Liberal Toryism in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

DUST has scarcely had time to settle on Lady Thatcher; yet already a thick sediment of historical significance attaches to the fifteen years of her ascendancy. The period between 1975 and 1990 looks likely to prove as significant for the political ideologies of the twenty-first century as that between, say, 1885 and 1906 currently looks for our own. In the twilight world of John Major (who appears part-antidote, part-surrogate), Conservative ideology is becoming informed by reviews from both sides as they reflect on not only what went wrong but what it was that seemingly went so right, from a party point of view, for so long. We have just had placed before us, for example, John Campbell's admirable biography of Sir Edward Heath, on theone hand, and Alan Clark's transfixing diaries very much on the other. Such documents supplement amass of theorising and comment by political scientists and journalists, most of which dwells on the twin themes of discontinuity and dichotomy. The history of the Tory party is seen to enter a period of catastrophe by the end of the Heath government out of which there emerges a distinct party ideology which people call ‘Thatcherism’: a ‘New Conservatism’ radically distinct from the compromise and accommodation that marked politics after 1951. But that process was contested within the party—hence a dichotomy between two persuasions: the hawks and the doves, the dries and the wets, the Tories and the Conservatives, the true blues and the Liberals. Language of this kind has a particular interest to historians. They want to raise issues about its chronological deep-structure: how ‘new’ was this ‘New Conservatism’?. They recognise the need to situate the dichotomies of the moment in a wider context of Conservative experience: how singular is a doctrine of dichotomy within Conservative party doctrine? Above all they bring into question bald postulates about the nature of current Conservatism which do not compare experience across time