ to deal with the matter of constitutional reform in order to restructure the state along devolutionary lines. Adjusting to the growing popularity of self-government, especially in Scotland, would provide Conservatives with the opportunity to secure their reputation as the party of one nation in modern Britain – ‘not simply to social groups, but also to the regions and nations’. That was not the conclusion to which Major came. Indeed, his premiership witnessed the government rededicating itself to an idea of Britain with a pedigree as old as the party’s opposition to Irish Home Rule. Indeed, one can argue that Major’s premiership was that idea’s Indian summer. On the matter of the Union, Major’s reputation has not been well served, especially by media commentary. It is common, when the ‘tricky’ matter of identity has been considered, to refer to an early speech in which he argued that Britain would ‘survive unamendable in all essentials’ (Major 1993). It would remain ‘the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school.’ Depending on the writer and the subject discussed, that speech is taken to demonstrate either how out of touch Major was with modern Britain or how incorrigible, as a Conservative leader, was his failure to distinguish English from British references. Of course, this is a misreading of his intent. That passage was not a sentimental, Baldwinesque, reflection on the ‘character’ of the British people. It was the conclusion to a speech which argued – and it is an argument which seems ironic today – that Britain had ‘come of age in Europe’. It was a speech addressed to the future and not to the past. In truth, Major was acutely sensitive to the challenges which faced the traditional Conservative ‘idea of Britain’ as he was also to charges of the party’s Anglo-centricity. It has been argued that Major put the party on the ‘wrong side of history’ in his attitude to devolution for Scotland and Wales – again Northern Ireland was ‘different’ – which left Conservatives at a serious electoral disadvantage in both countries. There are mitigating circumstances, however. Major, after all, was a Conservative and he was leading a party the members of which – especially in Scotland – shared overwhelmingly his idea of Britishness even though devolution had some powerful Scottish Conservative advocates like Alec Buchanan-Smith and Malcolm Rifkind. Bogdanor (1980: 93) had put it concisely that in the 1970s the Conservatives had supported ‘devolution in theory while opposing it in practice’. Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s opposed it in theory as well. Though

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the accusation of misreading the times has some substance, it abstracts from a complex historical inheritance a choice which, at the time, Major thought was not available to him. It would have contradicted as well the advice given by influential Cabinet colleagues during his premiership, especially by his secretaries of state for Scotland. As ever in Conservative politics a wager on the continuity of a certain idea of Britain was also an exercise in hard-headedness. During the 1992 general election campaign Major had announced a simple warning – ‘Britain in danger’ – and had called on his fellow countrymen to wake up to that danger before it was too late. It was a wager – betting on the Union, the whole Union and nothing but the Union (Northern Ireland again being exceptional) – which had delivered unexpected electoral dividends in Scotland, where in 1992 the party increased its votes and seats, though not in Wales, where the party lost two seats. Later, Major revealed a fatalistic assumption about constitutional change which was at odds with his then public commitment to resist it: in his autobiography (Major 1999: 415), he conceded that he always felt that devolved institutions were ‘inexorable’. However, since there was no consensus for change within the party, it was understandable if Major was reluctant to shift his ground. The warning he had raised in 1992 echoed the message of Conservatives during the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1912: there can be no halfway house between unity and separation. For example, when the question of devolution to Scotland and the challenge of nationalism had arisen in the 1970s, Biffen (1978: 165) thought that the choice simply boiled down to the ‘fundamental one of membership of a unitary state or else separation’. Conservatives could develop clever compromises and constitutional manoeuvres but they could only postpone ‘the fundamental nature’ of the choice which would have to be faced. The fundamental nature of that choice equally can be traced to the question which divided the parties over Irish Home Rule: was Britain composed of a single people, albeit one with distinctive national and regional cultures; or was it composed of separate peoples, whose national identities required expression in distinctive political institutions? Conservatives had believed the former and a similar view of identity informed Conservative policy in the very different circumstances of the 1990s. For Major, as it was under Thatcher, the Union was understood as a synthesis of patriotic identity and political belonging, an identity expressed, equally singularly, by the centrality in its public life of parliamentary sovereignty. To use that resonant Scottish phrase, the Union was a partnership for good, one formed by political convention, common history, cultural sympathies and elective affinities. These arguments were made in an important Conservative Political Centre’s (CPC) National Policy Group Report on the Constitution (1996). Devolution, that report argued, would undermine the unity of the country for it accepted implicitly what nationalism demanded explicitly: that it is not Parliament but the nation, be it Scotland, Wales or even England – again Northern Ireland was a special case – that is ultimately sovereign . The CPC report argued that devolution, to adapt a description of the old Stormont Parliament in Northern Ireland (Buckland 1979),

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would create elected ‘factories of grievance’ in Edinburgh and Cardiff which would work only to the advantage of nationalists. Parliamentary sovereignty remained the cement holding together nations and nation state. If its integrative role was weakened then the unity of the country also was threatened (Bogdanor 2010a: 59). There had been an intimation of this clash in the Scottish Convention established in 1989. The chair, Canon Kenyon Wright (cited in Marr 1992: 206) asked, referring to Thatcher: ‘What if that other single voice we all know so well responds by saying, “We say no, and we are the state?” Well, we say yes – and we are the people’. This set up a stark alternative of the sovereign people at odds with the constitutional people (see Chapter 1). Here was the political logic, if not necessarily the political wisdom, of the ‘no halfway house’ argument. The ‘certain idea’ of Britain to which the party was dedicated held that identity and constitution together composed the historical fabric of the country which, if unpicked carelessly, would unravel the Union – and, of course, in this view, everyone but Conservatives do act ‘carelessly’. The cultural distinctiveness of each part of the country should be recognized and cherished but it was axiomatic that the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts. Major (1992a) acknowledged that the Scots were distinctively Scots, the English distinctively English, the Welsh distinctively Welsh, and the Northern Irish distinctively Northern Irish. ‘I don’t wish’, he said, ‘to do anything that would damage the distinctive cultures, natures, traditions, and instincts of the component parts of the United Kingdom.’ He also accepted (1992b) that no nation ‘can be held irrevocably in a union against its will’ – therefore, the principle of consent which informed his policy in Northern Ireland was, it could be argued, consistent with the party’s unionist vocation. On the other hand, separation would serve to diminish all members of the Union, individually and collectively. As the CPC report of 1996 had put it, accommodating ‘nationhood’ was not the same thing as appeasing ‘nationalism’. Major’s secretary of state for Scotland, Ian Lang, wholeheartedly supported this approach. His view (Lang 2002: 211) was classically Tory: that conceding the principle of devolution meant more would be lost than could possibly be gained. There could never be any certainty where the process would end: ‘devolution would bring risk and uncertainty’ and it would be ‘the beginning, not the end’ of nationalist demands. Lang equally could see no good reason for Conservatives to impose that risk upon the country. He had hoped that the upsurge of nationalism would be ‘just one more of those emotional spasms that have gripped Scotland from time to time over the centuries’. Delay (Lang 2002: 183) was the tactic, elegantly formulated into the policy of ‘taking stock’, a phrase which became the mantra for all questions to do with territorial politics. And there was another concern. The Labour Party, argued Scottish Conservatives, was not only appeasing nationalism in Scotland and (to a lesser extent) in Wales but it was also deploying devolution as a way to undermine the authority of all Conservative government. According to Rifkind (cited in Lloyd 2008), who was a long-standing advocate of devolution, Labour in Scotland was playing a very dangerous populist game, implying that the Conservative Party had

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no mandate for policies north of the border: ‘To use the “no mandate” argument was wholly unprincipled’ because it ‘has left a legacy from which it, and we all, suffer – that a British government can lack legitimacy.’ As the ‘inexorable’ movement towards devolution in Scotland began to shift the plates of territorial politics, the Conservative Party was left in an uncomfortable position. It appeared to declare that you can have independence outside the Union if you want it but you cannot have any self-determining say within the Union – or at least critics of the party made it sound that way. If Conservatives were taking stock, what sort of reform was considered acceptable? It involved modification of the procedures at Westminster, which were implemented under Major’s premiership and restated in the Conservative Party’s 1997 manifesto. New powers were given to the Scottish and Welsh Grand Committees at Westminster which, it was claimed, enabled greater accountability of government than would be possible under any system of devolution. This was as far as that ‘certain idea of Britain’ could go in acknowledging regional or national differences while remaining faithful to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. The general election of 1997 – Major, characteristically, had delayed it as long as possible in the hope of a revival in Conservative fortunes, not least in Scotland – resulted in a Labour landslide. Ian Gilmour and Mark Garnett (1998: 382) wrote rather brutally that the idea of Britain so firmly proclaimed by Major now meant that the Conservative Party had become ‘in the worst sense a “One Nation” party – of England’. It had lost all of its seats in both Scotland and Wales. There was a temptation to understand this as a case of ‘back to the future’, with the Tories returning to their natural home after an extended British excursion, and to recall that 150 years ago the Conservative Party had only two seats in Scotland – two more than it had in 1997 (Tombs 2014: 509; Evans 2009: 109). The fading light of that idea’s Indian summer was replaced by the glad, confident morning of New Labour, which, after nearly two decades of Conservative government, promised to make Britain afresh by far-reaching constitutional change. In particular, New Labour believed that there could be a halfway house between unity and separation and the required programme of constitutional renewal would not tolerate the unitary British identity of the past. The early theme of ‘Cool Britannia’ (Leonard 1997: 72) was about galvanising ‘excitement around Britain’s core values – as a democratic and free society in an interconnected world – and finding a better way of linking pride in the past with confidence in the future’. Here was a new narrative – expressed as ‘rebranding’ – which defined the ‘project of forging a modern and inclusive patriotism’ (Leonard 2002: x) to be the task of progressive politics. Reforming the Union was designed to guarantee – by democratic, institutional recognition of identity in a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly (again, the Northern Ireland case meant something else) – the rights of the nations within the Union. Very quickly, the Conservative Party adapted itself to devolution and forgot equally rapidly its certain idea of Britain. Here was an excellent example of Wallace’s (2016) ‘admirable quality’

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in practice as the party adjusted to ‘political reality as it is rather than as one might prefer it to be’ – or, to use that Oakeshottian term, it involved a ‘swerving back’ to recover fragments of Conservative tradition appropriate to the new dispensation, one of which was now called ‘localism’. In debates about constitutional politics this had happened before with Ireland (Young 1947: 104) and the amnesia that had applied to Irish affairs after 1922 seemed, after 1997, to apply now to that certain idea of Tory Britain about which Major and Lang had been so passionate. If the purpose of devolution was ‘to destroy the omnicompetence of Parliament’ which the Conservative Party had so vigorously defended (Bogdanor 1996: 21), a decade later Bogdanor (2009: 155) judged that ‘the new constitution’, the shape of which he now detected, permitted the Scots, the Welsh and Northern Irish (somewhat differently) to have their ‘own identity and institutions’. This was the constitution of a defined multinational state – his own term was ‘quasi-federal’ – rather than a ‘homogeneous British nation containing a variety of people’. This new idea of Britain inverted the interpretation of the 1996 CPC report – it was no longer a single people with distinctive national and regional cultures, it was distinct peoples, whose national identities required expression in distinctive political institutions. The old Tory conception of territorial politics became redundant and one is tempted to conclude that the Conservative reconciliation with New Labour’s idea of Britain meant that politics had become universally Gladstonian. It was William Hague (1998), succeeding Major as party leader, who took the first step onto this new territory with his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1998. He condemned Labour in the usual terms for having undermined the stability of the country and, in the course of that condemnation, identified the purpose of his leadership to be one of restoring constitutional balance: We are not going to leave the battleground to nationalist parties who want to destroy our country and a Labour Party which has played into their hands. We are going to invest the time and the energy and the resources to make sure the Conservative voice is heard in Edinburgh and Cardiff.

Though much of his language was in the familiar idiom, that final sentence was a clear indication of a strategic shift. Hague was moving the party towards living with devolution. This was made clear in a later keynote speech by Hague outlining what he called the ‘British way’ of addressing questions of national identity. In this speech he argued that Conservatives must again become a recognisably patriotic party in touch with the values of the British people and embracing ‘a modern vision of British nationhood’ (Lynch 2000: 62). It was easy to mistake the intention and the tone in this speech, especially its claim that under Blair, Britain was becoming a ‘different country’. For instance, one journalist (McElvoy 1999) captured well the pitch of Hague’s position but asked why, if devolution was so bad for Britain, were Conservatives not committed to reversing it? If the party did not intend to reverse it, then Conservatives

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were just howling in the wilderness by overstating their case. Here the meaning of the message had got lost in the rhetoric, a general problem for the party at this time of New Labour’s early ascendancy. Like Major’s misunderstood reference to Orwell, Hague was not indulging in soft-focus romance about a Britain that was gone but recommending that Conservatives should adapt to changes which had already made Britain different. In an interview fifteen years later, there was a very candid admission not only of the problem but also of the scale of the change that had been required. Hague accepted (Hague, James and Clarke 2015: 443–4) that Conservatives were never in a position to manage constitutional change but that it had been vital to reconcile the party to it nonetheless: ‘With the Conservative Party having been dead set against devolution, I then had to turn that around to accepting the democratic outcome of the referendums, and campaigning to win seats in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.’ He admitted that it had all been a bit ‘tricky’ and though Conservatives had completely reversed their position, it had been the right thing to do. Conservatism, Casey (1978: 87) thought, ‘feels that the alteration and decay of customs and patterns of behaviour normally betokens a profound change in the consciousness of the age’. That ‘consciousness of the age’ – at least in respect of territorial politics – had become devolution. It betokened the ultimate decay of the old fabric of the Conservative nation and an alteration in the rules by which the constitutional people lived. Accommodation by the party to this new idea of Britain was yet another political wager on the future and there was neither certainty that it meant finality nor assurance that it would avoid moves towards separatism as both Major and Lang had feared. It was certainly Powell’s characteristically definitive judgement that the result of the 1997 general election meant that the British electorate had voted ‘to break up the United Kingdom’ (Heffer 1999: 950). Here was another serious challenge for the party and it was one which emerged directly from the political gap opened up by the acceptance of devolution, the partial accommodation with Blair’s ‘different country’ and the pull of traditional Britishness. The gap accentuated that ‘split in the mind’ in Conservatism – between national sentiment and state institutions – discussed in Chapter 2. On the one hand, the grand inheritance of the Union and Britishness remained untouched along with its hold on the collective imagination of the party. On the other hand, the weakness of the party’s support outside England made some Conservatives, especially in the media but also within the party, question its enduring value. Both parts of this conundrum are sometimes referred to in speeches, ones which are often spiced with a curious flavour of party self-sacrifice. To take just one example during the Scottish independence referendum campaign, Major (2014) returned to a theme he had addressed a number of times during his premiership. He confirmed that the Union remained fundamental to his party’s identity, not only as a matter of conviction but also as a matter of pride. Here was that venerable halo of one nation, British patriotism, which had served Conservatives well in the past. Though it was

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not as burnished as it once was, there seemed – to the Conservative leadership at least – no good reason to discard it. Maintaining the Union meant everyone being safer together, stronger together, more prosperous together and more influential together. There was a ‘but’, however. But, observed Major, ‘in pure political terms – if Scotland left the Union – the Conservative Party would benefit enormously’. He thought Conservatives would win most elections for Westminster, condemning their opponents to permanent Opposition. So here was Major’s question: ‘Why do I – an English Conservative – care about Scotland remaining in the Union?’ Why, indeed, should the Conservative Party favour the Union? Why should the party, asked Major, campaign ‘against our own political interests?’ The answer he gave was that the value of the whole Union was greater than the sum of its parts and in Major’s formulation at least, the general and particular interests still held together. Hague (1998) had made it clear already that the Conservatives would not become an English nationalist party but would continue as a British party. However, putting the challenge in this way revealed that it was just as easy to think of the two parts of the conundrum being at odds with each other as it was to think of them as complementary. Of course, there was a third way available: to ignore the changes which had occurred in territorial politics after 1997 and to carry on as if the old order remained undisturbed, an attractive option insofar as the party’s Westminster MPs were almost entirely English. All three of these responses – which might be called high unionism, continuity Conservatism and discontinuity Conservatism – warrant investigation. High unionism Though there was much that Cameron wished to change when he became leader in 2005, one thing he was determined to maintain. In a speech to Scottish Conservatives (cited in Seawright 2010: 137) he repeated, like Major, not only the vocation of but also the temptation for his party. There were some Conservatives, he said, who thought his support for the Union was crazy. The substance of their argument was a familiar one. Conservatives usually get more votes than Labour in England – this had been the case in the 2005 general election – and that the best way for him to become prime minister would be for Scotland to split off. Cameron could see the temptation but it did not weaken his sense of the party’s vocation. His message to those siren voices was the same as Major’s: ‘Sorry – not interested. I’m a Unionist and every corner of this United Kingdom is precious to me, including Scotland’. He reaffirmed the customary message of the Conservative nation: the Union contributed to the security of all its parts; gave citizens a powerful voice in the world; delivered economic prosperity; and through commonly financed health and social services, based on solidarity, provided for the common good (Cameron 2007). One may be cynical about political motives, yet the sincerity of Cameron’s unionism cannot be easily discounted. When Michael Kenny (2009: 157) was ‘taking the temperature’ of the political elite just before the 2010 general election, he was struck by Cameron’s sense

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of purpose – despite ‘the overwhelmingly English composition of his Parliamentary party’ – to make ‘defence of the Union (along with a tacit recognition of the need to manage relations between Westminster and the Scottish Parliament) a central plank of his thinking’. Chapter 1 referred to the formulation of Lord Salisbury that statecraft involved ‘rhapsody’, or the heart-warming enchantment of a great political tale, and ‘calculation’ or the sober-minded reckoning of political advantage. These two things were not entirely separate in Conservative practice, but Salisbury’s judgement was that it was best not to substitute the former for the latter. High unionism was certainly rhapsodic and still played well to Conservative audiences. In the new millennium, those voices in the party to whom Cameron referred suggested that Unionist rhapsody was losing touch with Conservative calculation. The leader was begging to differ. Confirming Kenny’s judgement, Cameron (2010), when he became prime minister, made a distinctively Unionist statement of intent, one which anticipated the slogan opposing Scottish independence in 2014: ‘When I say I am prime minister of the United Kingdom, I really mean it. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – we’re weaker apart, stronger together, so together is the way we must always stay’ (my emphasis). And if there is an obvious link between himself and previous party leaders, there is also an obvious link between himself and his successor, Theresa May. As Chapter 2 noted, when she became prime minister in 2016 May reiterated her commitment to that ‘precious, precious bond between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and restated the full name of the party: Conservative and Unionist (though, as noted below, that conjunction can be ambiguous). In other words, the expressive sentiment of what may be called ‘high unionism’ is not just a formality or requirement of leadership but remains a sentiment widely shared within the party. For example, a ConservativeHome online survey (Montgomerie 2011a) revealed that a majority of party members did think – as Cameron admitted – Scottish independence would be likely to ensure Conservative dominance at Westminster. Despite this seductive possibility, 72 per cent of respondents agreed that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland ‘are better together’. Only 17 per cent of respondents dissented from that belief, confirming a powerful ‘elective affinity’ amongst Conservatives for the rhapsody of high unionism. Mycock and Hayton (2014: 255) conveyed astutely that culture of the party political relationship, noting how it reflected a uniquely Anglo-British historical development and an ‘instinctive Anglo-Britishness in Westminster politics’ which merged into a collective unionist identity. The trans-nationality of the party system meant that ‘politicians and party elites from Scotland and Wales have left a disproportionately sizable and indelible mark’ on British politics. That trans-nationality, despite those siren voices, lingers powerfully in the Conservative Party. Moreover, Cameron even tried to extend the institutional reach of the Conservative nation. He was keen to restore a new relationship between the Ulster Unionist Party and the Conservative Party, one which had been broken during Edward Heath’s

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premiership. The Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force (UCUNF), established in 2009, promised to be a ‘dynamic new force’ in Northern Ireland politics (Randall and Seawright 2012: 116). The electoral arrangement was intended to show that Conservative values, unionist identity and commitment to the integrity of the United Kingdom nested comfortably together in all parts of the United Kingdom. If UCUNF would allow Ulster Unionists to claim a voice in mainstream British politics it also would allow Cameron (2009a) to argue that Conservatives ‘are now the only major party to field candidates in all four parts of the UK’. If devolution meant that British politics had become Gladstonian (different nations requiring institutional recognition) there was also a reassertion of the familiar Disraelian theme (that the Conservative Party was the truly national party). It also echoed Powell’s grand vision which linked Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Aberdeen and County Down, such that ‘when one part of the nation is under attack, the whole is under attack’ (Cooke 2012: 254). If the ‘attack’ was now political – the nationalist threat to break up Britain – rather than violent, the principle remained the same. Though the UCUNF failed to win any seats in 2010 and was soon abandoned – indeed the only sitting Ulster Unionist MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, rejected the UCUNF label, stating that Conservatives had little understanding of Ulster politics – it appeared to signify a new willingness to emphasise the second part of the party’s title: the Conservative and Unionist Party. It was also clear to Cameron that Conservatives, if returned to power, had to acknowledge that the Britain they would govern had become a very different country from their last period in office. The Cameron mantra – that the party had to get in touch with modern Britain – meant working with the grain of the new constitutional structures. Hague had taken the first steps and Cameron marched to the constitutional high ground. The term for his approach was the ‘respect agenda’: that a Conservative government, if elected, would acknowledge, and treat seriously, differing democratic mandates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Cameron (2009b) remarked on the tenth anniversary of devolution: ‘I stand here, the leader of the Conservative Party, and say loudly and proudly, we support devolution, we back it heart and soul, and we will make it work for everyone.’ The message was clear enough and there was a double function which is worth noting. It involved, first, a restatement of the British vocation of the Conservative Party and it attempted, secondly, to mitigate the Englishness of the Conservative Party. To adapt the formulation of Mycock and Hayton (2014), it represented an attempt to rebalance Anglo-British transnationality away from the narrow ground of Tory Englishness. This was the territory on which the politics of identity was now being fought and ‘Britishness’ was the prize, though the two major parties were compelled to marshal their arguments in very different ways. The high unionism of Cameron’s Conservatism was designed to present the party as more British than English – or to put that more accurately, that its identity

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was not merely English. The high unionism of the Labour Party, especially after 2007 when Gordon Brown became prime minister, was to present itself as more British than Scottish – or to put that more accurately, that its identity was not alien to England. Though it appeared that the Conservatives were struggling to make an impact in New Labour’s ‘New Britain’ and that the party at times seemed to be on the brink of irrelevance (Snowdon 2010), the changing context of politics held out one particular hope. Bogdanor (2010a: 59) noted that the Conservative opposition to devolution had been mainly institutional: ‘that by undermining the sovereignty of Parliament, it would lead to the break-up of the kingdom’. By contrast, the Labour Party’s opposition had been that devolution would deprive Westminster not so much of sovereignty, as of power: ‘the power to correct territorial disparities’. There was a Conservative opportunity here. If, as Cameron now conceded, his party accepted the new devolved institutions and was prepared, if the Conservatives came to power at Westminster, to respect the democratic mandate of whatever party (or parties) happened to be in office in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, then an institutional modus vivendi was possible. On the other hand, it might actually be more difficult for Labour to adapt to circumstances in which it could no longer use the power of the centre to secure its policy objectives. Institutional compromise might be easier for Conservatives to manage than ideological compromise for Labour. This would not have surprised Bogdanor (2009: 171–2), who had long argued that devolution threatened not so much the state as an ideology: ‘It undermines what was perhaps the dominant ideology in the UK until the 1970s, an ideology to which both major parties were committed, and which even Margaret Thatcher could not destroy. It undermines the ideology of social democracy.’ This was picked up by one scholar, who commented that the Labour Party in Wales and Scotland seemed to have come perilously close to saying that devolution could only work if Labour was in office in Cardiff, Edinburgh and London ‘which is pretty much an admission of defeat for the whole constitutional enterprise’ (Trench 2011). As Chapter 4 observed, those changes which were taking place in British politics and culture could be turned to Conservative advantage. If, as scholars argued, the tectonic plates of party competition were shifting; if, as Bogdanor suggested, the challenge of devolution was more ideological than institutional; and if the politics of national identity were ratcheting up (McCrone 2013: 470), then none of these trends was necessarily damaging to Conservative fortunes. The history of the Conservative Party showed that it was comfortable with the politics of nationhood but how it adjusted would decide the party’s fate as well as the fate of the Union. If class, as Chapter 4 considered, was no longer the single determining political factor it was once thought to be, Conservatives might have the advantage which they seemed to have lost. High unionism is one major option in its political armoury but there was another disposition, one distinguished mainly by silence rather than by voice. It is ‘continuity Conservatism’.

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Labour (and Liberal Democrat) commitment to devolution in Scotland and Wales had been – in part – to provide electoral insurance against Conservative majorities at Westminster, a legacy of Thatcher’s premiership. Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of 1997 was therefore a double whammy for the Conservative Party. They had lost convincingly at Westminster and were unlikely to win power in the devolved institutions. It was understandable if, in the circumstances, most Conservative politicians were minded – either as a way of escaping harsh political reality or as a way of coping with it – to continue at Westminster as if really nothing had changed. The parliamentary party between 1997 and 2001 had no MPs from either Scotland or Wales. The party had only one seat in each subsequent general election in Scotland, while in Wales its tally rose from zero in 2001 to eleven in 2015. Insofar as devolved institutions had been established, and the Conservative leadership had accepted the new dispensation, it was a reasonable and protective response to act as if at Westminster politics meant ‘business as usual’. It was an attractive option for those Conservatives for whom the high unionism of their leaders’ rhetoric was familiar mood music as they went about their normal constituency work and sat out Opposition on the benches of the House of Commons. Indeed, perhaps it was a bit of welcome relief. Simon Hoggart (2011) – in what Alan Bennett (cited in Paxman 1998: 18) would have called that very English manner of ‘joking but not joking’ – once remarked that the advantage of Scottish independence would mean that the BBC was relieved of the duty of pretending that anyone in England was interested in either Scottish football or documentaries about standing stones near Stornoway. Bennett also thought that the counterpoint of that joking but not joking sensibility was its ‘serious but not serious’ attitude, possibly best captured by the Conservative academic, Jim Bulpitt (1992: 271), who proclaimed his lifetime membership of the ‘English “Sod Off ” school of Anglo-Scottish relations’. Certainly, the Conservative Party does not favour independence nor does it want the break-up of the Union and the ‘sod-off school’ has remained a minority tendency. Yet a reduction in Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland business in the House of Commons was hardly a cause for Tory wailing and gnashing of teeth. It provided a convenient way to continue, almost unthinkingly, that style which Mycock and Hayton (2014: 255) defined as the core tradition of Westminster politics: the dominance of England within the Union and British politics; the primacy of English concerns in governance terms; and instinctive media reportage which merged English with British policy issues. Insofar as Westminster procedure continued as it always had done (Hazell 2007), the political world looked very much as it always had done. This ‘continuity Conservatism’ existed easily with high unionism and its character struck forcefully one constitutional scholar. In a review of the first edition of Bale’s impressive and influential work on The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron (2010), Alan Trench (2010a) noted how

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little of that book was concerned with questions of electoral geography or with territorial politics. Indeed, he detected little sustained engagement at all with constitutional matters. At first, Trench thought that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the author but on further reflection accepted that it was what the evidence – from the party’s website, official documents, newspaper reports, academic literature and the large number of interviews conducted – obliged Bale to believe about Conservative priorities. In short, issues of territorial politics did not really count because that was not what concerned the party’s voters, party members and MPs: ‘However important they may be, they fall off the agenda for most politicians’ (Trench 2010a). Of course, one response might be that what interests a constitutional scholar should not be confused with the whole of politics. There is some truth in that rejoinder but it is interesting to note too – apart from the question of European influences – how the UK constitution should function, and what should be the relation of the devolved parts to the whole, did not seem to concern the party of high unionism. ‘If the Tories can neglect such issues’, Trench concluded, ‘and serious commentators like Tim Bale overlook them’, it did not bode well for a serious, sober and thought-through approach to devolution when the Conservatives got back into office. Of course, Conservatives were not alone in thinking this way. As Hazell (1998) had pointed out, the Conservative disposition to carry on regardless tended to be Labour’s attitude as well. With devolution to Scotland and Wales now on the statute book – a matter of ‘been there and done that’ and a debt of honour paid – politics at Westminster could move on as before. If that was in the early days of New Labour, the effect was an enduring one. Once again Trench (2010b) thought it was quite striking that when former Labour junior ministers reflected on their party’s governing record, they mentioned little or nothing about their experience of territorial politics. ‘Given that many consider Labour’s constitutional agenda to have been one of its most successful areas of policy,’ Trench observed, ‘it’s telling that middle-ranking ministers simply never even noticed this particular part of Labour’s record.’ For these politicians too it seemed just like business as usual, mainly because devolution was designed for the convenience of the Labour Party and the new arrangements appeared perfectly adequate given its assumed dominance in Scotland and Wales. This was to change only after 2007 with the emergence of ‘new territorial politics, characterised more by conflict and confrontation than in the past’ (Lodge and Schmucker 2007: 93). This has led some scholars to a pessimistic judgement about the tendency of MPs to ignore the possibility that the UK may break up. For example, Hayton (2015: 131) argued that the obstacles to achieving a stable constitutional settlement remained immense and in particular he despaired at the lack of seriousness and attention given to the issue by Conservative MPs. Few of them, he thought, ‘appear willing to engage in a serious and far-reaching reappraisal of the basis of the United Kingdom, or appear able to articulate a Unionist vision that can accommodate the various identities of the constituent nations in a positive way’. This led him to an equally fatalistic conclusion

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that ‘the break-up of the Union in my lifetime remains, on balance, more likely than not’. Jeffery (2015: 277–8) too shared a similar assessment that the Westminster mentality ‘would not appear to suggest strong prospects for enduring stability’. The Conservative Party’s response implied that it was mainly one of ‘tactical expediency’ and he did not doubt that the party’s present positions would ‘be abandoned if new tactical expediency so demanded’. What was involved, or so it appeared in Cowling’s terms, continued to be the manoeuvring of ‘high politics’ according to convenience rather than ‘high unionism’ according to conscience. Continuity Conservatism was a convenient way to continue the tradition of ‘unthinking unionism’. Discontinuity Conservatism In a shrewd survey of Conservative thinking on the eve of the 2010 general election, three scholars (English, Hayton and Kenny 2009: 359) argued that it was England’s long-standing hegemony, politically and culturally, which made it difficult for the party to get beyond either high unionism or continuity conservatism in its thinking (or unthinking). Moreover, the first, high unionism – especially Cameron’s keenness to emphasise his own unionist credentials – meant that any radical alternative to continuity Conservatism would ‘run counter to his strategy of softening the party’s image and occupying the political centre-ground’ (English, Hayton and Kenny 2009: 356–7). Ironically, the traditional Britishness of the party was thought to be a necessary complement to the modernisation of its ‘brand’; or, to put it a different way, here was another example of the wisdom that if you want things to change, some things will have to stay the same. The ‘conundrum’ they detected was the value of sustaining a high unionist position when the anomalies of devolution meant that the old ‘model of a sovereign unitary state and a monocultural society was waning’ (English, Hayton and Kenny 2009: 355–6). This new condition also made the second response, continuity Conservatism, ever more difficult to sustain. English, Hayton and Kenny could appreciate the emergence of a new and vibrant debate about the Union in Conservative politics but accepted that it would be difficult for the leadership to find ‘shared ground in response to a genuine difficulty’. In those conditions, it was probably not difficult to understand why the party thought it best to stick to the old. However, those disposed to a revision of the Conservative nation, and who thought that neither high unionism nor continuity conservatism were adequate to the constitutional challenges facing the party, believed that the danger lay in confusing sentimentality with realism. Chapter 2 referred to A.J.P. Taylor’s provocative point (1975: 622–3) that it did not make sense to argue that there is ‘something called British history that is different from English history’, the difference between English and British being trivial and of interest only to people (nationalist ‘cranks’) who wanted to ‘have a row’. The argument of Chapter 2 was that, if a muddle amongst Conservatives about England and Britain did exist, the muddle was useful politically

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because it meant avoiding having that row about identity to the party’s disadvantage. The prevailing wisdom of Conservative politics has been that such questions are trivial when compared with the success of the Union – ironically, a very English way of looking at things. However, there was a definite mood in the party after 1997 – it was certainly not a definite movement – which suggested that the old tune was no longer one to which party members should march unquestioningly. If they calculated their advantage, maybe the Union was no longer self-evidently a Conservative good. Speak it softly, but perhaps the British vocation was ultimately dispensable and the Conservative Party should become what its electoral base showed it to be – an English party. This was a product not only of a perception that nationalists (especially in Scotland) wanted (and were winning) a ‘row’ about identity but also, and more significantly, of the concern that Blair’s New Labour was fashioning Britain into an alien country for Conservatives. It was necessary for the party to encourage English nationhood – to use Kenny’s term (2014a) – in order to secure a powerful redoubt for Tory resistance. This was not an entirely new disposition. One prominent Conservative academic (Minogue 1996: 5–6) thought that Conservatism was so very English that it was difficult for outsiders to feel it even if they could understand it. With Labour in office, some thought that the only authentic patriotism could now be found in England because the Britishness of Blair and Brown was not only antithetical to high unionism but also rendered continuity conservatism misguided. Authentic Conservatism was naturally English, just as England should be naturally Conservative. How this relationship fitted in with the Conservative Party as the British national party was neither answered nor even adequately addressed. The impact of New Labour’s identity politics meant that those who had been ‘brought up in the culture and mores of one place’ now discovered themselves to be ‘involuntary immigrants to another’ (Hague 1999). The implication of this view, widespread in the party, was that it represented an attack by a new cultural and political elite on the fabric of the Conservative nation, promoting a demoralisation of the ‘people’ (Heffer 2005). The Blair- and Brown-led governments, it was claimed by the most consistent of advocates of a distinctively Conservative Englishness, were ‘probably the most anti-British and certainly the most anti-English in history’ and the ancient institutions which Conservatives revered were being ‘wrecked in the interests of political expediency and democracy has been perverted’ (Heffer 2002). For what sort of Britain was this, the one being made now in the image of Blair? It was nothing other than a subversive anti-patriotism: without history, dismissive of tradition, deracinated, fit only for neophiliacs – to use Christopher Booker’s celebrated expression (1969) – a pays légal out of sympathy with the instincts of the pays réel. Conservatives may have won the political battle with socialism but they were losing the cultural battle. On this battlefield, the party had been outmanoeuvred and seemed incapable of fighting back with any spirit. As Peter Hitchens (2005) wrote, though the heartland of the country thought New Labour’s ‘metropolitan social liberalism’ was repulsive, Conservative politicians had failed to give political voice to that repulsion.

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For those who thought like this, Cameron’s great betrayal – despite all the evidence that their own alternative had not proven electorally attractive – was that he had accommodated the Conservative Party to Labour’s version of Britishness with all its metropolitan social liberalism, multiculturalism, as well as all its Europeanism. Conservative accommodation to it was a sort of anti-patriotism (Heffer 2010). In Heffer’s case (2000), English nationalism and the break-up of the Union were espoused outright. These views were most commonly expressed by what Bale (2010) called the ‘party in the media’, especially in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Indeed, the energies of the Brexit campaign (see Chapter 7) can be traced to this common feeling of displacement and lack of proper expression, with its emphasis on English disadvantage. It should be said that discontinuity Conservatism reflected neither the view of the party’s leadership after 1997 nor the default position of the majority of members but it did suggest the possibility of a changing disposition. If the first issue encouraging this mood was the impact of New Labour, the second was the impact of nationalism which, of course, Conservatives believed Labour had aided and abetted in order to render their party ‘alien’ not only in Scotland but also in Wales. There was an interesting reflection on this by the party’s official historian, Lord Lexden, who had been the intellectual driving force behind the classical Conservative unionism of the CPC report of 1996. Lexden (2015a) was alert to the connection between a sense of frustration amongst Conservative MPs about the failure to deal with the West Lothian Question: how to deal with English business in Parliament after devolution (see Chapter 6). He thought that the perceived neglect of England had done immense damage to traditional Conservative views on the inviolability of the Union. What one could sense now beneath the surface of political continuity, he thought, was ‘the venom with which some backbench Tory MPs (not all of them stupid) have recently started to speak of Scotland in private conversation and the equanimity (indeed in some cases relish) with which they contemplate its departure from the Union’. Lexden was sure that Cameron did feel passionately about the Union but he was not so sure about other Conservative MPs. Lexden mentioned as an aside that former Chancellor George Osborne ‘told me that there are no votes in constitutional issues’ and he remained critical of Osborne’s economistic approach to all matters political. However, one prominent and well-informed observer (Nelson 2008) thought that Osborne, far from being unsound on the Union, considered the Conservatives to be Britain’s natural national party which had ‘a duty not to give up on Scotland even if there is almost no political capital left in the country’. Nevertheless, when Lexden (2015b) commented on the 2015 election manifesto which had Osborne’s stamp on it, he detected a dangerous deformation. In 2015 it read: ‘we will always do our utmost to keep our family of nations together’; while in 2010 the wording had proclaimed the Conservative Party to be ‘passionate about the Union and we will never do anything to put it at risk’. He remarked that the commitment ‘John Major evoked so magnificently in 1992 and 1997, has been strikingly absent’

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and, when he weighed the tone and intensity of the rhetoric in the balance against the equanimity of some about the future of the Union, his conclusion appeared to be that, ‘for the first time in its history, it is no longer obvious that the Conservative Party is utterly determined to ensure that the Union remains the bedrock of our constitutional arrangements’. Lexden remained convinced that there were plenty of votes on the matter of Britain, so long as the party leadership displayed the appropriate statesmanship. Was the party’s heart really still in the Union? There were scholarly doubts which seemed to confirm Lexden’s fears. For example, in the first edition of his book, Bale (2010: 324) was sceptical about the enduring strength of the old certainties. His research convinced him that influential members of the party – though he accepted that the leadership had not encouraged these thoughts – were considering not only the benefits of ‘English votes for English laws’ as a solution to the West Lothian Question but also ‘of independence, which should prevent Labour from winning a general election ever again’, the very possibility both Major and Cameron had been at pains to reject. At the time, Bale (2010: 413) also thought that Cameron had given up hope of any revival in the fortunes of the Scottish Conservative Party. Alan Convery (2014: 321), considering the same matter from a Scottish perspective, wondered how long constituency associations throughout England, as well as party headquarters in London, would continue their financial support for Conservatives north of the border when they failed to make any electoral progress. More significantly, he noted the alleged admission by a Conservative Party treasurer in 2012 (Peter Cruddas) that the party was simply going through the motions in its commitment to unionism. Nelson (2008) too reported a conversation with one prominent Conservative shadow minister whose favoured policy for Scotland was ‘lining the Tweed with explosives and floating Scotland off towards Iceland’. Whether that fell into the category of ‘joking but not joking’ or ‘serious but not serious’ it is hard to say and perhaps one should not read too much into political gossip; even Nelson admitted that such asides jarred with most Conservatives, ‘who believe Britishness to be in the DNA of the party’. However, as a mood it was (and is) probably more widespread than the party – even with Theresa May’s rededication of its vocation as the Conservative and Unionist Party – would care to acknowledge. Thus, the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, alert to ‘the pulse of the Conservative Party’ (Helm 2012), did not think that the party should be so beholden (at least) to the Scottish connection. Like many who posted comments on ConservativeHome at the time, Montgomerie just thought that the Scots should try to sort themselves out rather than continuing to rely on the party in England (exactly as Convery surmised). If the Scottish Tories are one of ‘the least successful centre right party in all of Europe’, he thought that was because a large part of the patriotic vote there did not ‘see the Scottish Conservatives as Scottish’. Such a division between patriotism and Conservatism in Scotland, or between England and Scotland, would drain substantially the spirit of the Conservative nation (which is exactly what Lexden suspected). Here the ‘and’ in Conservative and

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Unionist meant not integral (one party) but associative – Conservative (England) with Unionist (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the general election of 2015 were to put some of these speculations and suspicions to the test. Ambivalent messages Cameron (2008) used the analogy put forward by the chief rabbi to describe not what the UK is but what it could become if a clear idea of the Union was not articulated and institutionalised. The analogy is with a hotel in which the guests live in different rooms, rarely interact and the hotel administration is merely a useful service provider. His point was that this scenario is intimated by nationalism and invites nations to ‘check out’ of the UK. His alternative was the Union as a home with common foundations in which distinctive national identities are not at odds with, but complement, a common political allegiance. Here was a venerable rendering of the Conservative nation as a multinational Union. The nature of the debate about the future of Britain was pitched in equally traditional terms: between nationalists with a separatist agenda and those with loyalty both to their nation and to the UK. Cameron rededicated the party to its historical vocation but there were evident tensions between his high unionism and countervailing currents of discontent. That discontent had a common source but intimated different responses. What was common was a sense that the leadership, which perhaps understandably wished to avoid a ‘row’ on issues of territorial politics, was too willing to concede ground to nationalism, particularly in Scotland. For some high unionists (Hill 2016) it was time for Tories ‘to shake off the intellectual inertia’ of recent years, ‘to stand up for Britishness’ and to champion its virtues in the face of the nationalist narrative (see also Aughey 2013). By contrast, some MPs agreed about the principled poverty of conciliating nationalists with the promise of ‘more powers’ but the complaint was different: that the party was not ‘speaking for England’ with sufficient strength, a role to which John Redwood, Owen Patterson and Boris Johnson all aspired ( Jeffery 2015). The Scottish referendum of 2014 was an interesting illustration of these ideas and tensions at work. The Scottish referendum on 18 September 2014 focused attention on a question normally implicit in constitutional practice but which had become explicit: what is Britain for in the twenty-first century? Although this presents itself at first glance as a question about the functions of the state, it is really a question about its legitimacy. That a Conservative-led government agreed to hold an independence referendum in consultation with the nationalist-led government in Scotland demonstrated full acceptance by the Conservative Party of the multinational character of the state. That identity can be expressed in the following relationship: no nation can be compelled to stay within the Union against its will – which Major had accepted in 1992 and had made explicit in his Irish policy (Gormley-Heenan 2017) – but it is assumed that no nation has any good cause to leave because of the mutual benefits the Union brings.

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Indeed, the referendum was a unique example of that relationship in practice. Its process was agreed formally between the British and Scottish governments; it was legislated for by the Scottish Parliament; and it resulted in an unprecedentedly high turnout. The process tested the implicit ‘elective affinity’ which Conservatives (see Chapter 1) proclaimed to be the basis of one nation; and if consent, as Lord Bew (2009: 262) remarked, was once the territorial principle that dared not speak its name in British constitutionalism, it had become the acknowledged rule of legitimacy. Scots did not vote for independence. The 55–45 per cent No vote in Scotland – though closer than Cameron had expected – appeared to confirm the key propositions of Tory high unionism, modified by its accommodation with devolution, even when pushed to the limit. One would have imagined, as the then SNP leader Alex Salmond conceded, that the Union was secure from challenge for another generation. The irony, however, is striking: an apparent triumph for high unionism quite rapidly became reinterpreted as a major failure. The future of the UK was not removed from the political agenda; instead the aftermath of the referendum intensified rather than diminished that debate and witnessed a resurgent nationalism. How had this happened? One reason was the pressure from discontinuity conservatism amongst the party’s backbenchers. Immediately following the referendum result, Cameron announced: ‘We have heard the voice of Scotland – and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question –requires a decisive answer’ (BBC News 2014). He was responding to discontent in the party, which felt that the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish were getting self-determination while the English were subsidising it. In turn, there was concern that UKIP would certainly play the English card in the forthcoming general election. No doubt, Cameron’s response to the referendum result had been driven by party management and there was a widespread view that he had failed to put first the needs of the Union. In short, he was accused of strengthening nationalism in Scotland by providing another grievance against Westminster (Ashcroft and Oakeshott 2015: 487). Certainly his response had surprised Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who thought that most Conservatives – high, continuity and discontinuity – had a tin ear for any matter outside England and that Cameron was ‘the only one who got the tone right’ (cited in Seldon and Snowdon 2015: 411). However, he now criticised Cameron for returning to ‘conventional party political point scoring’ and pushing the claims of England in a manner which could ‘jeopardise the Union they purport to defend’ (Hayton 2015: 125). The party’s strategy raised doubts about its sensitivity to politics outside England. Hugo Rifkind (2015a), who as a Scot is very sensitive to these matters, commented that even continuity conservatism was in danger of transforming into discontinuity conservatism: ‘Yes, your English Tory will talk the unionist talk, but press him on it – I am belatedly realising – and you will discover that the only Union they’re really interested in is one that has no impact upon them whatsoever.’ This sort of little Englandism had become the real threat to the Union and, in this opinion Rifkind was

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part of a long tradition (Crick 2008: 78). That this was more than mere journalistic froth was underlined by the party’s historian, Lord Lexden. He reminded the party leadership of its ‘supreme object’, the preservation of the Union (Lexden 2015b). Yet he wondered what had happened to that instinctive unionist faith, since it appeared to him that the party was ‘placing undue emphasis on the narrow interests of England’. Without any long-term constitutional plan to bind the country together there was a danger ‘of contributing to the further weakening of the Union’; this Conservative politics of English nationhood is considered more thoroughly in the next chapter. Nevertheless, and strikingly, high unionism is again the dominant Conservative voice. The reasons for this post-EU referendum dominance are discussed more fully in the final two chapters. However, some preliminary observations can be made. The success of the Scottish Conservatives under Ruth Davidson’s leadership meant that the sotto voce arguments in London about cutting loose the party north of the border began to lose traction even before the EU referendum. Former MP Paul Goodman (2014a) praised Davidson’s dynamism, sensing the potential for a Tory revival in Scotland, a mood more optimistic than the one a few years earlier (see Torrance 2012: 9–11). ‘Since the Party’s main selling-point is that it is a Unionist one’, Goodman (2014a) argued, ‘why shouldn’t it now style itself the Unionist Party, and go back to its roots?’ with the emphasis on the constitution rather than on Conservatism. If the implication of that remark is associative – that is, Conservative with Unionist – it identifies honestly the current ambiguity of high unionism. Davidson has more than succeeded against all expectations by framing Conservative unionism as the alternative to Scottish separatism. In the Scottish Parliament election of 2016, the party increased its vote by a quarter of a million, doubled its number of seats to thirty-one and became the official Opposition. According to Davidson (2016a), there had developed a yearning for someone to take on the SNP and she tried to reach out from the party’s core to get ‘people to support us who otherwise wouldn’t give us the time of day’. That achievement has to be kept in proportion – the SNP remains the dominant political force – but at least Davidson had shown that independence is not without serious challenge. That this has been done at the expense of Labour would appeal to the schadenfreude of Major. Moreover, the party in Wales was also improving its presence. In the decade since 2005 it had increased its representation from three MPs to eleven. If this was very different from the position in Scotland, a possible re-composition of the Conservative nation – between the parts of the UK and across the classes – on the basis of high unionism was one of the expectations which encouraged Theresa May’s snap election in 2017. Conclusion ‘You will never get to the bottom of this most perplexing and damnable country,’ Asquith wrote to his wife about Ireland in 1916. This was the source for George Dangerfield’s celebrated study (1976) of Anglo-Irish relations, The Damnable Question.

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Today it appears that the damnable question in British politics is not Ireland but England. As was once said of making Irish Home Rule workable, it would need the brains of a Gladstone and the balls of a Munster Fusilier. Kenny (2014a: 243) concluded his major study on the matter of English nationhood with a similar message, albeit pitched rather differently: ‘ a vital struggle over the political soul of Englishness is steadily emerging as the most important of the various English questions that now need to be faced in British politics’. This chapter has identified some of the elements of that struggle within the Conservative Party. The next chapter addresses the matter directly.

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In 1995 when he was secretary of state for Scotland, Michael Forsyth (cited in Bogdanor 2010b: 158) declared that the English Question would be the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of devolution. That description complemented the opposition of the Major government to devolution in general, a policy discussed in the previous chapter. Forsyth intended his remark to show that the inability to accommodate England in proposals for constitutional reform undermined devolution in its entirety. Yet ‘missing England’ (Aughey 2001) in this Bermuda Triangle sense can mean (at least) two things. First, it can mean that providing distinct political recognition for England within the Union is impossible and it is convenient for all parties that the issue should ‘disappear’ from the political agenda. Second, mention of the Bermuda Triangle also evokes the idea of disaster or loss. This is the other meaning: to ignore the English Question can be just as dangerous as trying to do something about it. Here is a delicate conundrum for British politics, particularly for the Conservative Party with its overwhelmingly English support. This chapter explores that Conservative conundrum by examining further the theme of ‘missing England’ and what it would mean politically to ‘find’ England. The possibility of giving distinctive recognition to English interests is considered in two main ways: either a modification of Westminster procedures to permit English votes on English laws or a thorough revision of the constitution to provide for English self-government. A concluding assessment is made of the relationship between England and the Union in contemporary Conservative politics. Missing England Take the first of those understandings of the Bermuda Triangle: the impossibility of distinct political recognition for England. Perhaps the most remarkable expression of that wisdom was made by the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, one spoken with confidence from the unassailable position of New Labour in power and in the irreversibility of devolution. The best way to deal with the West Lothian Question (or the English Question), he said, was to stop asking it. William Hague responded by suggesting that perhaps the best way to find an answer was to stop

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asking Lord Irvine (cited in Hazell 2000). Irvine’s dismissal was not so much an example of Labour (secure then in its Celtic strongholds) taking England for granted as it was an assumption of the stability and continuity of the British parliamentary tradition, notable because of Blair’s dedication otherwise to the ‘new, new, new’ (d’Ancona 2000). To adapt from the previous chapter, Irvine represented ‘continuity Labour’. It was thought that devolution would not provoke an English ‘backlash’ and that English voters – apart from a few of A.J.P. Taylor’s nationalist cranks – would not be aroused by a sense of constitutional grievance. At the time, that seemed a reasonably accurate judgement of the popular mood (Lynch 2000: 66). Soon it became uncertain, as sightings of England became reported more frequently (Aughey 2007; Kenny 2014a; Kumar 2015). Irvine’s remark was provocative for it asked of Conservatives: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Out of office there was little that the Conservatives could do and Irvine’s remark taunted the party with that enduring and challenging conundrum – should they maintain their unionist vocation or should they indulge an English temptation? Was it possible to envisage a statecraft which could harmonise the two? To play the English card (as the previous chapter observed) was a tempting option, for it meant speaking directly to the bulk of Conservative support as well as suggesting one way of reversing Blair’s impressive electoral strength. On the one hand, a strong position on England’s interests would appeal to that mood in the party which felt that the British identity promoted by Blair and then by Brown – especially when reduced to the catch-all expression ‘multicultural Britain’ – was subversive of the Conservative nation. If that mood was no more than a form of political ‘irritable growl syndrome’ (Aughey 2007: 132–7) – for which a Conservative electoral victory would provide an immediate remedy – it was potentially disruptive. Yet as Hazell (2006: 226) argued, for the Conservative Party to follow the logic of seeking an ‘answer’ to the English Question, making it a central plank of policy, would mean that it would no longer be a unionist but would have become an English party. And he thought that an ‘English party does not sound like a party of government’ if it is seeking a British mandate. The party would have accepted as fact Gilmour’s critical judgement that the Conservatives had become a one nation party but only of England. Hazell noted as an aside that Conservative manifesto commitments in 2001 and 2005 to introduce English votes on English laws at Westminster had not been electorally appealing and he doubted that the leadership was even convinced of its wisdom. Indeed, the Conservative academic and peer Lord Norton (2011a), in that ‘joking but not joking’ English manner, later amended Irvine’s remark: while Conservatives were fully entitled to ask the question, it was not necessary to implement an answer. Here was the voice of an older one nation view – a ‘certain idea of Britain’ – amid the clamour of grievance about the new devolved arrangements. Self-restraint, as Bogdanor (2010a: 59) believed, remained England’s essential contribution to the Union’s stability and when he summed up what he took to be the English ‘moment’, he

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intimated the considerations which probably influenced the judgement of Conservative backbenchers (especially continuity Conservatives). He thought that if one were to imagine the average voter living in England, who does not seek devolution for England in the form either of English regional government or an English parliament; who thinks that the Human Rights Act is a useful reform, but hopes never to have to consult lawyers or to appear in the courts; and who asks ‘what difference has constitutional reform actually made to me?’, it would be difficult to frame a convincing answer.

Bogdanor’s view coincided with that of Susan Condor (2010: 539–40). Her extensive interviews found little evidence of any so-called English ‘backlash’ despite it featuring regularly in the media. While issues relating to devolution clearly continued to excite media commentators, politicians and academics, her evidence suggested that ‘ordinary English people by and large remain stubbornly galvanized into inaction’. The devolution effect appeared – as Willie Whitelaw might have said – to stir up apathy throughout England. In this perspective the English Question had certainly disappeared and it was considered best if England continued to go ‘missing’. The second understanding of the Bermuda Triangle – that doing nothing about the English Question was equally disastrous – could not be ignored. If politicians believe that there comes a time when you will be damned if you don’t rather than damned if you do, then the balance of risks and opportunities shifts. To avoid the disaster of the Bermuda Triangle –Conservative voters going ‘missing’ – it may be necessary to make uncomfortable choices. Venturing into the Triangle in order to find England would be a risk worth taking if Conservatives sensed that the politics of Englishness had become a salient electoral issue and the party risked losing support by not doing so. In particular, some Conservatives fretted that doing nothing would concede the issue to UKIP (Rees-Mogg 2013). At the same time, the Labour Party – being outflanked in Scotland by the SNP – would have to look seriously at the English Question. The Irvine option, some argued, was yesterday’s news and a distinctive Labour politics for England was now required (Denham 2016 and 2017a; Hunt 2016). The changing balance of risks and opportunities was quickly spotted by scholars and illustrated by three major events. First, in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish referendum Peter Hennessy (2015: 126) thought that the English Question would become the ‘weather-maker’. He thought it was likely to ‘roar into life’ – the very phrase that Alex Salmond employed to describe growth in support for the SNP. Second, the meteorological image appealed to other scholars after the 2015 general election. For example, Kenny (2015b: 28) believed that it might become identified by historians as the ‘moment when the “English question” stormed the main stage of British politics’ and he thought that the active front in this storm was the Conservative Party’s orchestration of English fears about the influence of Scottish nationalism at Westminster. Even some Scottish Conservatives assumed that the conduct of that election campaign revealed how

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the Tories – when push came to shove – would return to their English roots as ‘discontinuity Conservatism’ subverted the pieties of high unionism. Rifkind (2015b), for example, asked if Cameron comprehended how the election campaign threatened to rip the rug from under the feet of Scottish Tories and assumed that, in the end, he did not really care. The election campaign had emphasised that the Scots were a problem and that Scottish influence at Westminster should be marginalised ‘with the least difference made’. The third event was the EU referendum, which led another Scot, Alex Massie (2016b), to reflect that the Conservative Party ‘has decided that leaving the European Union is something worth risking the Union for. If we have to break-up the United Kingdom to save the United Kingdom, then so be it. A price worth paying, you know’. These comments were made in the heat of distinctive political moments and it is necessary to consider coolly the politics of Englishness in Conservative thinking. Both variations of the Bermuda Triangle effect – missing England and sightings of England – have existed and continue to exist intertwined in Conservative politics. As one astute scholar (Mycock 2016: 544) observed, while the party was well-disposed to politicise English national identity, it struggled to do so in a way that did not undermine its British vocation. The significance of the events between 2014 and 2016 was that they brought together two major theses concerning the ‘drivers’ of English political identity: its relationship with the devolved United Kingdom, in particular with Scotland, and its relationship with the European Union. At the beginning of the decade Bogdanor (2010b: 170) continued to believe that the English were too (small ‘c’) conservative to avow nationalism: ‘Exhorted by both multiculturalists and Powellites to become lions, they prefer to remain ostriches. While the polemicists insist upon an answer, the English simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a question’. Despite that confidence, if one were considering a favourable confluence of circumstances for a ‘moment’ of Englishness in Conservative politics, then the second decade of the new millennium would seem to be it. Indeed, scholars as well as commentators had been saying so for some time. Finding England An arresting headline in the St George’s Day edition of the Spectator in 2008 proclaimed: ‘Welcome back, England’. Only three years earlier the front cover of the same magazine had led with an even more arresting headline: ‘Goodbye England’. The front page of 2005 had imagined the country entering another sort of Bermuda Triangle and feared that what made the country truly English would be lost forever. The headline of 2008 reported that England had been sighted again generally unharmed. The occasion in 2005 for saying ‘goodbye’ to England and fearing for its identity would have seemed rather arcane, even for the Spectator’s mainly Conservative readership. The event was the coming into force of New Labour’s ban on hunting with hounds, which the Spectator took to be not only an assault on the way of life of a minority

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but also symbolic – as William Hague (2001) had claimed – of people ‘who feel that their country is being taken from them’ and who, when they talk about their nation, are dismissed as ‘Little Englanders’. It was also a demonstration of the Conservative Party’s powerlessness under Blair’s electoral hegemony. As the Spectator reflected subsequently (2008), that moment captured a sense of ‘something ancestral and precious being needlessly slaughtered’, a mood that was more widespread amongst Conservatives than the issue of hunting itself: it was a fear that New Labour was intent on ‘the forbidding of England’, as Roger Scruton (2000) famously put it. Here in one act of ‘forbidding’ appeared to be, for the Spectator at least, repudiation of England’s ‘particular institutions, emblems and customs, usually by municipal authorities and liberal elites’ (that criticism of ‘liberal elites’ was to recur in 2016 as the Leave campaign invited people to get their country back again. Interestingly, under Theresa May foxhunting returned as an issue in the party manifesto of 2017.) It was coincidental that 2005 was also the year in which Cameron became leader of the party – but not a coincidence that mistrust of his objectives amongst some members of the party can be attributed to a view that Cameron’s own modernisation programme was prepared to be equally cavalier with the institutions, emblems and customs of England. In its pronouncement of 2008, which anticipated the assessments of both Hennessy and Kenny nearly a decade later, the Spectator now thought that much had changed and that the political and social contexts had altered significantly. The magazine thought that Englishness, appearing out of its Bermuda Triangle, was ‘moving centre-stage’. The ‘assaults on its country sports, customs and history and the growing injustices of devolution’ notwithstanding, England’s sense of itself had been strengthened (Spectator 2008). The Spectator remained – like the Conservative Party – ‘emphatically committed to the Union and the survival of the United Kingdom’, in large part because it feared the break-up of the Union might allow Brussels ‘to gobble up its constituent parts’, intimating one of the reasons for the strength of ‘high unionism’ in the aftermath of the EU referendum (see Chapter 7). Nevertheless ‘in a spirit of realism’, the Spectator was concerned about the potential for constitutional instability attending the return of England, an England now willing to make live political issues of those arcane debating points of constitutional theorists like English votes for English laws and the funding formula for public services across the United Kingdom. One can speculate that this leading article of 2008 was really a covert apology for the journal’s over-reaction in 2005, as if there was some embarrassment about the proposition that Englishness was either defined by, or confined to, hunting with hounds. Yet it is another example of a traditional presumption that the nation – whether British or English – should be defined by Conservative tropes and that what passes for patriotism on the part of its political opponents must be counterfeit. In other words, here was a Conservative English nation more assertive, more critical and more populist than the one customarily outlined in political textbooks, and certainly not one assured of harmony between the pays légal of the United Kingdom and the pays réel of England.

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This was certainly not the only possible England, for that depends upon the way in which England and Englishness are constructed. As Christopher Bryant (2010: 253–4) argued in a seminal article, there are a number of versions imaginable, none of which has an exclusive appeal, none of which is the authentic version but, equally, none of which can be dismissed as being inauthentic. People ‘can and do switch their identifications between, and buy into and rework (aspects of) different versions according to circumstance’. Bryant designated four versions: English England (‘the lands, liberties and customs hallowed by age, it respects tradition and quiet decency, and it lauds the common law’); Anglo-British England (England ‘to have been the core of Britain and the Empire, and the British state to have been the protector of English liberties’); Little England (‘those who would turn their backs on overseas adventures’); and Cosmopolitan England (‘acknowledges not just the diversification of the people of England’ but also ‘the enrichment of its economy and the enlarging of its culture from sources abroad’). In the broad church of the Conservative Party all four have a home though the first and second traditionally have been dominant, with the official bias towards Anglo-British England. The Labour Party would be characterised mainly by versions two and four with a bias towards Cosmopolitan England, at least under Blair’s leadership. Bryant did not pursue the party political implications of these designations but others were certainly convinced of the significance of the return of England which the Spectator had so dramatically announced. Kenny’s important book (2014a) captured the richness of the emerging debate on English nationhood, the broad contours of which – historically, institutionally and politically – had been identified earlier (Colls 2002; Kumar 2003). In similar fashion to Bryant, Kenny pointed out (2014a: 5) how history had shaped different versions of English nationhood and that the Conservative nation – which Gamble had considered to be dominant – was only one possible England. Indeed, he believed that two alternative understandings of England no longer adequately described its present condition. The first was a Conservative vision of the ‘British way’ – expressed succinctly by Moore (see Chapter 2) – which saw Englishness ‘as the whimsical and cultural side of a national coinage that has imprinted on its other side the more formal, legal, and civic associations of Britain’ (Kenny 2014a: 234). The second was a liberal-left vision – Kenny called it ‘modernist’ – which has tended to forget that a nation like England possesses a rich cultural and political past. This ‘modernist’ vision has been strongly embedded amongst academics and journalists but also influential in Labour politics. A good example of its cultural assumptions can be found in Vron Ware’s book – Who Cares about Britishness? (2007) – which also contained an approving preface by former leader of the Labour Party, Lord Kinnock. Ware elaborated a form of identity politics understood as a paradoxical outcome of self-creation and cultural belonging which, in all its diversity, demanded full recognition and public acknowledgement. That sort of identity politics, as a replacement for class politics, was familiar to anyone interested in the contradictory priorities of the left after 1989: personal emancipation and multicultural recognition.

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It corresponded with Ware’s other view (2007: 6): that globalisation had undermined ‘the very idea of national as borders’ as well as ‘separate spaces that demand special allegiance’. In other words, the nation now had no privileged standing whatsoever and the nation state was reimagined as an arbitrary, history-less, political ‘space’. As Margaret Canovan (2001) once argued, this is the cosmopolitan philosophy of the ‘soaring dove’ which lifts allegiance and identity beyond any territorial reference. A good example of its political assumptions may be called the ‘Emily Thornberry factor’ – referring to a prominent member of the Labour Party who, during the Rochester and Strood by-election in November 2014, tweeted a photograph of a working-class suburban house draped with three English flags, an act seized upon by Conservatives to illustrate Labour’s elitist disconnection from popular Englishness (Kenny 2014b: 6). Here appeared to be a left-liberal England divorced from the voters Labour traditionally represented. If Conservatives could successfully pin on Labour this identity of elitism and anti-patriotism then the party could possibly make substantial inroads into its English heartlands vote. Therefore, it was no coincidence when Theresa May (2016c) made that modernist Englishness the object of Conservative attack in her first speech as leader at party conference: ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, the sort of person who finds ‘distasteful’ the patriotism of the ordinary person – especially one who believes that the nation is not a mere ‘space’. In Michael Gove’s Burkean flourish (2017), only ‘Theresa May understands, deeply and instinctively, that attachment to place – parish, town, constituency and country – is the starting point for solidarity, loyalty and social justice’. And with a pointed nod towards Brexit negotiations, ‘it is only through belief in the dignities, traditions and beauties of your own nation that you best equip yourself to defend European civilisation in its noblest, and broadest, sense’. This patriotic claim was nothing new – May’s was a reprise of Hague’s speech of 2001, albeit at that moment from a position of political strength and not of weakness – yet it was a measure of the change in political mood about which the Spectator had editorialised in 2008. In Kenny’s opinion (2014a: 240–1), if the Labour Party wanted to promote ‘a viable form of English nationhood’ they would have to ‘reflect the strong sense of cultural particularity, place, and tradition that have been endemic to English culture’. Furthermore, he believed with good reason that the United Kingdom increasingly required explanation and justification to an English electorate which was becoming more self-conscious of the distinctiveness of its own nationhood: ‘Englishness is becoming a much more prominent point of reference, in political as well as cultural terms – a development that renders the prevailing idea of the English as a people who readily identify with the unionist tradition an increasingly fraught one’ (Kenny 2014a: 45–6). A clear English grievance in recent years (Colley 2014: 61) had been the assumption that England in the Union is ‘the big sister whose reliability could be taken for granted’. Academic research suggested that the reliability of big sister could no longer be taken so easily for granted. Conservative

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Party history implied that the party could – if it cared to mobilise – take advantage of English opinion either to strengthen or to weaken the Union. Taking the long view of the historian, Tombs (2014: 870) observed how there had emerged again, since devolution, ‘greater English self-consciousness and more debate about what kind of country England was and wanted to be’. He observed how G.K. Chesterton’s famous line: ‘But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet’ had reappeared predictably in recent publications about the state of the nation, yet no one ‘had the faintest idea what they might say’. In a lecture delivered at the launch of the University of Winchester’s Centre for English Identity and Politics, Tombs (2015b: 9–10) argued that one should not return the English Question to its Bermuda Triangle. Rather, it should be regarded ‘as an opportunity, and not just as a problem to be wished away or pushed out of sight’. It was time ‘for a sensible, moderate but thorough rethink of a system which is not in acute crisis or in decline, but which now needs be made better’. What was central to Tombs’ thesis – one he shared with Theresa May – was criticism of the England found in Ware, a vision of ‘a globalized world in which for a century or more clever people have been confidently predicting the demise of the nation’. Far from the nation being obsolete, Tombs argued that ‘it is coming back’ and he thought this was so because people prefer ‘a political community in which they feel trust, confidence and solidarity’. There is an interesting Conservative linkage here. In an interview with Matthew d’Ancona in 1996, Enoch Powell said that he had lived into an age ‘in which my ideas are now part of common intuition, part of a common fashion’. When d’Ancona asked why, Powell’s reply was: ‘The nation has returned to haunt us’ (cited in Heffer 1999: 949). When one considers the result of the 2016 EU referendum, one is tempted to conclude that Powell was right. Tombs was not writing or speaking as a Conservative, but his identification of the question and a possible answer recall Cowling’s (1978: 18) prescription for a successful Conservatism: ‘A low-keyed conception of traditional liberties and a secure conception of English interests’. Whether the Conservative Party could control the political framing of those English liberties and interests – at least within its traditional language of high unionism – was moot and intimated another dimension to the English Question. In Chapter 2 it was noted (Mandler 2006: 23) that the classic statement of Conservative nationhood was expressed as English liberty maintained by established institutions, meaning that ‘pride in those institutions’ should be celebrated ‘without cultivating too far the people’s pride in themselves’. In other words, Conservative statecraft was concerned mainly with institutions, not with the people, and it was also noted how that statecraft replaced popular forms of nationhood with concern for ‘the practical functioning of the great institutions of the state’ (Colls 2011: 582). Mandler (2006: 238) now thought that this bias was changing as a new popular English identity bubbled up from below: ‘Because politicians are wedded to their existing national institutions, organized on a United Kingdom basis, they are almost automatically disqualified from

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playing a role here, which increases the hopefulness that the new English identity might have deep and genuine roots in society’. If that interpretation of populist autonomy was correct it could deliver a serious challenge to the high unionism of the Conservative Party. For some this would not have been an entirely unexpected development. As Colley (2014: 93) observed recently of Scotland, the change over the last fifteen years has been ‘not so much a rise in Scottish nationalism, as the emergence of a different kind of Scottish nationalism’, one incompatible with the Union and not, as it was formerly, complementary to it (Kidd 2008). That was a possibility in England too. One of Margaret Thatcher’s advisers (Sherman 2005: 156–7) had speculated presciently about the impact of the intersection of devolution and European issues upon English public opinion, an intersection which in certain circumstances could promote ‘an upsurge of English nationalism’. Hitherto, Sherman thought (like Tombs), ‘the English have watched with tolerance verging on indifference as the Scots and Welsh have been given a privileged constitutional position’ (Sherman 2005: 156–7) yet there was no certainty that this tolerance would continue. He imagined indifference turning into resentment and, merging with opposition to European integration, producing a more volatile state of affairs. ‘Then’, according to Sherman, ‘almost anything might happen.’ The result of the European referendum may be taken as an example of that anything happening and for most, though not for all, it had happened unpredictably. This is discussed more comprehensively in the next chapter, but some preliminary observations are relevant here. If Tombs (2014: 877–8) thought that the English were rather complaisant about devolution he also thought that they happened to be very sensitive to the growing influence of the European Union. He linked (Fisher 2016) the grand sovereign themes of the Leave campaign – legitimacy, sovereignty, who runs the country – with the particular concerns of England within the Union – a ‘sense that something has to be done about English opinion’, a view mainly to be found amongst Conservatives. One of the unintended consequences of the long-running European debate in British politics has been to raise questions of English identity as well as to encourage expressions of English resentment. Here is a further ‘impact of UKIP’ which was discussed in Chapter 4. This linkage between a distinctive English politics of identity and Euroscepticism had been made already in an important work by Wellings (2011). Wellings directed attention away from the focus many scholars had placed hitherto on internal British politics in order to explain the character of English national sentiment – devolution, in particular England’s relationship with Scotland – and instead emphasised the influence of European integration. His thesis was that, when addressing the politics of Englishness, many writers suffer from ‘Singapore Syndrome’ with the firepower of academic analysis trained in the wrong direction. English nationalism has been directed against the narrative of ‘Europe’ and against those elites, in London possibly more so than Brussels, who continue to profess it. It is secession from the European Union, not from the United Kingdom, which defines the real spirit of English nationalism

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(Wellings 2011: 234). Far from being ‘the solution to the problems of sovereignty, in the English worldview the European Union is seen as an instrumental monument to decline’ (Wellings 2011: 78). That interpretation has a convincing ring to it (see also Wellings and Vines 2016: 325; Vines 2014) and the point is developed further in the next chapter. However, there is a paradox. In 2016 this popular English politics was marshalled in defence of British sovereignty and as a consequence Tombs thought that ‘all sorts of political and constitutional difficulties’ (in Fisher 2016) were likely to emerge when the defence of the British political tradition was conducted in a very distinctive English accent, literally so in the case of certain Conservative MPs like Jacob Rees-Mogg. It continued to leave uncertain exactly how English nationhood might be accommodated within British institutions and promoted by the Conservative Party. English exam question In The English Question (Hazell 2006: 240) the editor’s conclusion summarised a broad academic consensus. The English did not want devolution for themselves; they did not seem to mind centralisation of power – at least if the alternative was the sort of regional government offered by New Labour and rejected in the north-east referendum of 2004; they did not want an English parliament; and they were not going to get English votes on English laws. Here was expressed a delightful reluctance to be alarmed into action in the best traditions of keep calm and carry on: ‘The English Question does not have to be answered. It is not an exam question which the English are required to answer. It can remain unresolved for as long as the English want.’ That view captured the times quite well. Conservatives critical of the lack of urgency in seeking an answer – like Lord Baker (1998), who thought the people of England deserved better than to be treated as ‘the residue of constitutional change’ or ‘as an afterthought’; or like Teresa Gorman, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill to establish an English parliament – were judged to be, as A.J.P. Taylor might have put it, just ‘looking for a row’. One is reminded of the final line in that old song ‘Right Said Fred’: ‘You’ll never get nowhere if you’re too hasty.’ As far as England was concerned – as Fred’s mate might have said – devolution for England would ‘do no good, well I never thought it would’. This was especially the case if attempting a definitive answer to the English Question – like the song – risked a load of political trouble and half a ton of constitutional rubble landing on your head. That has been the nub of both academic and political criticism of proposed answers to the English Question: they suggest solutions to a minor anomaly which will only provoke a major catastrophe. Like that piano which defeated Fred and his mates, it has always seemed better – even to Conservatives – to have a cup of tea and to leave well enough alone. Firm masterly inactivity, as Sir Humphrey advised in the television comedy Yes, Prime Minister – rather like Norton’s asking the question but not acting on any answer – appeared to be a reasonable assessment of Conservative policy on the English Question.

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This was a constitutional convenience, one which reflected a well-established administrative view and captured already in Bulpitt’s study of territorial politics, a study which continued to influence creatively reflection amongst scholars of Conservative politics (Gamble 2015; Hayton 2016). The major concern of what is now popularly called the ‘Westminster elite’, Bulpitt argued, was autonomy of the political centre from the periphery, complemented by functional collaboration with regional elites. One of the key points he made about this governing perspective was that England never constituted the centre of the United Kingdom as many critics thought, especially in Scotland. Rather, Bulpitt thought that British government ‘attempted to relate to (or distance itself from) all parts of the country in a similar fashion’. Looked at from Westminster and Whitehall, England was not the centre but only another ‘part of the periphery’ (Bulpitt 1983: 237). This view represented the highest of high unionism, a position of elevation over and above all national particulars and it corresponds with the tradition of one nation Conservatism, which is why nationalists have been always suspicious of the party’s seriousness on the English Question (Aughey 2010). After devolution some Conservatives did think that what is important to England is being overlooked – something Rose, a generation before (see Chapter 2), had thought highly unlikely. The response to the ban on hunting with hounds – as the Spectator noted – was a symbol of that mood and for a while, under New Labour, the notion that England was being ruled by a ‘Scottish Raj’ was popularised by the BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman (Peterkin 2005; see also Paxman 1998). As one commentator asked: ‘if it was iniquitous for English rule to be imposed on Scotland, isn’t it all the more iniquitous for Scottish rule to be imposed on England?’ (Wheatcroft 2006). The trope in this case was the familiar one of political Englishness defined by an ‘absence’ or ‘lack’ of proper institutionalisation. It was this absence which had haunted the Conservative leadership when in opposition and became a matter of urgency when in office, especially after the Scottish referendum. Kenny’s summary (2014a: 208–9) of the opinion poll data on English identity and attitudes indicated a change in public opinion. It convinced him that there was a twofold movement in popular attitudes which made urgent a more active political response. First, he detected a ‘growing sense of affiliation with England’ and secondly, that this sense of affiliation was beginning ‘to coalesce with an increasingly dyspeptic, pessimistic, and populist attitude towards current political arrangements’. This was important for Conservatives because it was the sort of identity politics open to exploitation by UKIP ( Jeffery et al. 2016: 346). The intersection of this attitude with Euroscepticism confirmed Kenny (2014a: 243) in his judgement that ‘a vital struggle over the political soul of Englishness is steadily emerging as the most important of the various English questions that now need to be faced in British politics’. The danger for the Conservative Party was now not having ‘a row’ to no useful purpose but being behind the curve of growing English national sentiment. There was a clearer choice to be made.

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An old fable may help to clarify the choice. It is a tale which delighted English metaphysicians, moralists and lawyers; provided humorous copy for English essays like Alexander Pope and Thomas De Quincey; and, more recently, was discussed by English philosophers like Oakeshott. It is the tale of Sir John Cutler’s stockings. In the story, Sir John had a pair of silk stockings regularly darned with worsted thread by his housekeeper, Dolly. After years of such darning all the silk had disappeared. The original stockings had become a pair of woollen stockings. This tale appeals to the speculative imagination because it raises profound questions about the nature of identity. Are Sir John’s stockings the same stockings – or are they different? When addressing the English Question should Conservatives continue to darn the old constitution, a political version of mend and make do? Or, after devolution, has a new constitution come into being already, one which needs to be recognised and which demands of the party a response equally novel? Both responses – either the politics of repair or adaptation to the new – could be justified in terms of Tory principle. The politics of repair The Conservative Party has been content so far to subscribe to the first view on the assumption that present constitutional arrangements – all other options considered – are not ideal yet not without their merit. Like Barker’s (1927: 194) conclusion on English national character, Conservatives have tended to murmur to themselves that ‘the English constitution might be worse, and England, after all, is not a bad country’. Incremental change and asymmetrical adjustments, tweaks and twiddles, organic adaptations, muddling through, have been the merits, not the defects of British politics. If there was an implicit exhortation in this style of Conservative politics it would be this: let the darning at Westminster continue, avoid all grand schemes of constitutional reform and prolong the sentimental romance of parliamentary sovereignty along with the obvious advantage of conventional flexibility. This disposition to mend and make do on the English Question may have all the more weight in Conservative counsel today especially when the complexities of managing Brexit are taken into consideration. The approach which the party adopted after 1997 embodied the wisdom of one ‘Norton view’. Yes, there is an answer to the English Question – you can find it in Conservative Party manifestos and it is English votes on English laws (EVEL) – but there is no pressing need to do anything about it (this last was never said, of course). Even when a dose of anticipatory Conservatism was required, darning the constitutional stockings remained the objective. One could call it the precautionary principle of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. In opposition, Norton’s review (Conservative Party 2000) advocated revising procedures in the House of Commons for exclusively English (or English and Welsh) Bills such that the main stages would be considered by English (or English and Welsh) MPs only. The full House would have the final

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say, though Norton expected a convention would emerge respecting votes on these Bills to be taken only by English (or English and Welsh) MPs. In a later review, Kenneth Clarke (2008) was similarly disposed towards the party making ‘some sensible constitutional minor change’ in order to sort out ‘this niggle that sometimes English matters are settled against the majority votes of the English MPs’. It was that view which also informed the conclusions of the Conservative Party’s Democracy Task Force’s report (Conservative Party 2008) which Clarke chaired. The Task Force did admit that a build-up of English grievances ‘could undermine the current constitutional arrangements’ but it understood the remedy to lie in the development of a convention of compromise (like Norton’s report) between English MPs and the whole House. The new would be accommodated within the traditional in the classic style of constitutional mending. If English grievances were a temptation to be exploited electorally, then the Conservative Party leadership proved very reluctant to do so in contravention of its high unionism, a disposition which reflected the centre of gravity within the parliamentary party (Kenny and Lodge 2010). What of the Conservatives in power after 2010? According to Bogdanor (2011: 41), that the coalition had an overwhelming majority of seats in England, along with Liberal Democrat seats in Scotland, was just about as good as it got from the point of view of calming English worries about either devolution or non-English votes determining English affairs. Here were perfect conditions for the party to have the answer in theory – a Commission to consider the West Lothian Question which featured in the 2010 Programme for Government – and yet not have to do anything about it in practice. It was no coincidence, then, that the announcement of this Commission (the McKay Commission) on 8 September 2011 took place the day before the government ensured the defeat at report stage of Harriet Baldwin’s Private Member’s Bill – the Legislation (Territorial Extent) Bill – the purpose of which was to allow only English MPs to amend Bills solely affecting England. Baldwin had pushed the matter up the coalition’s list of priorities and revealed a changing mood on the backbenches. With the Commission’s work in prospect, Norton thought (2011b: 192) that Parliament should respond pragmatically to any proposed change and, even if the issue was not resolved according to abstract theory, Parliament could adapt expediently. His concern was that the government should avoid straining the limits of the Union by doing anything more radical than darning the (still comfortable) Westminster stockings. The McKay Commission Report (2013) was delivered two years later and was a well-crafted work which married political intelligence with a deep appreciation of the nuances of parliamentary procedure. The principle it enunciated was a familiar one: ‘decisions at the United Kingdom level with a separate and distinct effect for England (or for England-and-Wales) should normally be taken only with the consent of a majority of MPs for constituencies in England (or England-and-Wales)’ (McKay Commission 2013: 8–9). The word ‘normally’ was important for it was designed to ensure that priority would be given to the common or British interest. McKay also

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preserved ‘the right of the House of Commons as a whole to make the final decision’ albeit with the recommendation that any departure from its principle should be justified. Unfortunately, the calm deliberation of McKay was disturbed by the backwash of the Scottish referendum and pressure of influential backbench Conservative MPs like John Redwood that concessions to Scotland required immediate compensation for England. Hence Cameron’s precipitate announcement on the steps of 10 Downing Street on 19 September 2014 (see Chapter 6). The inability to achieve cross-party consensus on England compelled the Conservative leadership to establish a Cabinet committee, chaired by William Hague, in order to formulate the party’s own proposals to implement the McKay principle. In February 2015, Hague proposed four options for securing EVEL, one of which was included in the party’s manifesto and which was expected to be part of any future coalition talks (with the prospect of Norton-esque postponement). The Conservative election victory in 2015 meant that Cameron was condemned to deliver – as he was on the promise of a referendum on EU membership as well. In short measure he did deliver and by October 2015 the standing orders of the House of Commons had been changed to implement EVEL. As the best comprehensive review of its operation by Gover and Kenny (2016: 14) explained, the new procedures involved a ‘double veto’ such that both English (or English and Welsh) MPs and the whole House of Commons can veto Bills that apply exclusively to England (or England and Wales): ‘As such, both groups of MPs must support such a provision for it to be passed by the Commons.’ One important point they made, relevant to the concern of this chapter, is this: ‘EVEL procedures have effectively prioritised veto over the establishment of a deliberative space for the English’ (Gover and Kenny 2016: 25). To some Conservative commentators – to adapt the Sir John Cutler stockings analogy – this appeared to be a bit of a constitutional stitch-up. For example, Tim Montgomerie (2015) described the original manifesto proposal for EVEL as ‘a teeny-weeny, half-hearted, pee-wee form of devolution to England – of a kind more suited to Lilliput’ rather than to the major partner in the Union. In his opinion, England should not be denied what other parts of the UK now take for granted. ‘It’s time to give England some self-government of its own’. He asked what kind of Union it is which can only be sustained by discouraging serious questions about the devolution settlement. A separate English parliament, rather than EVEL, was supported by the readers of Montgomerie’s former fiefdom, ConservativeHome, reflecting, to use an Irish-ism, a sort of ‘advanced’ Englishness. In other words, something more substantial than the politics of repair was now required. Gover and Kenny captured this brilliantly. With devolution, they argued, it was possible to detect a new constitutional principle at work: ‘the idea of the union as a voluntary association of free nations’ (Gover and Kenny 2016: 18). Whether this idea was fully compatible with the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty ‘remains a moot point in legal and political terms’ like the familiar question of compatibility between the ideas of the sovereign people and the constitutional people. Whether

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moot or not, ‘widespread acceptance of this principle, and its application to the English situation, carries important legal and constitutional implications’. It would lead in a direction beyond mere amendments to the standing orders of the House of Commons, intimating more fundamental constitutional change and it ‘points towards solutions that seek to eliminate the anomalies in rights between the four parts of the UK – potentially resulting in institutional solutions that stand at some remove from traditional interpretations of parliamentary government in the UK’. It suggested a ‘more wholesale solution which is intended to reflect the overriding goal of procedural equality for England’. Here was already a new pair of stockings; minor stitching might become irrelevant to accommodate English nationhood. If post-devolution Britain (see Chapter 6) was no longer conceived as a single culture but as separate peoples whose national identities required expression in distinctive political institutions, then it was difficult to understand why England should be treated differently – logically, of course, if not politically. Adapting to the new Tombs (2015a) pointed out that the Scots and the Welsh ‘have demanded – and have been given – not regional, but national government; the principle of a United Kingdom of nations has been conceded’. Making a distinction as old as Dicey’s (1973) in his work on Irish Home Rule, Tombs concluded that it is national identity, not administrative or economic efficiency, which is the basis of devolution ‘and the rest is window-dressing’. It is a point hard to refute, either politically or logically. Therefore George Osborne’s championing of the Northern Powerhouse, while not only window-dressing, did not address Tombs’ central point, especially when its ‘objective is to achieve a sustained increase in productivity across the whole of the North. It is at the heart of the government’s ambition for an economy that works for everyone’ (Her Majesty’s Government 2016: 5). Similarly, the Conservative commitment to qualify centralisation with democratic localism on the model of directly elected mayors did not address the Tombs factor either. This is a reform which is far from mere window-dressing but scholars of regionalism have been sceptical of it, even as a form of democratic accountability. As one argued, these economic and democratic changes ‘can hardly be said to reflect the “settled will” of the English people’ (Tomaney 2016: 551). He went on to refer to the familiar line of G.K. Chesterton that the people of England have not spoken yet. ‘Indeed, they have yet to be asked their opinion, and there are no plans to do so’ (Tomaney 2016: 551). How might English opinion be expressed? Since devolution, the constitution can be regarded as loosely federal when viewed through a lens that is less pedantically legalistic; it is ‘quasi-federal’, as Bogdanor (2009) has argued. Perhaps it is the English way to acknowledge a political reality not in a prospective declaratory fashion (a very French way) or as a concept (a very German way) but in a retrospective manner of discovery (like the fable of Sir John

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Cutler’s stockings). Humphrey Lyttleton once replied to a journalist’s question about the future of modern jazz: ‘If I knew where it was going it would be there already.’ Perhaps there is a sense of where the constitution is going because, in part, it is there already. Here we encounter another Norton view. Reflecting on Blair’s constitutional reforms, he observed that his achievement was radical but incoherent, ‘a mishmash of positive and negative constitutionalism, of populism and of fragmenting institutional power’ (Norton 2008: 330). Norton likened their course to Christopher Columbus, of whom it was said that ‘when he set sail, he did not know where he was going; that when he got there, he did not know where he was; and when he got back, he did not know where he had been’. Labour’s constitutional voyage had not been properly mapped and the result was a set of institutions and practices more incoherent than those which had existed at the point of departure. He believed that it was time to consider the constitution ‘holistically’. Though Norton was not an advocate, the idea of federalism suggests itself as a Conservative answer – and there is a Conservative history here too. Shortly after he became leader of the party, Hague (1999: 12) claimed that devolution had ‘unbalanced’ relationships within the United Kingdom and he identified the patriotic task of Conservative policy to involve rebalancing the Union, albeit ‘consistent with the Britishness of our existing constitution’. The object was to dispel the ‘dark clouds of nationalism’ that Hague imagined to be gathering over England. In response to that same danger John Barnes (1998: 10), in a closely argued pamphlet, had advocated a ‘federal Britain’ to be the appropriate solution. While he thought that there was ‘little immediate danger of a resurgence of English nationalism’ sufficient to threaten the stability of the United Kingdom, he still thought that a ‘prudent conservative will expect the worst’. Barnes (1998: 44) believed that the strategic conclusion was a simple one. Anticipating Norton’s critique of Blair, he argued that New Labour’s ‘ill thought out’ conception and its ‘lopsided’ effect could only lead to the ‘Balkanisation of politics’, provoking the ‘disintegration of the United Kingdom’. Only a Conservative-conceived scheme of federation, he thought, could make ‘governance more effective and more accountable to its various publics; it will foster the practice of democracy and meet that sense which most British people have of showing a number of different identities’. And one of those identities requiring a democratic expression was Englishness. It is also interesting to consider the critical response by Noel Malcolm in that same pamphlet, if only because it helps to provide a measure of the extent to which things have changed. Malcolm (1998: 50–3) commented that all the sound and fury about the West Lothian Question presupposed that national categories were the key to understanding how voters made their choice at elections. He thought that this was an erroneous presupposition. ‘The West Lothian question only becomes dangerous when the average Englishman thinks that these are Scots who are deciding our future. At the moment the English do not seem to think like that.’ If a Cabinet minister appeared on radio or on television speaking with a Scottish accent, Malcolm found it

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hard to believe ‘that the English are sitting there at their breakfast tables saying “My God, we’re being ruled by the Scots!” ’ It was party identification which mattered in British politics and not nationality: if federalism was no longer unthinkable, it was still not desirable because it mis-described reality and it over-reacted to circumstance. When one compares Malcolm’s assessment then with the political arguments deployed by Conservatives before, during and after the general election of 2015 (never mind Paxman’s Scottish Raj) one is tempted to say: how things have changed. The Conservative Party was responding to, as well as directing, English public disquiet about the potential consequences of the SNP holding the balance of power at Westminster. As Cowley and Kavanagh (2015: 172) discovered, more than 60 per cent of Conservative press releases during the 2015 election campaign mentioned either the SNP or its new party leader, Nicola Sturgeon. In their judgement ‘Labour spent the campaign playing down the chance of the SNP being involved in government, while the Tories spent the campaign playing it up – and the Tories won’ (Cowley and Kavanagh 2015: 191). If this constituted ‘negative campaigning’, scholars found that the idea of a Labour–SNP threat certainly made an impact on the intentions of English voters (Bale and Webb 2015: 51; Ross 2015: 72). For some important voices in the Conservative Party, times had changed and the party needed to respond accordingly. Federalism had become not only thinkable, not only desirable but also necessary – though earlier Lord Hailsham (1978) had been a lone voice in favour of a federal Britain to avoid ‘elective tyranny’. Consider, for example, the response of David Davis (2014) to the Scottish referendum. He thought that the political framework of the United Kingdom was no longer fit for purpose. To make it fit for purpose there needed to be an acceptance of equality: ‘I have long taken the view that we need a more federal answer to the Union. There will be a separate English parliament, with an English first minister.’ The politics of repair was no longer good enough and reform of the constitution ‘must be delivered as a whole solution, not piecemeal’. There were new stockings already. The time to tackle the issue directly was now and ‘the death of our old Union can be the birth of a new nation’. This corresponded to the more forthright expression of John Redwood (2014) that what was good enough for Scotland was good enough for England: ‘Fairness demands no less. Let’s have some balance in our new constitutional arrangements.’ England, he thought, should have its own parliament, if only because what was intended for Scotland had made the United Kingdom already federal. Wool was the new silk. In The New British Constitution, Bogdanor (2009: 310) had invited readers to consider that the future might actually bear resemblance to a road not taken: that it could be understood as ‘a belated triumph for the nineteenth century liberal and radical movement’. Lords Salisbury and Lexden have suggested something similar, albeit with a Tory, though still radical, edge. They proposed that Conservatives should not die in the ditch for the centralised constitution of a previous generation. The significance of their voices in this debate is the pedigree of their unionist credentials.

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Both Lexden and Salisbury were dedicated and tireless patrons of the Friends of the Union – not the recent organisation dedicated to Scotland’s, but the older (though now defunct) one dedicated to Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. Their support for federalism intimated a possible sea change in Conservative statecraft acknowledging the existence of new constitutional stockings. Three months before the 2015 general election, Lord Lexden (2015c) had written that it was Cameron’s duty ‘as a Conservative and Unionist Prime Minister’ to spell out a convincing policy to halt ‘the process of national disintegration that is the inevitable consequence of having three devolved legislatures using their differing powers for their own ends while undevolved England becomes ever more resentful’. He referred favourably to Joseph Chamberlain’s proposal in 1886 for ‘equally applicable’ (my emphasis) institutional arrangements in all parts of the United Kingdom under the sovereign Parliament at Westminster. ‘Chamberlain’s federal ideals’, Lexden suggested, ‘can provide Mr Cameron with the only Unionist policy capable of averting disaster,’ an interesting reference given Nick Timothy’s Chamberlainite influence on Theresa May (and for a Welsh Conservative perspective, see Melding 2009). Lord Salisbury (2015) also summed up his proposition (possibly with a nod towards the confusion attending Cameron’s Big Society) as ‘a model that offers clarity and whose principles can be explained in a few sentences – always an advantage’. This was not a random reflection but a considered judgement. It was to form the central plank of the proposals made by the cross-party Constitution Reform Group (CRG) of which Lord Salisbury has been convenor – other prominent members of the group include Gisela Stuart, Peter Hain and Menzies Campbell – set out in the discussion paper ‘Towards a new Act of Union’ (CRG 2015). As its title implied, this was a unionist paper and the basic proposition was that if the ‘United Kingdom were to be broken up, we would all become immeasurably weaker in the short term, and more so with time’. However, that paper also accepted that there was growing discontent with present constitutional practice such that it had become clear that ‘making only minor changes at the edges’ would be ‘ineffective at best and could be seriously counter-productive’ (CRG 2015: 4). This was not the occasion for constitutional darning because the political fabric had been transformed already. The authors were convinced that EVEL ‘cannot itself be a sufficient long-term solution to the frustrations clearly felt by, in particular, a significant number of English citizens, although they may be a necessary and appropriate short-term palliative’ (CRG 2015: 24). The CRG added that growing disenchantment with England’s place within the United Kingdom could only be ended ‘when all our citizens feel that all parts of the Kingdom have equality and fairness in our institutions of national and regional governance’ (CRG 2015: 16, my emphasis). It did acknowledge that the dominant position of England within the Union required of it a dual responsibility and constitutional duty ‘to ensure that English interests and identity are constitutionally recognised; and at the same time to ensure that this is not done in a manner which effectively establishes a domineering English state within the UK, so promoting

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separatist tendencies elsewhere’ (CRG 2015: 18). Having recognised that crucial duality, the CRG identified what others thought to be the flaw in any federal solution. Historically, the auguries did not appear to be good. Dicey’s view (1973: 189) had been originally and logically uncompromising: ‘Federalism, which in other lands has been a step towards Union, would, it is likely enough, be in our case the first step towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom into separate States.’ In 1911 Winston Churchill, then a member of the Liberal government’s Cabinet Committee on Home Rule, had ruled out an English parliament on the grounds that it ‘would be too strong’ not only in relation to the other parts of the Union but also in relation to the United Kingdom Parliament (Evans 2015: 30). Recently, the academic consensus had been equally negative. Hazell (2000: 7) observed that there has been no successful federation where one part was greater than one third of the whole. England with four-fifths of the population would be ‘even more dominant than Prussia in the old Germany. It would be grotesquely over-balanced, with the English Parliament as important as the Westminster Parliament.’ He did not think federalism was a credible proposition. A separate English Parliament within a federal system, Anthony King (2007: 206) also thought, would leave little for the Union Parliament to do and, if one were considering such a radical constitutional reform, it would probably be best to ‘make a clean break all round’. In his scenario there would be no need for further stitching – but then neither there would any longer be United Kingdom stockings to mend. Whether or not those serious reservations can be overcome, it is indeed a sign of changed times that the Constitution Unit, of which Hazell was formerly a distinguished director, conceded that the option of an English parliament deserved to be taken seriously (Sheldon and Russell 2016). The CRG (2015: 19) accepted that any model for English governance would need to protect the rights of other parts of the Union and its proposal was designed as much to ensure that England ‘cannot simply dictate to the other parts on matters of central constitutional interest as it is about ensuring that English aspirations for self-determination are properly recognised and realised’. Therefore, its Act of Union Bill, launched in September 2016, represented a retreat from the original (advanced) position in that it now contained two options for England: the first was a directly elected English parliament sitting in the House of Commons; the second was a combination of EVEL along with provision for further devolution to the cities and regions of England. Remarkably, then, the conundrum of Sir John Cutler’s stockings remained. Research by scholars at the University of Edinburgh revealed why this should be so: support for an English parliament was the least favoured option by region, age and party identification, and English voters had no single preferred option of government (Eichhorn et al. 2015: 8). Like Gover and Kenny, they also accepted that EVEL – the most favoured option – was not ‘the silver bullet answer’ to the English Question. Nevertheless, it is clear that the mend and make do approach is no longer considered to be the virtue that it once was. Even Norton (2015) proposed that a constitutional stock-taking ‘convocation’ should be established to determine

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‘where we are now, how the different elements fit together, and the constitutional principles that underpin those arrangements’, concluding ‘that the ad hoc approach to devolution has gone as far as it can and that a more systematic view is required’. It was no longer good enough, he argued, to remain in ‘response mode’. When the House of Lord’s Constitution Committee (2016: 29–31) took oral evidence on the working of EVEL, Norton remained to be convinced that EVEL had gone far towards giving proper scope to an English political dimension: giving English MPs a ‘veto’ was not the same thing as giving English MPs a ‘voice’. If that was the view of the party’s most respected constitutionalist, it suggested that the Conservative future is not what it used to be. The policy which the party had advocated for two decades and now put in place – EVEL – may no longer satisfy. Yet, is there any evidence that Conservatives have seriously considered a more advanced position than ‘response mode’ or thought beyond the British framework of federalism which Salisbury and Lexden wish to preserve? In short, is there any evidence of serious advance on the politics of repair? Can one detect English Conservative nationalism? England before Union? Some of those who would fall into the category of Conservative ‘public intellectuals’ certainly have argued the case for English independence (Heffer 2000). Scruton (Scruton and Dooley 2016: 99–100) even put Scottish influence at Westminster on a par with interference by the EU, arguing that they both wished to harm England’s institutions and customs. Not only did he think that the English do not want to be governed ‘from outside’ by people who do not share their way of life but he also predicted that the ‘political landscape is obviously going to change very radically in the next decade’. Scruton was proved right on the EU at least. There is also evidence of a similar disposition on the part of some Conservatives in the media. For example, Matthew Parris – hardly a representative figure of any right-wing faction – has expressed a mood of changing English attitudes. Four years before the Scottish referendum he detected a ‘collective shrug of English shoulders’ about the Union and chronicled a popular – and not only Conservative – mood of English irritation (Parris 2010). After the Scottish referendum in 2014, he thought that this irritation had become ‘a turning away, a hardening of the heart (Parris 2015). Unconsciously repeating Bulpitt (see Chapter 5), he thought that when English voters say, ‘ “Why don’t they just sod off then, if that’s what they want?” they really mean it now’. Parris was convinced that the 2015 general election proved that the Union ‘is over’ and that the real choice in British politics was now between ‘separation and federation’. Some academics have also pointed to the party’s struggle with the English/British conundrum ( Jeffery et al. 2016) and this returns us to Gamble’s revised understanding of the Conservative nation. Gamble (2016: 360) accepted that the Conservative Party remained committed to the Union but he had come to doubt the strength of that commitment. Those

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doubting voices were never really absent (Body 2001) but, rather like those who wanted to leave the EU, they had been generally marginal in impact. Now that they appeared to be more central, Gamble (2016: 360) asked himself the question: ‘Is the Conservative Party ceasing to think of itself as a Unionist party?’ He thought that there were definite signs of a distinctive English Conservatism, having: strong continuity with an older English Toryism which was partially buried by the ascendancy of Unionism. English Tories have always considered the Union to be desirable, but it comes second in their thinking to the need to protect the sovereignty of the British state, the core of which is England and its traditional institutions.

This augurs not so much a rise in Conservative Englishness as different kind of Conservative Englishness, one indifferent to the high unionism of the party. In line with Blake’s remark (Chapter 2), Gamble believed that the 2015 general election demonstrated the party returning to its English roots as the former appetite of the Conservative Party to put the Union first appeared to be waning. There no longer seemed ‘to be any passion about defending the Union among these Conservatives or even of thinking about the United Kingdom in Unionist terms’. It was, he concluded, coming to make less and less sense for Conservative MPs to think in high unionist terms and political logic, if not ideological logic, was ‘leading the party away from defending the Union as a priority’ (Gamble 2016: 361). Yet it is important not to overstate the case. It is worth pointing out how the Englishness of Conservative politics was always evident in its politics. Working in the party’s archives, McKenzie and Silver (1968: 54–5) uncovered ample evidence of the English Toryism which Gamble detected more recently, albeit in language more florid, or perhaps more honest, than the modern party would allow. For example, they highlighted one pamphlet of 1894 which argued that Conservatives had won the majority of English constituencies yet the party had been excluded from power ‘entirely due to Irish, Welsh and Scotch votes’. Anticipating current anxieties and discontents in the party, that pamphlet also argued that only England was denied special consideration, its affairs controlled by the other parts of the country ‘while these are free from the interference of Englishmen’. A later pamphlet described this ‘mongrel political combination’ of MPs – with intimations of the 2015 election campaign – as ‘general uprooters of all that is national and good’. Though this rhetoric was not mobilised in the cause of English separatism – indeed ‘English separatists’ were part of that mongrel combination – the deep roots to which Gamble referred have always been visible. Conclusion Diamond, Kenny and Liddle (2016: 4) argued that ‘a significant process of national reawakening has been occurring over the past two decades as notions of English national identity have come to acquire greater salience and meaning’. This is true

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and the Conservative Party has been forced to address it. In his conclusion to The Character of England, Ernest Barker (1947: 558–9) wrote of conversio morum – when a shadow line is crossed in English history, revealing a change in public behaviour. Perhaps one can also talk of political conversions – from one way of English institutional self-understanding to another. The English disposition to modify rather than to transform may involve recovering – but only by a process of reimagining – English institutions. As the previous chapters have argued, by history, culture and tradition, this would seem to be productive territory for Conservatives. There is no inevitability but one would certainly not bet against the party adapting the English Question to its advantage as astute Labour critics feared (Denham 2017b). Even so, the party’s unionism has become more prominent than ever after the EU referendum. Whether it endures is a moot point. Theresa May’s restatement of the party’s high unionism should be taken seriously. The significance and necessity of that high unionism in the context of Brexit is considered in the next chapter.

7

Conservatives and the European Question

Owen Bennett (2016: 333) records an emotional moment as the result of the EU referendum vote was confirmed in the early hours of 24 June 2016. At the offices of Vote Leave, Bernard Jenkin is hugged by Iain Duncan Smith. ‘ “Do you realise it’s been twenty-five years, Bernard?” said one Maastricht rebel to the other. “It’s over! It’s over now!” replied Jenkin.’ To use that famous Scottish expression of the Earl of Seafield in 1707, both of them could say here was ‘ane end of ane auld sang’, though in their case it was not farewell to sovereignty but welcome to its recovery. For those two veteran Conservative MPs, a quarter of a century had been a very long time in politics – the European issue had divided not one generation of Conservatives but three, and the outcome of the referendum reversed over fifty years of party policy, if one dates it from Harold Macmillan’s first application in 1963 to join the then Common Market (Heppell, Crines and Jeffery 2017). Though the campaigns in 2016 – Remain and Leave – had their distinctive contemporary arguments, those with a historical sense could detect echoes of former debates and of voices long dead. It is tempting to dismiss those echoes and those voices, to argue that these were very different worlds and it is impossible to equate the premiership and personalities of Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron. Nevertheless, if Duncan Smith and Jenkin could understand their own achievement in terms of a common purpose shared across twenty-five years, then fifty years does not stretch political connection too thin. In the case of the debates on the Maastricht Treaty during John Major’s premiership – the point of departure for Duncan Smith – John Barnes (1994: 91) had detected a reprise of the arguments of the 1970s. And since the arguments of the 1970s were largely a reprise of the arguments of 1960s, the fifty-year linkage is a defensible one. Indeed, one is struck by the familiarity of the arguments, rather than by their difference. The European inheritance What the modern party received from the past can be stated simply. To use Gamble’s distinction, the case for membership has always been presented according to the politics of power, meaning that, from the beginning, it has always proved difficult,

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though not impossible, to generate emotional commitment to European institutions within either the Conservative Party or the country (Butler and Kitzinger 1996: 279). Here was another ‘split in the mind’. It was understood to be an issue of high politics, involving grand strategic calculations of Britain’s ‘role in the world’ and more traditional Tories were generally persuaded that this was a matter best left up to the leadership – in the words of Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles to the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs in 1971 during the passage of Heath’s European Communities Bill: ‘pro bono publico, no bloody panico’. After all, the party claimed a privileged knowledge of British national interests as well as a special grasp of its Realpolitik. If the decision had been reached that the balance of power now lay in Europe, it was in the country’s interest to be in rather than outside; or, to use the sort of language of 2016, that Britain should be a ‘rule maker’ not a ‘rule taker’. Britain had to ‘choose’ Europe (Pocock 1975: 601) in order to secure its international standing, to ‘punch above its weight’ in world affairs. According to the politics of power, European membership did not indicate a British retreat from world status but its reassertion in late twentieth-century conditions. Those who believed this meant a threat to sovereignty, to the traditions of parliament or to the rule of law were mistaken, according to this view. Sovereignty was re-expressed as the capacity to acquire influence, to exercise power and to secure strategic position. It became the exercise of power rather than the principle of autonomy. Lord Home put it prosaically in a Conservative Central Office (1962a) pamphlet: ‘If, as is certain, power is to lie in Europe, then I think it is there that Britain ought to be.’ Those Tories opposed to British membership challenged all these points. To adapt again from Gamble, their arguments emphasised the politics of support, particularly the centrality of democratic responsibility associated with ‘parliamentary sovereignty’. Their argument was that European integration would undermine the traditions of British democracy, pose a threat to national identity, betray trust in the Conservative Party as the national party and, despite what was said by the leadership, there would be no limit to integration. Far from it being a journey to an unknown destination (Schonfield 1973), a federal Europe was all too obvious. The ‘power’ rhetoric was a delusion and the choice was not Europe or bust. The choice was between European entanglements at odds with British traditions and what was then called the ‘open sea’. Similar arguments on both sides, albeit in modified jargon, were made during the EU referendum campaign. Of course, the government of Edward Heath did take the country into the then European Community, against the stubborn resistance of a solid core of Conservative backbench MPs (there were about thirty). As Norton’s exhaustive study (1978) revealed, the majority of the parliamentary party were pragmatists, prepared to follow the lead given by Heath and to accept arguments of strategic necessity. Few were either committed Europeans or British sovereigntists. Therefore, one could say the party followed its head not its heart on Europe; or to put that otherwise, was prepared to put calculations of power ahead of support. Later, the result of the

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referendum in 1975 – during which the Conservative Party, under its new leader Margaret Thatcher, campaigned solidly for ‘Britain in Europe’ – seemed to settle one question: should Britain be in or out? However, it did not settle the question: of what sort of Europe should Britain be a part? It has been a consistent criticism of Conservative leaders that Europe has been a matter of party management rather than a matter of strategic commitment (Wallace 1994: 291). This reproach is too unpolitical, for genuine differences of view have made party management difficult and in Conservative politics these differences have been as much soulful as pragmatic. The twenty-five years referred to by Duncan Smith and Jenkin has its distinctive character because of a transformation in attitude in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf yet again, in or around that time the European issue changed and a number of issues unsettled the party’s European policy. The first issue concerned Thatcher’s political legacy. After the general election victory of 1987, the European ‘terms of trade’ in party politics changed. The Labour Party had come to the conclusion that its advocacy of withdrawal was one reason for being unelectable. It looked favourably on the European Commission under President Jacques Delors as a counterweight to domestic Conservative policy. Delors had predicted in 1988 that within a decade 80 per cent of domestic legislation, economic and possibly social, would originate in Brussels (House of Commons Library 2010). Thatcher’s response (1988) was her speech to the College of Europe, known subsequently as the ‘Bruges speech’. Its most memorable line was the prime minister’s defence of her free market reforms: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels’. However, it would be wrong to interpret the Bruges speech as an intimation of Brexit for it was a very Conservative statement, reaffirming a traditional position on Europe while seeking to establish acceptable limits to integration. Though the speech distinguished between Europe as a cultural identity and the European Community as an association of states – ‘Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome’ – there was also a firm commitment to continuity: ‘Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’ Continuity involved four familiar Conservative principles. The first was the nation: any European destiny required the ‘willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states’ in a manner ‘which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country’. The second was pragmatism: the problems of Europe had to be tackled ‘in a practical way’ and not according to an abstract federalist blueprint, especially on questions of borders and currency. The third later became known as globalisation: that Europe should be open to free trade and not be protectionist. The fourth was Atlanticism: that European defence and security should remain bound to NATO. In other words, that the Bruges speech later became understood as the rallying cry for a distinctively

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‘hard’ form of Euroscepticism had more to do with the changing shape of politics in the years that followed than it had with the content of Thatcher’s speech. It was the dynamic of European politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall which raised concern that the hard-won achievements of the Thatcher years would be sacrificed and that Europe was set on a course at odds with those Conservative principles enunciated at Bruges. By the time she came to write her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher felt that her major European legacy – the Single European Act of 1986 to complete the internal market – was being used to undermine rather than to promote British priorities. Though she believed that the idea of the Act was intended get Europe ‘back on course and to concentrate on its role as a huge market’ (Thatcher 1993: 556), she also admitted misjudging its political implications: ‘The trouble was – and I must give full credit to those Tories who warned of this at the time – that the new powers the Commission received only seemed to whet its appetite.’ Here appeared to be a European ‘super-state’ in the making. Eurosceptics did not at this time talk of withdrawal, at least openly, but the experience of the Major government’s ignominious exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1992 as well as the trauma of enacting the European Communities Amendment (or Maastricht) Bill (Baker, Gamble and Ludlam 1993a) showed how toxic the issue had become in Conservative politics. Perhaps it was fitting that the former Chancellor Norman Lamont, whose reputation and career had been damaged by the ERM fiasco, should be credited as being first to say the unsayable in 1994: ‘One day it may mean contemplating withdrawal. It has recently been said that the option of leaving the Community was “unthinkable”. I believe this attitude is rather simplistic’ (cited in d’Ancona 2016). By 24 June 2016 it had become fact and Lamont had been a key voice promoting that outcome. One should recall, of course, that Major succeeded in passing the Maastricht Bill and that the centre of gravity in the parliamentary party remained pragmatic. As Barnes (1994: 91) also observed of the party in the country, while hardly enthusiastic about the EU, few saw any realistic alternative to it. Certainly, Major thought that his critics were ‘harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented’ (Baker, Gamble and Ludlam 1994: 37). Moreover, Margaret Thatcher’s legacy was equally ambiguous and Lord Powell, who had helped to write her Bruges speech, speculated (Helm 2016; but see Moore 2015: 408; and Campbell 2017) whether, albeit frustrated by the politics of Brussels, ‘she would ever have campaigned to take Britain out of Europe’. So there was no certainty that Conservative criticism of the EU would ever become the radical proposition – or as Major understood it, the romantically reactionary position – of withdrawal. Surely, as the party of power, representative of the established interests of the country, serious Conservative politicians would never be attracted to such an option? The academic authority on the party’s statecraft, Jim Bulpitt (1992: 267), certainly did not think so, believing that future resistance to the EU ‘amongst both Conservative MPs and leaders will

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be minimal’. His conclusion anticipated a critical trope which can be found in the Leave campaign of 2016: that the weakness of the Eurosceptic case had less to do with its analysis and more to do with ‘the culture of defeatism which has affected so many sections of the British political elite since the late 1980s’ (Bulpitt 1992: 275). At the time, scholars (Baker, Gamble and Ludlam 1993b: 434) did speculate about a ‘Rubicon that Conservative MPs would refuse to cross’ on Europe though where that point of refusal would be was uncertain and, as Bulpitt implied, it seemed to be always somewhere over the political horizon. So scepticism about Conservative Euroscepticism was justified. Yet times do change and with them, the party. For example, Bale (2010: 71) found the parliamentary party at the beginning of the new millennium to have become economically liberal, socially conservative and increasingly Eurosceptic. He was convinced that Cameron needed to ‘slaughter, or at least retire, some of their sacred cows’ in the new era of ‘valence politics’ (Bale 2006: 396; see also Chapter 4). There was no good reason, thought Bale, why Europe should remain the only ‘position’ issue the party had to carry round its neck, and Cameron thought likewise, wishing to stop Conservatives ‘banging on’ about it (BBC News 2006). Others (for example Heppell 2013: 348) noted how in coalition after 2010, Eurosceptic MPs were frequently at odds with a Eurosceptic ministerial team and a pragmatically Eurosceptic prime minister. Cameron ‘experienced high (and unprecedented) levels of Conservative parliamentary dissent on Europe’ and Heppell thought it was because he was not fully trusted on the issue. He concluded that Cameron’s disposition – to support membership of the EU but to oppose deeper integration – no longer satisfied a growing number of Conservatives at Westminster, as well as in the country, who now had moved towards ‘leave’ (Heppell 2014: 159). And in a survey of intra-party dissent, Lynch and Whitaker (2013: 331) identified a similar gap but also pointed to differences of emphasis and commitment within the broad category of Eurosceptic MPs which worked against a common position. They concluded presciently that if Cameron’s promise of change in the relationship with the EU was not sufficiently convincing, then ‘differences between Conservative Eurosceptics could transform into a starker “in” versus “out” divide’. And so it proved. Cameron’s conundrum Cameron’s conundrum was a delicate one: reconciling the established politics of power which, for over forty years, had determined that membership of the Europe was vital for British prosperity, security and international influence; and the politics of support which, inside the party, had become increasingly Eurosceptic and outside on its right, in the shape of UKIP, threatened to split the Conservative electoral constituency (Hayton 2014: 16). UKIP challenged the Conservatives as the ‘national party’, appealing to what Ford and Goodwin (2014: 170) called ‘the blue-collar section’ of Cameron’s electoral support, those working-class Conservatives who felt

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themselves displaced by a sense of metropolitan exclusion from their ‘traditional preferences for the centre-right’. To put that another way: there was a mood which felt that the gap between the pays légal and the pays réel had widened significantly and that the political class was dangerously out of touch (Goodhart 2017). Some thought the problem inside as well as outside the Conservative Party actually had a common provenance. According to Parris (2014), the UKIP challenge externally mirrored an internal struggle which Cameron’s liberal disposition found difficult to manage. Yes, the prime minister had in Nigel Farage’s so-called ‘people’s army’ a sworn political enemy but the real problem was much closer to home and amongst his colleagues (as Cameron was to discover to his cost during the referendum campaign). As Parris described the UKIP challenge, its mindset is ‘implanted inside the heads of many Conservative MPs and party members. It is within those heads, and between those heads and opposed heads, that the real battle is taking place.’ Resolving this ‘European question’ (d’Ancona 2015: 410) was not a task which Cameron took on willingly but one which he felt he could not avoid. He could not avoid it because the history of the party as the national party haunted every deliberation. Cameron’s statement of intent and – as it turned out – the fatal commitment was made in his 2013 Bloomberg speech. There was an interesting historical echo at the beginning of that speech and another at the end. At the beginning one heard an echo of Margaret Thatcher at Bruges distinguishing ‘Europe’ as a set of relationships and the ‘EU’ as an organisation of states. Cameron (2013) distinguished the people of Europe from the institutions of the EU, a distinction he was to make again in his renegotiation three years later. He observed that the original European Treaty committed the member states to ‘lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. This, he argued, had been interpreted to apply ‘not to the peoples but rather to the states and institutions compounded by a European Court of Justice that has consistently supported greater centralisation’. He was in favour of the first but dissented, like Thatcher, from the second. Also like her wish to deal with European matters ‘in a practical way’, he looked upon the EU as ‘a means to an end – prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself ’. That distinction was one which Major also had made (Lynch 2000: 63), between a Europe that was flexible, respecting different national traditions – in Cameron’s words with ‘a bigger and more significant role for national parliaments’ – and a Europe designed according to ‘the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc’. In particular – with UKIP firmly in mind – Cameron observed the ‘gap between the EU and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years’, one which was ‘felt particularly acutely in Britain’ where, as a consequence, democratic consent for the EU had become ‘wafer thin’. This tension between the politics of European power and the politics of British support needed to be addressed. On the one hand, it ‘is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics’. On the other hand, Britain’s European partners needed to ‘work with us on this’ to deliver

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a compromise capable of being sold to a public (and Conservative Party) which maintained ‘an entrenched Euroscepticism’ (Ashcroft and Oakeshott 2015: 495). At the end of the Bloomberg speech there was a further historical echo, this time of Harold Macmillan. Macmillan (Conservative Central Office 1962) had said that, if Britain stood outside the Common Market, ‘we shall go on but we shall be relatively weak, and we shan’t find the true strength that we have, and ought to have’. In 2013 Cameron phrased it thus: ‘I understand the appeal of going it alone, of charting our own course’ and certainly ‘Britain could make her own way in the world, outside the EU, if we chose to do so’. But the question the country had to ask itself was this: ‘is that the very best future for our country?’ Cameron’s question implied his ultimate recommendation – which Bulpitt’s ‘ratchet’ would have predicted. Nevertheless, it was a great risk to offer a referendum, especially if Cameron already knew what the answer should be ‘in the national interest’. And as his critics claimed, that implied answer undermined the serious purpose of renegotiation. In an otherwise insightful article, John Gray (2015) deployed that criticism unfairly applied to all Conservative leaders: that Europe was never ‘more than a question of party management’ (as if democratic politics can avoid questions of party management). The appropriate Conservative response according to its ‘national/natural party of government’ self-understanding was well made by Gimson (2017b): if the party did not keep together it would have nothing to offer the nation and this ‘elementary point is regarded, by those who choose to regard politics as an exercise in moral idealism untainted by practical considerations, as disreputable’. That consideration was apparent both during the referendum and after, as Gimson admitted (see below). Gray was closer to the mark when he argued that the referendum had been proposed as ‘a wheeze, designed to put off the matter until another day’; and correct that as the day of reckoning approached, Cameron was trapped by events over which he had little control. Whatever package of reform he brought back from Brussels would have to pass through the ever finer filter of Conservative Euroscepticism. Moreover, public opinion no longer considered the EU to be the positive default option as it had done in 1975, such that it ‘can no longer be taken for granted that pragmatism favours a continuation of the status quo’. Again, so it proved. When Cameron (2016) made his statement on his renegotiation after the European Council meeting in February 2016, he claimed that he had fully delivered on the commitments laid out in his Bloomberg speech. Britain would be absolved from ‘ever closer union’ and would never have to be part of that Thatcherite anathema: the ‘European super-state’. Equally, proposals, would be brought forward ‘unilaterally, to strengthen the sovereignty of Britain’s great institutions’. New restrictions were promised on access to welfare for EU migrants – an ‘emergency brake’ so that they would have ‘to wait four years until they have full access to our benefits’. Moreover, there was no question of Britain ever joining the Euro, and there would be ‘vital protections for our economy and full say over the rules of the free trade single

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market’. Cameron believed that he had achieved sufficient of political substance to be able ‘to recommend that the United Kingdom remain in the European Union – having the best of both worlds’. Pragmatically, Britain would remain ‘in the parts of Europe that work for us’ and yet be ‘out of the parts of Europe that don’t work for us’. In proposing the deal, then, Cameron returned to those solid traditions of Conservative-speak on Europe. ‘I do not love Brussels. I love Britain’, and he put his credibility on the line in a ‘hard-headed assessment of what is in our national interest’. Cameron concluded with a flourish: ‘And that is why I will be campaigning with all my heart and soul to persuade the British people to remain in the reformed European Union that we have secured today.’ His big problem, which the other EU states did not appreciate and did not concede, was that the public would be impressed only by major changes to Britain’s relationship (Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley 2017: 20–2). Unfortunately for Cameron, the legacy of his own ‘soft’ Euroscepticism – one of his signature acts as leader was to remove Conservative MEPs from the centre-right European People’s Party – and the culture of contemporary Conservatism made ‘heart and soul’ an impossible course of action. Those pushing Cameron to make a passionately Europhile case forgot that option was foregone and to make an emotional argument in favour of the EU would be convincing neither to the party nor the country (Ruparel 2016). This assessment was confirmed within the prime minister’s own circle. Daniel Korski (2016), who had been intimately involved in the European renegotiation as well as deputy director of the Number 10 policy unit, admitted Cameron ‘did not want to make big, emotional arguments about Britain’s place in Europe’. He did not want that because he subscribed to the view that only the practical merits of EU cooperation could ever be sold and to argue otherwise would invalidate a whole generation of Conservative discourse. ‘Nobody in power’, argued Korski, ‘spoke of the positive things Europe provided. There was no counter narrative, and there hadn’t been since the 1975 referendum.’ As a result, no ground had been laid for a positive EU case and, to adapt Burke’s phrase, the passionate intensity was conceded from the start to the government’s critics. The changes secured in 2016 could be presented only as consistent with Conservative tactics: tactical defensive manoeuvres against an insatiable European power-grab. Therefore, ‘when Cameron began to argue that the EU was important to the point of being almost indispensable the electorate had no reason to believe him’. Indeed, it only confirmed his critics’ narrative that Bulpitt’s ratchet was still at work. The Remain campaign was condemned to be either prosaic or, as its critics claimed, reduced to ‘project fear’, emphasising the negative costs of leaving rather than the positive benefits of staying. Both might appeal to the ‘politics of power’ but they were unlikely to appeal to an increasingly unpredictable ‘politics of support’. As Ford and Goodwin (2014) had demonstrated already, those whose disaffection had been tapped by UKIP were least likely to be convinced. Remain was clothed in an unimaginative

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straightjacket. Cameron’s position was not even strengthened by arguments of senior Conservatives (Clegg 2016: 196). For example, when Theresa May (2016d) made her speech on Brexit, it was couched in characteristically Conservative fashion. The choice should be based on ‘a hard-headed analysis’ of the national interest: ‘Our decision must come down to whether, after serious thought about the pros and the cons, we believe there is more in the credit column than in the debit column for remaining on the inside.’ On balance, she believed the evidence spoke in favour of staying in. That may have been an honest assessment but it was hardly convincing – unless one was already convinced. Similarly, Oliver Letwin (2016) argued that during the forty years of EU membership he had ‘hoped for a time when a British government would renegotiate the terms of our membership and create the opportunity for us to be in an outer, free-trade circle of the EU while enabling some other member states to be in an inner circle of emerging political, fiscal and monetary union’. Now he was convinced that reform was fundamental and would achieve the goal he had hoped. Put that way, it was hardly a ringing endorsement of the experience of EU membership. Letwin admitted to being ‘genuinely surprised that there is as much debate as we are currently experiencing in the lead-up to the referendum’ since Britain now had the best of both worlds. No more ‘ever closer union’ and so ‘the option that clearly now provides the best chance of being safer, stronger and better-off is to remain a part of the outer-circle free-trade single market’ (my emphasis). That sounded less like an argument for the EU and more an emphasis on damage limitation. William Hague (2016a and 2016b) made similar points about a ‘two-tier EU’, acknowledging its value for those ‘torn’ or ‘conflicted’ – so long as they were prepared to give the leader, as good Tories were expected to do, the benefit of the doubt in the national interest. Unfortunately, Cameron’s renegotiation could be read as the worst of both worlds: the country marginalised, without an influential voice on the decisions that inner Europe would take but subject still to the costs of membership and the authority of EU institutions. If Conservative Party management explains much of the drama from Bloomberg in 2013 to the referendum in 2016, then perhaps Cameron’s renegotiation can be interpreted a little more sympathetically. This mitigation would submit in evidence Iain Macleod’s remark about the logic of his colleague, Enoch Powell: ‘I am a fellow traveller but sometimes I leave Powell’s train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers’ (cited in Heffer 1999: 380). Here was the opportunity offered to those in the party, especially to those in Cabinet, who were tempted to ride all the way down the line, to break with membership of the EU and – as Cameron thought – damage British interests. Cameron’s message was this. We are all in the same Eurosceptic carriage, we all have anxieties about the security of the nation and we all share a common Conservative tradition. We all have a ticket stamped ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ because we are the ‘national party’ but that ticket can take us to different destinations. It can take us to the terminal of exiting the EU. I believe, if we do so, there is no way to avoid a disastrous crash into

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the buffers at the end of the line. Not only will we injure the national interest but there is no guarantee that the party will not be wrecked and derailed for a generation, or even for good. I have negotiated for a ticket along a branch line parallel to the federal track. It requires us to get off a few stations up the line – at the signals ‘no ever closer union’, ‘emergency break’ and ‘no super-state’ – in order to change trains and avoid crashing into the buffers. As Conservatives, we can appreciate the logical, one-track mind of Brexiteers like Daniel Hannan (see Knight 2016). However, those like him have no experience of running a railway. What renegotiation offers is in the traditions of pragmatic Toryism and is also the patriotic option. That analogy is a bit laboured but it does convey how Cameron’s (admittedly limited) renegotiation provided an honourable escape for colleagues whose journey was not already well advertised. Flexible ticketing – how Britain had always operated in the EU – might have worked in the past. Certainly, one journalist close to the Conservative leadership (Ganesh 2015) thought that the sort of ‘fudge’ on all the big European issues was truly the ‘British way’ and should have appealed to conflicted colleagues. Its failure to persuade the most important amongst those ‘conflicted’ like Michael Gove, who had advised originally against a referendum, and Boris Johnson (2003), whose journalistic career had flourished on a Eurosceptical diet of Brussels bureaucracy – never mind other members of the Cabinet and parliamentary party – was a serious double blow. It not only delivered significant political talent to the Leave campaign but also undermined whatever political credibility the renegotiation brought (Letwin 2017: 22). Prime ministerial authority was weakened and serious promotion of the merits of the deal was abandoned. If Cameron had been tempted to repeat (privately, of course) Disraeli’s advice: ‘Damn your principles! Stick to your party’, the moment had gone and Leave campaigners knew it as their opportunity. As one of their leading strategists, Dominic Cummings, put it (Shipman 2016: 46), the fact that Cameron’s Macleod sanction (if the expression is allowed) had not worked provided the perfect excuse for MPs and donors ‘to jump ship’. It also damaged the Conservative public ‘cue’ which Margaret Thatcher had delivered in 1975 (Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley 2017: 148–9). Here was a critical situation for the party. Leaving the EU had never been the preference of a majority of Conservative MPs but the logic of the referendum now brought that possibility centre-stage. Reform had been the mantra but now it became legitimate to argue that the reforms delivered were not only inadequate but also proved that Europe was incapable of reform in a manner favourable to British national interests. The question was captured well by one of Korski’s (2016) confidants: ‘You sort of admitted that there had been no decent reforms, so how come Cameron now said we had to stay?’ There was no good answer to that question and so it was avoided. The party was divided; the outcome was now unpredictable; the Leave genie was out of the bottle and it was impossible to put it back (Forsyth 2016). It was the nightmare prospect which had concerned George Osborne from the beginning. For those with any sense of Conservative Party history, that genie was familiar, though

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it was interesting that throughout the referendum campaign its name was rarely, if ever, mentioned. That genie was the spectre of Enoch Powell. The spectre of Powell When he looked with a historian’s eye at the result of the EU referendum – what he believed to be the most tumultuous event in modern British politics – Dominic Sandbrook (2016) pinpointed April 1968 as the ‘moment’ which resonated most strongly in the Leave victory. The historical reference was to Powell’s (in)famous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, warning against the effect of immigration on British society, and to Powell’s tapping into the public’s anxiety not only about immigration but also about wider economic, social and cultural changes disrupting British national identity. Almost fifty years later, a major study of the 2016 referendum result concluded ‘that strong public concern over the large number of migrants entering the country was front and centre to Leave securing victory’ (Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley 2017: 208). This was not Powell’s criticism at the time, of course, but for him the passing in 1972 of the European Communities Act by the Conservative government of Edward Heath became the betrayal of national identity later associated with immigration. In his superb biography, Simon Heffer (1999: 960) described Powell as a ‘Tory anarchist’, as someone who combined a romantic reverence for parliamentary sovereignty with an anarchical disdain for an ‘establishment’ which, he thought, showed no such reciprocal reverence for the Conservative nation. The Leave campaign exhibited a similar character: rallying under the Conservative banner of nation and constitution, denouncing the compromising, and compromised, politicians who were in charge and willing – under the maxim of ‘take back control’ – to pull down those structures of power determined by Britain’s EU membership. In the preface to a collection of his speeches on Europe, Powell (1989: xiii) had written that if ‘the nation into which I was born is what I believe it to be, nothing can prevent it sooner or later re-asserting itself ’. One is tempted to conclude that Powell would have responded to the result of the EU referendum by saying: ‘I told you so’. However, things did not look that way when Powell died in 1998. Concluding his life of Powell, Heffer (1999: 961) referred to his celebrated remark that all political lives end in failure. A conventional biographer would have left the story there, finishing on that note of pathos. But Heffer was no conventional biographer and neither was his ending. The final sentence reads: ‘He did not fail.’ When the book was published, that sentence was striking, if only because it appeared to be so obtuse. A reader would observe New Labour in its early pomp: an agreement in Northern Ireland involving Sinn Fein and a still fully armed IRA; devolved institutions agreed for Scotland and Wales; a Human Rights Act in place; a Europhile prime minister sympathetic to joining the European single currency; and a government which identified modernisation with multiculturalism and high levels of immigration. Those seemed to be the final stake in the heart of ‘Powellism’. It certainly does not

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look that way today. On borders, on immigration, on sovereignty and on free trade, Powell’s legacy is very much alive. And his message to the party in 1981 anticipates events thirty-five years later. The Conservative Party, he announced then, is both a pragmatic and a national party (Powell 1989: 128–9). What has defined its success is catching the popular mood and giving expression to its patriotism. Pragmatism and national purpose were thereby fused. ‘If the people of this country wish again to be a nation among nations,’ he asked himself the question: ‘will the Conservative Party not be their spokesman?’ It was on that invitation that Leave mobilised in the party, speaking for the restoration of nationhood, and much of their prospectus had an unacknowledged Powellite flavour. There are three points worth noting. First, it was Powell’s view that securing the country’s place in the world did not mean having to choose with which power bloc to be tied up. ‘When we consider the various arrangements we might make with other countries,’ he argued, ‘we are not a drowning man clutching at a rope or screaming for someone to throw him a lifebelt. We are no more drowning than these islands are sinkable’ (Heffer 1999: 528–9). There was no need to choose Europe. This returned as one of the central propositions of the Brexit campaign: essentially that the economic arguments were not for or against the EU but, as Powell had argued, for ‘free, or freer, trade all round’. Second, though Heath had promised that only ‘with the full-hearted consent of the British parliament and people’ would Britain join the Community (Goodhart 1976; Norton 1978), Powell argued that such a clear identification with European institutions could never be forthcoming. Speaking in Brussels shortly after Heath had signed the Treaty of Accession, Powell told his audience that ‘the English (sic) have never belonged, and they have always known that they did not belong to it [Europe]’ (Heffer 1999: 613). This was an argument according to elective affinity which had also a contemporary ring. Though the referendum of 1975 seemed to refute Powell’s thesis, he was still convinced two decades later that ‘the British people, somehow or other, will not be parted from their right to govern themselves in Parliament’ (Heffer 1999: 939). Third, the reason for that faith can be traced to his celebrated speech to the Royal Society of St George in 1961. Then he made a simple point: that what binds the nation are its traditions of ‘government and lawgiving’ (Powell 1969: 339–40). Those traditions, he felt, could be suppressed by membership of the EU but ultimately they would be resurrected such that, to use one of the slogans of 2016, the people would ‘take back control’. These themes of Powell’s opposition to Europe involved a number of further interlocking propositions: that the decision to join Europe represented a failure of self-belief by the political class; that it was a misreading of Britain’s role in the world; that it required repudiation of parliamentary sovereignty; and that, as a consequence, it stood as a betrayal of the British people. These arguments, without reference to their originator, were more or less repeated in the rhetoric of Conservative Leave. What ensued appeared to invert the old relationship between power and support in the Conservative nation: for Leave to be successful required the

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politics of power – that complex of state, commercial and financial interests generally disposed to back Remain – to be subordinated to the politics of support – the will of the nation which wished to make itself a constitutional people again. It also required the party to sacrifice a prime minister who had just won office a year earlier. For some it would be regrettable, but for others who believed that Cameron’s modernisation had marginalised ‘real’ Conservatism, it would be a pleasure (d’Ancona 2016). Once more, so it proved. The anatomy of Conservative Leave One distinguishing aspect of Conservative Euroscepticism involved redeeming time, and one can detect two distinct but related propositions in their case for Brexit. The first concerned the future. When considering the character of the Conservative Party in Chapter 1, it was argued that its capacity to achieve office lay in presenting itself as most capable of steering the ship of state on Oakeshott’s ‘boundless and bottomless sea’. Europe had been ‘sold’ from Macmillan to Cameron as the guarantee of British power interests, Conservatives fulfilling their vocation as the national party and securing Britain’s future in dangerous international waters. After British accession, few Conservative MPs saw an alternative even though voices challenging that consensus grew louder and more numerous. For example, Michael Spicer (1992) thought that the European Union model proposed at Maastricht was a ‘treaty too far’ which would lead to its own undoing. Rather than European Union being a model whose time had come, Spicer claimed that it was a model whose time had gone. That was a minority view in 1992 but it was to become more persuasive in the new millennium when the economic crisis in the Eurozone damaged the progressive image of the EU as well as questioning the desirability of deeper integration. Scepticism about the EU in its particulars, for example the Common Fisheries Policy, was held to be a manifestation of its dysfunction in general, the ‘handcuffed to a corpse’ claim. Times had changed, and so had the Conservative Party, so had the country, but, more importantly, so too had the EU. Cameron’s own phrase in his first Prime Minister’s Questions with Tony Blair – ‘you were the future once’ – was implied in Leave descriptions of the EU. As John Hayes (2016) argued, there was now a clear generational difference between older Conservatives, like Major, ‘whose perspective is drawn through the prism of an earlier age, and what the people want now’. Indeed, Hayes thought that the EU was ‘a 1950s structural solution to a 1930s problem. The ghosts of the past must not haunt our children’s future.’ This was a very different tone to the party debate of 1972 and 1975. Thus, Boris Johnson (2016) claimed that the EU had become an anachronism: ‘It is increasingly anti-democratic; its supranational system is being imitated nowhere else on earth; and its economic policies are causing misery in many parts of the EU.’ And rather effectively, if cruelly, he identified the major deficiency in his opponents’ case. ‘No one on the Remain side has shown any shred of explicit federalist idealism;

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no one has called for Britain to join in “building Europe” or in creating a “European identity”.’ They knew it was unsellable. If Johnson was making a polemical point, it persuaded seasoned Conservative commentators (O’Sullivan 2016) who could detect no optimism at all on the Remain side, so unlike the experience of the 1975 referendum when it was possible to ‘believe that the EEC would save Britain from economic and social decline’. In 2016, thought O’Sullivan, Remain had no option but to roll out ‘Project Fear’ because the Eurozone crisis had reversed the terms of debate. Some, like the veteran Eurosceptic Sir Bill Cash, went even further and argued that the EU model was ‘doomed’ (Greenwood 2016) and it was never too clear if, for these Conservatives, that was either a wished-for outcome or a confident prediction. O’Sullivan did enter a note of caution about the often-windy assertions of the Leave side and it was a characteristic note which came to dog its subsequent victory: there was little in the Leave alternative by way of ‘satisfying support of detail’. Here was another of those ironies in Conservative politics. Before 1975, and subsequently, it was Powell who had been labelled the ‘romantic’, someone whose views about sovereignty, borders and global free trade were dismissed as being ‘out of time’. But Conservatives – or at least a substantial proportion of them in Parliament and the bulk of the party in the country – were swerving back to recover that older idea of the nation associated with Powell. As Hayes intimated, it was Powell’s former opponents who now seemed ‘out of time’, a point consistently repeated by Conservative Leave throughout the referendum campaign. For example, attending the memorial service for Geoffrey (Lord) Howe, Charles Moore (2016a) realised that he felt about Howe’s Europeanism as he once did about those Conservatives who had opposed either the Great Reform Bill or the repeal of the Corn Laws: ‘a romantic admiration for those who honourably failed to see the way the world was going’. Others looked back even further. Owen Paterson had a portrait of King Charles I on the wall of his office because he thought it summed up the spirit of the Leave campaign, a good reminder of what happens when the establishment loses touch with those it represents in the county – and in the party (Bennett 2016: 47; Parris 2016). Nevertheless, Tories as the Roundheads disordered the historical senses even if the analogy captured the inversion of power and support in Leave thinking. It was also a potentially dangerous claim since there was already a ‘People’s Army’ on the field of battle – and its self-appointed leader, Nigel Farage, made no secret of his contempt not only for Cameron (the feeling was mutual) but also for the Conservative Party. Moreover, the prospect of intra-party warfare and a divisive campaign in the country hardly suggested the prospect of one nation Conservatism. The second proposition concerned the past. It held that the shift in the party’s position on Europe, first under Macmillan and completed under Heath, represented a loss of self-confidence by the political class and a failure of nerve. For others – and one finds an echo of this in Powell – it represented something worse: a betrayal of the nation by the political class. As Robert Tombs (2016) understood it, the turn to Europe was a good example of the declinist thesis (see English and Kenny 2001)

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which stated: ‘Britain was “the sinking Titanic”, and “Europe” the lifeboat.’ Here was another historical irony because, according to Tombs, the era of superior European economic performance which Britain was supposedly joining in 1973 had just ended. He thought that the folk memory of British declinism ‘still seems to weigh with older Remainers’ even though ‘the days when Britain seemed the Titanic and Europe the lifeboat were long gone’. On the contrary, the reverse was now true and, if people were voting with their feet, the sustained migration of East European labour to Britain proved the point as well as making the case for Leave. So redeeming time meant regaining self-confidence and having faith once more in the nation. One prominent Leave Conservative who had founded the Parliamentary Fresh Start Group in 2011 put it this way: ‘Britain wouldn’t choose to join this economically declining, political talking shop if we weren’t already members – so we should have the courage and self-belief to leave. Self-belief is the ingredient missing from the current debate’ (Leadsom 2016a). And she combined the two propositions about past and future to illustrate the new times: ‘I believe in our country. The EU is yesterday’s game’ (Leadsom 2016b). That message can be described as the ‘soaring dove’ – un-caged from the constraints of EU membership, Britain would soar free into the blue skies of a ‘liberating, empowering moment of patriotic renewal’ (Gove 2016). Of course, rather than a soaring dove Conservative Remainers could only visualise ‘Kant’s dove’ (from his Critique of Pure Reason): ‘The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space’. Project Fear was nothing if not a relentlessly graphic tracking of the plummeting Brexit dove, suggesting that, for all its institutional dysfunctions and regulatory limitations, membership of the EU continued to be the real politics of power and Conservatives should be in the business of defending it. Criticism of the Leave position also cut along the grain of a very traditional Conservative thought: that, as Bulpitt (1983: 136–7) put it, the domestic stability and tranquillity of the nation required the construction of a viable ‘external support system’. Since the early 1960s that ‘external support system’ was thought to be engagement with European states not only for economic reasons but also for reasons of national security (Field 2014 and 2016). Attached to that functional calculation was the rhetoric of patriotism: that membership of the EU allowed Britain to play its appropriate role in the world as a country which, given its traditions and experience, ought to ‘punch above its weight’. At one level, of course, the Conservative argument for Brexit was that the EU was no longer (if it ever had been) a supportive external system; rather, it had become a restrictive system of internal meddling, no longer delivering heft to British diplomacy. Though the ‘little England’ jibe does miss the mark, it was interesting that some significant voices in Conservative journalism thought that this question of Britain’s ‘role in the world’ had for too long been part of the country’s problem. For example, Moore (2016b) argued that Dean Acheson’s much-repeated phrase about Britain having lost its empire and failing to find a role had dogged a generation of politicians who ‘kept asking what that role should be’.

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This had been part of that culture of ‘declinism’ which Margaret Thatcher had (supposedly) dispatched in the 1980s. With an echo of Powell’s resonant phrasing, Moore (2016b) made the following observation: ‘As our system of government developed over centuries, we did not ask ourselves “What should our role in the world be?” We asked a much more primary question – “Who should rule us, and by what right?” The almost boringly obvious answer is “Ourselves, by the consent of our people.” ’ The longing for a world role neglected that simple point, confusing sovereignty as power with its source. The referendum had now imposed its truth upon government and Moore concluded with an aside on Tony Blair’s concern that Brexit would mean a significant loss of diplomatic soft power: ‘Ah, that top table again, with Tony trying to get his feet back under it. No, it’s adieu to all that.’ Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Moore had in mind the ‘soaring dove’ vision of a post-EU Britain – ‘global Britain’ in the new Conservative jargon – which envisioned the country becoming an international marketplace in finance and trade, with low taxes to promote entrepreneurship and attract investment. Here is an imaginary conjunction of memories: a long historical one of Drake-style, swashbuckling commercial spirit with a short one of Margaret Thatcher’s free market policy. This was not the only vision, however. There had emerged another which did imagine Britain playing a ‘role in the world’ beyond a materialistic one in a refashioned geopolitical partnership. This vision emerged as part of the intellectual shifts taking place at the end of the Cold War when ideas of a ‘new world order’ became fashionable. It has been described perfectly (Kenny and Pearce 2015) as the dream of a ‘geo-political and economic future for the United Kingdom, one that claims to relocate it in the historical trajectory and distinctive values that once made Britain great’. This was the vision of the ‘Anglosphere’ and later ‘CANZUK’. The Anglosphere involves an association of English-speaking countries – the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean states – while CANZUK imagines a smaller Commonwealth grouping of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The economist Andrew Lilico (2017) who, along with the historian Andrew Roberts, has been a prominent advocate, described CANZUK as ‘a geopolitical partnership, not just a trade deal’. Unlike the commercial basis of the Anglosphere, which would be clearly US-dependent, CANZUK implies the re-creation of an older strategic ‘elective affinity’: what used to be known as British ‘kith and kin’, an idea which appealed to Joseph Chamberlain in his quest for imperial federation. That historical elective affinity was not only cultural (some might say, racial) but also the inheritance of common institutional and legal practices. If the former is no longer prominent today, the latter remains central. It is what proponents suggest gives hope to its realisation – reversing that choice of Europe which so distressed the New Zealander Pocock. The historian of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ (Bell 2017) doubts whether any of this is possible or even credible and his scepticism appears well-founded. Nevertheless, Roberts (2016) was confident enough to announce that ‘CANZUK is an idea whose time has, thanks to Brexit, finally come again’. The

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truth is that, thanks to Brexit, it is not ‘adieu’ to ideas of Britain at the top table, realisable or not. Tory populism One can ask of the referendum campaign and of what has followed: whatever happened to the Conservative constitutional people? As Chapter 2 argued, what originally distinguished Conservative patriotism was its idea of the ‘constitutional people’, one reluctant to distinguish between an ‘active’ people and merely ‘responsive’ institutions. However, supporting Brexit meant prominent Conservatives involving themselves in a campaign asserting popular sovereignty in order to recover parliamentary sovereignty. Of course, such ironies are not without precedent in Conservative Party history – for instance, the role it played during the Irish Home Rule crisis of 1912–14 (see Smith 2001). However, it appeared that the populism of 2016 was more comprehensive than before. Here was a challenge not only to the elitism of a pro-European ‘establishment’ but also to elites or experts of any description. Commentators observed how very different the public mood was in the second European referendum of 2016 when compared with the first in 1975. In both cases, those in favour of Remain adopted a similar position: the politics of power – the considered voice of the ‘constitutional people’, expressed by its political elites as well as the voices of finance and business – should be listened to and, more importantly, followed by the electorate. As Prime Minister Harold Wilson had in 1975 (Bogdanor 2016b: 349), the politics of power continued to argue that an important reason for voting to stay in the EU was a simple consideration of the alternative: it would empower the ‘wrong kind of people in Britain’. If in 1975 the wrong people were those like Enoch Powell, in 2016 they were those like Nigel Farage. Indeed, when asked why he thought the 1975 referendum had been won so convincingly, the then foreign secretary, Roy Jenkins, replied that ‘the people took the advice of people they were used to following’ (cited in Colvile 2016). Conservative supporters of Leave occupied an ambivalent position: on the one hand, they stood for the imposing continuity of the institutions of the constitutional people as Disraeli had defined it, ‘popularly known as Queen, Lords, and Commons’; on the other hand, they were riding the popular wave which might empower the ‘wrong kind of people’ and foster a mood in which they would no longer take advice from those ‘they were used to following’. Colvile (2016) added a further irony: that the ‘professional class dominated by the products of the elite private schools’ which populated state and civic institutions had been turned upon by some of its own members. In the words of Michael Gove, they now placed their faith in the wisdom of the British people and not in those who think they know best. Disraeli (1872: 4) had praised the wisdom of a political tradition which put ‘the prize of supreme power’ without ‘the sphere of human passions’. The referendum would now put the fate of the EU firmly within that passionate sphere. What response could there be

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to those critics of populism who thought that this was a decidedly un-Conservative style of politics? The response actually fits closely into a recognisable pattern of Conservative argument. It is that the fault is not to be found with the people nor with national institutions; rather it is to be found with the baleful influence of the EU imposing itself on the way in which the latter must engage with the former (Kenny 2015a: 38). In other words, the impact of the EU has been to disrupt the flow of sympathy between the pays réel and the pays légal. For Conservative critics of Europe, this disruption had been a long time maturing. During the debate on the Maastricht Treaty, for example, Kenneth Minogue (1992: 74) had argued that EU had induced ‘rhetoric of deception which goes far beyond the ordinary equivocations of politics’ which ran ‘contrary to Conservative principles’. He did not think that the gap between what the political elite told the people and what the evidence obliged the people to believe could widen much further without provoking widespread national resentment. A quarter of a century later, that disconnect between the people and the European vocation of most of the elite was cited by journalists as one key reason for the shock result (Hastings 2016b). At issue were two clashing ideas of the people – the constitutional people of parliamentary sovereignty and the national people of popular sovereignty. This was something which had been flagged up in the work of Ben Wellings and Emma Vines who observed (2016: 311) that the coalition government’s concession in 2011 of a referendum ‘lock’ on further transfers of powers by treaty to the EU ‘made the People, not Parliament, the final guarantor of the UK’s sovereignty’. The result of any referendum would be considered mandatory, not advisory. Yet the idea of the people ‘speaking’ – while superficially attractive, conclusive and authoritative because directly participatory – also had a negative possibility. Referendums, Wellings and Vines (2016: 324) thought, can be exclusionary as well as participatory, reinforcing populist politics, contrasting the ‘people’ who win against the ‘people’ who lose, never mind against British and European ‘elites’. It can lead to unintended and ironic consequences. Thus Wellings and Vines (2016: 325) thought that the EU debate had opened up tensions between popular and parliamentary sovereignty which it was never the objective of the Conservative Party to create. Certainly Burke would have recognised the challenge to the role of the MP as representative and not delegate, a distinction which resurfaced in the arguments of those Tories, like Kenneth Clarke (2017), who vigorously opposed the triggering of Article 50 to withdraw from the EU. Equally, in a revealing exchange with former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, Michael Gove challenged the former’s intention to make sure that, following Brexit, Britain stayed within the EU single market (Miliband and Gove 2016). He argued that Miliband’s position was ‘fine as a personal preference but it runs counter to the clearly expressed will of the people’ and merely observed that ‘the 69 per cent of people in your constituency of Doncaster North who voted “Leave” would not think such an outcome respected the result’. The reasoned judgement of the MP had been delegated in populist fashion to the

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people. ‘Parliament voted – by 6 to 1 – to hold a referendum’, Gove continued, and Parliament’s ‘legitimacy comes from the ballot box. We can’t overturn the clearly articulated views of the majority without undermining the ground on which we stand.’ In his opinion – in this instance, anyway – the people had become part of the constitution and the mood of the people was not for parliamentary games to restrict its will. That the Leave campaign involved a large degree of contempt for most Conservative MPs was another irony admitted by its mastermind (Cummings 2017). Once again, Tombs (2016) is an intelligent guide to this mood which, he thought, was a democratic moment not a populist one, a moment when a majority of British people rejected the notion that their ‘attachment to self-government’ was ‘some sort of impertinence’ and who chose to reject the proposition ‘that great decisions should be left to professional politicians, bureaucracies and large corporations’. The elite response, he thought, simply showed (as Minogue had predicted) just how out of sympathy they had become with national sentiment, ‘resorting to collective proclamations of institutional authority which proved embarrassingly ineffective’. Tombs concluded with the remark of Victor Hugo’s in 1850 against those French who rejected the expression of democratic will: you simply reveal ‘your ignorance of the country today, the antipathy that you feel for it and that it feels for you’. And yet was it possible to be so categorical? Can one really argue that those who voted Leave somehow constituted the ‘real’ country and those who voted Remain did not, especially when the popular vote was so close? To what extent does Brexit mean that the relationship between the state and the people had become ‘honest’ once again? This is really a question of legitimacy. Yes, the referendum was Britain-wide; yes, the people had spoken. But who are the people? McCrone and Bechhofer (2015: 207) finished their important study Understanding National Identity with the line: ‘To ask who “we” are, and for what purposes, remains one of the key questions of our times.’ That key question was only partially resolved by the EU referendum. Outcome UK-wide Leave had won by 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent. Taking the UK nations individually, the figures were: England, 53.4 per cent Leave and 46.6 per cent Remain; Wales, 52.5 per cent Leave and 47.5 per cent Remain; Scotland 38.0 per cent Leave and 62.0 per cent Remain; and Northern Ireland 44.2 per cent Leave and 55.8 per cent Remain. In 1975 the concern at Westminster was that England would vote to remain and Scotland and Wales would vote to leave. It was also considered likely that Northern Ireland would vote to leave. In the end in 1975 all parts of the United Kingdom voted to remain, with the exception of two Scottish regions: the Shetland Islands and the Western Isles. 2016 was different and the outcome reflected the party political changes which had taken place over forty years (Gifford 2010). As a measure of the change, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson (2016b) remarked that ‘north of the border, the EU referendum felt like someone else’s war’. Scottish Tories

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had recommended Remain mainly because of concerns about the consequences of Brexit for the Union. That had also been the position of the Ulster Unionist Party (though the Democratic Unionists had supported Leave). Davidson’s point was one that informed much of the subsequent commentary on the referendum: though the vote was a British vote, the outcome involved distinct angles of vision such that Brexit was a different prospect when looking out from England (and Wales) than when looking in from Scotland and Northern Ireland. This was not exactly the same line as David Marquand’s claim (2013) that ‘the paladins of Brexit’ resolutely ignore a paradox: that the ‘heart to which they speak is English, not British’. It was, however, on a similar page and the result which was thought to spell trouble in 1975 had been realised (albeit reversed). It posed policy challenges for the Conservative government but it also brought potential advantages (Davis 2016). Raphael Behr (2016b) thought that the result meant that the Conservatives had been captured by a fringe agenda within the party. Heppell, Crines and Jeffery (2017) estimated that this ‘fringe’ – ‘anti-Cameronite, socially conservative and Euro-rejectionist’ – composed about one quarter of the parliamentary party. They also estimated that the majority of MPs had voted Remain (52 per cent), though a majority of members and voters (about 60 per cent) had voted Leave. Theresa May’s speech (2017), which set out an agenda for a ‘clean’ Brexit, seemed to give that 52 per cent what they wanted, an agenda which inverted Gamble’s equation of power (the stated position of key business and financial interests) and support (the voice of the people). However, Bale (2016) speculated that leaving the EU could prove to be one of the best things in recent Conservative politics in two ways: it might encourage ‘the emergence of a more cohesive, more coherent’ party and there was the opportunity to make it a ‘more popular’ party, broadening its constituency of support. On Bale’s first point, an interview with Tim Shipman, author of the most comprehensive study of the referendum, revealed that a major consideration in the campaign had been to keep the Conservative Party together. In Shipman’s words: ‘People who read ConservativeHome may come ultimately to thank David Cameron, because throughout this process he put the interests of the Conservative Party ahead of winning the referendum’ (in Gimson 2016). The logic was clear: if you think the Conservative Party should run the country the last thing you want is a split. ‘Cameron preserved a situation where the country could move forward after the result’. For those who do not subscribe to that logic it could be put less favourably: Cameron put party before country. On the second point, Conservatives might appeal to Euroscepticism and patriotism, outflanking the Labour Party with working-class voters on the left and recovering support from UKIP on the right to build a new Conservative nation. In this speculative move, the Conservative Party would become an integrative one nation, Brexit, ‘people’s party’. May’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’ declaration was a commitment to such democratic fidelity and she positioned Conservatives on familiar territory – as the national party and once again as the natural party of government. This placement

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had a twofold purpose, combining both points of unity and support. It positioned the party on the winning side of the referendum with the expectation that its novel configuration of voting would deliver electoral success in a general election. It also had the objective of uniting the party behind a common objective. What it also revealed was the party’s traditional adaptability. Lord Ashcroft (2016) pointed out how in 2010 it was doubtful if the Conservative Party could ever build a coalition of voters sufficient to govern alone. Then there was Cameron’s surprise victory in 2015. A year later, the political landscape had changed yet again. Cameron was gone, a new prime minister was in office, the Conservatives seemed united and in the ascendant. ‘Altogether pretty benign circumstances, then, for a new government’, thought Ashcroft. Commentators spoke of a possible landslide victory if an election was held in 2017. However, if this set of pretty benign circumstances had been unforeseen there was no certainty they would be sustained for, as Ashcroft also admitted, ‘nothing in politics can any longer be taken for granted, if it ever could’. Though the Cameron project was out of favour, his modernisation project no longer mentioned and some of his close confidants banished from the Cabinet, Ashcroft was correct to advise that whatever the May leadership wished to change, there was one thing it should try to keep: Cameron’s ‘electoral coalition’. Care was needed not to repeat the mistakes of which, in 2005, Theresa May had accused the party (see Chapter 1) and for which Cameron’s electoral strategy – getting Conservatives in touch with modern Britain – was designed to remedy. It was tempting to think that Cameron’s modernisation had misread modern Britain; that his leadership had been ‘in a bubble of privilege above the common herd’; that there had been ‘too much tactics and not enough authenticity’ (Montgomerie 2011b); and that the EU referendum indicated a popular rejection of ‘elitism’. If that was the case, perhaps the party should return to the ‘authentic’ Conservatism of ordinary people? It was seductive to think that the times were propitious for popular, self-confident Conservatism. Yet how would the Conservative leadership answer the question put by McCrone and Bechhofer (2015): who are ‘we’ and for what purposes? It brought into play the Davidson question which may be considered in the following way. Tombs (2014: 877) thought that, though ‘Euroscepticism is a form of British nationalism, it is more prominent in the most “British” island nation, England’. The referendum result proved that he was only partially right but it also raised doubts about the simple correspondence between English and British in Conservative politics. Would Euroscepticism function according to what Gifford (2010: 336) called Conservative ‘Anglo-Britishness’ which appeared ‘increasingly in tension with the multi-national direction of British politics’ if only because the ‘Anglo’ was stressed at the expense of ‘Britishness’. That was certainly the original expectation of the SNP, which considered Brexit to be an English revolt, one justifying a second independence referendum. However, it has not worked out that way, at least in the immediate term. It is high unionism which remained the official discourse of Conservatism and it was obviously essential for it to have substance if the party was to govern the United

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Kingdom as a whole. High unionism once had the power to enchant but its power had begun to wane in the last quarter-century. Bogdanor (2009: 164–5) thought that Conservatives had to decide either to remain a unionist party or to become an English party. The future of the United Kingdom would depend upon their choice. The party’s vocation, as Theresa May confirmed, had been reaffirmed as unionist and this became ever more prominent for one obvious reason. The unity of Britain was essential as the negotiation of Brexit proceeded and was more necessary than ever for the credibility of the Conservative Party. The general election of 2017 would test these calculations openly and this is the subject of the Postscript.

Postscript: Conservatism confounded

It was supposed to be glad, confident morning again on 9 June 2017 as the Conservative Party under Theresa May expected to be returned with a large or even landslide majority. All the signs were there to suggest that the wonders of a new Conservative nation would come to pass. One commentator (Goodman 2017a) thought that May understood well the psychology of the electorate and had pitched her message such that all divisions in the country would be folded into the party. This was not only Whig plus Tory and working class plus middle class but also now Leave plus Remain. The Conservative Party, Goodman thought, ‘now contains the nation’s political differences over Brexit within itself, and appears capable of somehow reconciling them’. These were glad tidings indeed. Even the controversial provisions for social care in the party’s manifesto – immediately dubbed a ‘dementia tax’ by Labour – could be defended as Disraelian acknowledgement by the Conservative leadership of the need to reconcile yet another ‘two nations’: the young and the old. Again according to Goodman (2017b), ‘Team May’, confident of a decisive victory, had chosen to trade part of its expected majority to achieve a new Burkean ‘social contract between the generations’, to modify the balance of opportunity between ‘richer older retired people’ and ‘younger poorer working ones’. If the country was now divided less by class than by age, here was a social division which the Conservatives proposed to bridge. Yet if class was no longer so central in British politics (see Chapter 4) it was not unimportant. Rather like the estimation of that generational trade-off, it was considered that successful Conservative penetration of Labour strongholds was worth risking some votes elsewhere, especially in Conservative strongholds in the south of England. If the election delivered on all these fronts, the result would presage another ‘Conservative century’. This was a reaction to the Cameron approach which, some thought, had cared little about what ordinary people thought as if ‘floating in a bubble of privilege above the common herd’ and acting with ‘too much tactics and not enough authenticity’ (Montgomerie 2011b). If the outcome of the EU referendum intimated a popular rejection of that sort of ‘elitism’, then perhaps the remedy was indeed a return to the ‘authentic’ Conservatism of ordinary people. This was not merely wishful thinking but appeared to be writ large in the outcome of the local election results in May

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2017. As the UKIP vote in those elections leached away to Conservative advantage, the trend was considered to be a double bonus for the party – not only did UKIP defections increase the party’s vote share but also the party had translated those votes efficiently into winning over 500 council seats, even in those places where the Labour vote held up. As Robert Ford (2017a) observed, if that pattern were to be repeated in the general election, the Conservative Party could take ‘dozens of such seats without needing to win over a single Labour voter’. Of course, the party did expect to win over those Labour voters whose fundamental patriotism (it was assumed) meant that they would be incapable of voting for a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party deemed unsound on national security. If it was possible to believe in the achievement of a Disraelian one nation (reconciling rich and poor) and a Burkean one nation (reconciling young and old) it was also possible to conceive of re-establishing a Unionist one nation (extending Conservative representation across the nations). Ford (2017a) concluded that the ‘first nationwide victory for the Conservatives in Wales since 1859 – the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species’ had become a strong possibility. This really was disordering of the senses stuff. So too was the resurgence of Conservatives in Scotland. That resurgence had seemed unimaginable only two years previously. It emerged as a possibility not only because of the intelligent leadership of Ruth Davidson but also because of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s error in making the prospect of Brexit the justification for promoting a second Scottish referendum on independence. Scotland was distinct from England (and Wales) in that it was, as Massie (2017) correctly argued, the ‘national question’ – or Union question – which had become the fulcrum of politics. That question was now bound up with another: the SNP question. Having been in office for a decade, the SNP’s record of delivery at Holyrood was a factor in the electoral mix. The Conservatives – but not only them – made an effective platform out of the association of two messages: no to another referendum and yes to effective delivery on the promise of devolution. There was a paradoxical quality to the promise of a Conservative Party landslide led by May. It was a paradox which appeared initially to give the party an enormous advantage over Labour. This paradox was captured by Raphael Behr (2017). He thought that May appealed to an electorate which was looking for stability through a difficult and complex time of change. On the one hand, he believed that millions of voters on both sides of the EU referendum would vote for her as ‘the reassuring face of cautious, managed change. She is their emblem of continuity, attachment to the way things have always been done, and the avoidance of unnecessary risk’. On the other hand, of course, the mantra of ‘strong and stable’ government intimated the delivery of the most radical reversal of British policy in half a century. Behr, like most other intelligent commentators on the left, as well as the right, assumed that Labour under Corbyn would be incapable of challenging the first in terms of the second, not only because of leadership limitations (after all, Corbyn did not have the

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confidence of his own parliamentary party) but also because of Labour’s manifesto, a ‘wild-eyed flight from caution’. It was also assumed that fidelity to the Brexit vote of 2016 would be the key to success. Lord Denning had once likened the consequences of British membership of the (then) European Community to an incoming tide flowing into the estuaries and up the rivers and which could not be held back. Such was the (apparently confident) radicalism of May’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’ that the Repeal – or EU (Withdrawal) – Bill proposed to do what Canute had failed to do: turn back the tide. The electoral benefits were expected to flow too: embracing Brexit would mean holding Conservative Remain-voting constituencies and gaining Labour Leave-voting constituencies. If joining Europe could be described as ‘a journey to an unknown destination’ (Schonfield 1973) then forty-five years later, leaving Europe was another, even more perilous ‘journey to an unknown destination’. Conservative ends (restoration of sovereignty) by radical means (withdrawal from the EU) – or vice versa, depending on one’s perspective – was another reconciliation suggested by the new leadership. When the general election was called, all the political stars appeared aligned – cross-Brexit, cross-class, cross-generational, cross-regional – for the Conservative Party to feel buoyant about refashioning its one nation dominance. And in anticipation of that achievement in June 2017, the hunt was on to define ‘Mayism’ which, like Thatcherism before it, was considered to be the defining political tag for a new political generation. At the party’s manifesto launch in Halifax, Theresa May denied that there was any such thing as ‘Mayism’, only that she was offering ‘good, solid Conservatism’. Most seasoned commentators begged to differ. Martin Kettle’s view (2017) was that the sections in the manifesto on education, housing, social care, intergenerational justice, energy prices and workers’ rights did add up to a different kind of Conservatism. However, his central and prescient point was this: he doubted whether May or her advisers had thought through these policies. Significantly, he believed that neither the party nor its core vote had been prepared adequately for the emergence of this Robert Halfon-style Workers’ Party (see Chapter 1). Kettle was right: both the manifesto and the campaign revealed just how isolated was ‘Team May’ even from other members of the Cabinet – and the aftermath of the result also revealed how exposed personally May had become. Others had been more optimistic about successfully translating aspiration into achievement. D’Ancona (2017b), for example, was convinced that the controversial manifesto illustrated the ‘governing principle of Mayism’, which he defined as ‘a conviction that politics is not simply a branch of economics; that the voters’ experience is not exclusively defined by disposable income; and that the nation’s prosperity is, in any case, distributed much too unevenly’. The Conservative Party’s rediscovered and re-expressed one nation vocation required it to ‘speak to, and for, working-class communities as vigorously as it does with its traditional base of rural and affluent suburban voters’. D’Ancona also supposed that this governing principle was popular and he assumed like most that May had assembled a formidable

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coalition of support in the country. That it did not work out that way proved that the currents of British politics were not so predictable after all (Ford, Goodwin, and Sobolewska 2017). It is an understatement, therefore, that the general election result was a dramatic shock which took nearly everyone by surprise. A party which had begun its campaign expecting a majority of at least sixty seats, and possibly double that number, had ended up without an overall majority. Though the Conservatives remained the largest party with 318 seats, overall they had lost thirteen from the 2015 total. What had gone wrong? If Theresa May could secure a sympathetic biographer – like Heffer on Powell (see Chapter 7) – he or she might argue that, from one point of view at least, she ‘did not fail’. The Conservative Party polled just under 43 per cent of the vote, well up (plus 5.5 per cent) on Cameron’s surprise election victory in 2015 (which had lifted the party’s share of the vote only by 0.7 per cent over the 2010 election). For all the well-founded criticism of the campaign, the quality of her leadership and the commitments in the manifesto (especially the ‘dementia tax’), in any other circumstances this outcome would have delivered a landslide victory. If May’s biographer at some point happened to be Nick Timothy (2017), the apologia would read thus: ‘In the end, the Conservatives got their highest share of the vote since 1983, and more votes than Tony Blair managed in any of his elections, yet still we ended up with a hung parliament’. Nevertheless, it is the hung parliament, rather than the highest share of the vote since 1983, which is politically salient. Unfortunately for May and for her adviser Nick Timothy, these were not any other circumstances; the buck stopped at their door and Timothy and his close associate, Fiona Hill, felt obliged to resign. In context, expectations frustrated became tantamount to the party’s humiliation and it certainly felt that way for most constituency activists who complained about the shambolic management of the campaign (Strafford 2017). The result can be read not so much as a Conservative failure – the party, after all, remained in government – as an unexpected Labour success, defying previous judgements about Corbyn’s electoral acceptability. The Labour vote had increased by 9.5 per cent and delivered the party thirty extra seats. The consequence of the result was to derail the Conservative prospects of only a few months before and historians will find it remarkable to reflect on just how dramatically the fate of the party had been overturned in such a short space of time. Hubris, according to the title of one collection of essays, has been the recurring temptation of modern Conservatism (Anderson and Frost 1992) – and so it seemed again in 2017. Far from the Conservative nation being secure for the future and its opponents scattered, attention turned once more to that old nagging doubt: did the Conservative Party have a future? There was a twofold irony in the election result. The first was that only the success of the party in Scotland – which increased its vote share by almost 14 per cent, gaining twelve seats in addition to the one it had retained in the SNP landslide of 2015 – secured the UK party’s majority position at Westminster. Without it, an alternative

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Labour-led coalition would have been a possibility, or at least a serious complicating factor for government formation. There had been no great triumph in Wales after all and though the party’s votes share had increased by over 6 per cent, three seats were lost. As Chapter 5 noted, there had been persistent sotto voce arguments in London about cutting loose the party north of the border but Ruth Davidson had more than delivered for the UK leader. The second was that her impressive achievement became almost immediately eclipsed by May’s decision to achieve a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), considering the votes of its ten MPs now crucial to the minority government’s survival. This eclipse was compounded by the Scottish party leader’s strong personal commitment to gay rights. She sought, and received, ‘categoric assurance’ that any arrangement with the DUP – which opposed same-sex marriage – would see ‘absolutely no rescission of LGBTI rights in the rest of the UK’. Moreover, Davidson also wanted the prime minister to use her influence to press the case for LGBTI rights in Northern Ireland, an issue which had become almost universally identified in politics as the key measure of modernisation (BBC News 2017). Though most journalistic comment on the DUP assumed that its views were somehow alien to the Westminster, or even British, mainstream, that simplistic view needs to be questioned. Chapter 3, for example, discussed widespread opposition within the Conservative Party to Cameron’s commitment to push through legislation on same-sex marriage. Moreover, the definition of ‘Mayism’ – for example, d’Ancona’s one of speaking to, and for, working-class communities as well as rural and affluent suburban voters – would have much in common with the DUP’s own character. Though ‘right of centre’ on constitutional matters – here the difference between DUP members’ views and Conservatives on Europe, defence and immigration would be minimal – the DUP maintains a distinct character on socio-economic affairs. Nigel Dodds, leader of the party in the House of Commons, argued that the DUP is not right of centre when it comes to ‘issues of how the market should operate’ or ‘in terms of how society should work’ (Eaton 2015). Those words echoed the sentiments outlined in the Conservative manifesto (2017: 11): ‘We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality’. Though there was evidence that a small majority of DUP members ‘feel closer to the Conservative Party’ than they do to any other party (Tonge et al. 2014: 178–9) – and there was no way in which any Unionist could have supported Corbyn, whose sympathy for Irish republicanism was well documented – that closeness has always tended to be lukewarm. Indeed, some Conservative commentators had longed assumed that ‘what determines Unionist votes in the lobbies is less ideology than favours, electoral or financial’ (Goodman 2014b). When the two parties finally did agree their confidence and supply motion, public attention focused immediately on the financial favours, the £1 billion in additional public expenditure for Northern Ireland over two years. Less attention was paid to ideology, the joint commitment to ‘our shared

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objectives for strengthening and enhancing the Union, security, prosperity and an exit from the European Union that benefits all parts of the United Kingdom’ (Belfast Telegraph 2017). However, it is undeniable that there is an awkward fit between the two parties which did not apply in the same way to the old association with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). The public bargaining in 2017 was very different from John Major’s unspoken arrangement with the UUP leader Jim Molyneaux in 1992. As Seldon (1997: 368) recounted Molyneaux’s memory of that ‘gentleman’s agreement’: ‘I don’t think we should engage in anything of a sordid deal because it’s not in either of our characters to do that. I think we simply did what’s best for the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in particular.’ That was never the DUP style. However, the bottom line of the deal was a simple arithmetic one: it gave the Conservative government an effective majority for two years, even the possibility of seeing the government through the lifetime of a parliament. With that deal, one of Margaret Thatcher’s speech writers (O’Sullivan 2017) was optimistic that a ‘limited normalcy’ would return to politics, allowing the Conservatives time to readjust to the outcome of the election and to rethink its strategy. It was that possibility which accounted for Labour’s hostile reaction. If the short-term deal with the DUP was concerned with parliamentary arithmetic and the necessary insurance policy to hold on to power, it was not the cause of long-term doubts at the heart of post-election Conservative politics. The concern was about prospects for the Conservative nation. As Chapter 7 argued, the Brexit commitment meant that the Conservative Party and a Conservative government no longer seemed the secure bet to reconcile Gamble’s politics of power and politics of support. Concerning the first, Garvan Walshe (2017), former national and international security policy adviser to the party, feared that British business and finance were unprepared for the Brexit which was now the lodestar of party policy. Walshe’s judgement was severe. Business and finance ‘are used to a government that broadly shares their outlook and interests, not one indifferent to the collateral economic damage its own nationalist agenda will cause’. That would have seemed unlikely criticism of Conservative leadership at any point in recent history. Concerning the second, Goodwin (2017) was convinced that, according to polling evidence, Brexit continued to have wide popular support and delivering it ‘would create a new Conservative ascendency’. Of course, if the collateral damage was as bad as Walshe feared, then the Conservative ascendancy intimated by Goodwin might be short-lived and ultimately disastrous. As it turned out, the general election revealed that the Conservatives had not even got to the foothills, never mind the peak, of political ascendancy. The result revealed just how much the politics of power was out of line with the politics of support. Country against court has been a useful cry for Conservatives to challenge for power but it has rarely been the mode in which the party has chosen to govern and even to her own colleagues Theresa May could appear as ‘a lonely guardian of the unfashionable unmetropolitan common sense instincts of provincial conservatism’ (Sylvester 2017). It was Andrew Marr (2017)

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who put best the party’s dilemma. He recognised that revolt against big money can be an opportunity for Conservatives to mobilise support, yet, by and large, ‘parties of the centre right get into trouble when they find themselves divorced from the interests of big money and big business’. The party’s present state, Marr thought, illustrated ‘both the problem and the revolt against the problem’ and it has become the Conservative conundrum of how to bring together power (protecting the economic interests of business and finance) and support (addressing identity concerns about immigration). The election result served only to deliver a prime minister who had lost her authority, a government uncertain about the scope of its mandate and a party unsure of its own purpose. Moreover, the Conservative problem was revealed starkly in the profile of party support in 2017. An Ipsos/Mori poll (2017) showed three key findings: the middle class had swung to Labour and working class to the Conservatives; Labour had a fifteen-point lead amongst graduates and Conservatives a seventeen-point lead among those with no qualifications; and Labour was strongest amongst those under forty-four and Conservatives those over fifty-five. As Ford (2017b) observed, class politics had been turned upside down: ‘Wealthy professionals in leafy suburbs have swung behind a Labour leader who pledges to sharply increase their taxes, while it was struggling blue-collar workers in deprived and declining seats who were most attracted by the party of austerity cuts to public services and welfare.’ Two quite remarkable events measured this disordering of political expectations: Labour took from the Conservatives (by twenty votes) Kensington, one of the wealthiest constituencies in London; and the second-largest swing from Labour to Conservative was in Dennis Skinner’s constituency of Bolsover. That age gap, educational gap and changing class profile of Labour and Conservative confirmed how past political ‘certainties’ had become disturbed indeed, as Chapter 4 discussed. In short, despite its 43 per cent, the Conservative Party did not look very like a long-term party of ‘power’ and its ‘support’ did not intimate an emerging ascendant coalition. That realisation could only be disconcerting. The previous chapter argued that Lord Ashcroft had identified the necessary elements of Conservative success: march into Labour working-class territory by all means, hoover up UKIP voters by all means, but make sure that the party kept together Cameron’s ‘electoral coalition’. In doing so, the party would expand the centre ground as well as consolidating it as Tory. It was Cameron’s electoral coalition which did not keep together. This failure could be read in 2017 as an exceptional effect of exceptional (Brexit) circumstances. It could, by contrast, also be considered to indicate a long-term trend and that, ‘by abandoning graduates for workers, May has driven a stake into the heart of the Cameron coalition’ (Colvile 2017a). Indeed, Colvile (2017b) could imagine – as Geoffrey Wheatcroft (2005) had predicted a decade earlier – the strange death of Tory England if only because, as ‘the proportion of people living Tory lifestyles shrinks, the Tory vote could follow suit’. How very different were those thoughts from those of only a few months earlier. It was really

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quite remarkable, revealing how superficial was the party’s supposed hegemony. In the space of two months, the future no longer seemed to belong to the Conservative nation but to the youthful, middle-class, well-educated, cosmopolitan coalition assembled by Labour. It was now thought (ironically) that the party needed to do a Cameron and to modernise all over again. As the arch-moderniser Lord Maude (2017) asked: ‘what happened to the modern Conservative Party?’ Modernisation had been intended to make the party ‘acceptable to large groups who had come to find us unattractive – the socially liberal, younger people, London, the environmentally conscious, women, LGBT and ethnic minorities. That detoxification process got us into government in 2010 and again with a majority in 2015. Now it feels like it’s all to do again’. That objective also seemed to be in tune with changing public mores (see NatCen 2017; also Shorthouse, Maltby and Brenton 2014). One may argue that fifty years ago there had been an intimate connection not only in the Conservative imagination between the party as the one nation party and its being the ‘natural’ party of government, but also in the country’s imagination (Norton and Aughey 1981: 280-1). It linked a providential sense of national history, the exemplary character of national institutions, the exceptional national achievement of stability and progress with the natural fitness to govern of the Conservative Party. McKenzie and Silver (1968) charted its character at the very moment its self-evidence was collapsing. As the first three chapters of this book argued, one nation is in the DNA of the party and the codes of ‘high unionism’ have endured; yet as the subsequent four chapters argued, the meaning of ‘one nation’ has become more contested than ever before. Without wishing to romanticise the Disraelian appeal of Conservatism, the fading of that imaginative resource has diminished the standing of the party and, along with it, the party’s ‘national’, never mind its ‘natural’, appeal. The determination of Theresa May, the object of her style of Conservatism and the purpose of the election had been to revivify the Conservative nation in the cause of Brexit. That objective seemed a grand illusion after June 2017. If the effect of the EU referendum had been – in a phrase of Tony Blair’s – to throw the political cards into the air, the general election did the same thing again for the parties. How those two sets of cards fall, and into what pattern, is (at the time of writing) nothing if not unpredictable. It is always a temptation, and one difficult to avoid, to overemphasise the present moment and to be overly impressed by the nature of changes currently taking place. Oakeshott (1991: 59) once provocatively, if playfully, remarked in a footnote to his essay on ‘Political education’ that the Revolution of 1917 had been a modification of Russian circumstances. This suggests two interpretive rules of thumb: first, that the further in time one gets from an event the more one is likely to notice continuities rather than discontinuities; second, that change is more likely to be contextual rather than the product of grand ideological influences. Those two rules of thumb may sometimes be a poor guide to understanding contemporary events but they are a useful corrective to the captivations of the moment in order to avoid getting present times

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and its political challenges out of proportion. Yet one must be wary of an opposite temptation and think that nothing at all is new (see Bogdanor 2016c). The issues for Conservatives – on the Union, English identity and Europe – remain challenging and the relationship between them constantly changing. However, the history of the party shows that its capacity to adapt in order to survive is one of its defining characteristics. But this adaptation is not guaranteed, even if liberal Conservatives still hope for the best (Letwin 2017: 283). It will be interesting for scholars in the future to consider who the Conservatives are, what we understand by Conservatism and whether one can speak intelligibly of the Conservative nation.

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Index

Acheson, Dean 142 Acton, Lord John Emerich Dahlberg 22–3 Amery, Leo 23, 29 Anderson, Bruce 43, 45 ‘angels in marble’ 16–17, 71, 82 Anglo-Britishness 93, 94, 111, 148 Anglosphere 143 Ashcroft, Lord Michael 57, 72–3, 148, 156 Aston Villa Toryism 80, 81 Bagehot, Walter 11, 36 Baker, Lord Kenneth 115 Baldwin, Harriet 118 Baldwin, Lord Stanley 31, 33–4, 46, 48, 58, 86 Bale, Tim 96–7, 100, 101, 132, 147 Barker, Sir Ernest 61, 117, 127 Barnes, John 121, 128, 131 Behr, Raphael 16, 147, 151 Bennett, Alan 96 Bennett, Owen 128 Bermuda Triangle (English) 106, 108–9, 110, 113 Bew, Lord Paul 103 Biffen, John 29, 35, 87 Big Society 18, 123 Blair, Tony 12, 26, 45, 56–7, 58, 65–6, 68–9, 73–4, 82, 90, 91, 99, 107, 110, 111, 121, 140, 143, 153, 158 Blairite 66, 69 Blake, Lord Robert 11, 21, 22, 29–30, 126 Blond, Phillip 75 Bloomberg speech (2013) 133–4, 136 Blue Labour 81–2

Bogdanor, Vernon 26, 33, 47, 63–5, 67, 75, 78, 82, 84, 86, 90, 95, 107–8, 109, 118, 120, 122, 149 Booker, Christopher 99 Brexit 28, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 100, 112, 117, 127, 130, 136, 139, 140, 142–3, 145–9, 150–2, 155, 157 Brexiteers 137 Brown, Gordon 37, 38, 95, 99, 107 Bruges speech (1988) 130–1, 133 Bryant, Christopher 63 Buchanan-Smith, Alec 86 Bulpitt, Jim 96, 116, 125, 131, 132, 134, 135, 142 Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Edward 10, 11 Burke, Edmund 1–2, 6–7, 16, 22, 25, 45, 53, 135, 145 Burkean 26–7, 45, 112, 150–1 Butler, Sir David 63 Butler, Lord Richard Austin 48 Cameron, David 2, 9, 19, 20, 24, 35, 38–9, 44, 47, 56, 57–60, 63, 66, 68–70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 80–2, 84–5, 92–5, 98, 100, 102–3, 109, 110, 119, 123, 127, 132–7, 140–1, 147–8, 150, 153, 154, 156–7 Campbell, Lord Menzies 123 Canovan, Margaret 112 CANZUK 143 Carswell, Douglas 73 Casey, John 13, 14, 91 Cash, Sir William 141 Cecil, Lord Hugh 46, 56 Chamberlain, Joseph 71, 79, 123, 143

186Index Chamberlain, Neville 2 Chamberlain Toryism 79–82 Chesterton, G.K. 113, 120 Churchill, Lord Randolph 25 Churchill, Sir Winston 124 Clark, J.C.D. 37–8, 60, 61 Clarke, Kenneth 118, 145 Clegg, Sir Nick 52, 103 Cobbett, William 27 Coleman, Bruce 50 Coleraine, Lord Richard 10 Colley, Linda 29, 114 Colls, Robert 24, 26, 28–9, 31, 32, 46, 61 Colvile, Robert 144, 156 common sense 11, 12 Common Sense Revolution 14 Condor, Susan 108 Conservative Political Centre (CPC) 87–8, 90, 100 Constitution Reform Group (CRG) 123–4 Constitution Unit 124 constitutional people 21, 22–9, 32, 38, 40, 42, 46, 88, 91, 119, 140, 144–5 Convery, Alan 101 Cooper, Lord Andrew 4, 6 Corbyn, Jeremy 64, 71, 75, 151, 153–4 Cowling, Maurice 4, 16, 40, 59, 62, 73, 98, 113 Crick, Sir Bernard 30, 85 Crouch, Colin 77–8 Cummings, Dominic 137 Cutler, Sir John 117, 119, 121, 124 Dalton, Hugh 81 D’Ancona, Matthew 69, 73, 82, 113, 152, 154 Dangerfield, George 104 Davidson, Ruth 104, 146–7, 148, 151, 154 Davis, David 122 Delors, Jacques 130 Democracy Task Force 118 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 154–5 devolution 29, 61, 85–95, 96, 97–8, 100, 103, 106–8, 110, 113, 114, 115–19, 120, 124, 125, 151

Dicey, Albert Venn 23, 27, 120, 124 Disraeli, Benjamin (Earl of Beaconsfield) 4, 6, 10–11, 16, 21–2, 23, 27–8, 35, 40, 44–5, 49, 54–5, 57–8, 59, 71, 80, 137, 144, 150–1 Disraelian Conservatism 19–20, 30, 39, 57, 79, 94, 150–1, 157 Dodd, Philip 47 Dodds, Nigel 154 Drucker, Henry 44 Duncan Smith, Iain 51–2, 56, 69, 70, 129–30 Easterhouse 70–1 elective affinity 8, 9, 16, 21, 35–7, 48, 72, 93, 103, 139, 144 Empire 11, 33, 111, 142 English votes on English laws (EVEL) 101, 117, 119, 123–5 Erdington modernisation 79, 81 European Communities Act (1972) 138 Euroscepticism 114, 116, 131–2, 134–6, 140, 147–8 Evans, Geoffrey 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 80, 81 Farage, Nigel 133, 141, 144 federalism (European) 129, 130, 137, 140 federalism (UK) 120–5 Feldman, Lord Andrew 59 Ford, Robert 74, 76, 77, 132, 135, 151, 156 Forsyth, Lord Michael 106 foxhunting (with hounds) 25, 109–10, 116 Fraser, Maurice 66 Frayne, James 75–7, 78, 79 Freeden, Michael 8 Fresh Start Group 142 Gamble, Andrew 5, 18, 40, 44, 52–6, 59, 60–1, 64–5, 76, 83, 111, 125–6, 128, 129, 147, 155 Garnett, Mark 89 Giddens, Lord Anthony 58, 66, 68 Gilmour, Lord Ian 8, 10, 12, 30, 107 Gimson, Andrew 69, 134

Index Glasman, Lord Maurice 81–2 Goodhart, David 40, 64 Goodman, Paul 82, 104, 150 Goodwin, Matthew 74, 76, 77, 132, 135, 155 Gorman, Theresa 115 Gove, Michael 112, 137, 144, 145–6 Grainger, J.H. 17 Gray, John 19–20, 49, 54, 134 Greenleaf, W.H. 7–8 Hague, Lord William 14, 56, 69, 90–1, 92, 94, 106, 110, 119, 121, 136 Hailsham, Lord Quentin 7, 12, 43, 44, 48, 122 Hain, Lord Peter 123 Halfon, Robert 2, 74, 152 Hannan, Daniel 137 Harris, Nigel 8 Harris, Robin 50 Hastings, Sir Max 18, 19 Hayes, John 140, 141 Hayton, Richard 50–1, 75, 78, 93, 94, 96, 97–8 Hazell, Robert 97, 107, 124 Hazlitt, William 15 Heath, Sir Edward 4, 19, 93, 128–9, 138, 139, 141 Heath, Oliver 72 Heffer, Simon 100, 138, 153 Hennessy, Lord Peter 108, 110 Heppell, Timothy 132 Herbert, Nick 5 Hermon, Lady Silvia 94 Hill, Fiona 153 Hitchens, Peter 99 Hoggart, Simon 96 Home, Lord Alec Douglas 129 Honderich, Ted 18 Howard, Lord Michael 56, 69 Howe, Lord Geoffrey 141 Hurd, Lord Douglas 66 immigration 25, 72–3, 74, 76, 80–2, 138–9, 154

187 Irish Home Rule 2, 29, 42, 61, 79, 85, 86, 87, 105, 120, 144 Irvine, Lord Derry 106–7, 108 JAMs (just about managing) 76 Jeffery, Charlie 98, 147 Jenkin, Sir Bernard 128, 130 Jenkins, Peter 65 Jenkins, Lord Roy 144 Johnson, Boris 102, 137, 140–1 Joseph, Lord Keith 10 Kedourie, Elie 3, 4 Kenny, Michael 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 92–3, 98, 99, 105, 107, 110, 111–12, 116, 119, 124, 126 Kettle, Martin 152 Kidd, Colin 84 King, Anthony 124 Kitson Clark, George 42–3, 48, 49, 50, 55 Korski, Daniel 135, 137 Lamont, Lord Norman 131 Lang, Lord Ian 88–90 Larkin, Philip 38 Leigh, Sir Edward 58 Letwin, Sir Oliver 136 Letwin, Shirley 49–50 Lexden, Lord Alastair 100–1, 104, 122–3, 125 Liberal Democrats 1, 78, 96, 118 Liberal Unionism 2, 79 Liddle, Rod 14 Lilico, Andrew 143 Lloyd-George, Lord David 40 Lynch, Philip 54, 132 Lyttleton, Humphrey 121 Maastricht Treaty 128, 131, 140, 145 McElvoy, Anne 75 McKay Commission 118–19 Macleod, Iain 136–7 Macmillan, Lord Harold 11, 18, 128, 134, 140, 141

188Index Major, Sir John 6, 19, 56, 85, 86–92, 100–2, 104, 106, 128, 131, 133, 140, 155 Malcolm, Sir Noel 121–2 Mandler, Peter 113 Mansfield Jr, Harvey 24 Marquand, David 147 Marr, Andrew 155–6 Massie, Alex 77, 109, 151 Maude, Lord Angus 12 Maude, Lord Francis 56, 157 May, Theresa 2, 10–11, 20, 26, 34, 35, 38, 44–5, 60, 69, 70, 74–7, 79, 80, 81, 85, 93, 101, 104, 110, 112–13, 123, 127, 136, 147–9, 150, 152–3, 155, 157 Mayism 60, 152, 154 Miliband, Ed 45, 145 Mill, John Stuart 54 Minogue, Kenneth 145–6 Molyneaux, Lord James 155 Montgomerie, Tim 59, 101, 119 Moore, Charles 30–1, 32, 33, 49–50, 111, 141, 142–3 Morrison, Lord Herbert 3 Mycock, Andrew 93, 94, 96 Nelson, Fraser 101 New Labour 19, 23, 28, 30, 39, 54, 57, 65–7, 69–70, 74, 85, 89, 90–1, 95, 97, 99, 100, 106, 109–10, 115, 116, 121, 138 Northern Powerhouse 120 Norton, Lord Philip 107, 115, 117–18, 119, 121, 124–5, 129 Notting Hill set 70–1, 75 Oakeshott, Michael 4–8, 12, 14–15, 27–8, 31, 39, 42–3, 48, 52, 55, 62, 70, 79, 84, 117, 140, 157 Oborne, Peter 18–19 oikophobia 47, 50 One Nation 2, 38, 41, 44–52, 53, 55–7, 60–2, 71, 74, 77, 81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 103, 107, 116, 141, 147, 151–2, 157 Ortega y Gasset, José 7 Orwell, George 15, 23, 65, 89, 91

Osborne, George 69, 100, 120, 137 Ostrogorski, Mosei 22 O’Sullivan, John 141 Parris, Matthew 48–9, 51, 70–1, 125, 133 Paterson, Owen 102, 141 Paxman, Jeremy 116, 122 pays légal 11, 24, 31, 53, 64, 83, 99, 110, 133, 145 pays réel 11, 24–5, 30, 53, 64, 83, 99, 110, 133, 145 Peel, Sir Robert 59 Peguy, Charles 13 Phillips, Melanie 45 Pickthorn, Sir Kenneth 2–3, 21 Pocock, J.G.A. 34, 143 Policy Exchange 70, 75 politics of power 40, 53–5, 61, 68, 128–9, 135, 140, 142, 144, 155 politics of support 40, 53, 61, 68, 129, 132, 135, 140, 155 populism 15, 18, 24–5, 40, 47, 67, 72, 75, 78, 80, 88, 110, 114, 116, 121, 144–6 Portillo, Michael 13 Powell, Enoch 8, 9–10, 11, 33, 79, 80–1, 91, 94, 113, 136, 138–41, 143, 144, 153 Powellism 80, 109 Pulzer, Peter 46, 52 quasi-federal (UK) 90, 121 Reckless, Mark 73 Red Tory 75, 82 Redwood, John 78, 102, 119, 122 Rees-Mogg, Jacob 115 referendum 1975 (EEC) 130, 139, 141, 144 referendum 2004 (north-east regional) 115 referendum 2014 (Scottish independence) 38, 39, 91, 102–3, 108, 116, 119, 122, 125 referendum 2016 (EU) 14, 24, 64, 70, 71, 73–5, 80, 85, 104, 109–10, 113–14, 119, 127–8, 129, 133–9, 141–4, 146–8, 150, 151, 157

Index Rifkind, Hugo 103, 109 Rifkind, Sir Malcolm 36, 86, 88 Roberts, Andrew 143 Rose, Richard 31–2, 35, 38, 61, 84, 116 Sackville-West, Vita 36–7 Salisbury, Lord Robert (3rd Marquess) 3, 10, 12, 93 Salisbury, Lord Robert (7th Marquess) 122–3, 125 Salmond, Alex 103, 108 Sandbrook, Dominic 81, 138 Santayana, George 48 Schwarz, Bill 17 Scottish Conservatives 86, 88, 92, 101, 104, 108, 146 Scottish National Party (SNP) 78, 103–4, 108, 122, 148, 151, 153 Scottish Parliament 89, 91, 93, 103–4 Scruton, Sir Roger 11–12, 13, 25, 28, 47, 110, 125 Seawright, David 44–5, 50, 61 Seldon, Sir Anthony 155 Sherman, Sir Alfred 7, 28, 114 Shipman, Tim 147 Singapore syndrome 114 single market (EU) 134–5, 136, 145 Skinner, Dennis 156 sovereign people 24, 88, 119 Spicer, Lord Michael 140 split in the mind 30–3, 91, 129 Stapleton, Julia 23–4, 31 Stokes, Donald 63 Sturgeon, Nicola 122, 151 Taylor, A.J.P. 26–7, 34–5, 37, 98, 107, 115 Thatcher, Lady Margaret 7, 10, 18, 19, 25, 37–8, 43, 48, 51, 56–7, 65, 66–8, 70, 72,

189 75, 86–8, 96, 114, 129, 130–1, 133, 137, 143, 155 Thatcherism 5, 7, 10, 30, 50–1, 56, 58, 66, 134, 152 Tilley, James 68, 70, 72, 73, 80, 81 Timothy, Nick 79–82, 123, 153 Tombs, Robert 113–15, 120, 141–2, 146–7, 148 Tory democracy 25 Trench, Alan 96–7 UK Independence Party (UKIP) 25, 47, 59, 67, 72–9, 82, 84, 103, 108, 114, 116, 132–3, 135, 147, 151, 156 Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force (UCUNF) 94 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 93, 147, 155 Utley, T.E. 3, 13, 29, 81 Wallace, Mark 85, 86, 89 Walsha, Robert 51 Walshe, Garvan 155 Ware, Vron 111–12, 113 Wellings, Ben 114–15, 145 Welsh Assembly 89, 91 Welsh Conservatives 123 West Lothian Question 100–1, 103, 106, 118, 121 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey 156 White Van Conservatism 77 Willetts, Lord David 32, 37, 39–40 Wilson, Lord Harold 45, 144 Woolf, Virginia 10, 35, 36, 64, 130 Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine 17–18, 19, 59–60 Wright, Canon Kenyon 88 Young, G.M. 40–1