This article is from the February issue of Total Politics
The Conservatives: A History
Robin Harris
Bantam Press, £30
As Robin Harris points out in his introduction to The Conservatives: A History, the last one-volume history of the Conservative Party was written by the late Professor John Ramsden. His An Appetite for Power (1999) was published just as the author had given up his membership of the party. Harris stresses that his interpretation of the history of the Conservative Party is different from that of Ramsden, who covered organisation, campaigning and wider political issues.
At 632 pages, this is a substantial book, and the author brings to his research and writing both the work he put into his superb biography of Talleyrand and experience gained as director of the Conservative Research Department, and then as a member of Thatcher’s No 10 Policy Unit.
Harris takes a ‘high politics’ interpretation of his history, which concentrates on the lives and leadership of its leaders and prime ministers. It is really a book in two parts, with the first 13 chapters of 375 pages being a traditional and stimulating account. The final five chapters, from Eden to Cameron – 150 pages – are more of a polemic, moving very quickly through the lives of Thatcher and Major. In his introduction, the author points out that he has written a biography of Thatcher that will not be published until her death, so he is reluctant to reveal too much.
But she, alongside Disraeli and Salisbury, is a hero of his, while the tradition of Baldwin, Macmillan, Major and now Cameron receives short shrift. Harris argues that the Conservative Party has survived for more than 150 years – and for most of that period in government – because it had managed change, appealed to public sentiment, ditched unpopular policies and leaders, split its opponents, and had a touch of magic. But Conservative leaders have often attempted change against the conservative, if not reactionary, instincts of the party’s parliamentarians and activists.Balfour dithered, and, as Harris notes, he saw the Carlton Club as “infested by the political bore”, and “when Balfour or any other Conservative lost the bores, he lost the party”.
On Cameron, Robin Harris concludes: “Mr Cameron and his closest colleagues will probably have to face the choice they most dread: whether to side with the Conservative Party on the backbenches and in the country, or whether to cling to their coalition partners.”
Keith Simpson is the Conservative MP for Broadland and PPS to William Hague