Blake The Conservative Party from Peel to Major

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28760-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Therewas no more appropriate person to write this book. Robert Blake was the doyen of Tory historians being most famous for his unsurpassed biography of Disraeli (to be reissued in Faber Finds). His history of the Conservative Party was first published in 1970. It then went as far as Churchill. A subsequent edition took it up to Thatcher and the final edition, the one being reissued by Faber Finds, to Major. For the span it covers, it remains the definitive one-volume history. 'His consummate insight into the whole of the political scene, and his power to communicate the enjoyment of it, makes this exciting reading for anyone remotely interested in British political and social history, or even in the English character.' Sunday Times 'This book is full of insights and enriched throughout by sparkling commentary' Evening Standard 'An up-to-date history of the Party was wanted. Mr Blake supplies it with lucidity, scholarship and serene worldliness' Guardian

Robert Blake (1916-2003) was the pre-eminent Tory historian of his day. In addition to his masterpiece, his biography of Disraeli, his books include Bonar Law: The Unknown Prime Minister, The Conservative Party from Peel to John Major and a volume in the Paladin History of England, (a series which he edited), The Decline of Power, 1915-1964. These and Disraeli's Grand Tour are all being reissued in Faber Finds.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blake, Robert

Leseproben

The ancestry of the party

The ancestry of the Conservative party has been variously traced. Some discern a continuous tradition from Strafford, Laud and Charles I, ‘the holocaust of direct taxation’, as Disraeli termed him, through the Tories of the time of William III and Anne to the younger Pitt and his successors. Others have been unwilling to go back so far. Suspecting that the old Tory party, which Walpole was able to ruin (thanks to the Hanoverian succession and the cowardice of Bolingbroke), had little connection with anything that came after, they have preferred to place its origin with Pitt and the great crisis of 1782–4. Yet others, uneasy at the fact that Pitt never called himself a Tory let alone a Conservative, have endeavoured to place the ancestry later with Perceval, Liverpool, or most commonly with Peel.

It is not easy to date the origin of a political party with any precision. As Sir Ivor Jennings observes:1

We must remember that in Britain a party is not a legal entity except in the sense that any association having funds vested in trustees or a committee is a legal entity…. If a party were a legal entity created by charter or legislation, like a college or a public company, we could give it an age and celebrate its birthday.

This is exactly the trouble. Even if we were to take the matter of central party funds vested in some sort of trustees it is difficult to discover the facts. The researches of Professor Gash2 show the obscurity of the subject. It is not clear that any such fund existed for the Conservative or Tory party before 1832, or even in the election of 1832. There was, however, an election fund in the elections of 1835, 1837, 1841 and 1847. Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington were its trustees and it was administered by the Earl of Rosslyn, the leading member of the party’s election committee. But one would hardly date the origins of the Conservative party in 1835, merely because of the fund.

Are there other institutional features which would enable us to identify the continuity of a political party? One characteristic of a modern political party is a centralised bureaucracy and a countrywide mass organisation. As far as the Conservatives are concerned one can be reasonably precise here. Both these features came into being as a result of a challenge created by the first major step towards mass democracy, the Reform Bill of 1867. In that very year on November 12 at the Freemasons Tavern, London, was founded the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations with the avowed purpose of organising working class support for the government True, a Mr Eadie of Newcastle who said he was the son of a working man declared that the word ‘Conservative’ would be a fatal handicap in Radical areas, adding that he personally ‘was not a Conservative, he never pretended to be one, and he never should be’. But his attempt to elaborate on this interesting theme was drowned not surprisingly ‘in hisses and confusion’. In 1870 the Central Office was founded and it is thus possible to say that a century ago the most characteristic institutions of the modern Conservative party had come into being.

The form and features of the National Union and the Central Office today would be fully recognisable to a Conservative party worker of the 1870s. Considering how much has changed in political life since then, one can only be surprised at this continuity – a tribute to Disraeli’s organisational power, or if not to his, to that of the people whom he selected to do the work. Is there, then, a case for stopping our search into the past at the early 1870s and dating the Conservative party from then? This would accord with the idea of Disraeli as the founder of modern Conservatism – a notion widely held and by no means devoid of substance. For Disraeli not only innovated in the field of organisation. He did so too in the far more important field of ideas; or, if this is too big a claim, he certainly expressed old ideas with a personal style and colour which made them seem new. It cannot be wholly accidental or erroneous that so many modern Conservatives look back on Disraeli as their prophet, high priest and philosopher rolled into one.

Yet however strong these arguments, it simply does not sound plausible to begin the story of the Conservative party then. To do so is to ignore a continuity of outlook, of parliamentary organisation and of succession to the leadership which undoubtedly goes back earlier, though just how far is the point we are trying to discover. The Conservatives of the late 1860s and early 1870s did not feel themselves to be in any sense a new party or to be making a fresh start; many of them distrusted Disraeli; a small minority positively detested him. No contemporary Conservative would have regarded him as the founder of the party – least of all Disraeli himself.

Perhaps at this stage it is worth glancing at Disraeli’s own theory of the history of the party which he came in the end to lead. As so often in his career his view of history varied with the political circumstances in which he found himself. It depended upon whether he was a rebel or an Establishment man. In 1880 when he had just resigned as Prime Minister but had accepted an invitation from the party to continue as their leader, he wrote to Lord Lytton: ‘They [the Tory party] have existed for more than a century and a half as an organised political connexion and having survived the loss of the American Colonies, the first Napoleon, and Lord Grey’s Reform Act, they must not be snuffed out.’ This suggests belief in continuity since the early eighteenth century. The same view in more detail is expressed forty-five years earlier in his Vindication of the English constitution where Bolingbroke is regarded as the founder of a Tory tradition which continues through William Pitt the younger, Burke and apparently Lord Liverpool (for although he is not named his measures are praised), the Duke of Wellington and Peel himself. Disraeli makes no attempt to contrast Tories and Conservatives, merely observing that ‘in times of great political change and rapid political transition it will generally be observed that political parties find it convenient to re-baptise themselves’.

But in between the time when he was seeking Peel’s favour in the 1830s and the time of his own ascendancy a generation later the story was quite different. He was a rebel in the 1840s. Needing a Tory philosophy of history as a counterweight to the Whig philosophy, and at the same time determined to put Peel in his proper place he advanced in his novels an ingenious version of ‘true Toryism’. This begins with Charles I, and an inclusive list of members contains the Jacobite, Sir John Hynde Cotton, Sir William Wyndham who was Bolingbroke’s lieutenant, Bolingbroke himself of course, Carteret, Shelburne and the younger Pitt. But at this juncture it becomes necessary to distinguish. If Pitt’s successors in the leadership were to be included, then, as Disraeli saw it, there would be no means of avoiding a lineal descent through Addington, Portland, Perceval and Liverpool, which would end in Peel; and Peel, for a number of reasons, one of which was his refusal of office to Disraeli in 1841, was just the man on whom he least wished to confer this accolade.

Therefore it becomes necessary to argue that things somehow went wrong during Pitt’s reign. Pitt himself was a great man but the Tory apostolic succession stopped with him. He is ‘the best of the Tory statesmen but who [sic] in the unparalleled and confounding emergencies of his later years had been forced unfortunately for England to relinquish Toryism’. His successors were not in any sense standard-bearers of ‘true Toryism’ or, as Disraeli sometimes and significantly called it, ‘the English system’. They were a ‘factitious league’ who ‘had shuffled themselves into power by clinging to the skirts of a great minister’. They are the ancestors of ‘Conservatism’.

Disraeli’s denunciation in Coningsby of Conservatism as practised by Peel is famous.3 Less well known is his apostrophe to Toryism in Sybil.

But we forget; Sir Robert Peel is not leader of the Tory party – the party that … [and a long list follows of its virtues and achievements]. In a Parliamentary sense, that great party has ceased to exist; but I will believe it still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated memory of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and in noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks up to the Most High. It can count its heroes and its martyrs; they have met in its behalf plunder, prescription, and death. Nor when it finally yielded to the iron progress of oligarchical supremacy, was its catastrophe inglorious. Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St John; and breathed in the intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham. Even now it is not dead but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet arise from the tomb over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the Subject, and to announce that power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the...