David Cameron As Leader of the Conservative Party Will Doubtless Face a General Election

330 Years of the Tory Party Talk given by Paul Langford, Rector of Lincoln College, at the London Dining Club on Monday 1 March 2010

2010 will see the 85th election fought by the tories. Parliament goes back much further. But the breakthrough occurred in 1688, turning Britain into a limited monarchy, and ensuring that parliament met annually. In the 1680s crown supporters were called tories or Irish banditti, their opponents whigs or Scottish presbyterians. The English always enjoy Celtic failings. The origins were gradually lost, though abuse lingered on. The saying that ‘a Whig can smell a Turd at a distance, a tory not till his nose is in it’ became a proverb. i Tories looked back to Charles I and his anglican church. The arrival of William of Orange and the Revolution of 1688, divided their party. Even so, in 1710 the tory party carried a large majority of votes for the church against nonconformity, for the people against endless war on France. Jonathan Swift called 1710 the year of tory revolution. This was the first tory ministry, Robert Harley its first premier.

It did not last. Queen Anne’s death in 1714 divided tories among jacobites and hanoverians. Sir Robert Walpole described all tories as jacobites. Tories seeking a whig career left speechless and dim-witted squires to 44 years in the wilderness. This is not the full story. County electors kept a hundred MPs in the Commons. Whigs admitted that without a standing army they were never safe from the people of England.ii In populous towns opposition grew, calling itself tory. When George III succeeded in 1760 he announced the end of parties. That was not the outcome but he certainly caused chaos. The tory phoenix stirred. Burke noted that tories gave up their idol but kept the idolatry.

George III accepted both whig and tory. Most premiers up to 1830 approved tories without using the term. North was such, of tory family, and Chancellor of Oxford University, the heart of the anglican church. The younger Pitt trusted tories, though he ‘never would have allowed any person to call him a Tory'.iii Lord Liverpool was also cautious though his background was tory. Nonetheless the words ‘ultra tory’ and ‘liberal tory’ were common. Peel preferred ‘conservativism’ until in 1846 he split it in two, protectionists and peelites. Conservatives revived, until in the 1880s they called themselves unionists, and in the mid-twentieth century they reappeared as conservatives once more. In any event the press has never given up the tory label. Disraeli used the name tory from 1862. After all he flew the flag of tory democracy. Toryism was not buried. ‘Big Ben’ George Bentinck, long a Norfolk member, even designated himself simply as a tory in Dod’s Companion.iv

There is no doubt that the tory party is unique for longevity. Whig identity withered in the 1880s. Liberals had not been born until the 1830s. Their twentieth-century decline dwindled to less than ten members. Whether liberal democrats have revived liberalism is not clear. Labour had two members in the 1870s and took half a century to become a major party. Radicals have been numerous but were never a party. None of these comes

1 close to 330 years of continuity. Does that matter? Is it merely a purposeless label?

Are tories British or English? The Welsh gentry were certainly tories from 1680 to 1868. Since then Welsh tories have managed only ten or less MPs. In 2001 Welsh tories had no MP. In eighteenth-century Scotland tories were taken for jacobites. Johnson was not impressed. ‘Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance, as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty; for he has no principle.’v After all tories were anglicans in England, rarely non- conformists. In any case the Scottish establishment was whiggish. Only gradually did Scots see themselves as tories, thanks to Sir Walter Scott and George IV.vi As to post 1832 politics, Conservatives have exceeded half of Scottish seats only in 1900, 1926 and 1955, and then by only one seat. They lost all their seats in 1997, and regained only one in 2001 and 2005? Overall, Scottish whigs, liberals, labour and nationalists in one period or another have almost always outvoted tories. Many Scottish tories have connections with England or Northern Ireland, sometimes without Scottish accents. Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister, remarked in 1888 that ‘Scotch Tories are difficult people to deal with; they have a strange generic resemblance to French Legitimists.’vii

Tories have been celebrated for their patriotism, from John Bull to the Falklands, to the irritation of their opponents. Not that their leaders were all sentimental. Peel never clove to the spirit of his party, preferring the middle class. Lord Salisbury never suffered emotional pangs on behalf of his party; he protected his own class by associating it with suburban snobbery. Others leaders offered a wider rhetoric. Canning ’s oratory carried patriotic ideology far beyond parliament. Disraeli summarised ‘Toryism a[i]s the national spirit exhibiting itself in the maintenance of the national institutions, and in support of the national character which those institutions have formed.’ viii He traced it onwards to Tory Democracy and the Primrose League. Baldwin’s sermons on the English character, Churchill’s reliance on his brand of history, and Thatcher’s faith in work ethic and common sense as once a Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter had recalled it, all looked back, Thatcher included, to visceral rather than ideological faiths. Tory policies have been pragmatical and convenient over times, divine right, imperial supremacy, counter-revolution, the corn laws, tory democracy, unionism, tariff reform, Butskellism and the welfare state, the common market, the market economy. Whether tories can embrace the constitutional changes that have gathered speed in recent years remains fully to be seen. But their capacity for survival remains impressive.

Aside from two long spells in opposition (1714-1757, 1846-1872), the conservative party has rarely been out of office for very long. Since 1874 it has been in government, including coalitions, during 84 out of 136 years. ix During that time it suffered three debacles: 1906, 1945, and 1997. Recovery from the first took time, from the second only six years, from the third – who knows? In any case it saw off two other great parties, whigs and liberals.

Whigs were the best bet on the modernisation of Britain, throughout its history. Yet whigs were notoriously snobbish. Whig cabinets were exclusive.

2 Burke never featured in a cabinet, nor did Sheridan. Canning left the whigs because as the son of an actress he would climb higher with the tories. When he became leader of the tories and briefly their premier, Melbourne, could not fail to sneer at his ‘tone of a clerk’.x Macaulay did succeed in joining Melbourne’s cabinet but at the expense of his humiliation. Whigs certainly saw themselves as legislators, embracing ideas and measures. But embracing men not of their ilk was another matter. The whig Lord John Russell, depended much on Peel, yet he insisted that Peel was not a gentleman.xi

Tories were reluctant to act as legislators until the 1870s. Dicey called it ‘Old Toryism or Legislative Quiescence.’xii On the other hand they lacked the aristocratic tone of the whigs. When they did come to dominate the upper house from the 1790s it was because they elevated men of money and profession. Cabinets from Pitt to Wellington were far from blue-blooded; Tories saw no difficulty in welcoming class at many levels. Whigs complained that appointing a tory Lord Lieutenant of Kent who had no estate and merely a villa near London in 1870, was monstrous.xiii Men of money were not all followers of whigs. As Ruskin put it, 'I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school;' including Sir Walter Scott, and Homer.xiv The father was a partner in a wine business, the son educated at Christ Church. After a great gain in 1885 of 50 out of 64 seats, Salisbury ‘discovered that middle-class ‘London is really the base of Tory principles.’xv

Moreover tories by no means ignored plebeians. The reforming whigs of 1832 did nothing to impress the working class, as the chartist movement proved. It was a tory minister in Wellington’s government, Lord Ashley, ‘who led the factory cause in Parliament.’xvi Disraeli’s reform act of 1867 also took his opponents by surprise. Bagehot saw clearly that the tories had no real distrust of the people, whereas their opponents did,xvii including two famous liberals, John Bright and Robert Lowe, who were far more frightened of democracy than Disraeli was.xviii

Are parties destroyed or do they destroy themselves? John Morley, a great cabinet minister, of Lincoln College, wrote shrewdly about whig splits over the centuries.xix Gladstone had always packed his cabinets with whigs but his obsession with Irish home rule practically finished off whiggery, throwing in its lot with the tories. Liberalism also sank itself after 1916 thanks to Lloyd George and Asquith. It gave Baldwin and MacDonald the spur to get rid of it in the 1920s. Politics is not pretty, and tories have certainly employed brutality. They were inflexible during the American and French wars under George III. They never forgave Peel after 1846. Under Balfour and Bonar Law they were closer to civil war in Ireland than whigs or liberals had conceived. Ramsay Macdonald pointed out that labour was far better behaved than tories in democratic politics.xx The ‘forty thieves’, business men who made their fortunes in the 1914-18 war, shocked other parties and some conservatives.xxi As for the disastrous liberal premier, Lord John Russell, the most that his cabinet would do was to hope the opposition would get rid of him. Compare the Tories’ dismissal of Goderich in 1827-8 and Mrs Thatcher’s ejection after three elections. They were far less polite.

3 How important is leadership? Whigs unwisely depended on nobility. Walpole and Gladstone were the only whig premiers who were commoners. The rest were all blue-blooded, Henry Pelham and his brother Newcastle, Devonshire, Rockingham, Grafton, Portland, Grenville, Grey, Melbourne, Russell, Aberdeen, Palmerston. What a roll call of titles. Even in the liberal party of the 1890s, with few whigs left, the Earl of Rosebery had to be elevated to the premiership.

Tories have sought leaders much further. Good or bad tories took risks, from the time of Harley and St John, Chatham, North, Shelburne, Pitt, Addington, Perceval, Castlereagh, Canning, Peel, Disraeli, Lord Randolph Churchill, Chamberlain, Bonar Law, Baldwin, Churchill, Heath, Thatcher, Major. None of these choices were obvious. Taking only one, as A.P. Thornton observed later of Bonar Law, ‘The Tories found themselves under the political direction of an ironmaster from New Brunswick via Glasgow, who had no knowledge of their traditions, no sympathy for their habits, no interest in their ideas, and no plans for the future at all.'xxii He was nonetheless much valued by his party. Wellington, Derby, Salisbury, Balfour, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home would have fitted quite well into whiggery, but many others would have not. Incidentally the three Labour premiers who have won their own overall majority in government, Attlee, Wilson, Blair, all came through the whig equivalent of meritocracy in place of aristocracy, middle class males, two from public schools, and all three from Oxford.

As for the tories today Cameron is an interesting choice following William Haig who went to a Comprehensive School at Rotherham, Iain Duncan-Smith at service schools, and Michael Howard, from Llanelli Grammar School. Douglas-Home apparently brought the Etonian tradition among premiers to an end. Douglas Hurd and other notable Etonians seem to have agreed. In 1997 only seven per cent of tory MPs were Etonians, against twenty-five per cent in 1950. On the other hand the tory tradition has a remarkable way of surviving at all costs, frequently by turning its back on its own earlier habits. If Cameron becomes Prime Minister, it will have been yet another successful risk in the long history of the tories.

4 5 i Samuel Curwen, The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, ed. A. Oliver, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1972, ii. ii Mordaunt 7321, 7517. iii Letters of the Right Hon. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Bart. to various Friends, ed. Rev. Sir Gilbert Frankland Lewis, Bart., London, 187, p. 395. iv Henry W. Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Gladstone Parliament, 1880-1885, London, 1886, pp. 381-2. v Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. R.W. Chapman, Oxford 1970, p. 342. vi Amédée Pichot], Historical and Literary Tour of a Foreigner in England and Scotland, 2 vols., London, 1825, ii. 422-3. vii Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan, London, 2000, p. 505. viii Whigs and Whiggism: Political Writings by Benjamin Disraeli, ed. William Hutcheon, Port Washington, 1971, pp. 81, 417. ix 1881-6, 1892-5, 1902-15, 1923-4, 1929-31, 1945-51, 1964-70, 1974-9, 1997-2010 –. x L.G. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848, Oxford, 1997, p. 111? xi Georgiana Blakiston, Lord William Russell and his Wife 1815-1846, London, 1972, p. 220. xii A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn., London, 1914, p. 57. xiii Leveson Gower, Hon. F. ed., Letters of Harriet Countess Granville 1810-1845,2 vols., London, 1894, i. 177. C. 1870? xiv John Ruskin, Praeterita: The Autobiography of John Ruskin, Oxford, 1989, pp. 5, 161-2. xv John Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830, London, 1998, p. xvi Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830-1852, Oxford, 1990, p. 146. xvii Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, London, 1968, p. 389. xviii Dicey, p. 253. xix Morley, Walpole, xx Spencer, Asquith, xxi Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, London, 1953, p. 141. xxii A. P. Thornton, The Habit of Authority: Paternalism in British History, London, 1966, pp. 313-4.