A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830
by John Charmley
Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99

THE Tory Party has been with us for getting on for two centuries, and its mindset has been with us since the first cavemen began trading flint scrapers. Indeed, Ug and Og can be readily identified by a cursory glance across the Opposition benches. Suits may have replaced animal skins but barbarian hearts still beat beneath them.

Nonetheless, as John Charmley, Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia, asserts in this new edition of his history of Conservative politics, the Tories continue to fascinate historians. Not as much as one might wish, because exclusively historical interest would render their party extinct, but certainly enough to keep volumes of this nature rolling off the presses.

I wonder why. The story has been told over and over again. Even the new material available from the last tumultuous decade has been thrashed senseless – much like the party itself. There isn’t much room for a new book, particularly one that gives only 20 pages to the post-1997 period. The saving grace of Charmley’s offering is its occasional wit, for there are no blinding insights into the Tory beast here.

The Conservative Party exists to conserve, he observes. It is the party of the status quo, but “unfortunately for it and its adherents, all things change”. The process of change poses a fundamental challenge to Conservatism as a political force but, by and large, Tories have adapted to change, he argues, thereby scoring “great success”. That all depends on what you mean by success. Successful for those who benefit from its predatory instincts, naturally, but not for those who are preyed upon.

Modern Conservatives insist that socialism has been tamed, at least in Britain. Charmley detects a sea change with the election of Tony Blair, pointing out that until Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives had dominated British politics without ever dominating the political agenda. “By 1997, this position was exactly reversed. Conservative ideas were so dominant that ‘New Labour’ intended to work within the Thatcherite legacy rather than abolish it.” That has become the conventional wisdom. Yet Thatcher did not abolish the welfare state, or the NHS, or trade unions and their links to Labour. She privatised and she legislated, but she did not eliminate the collective spirit. It might just as well be argued that she had to work within the Old Labour tradition. Instead of Butskellism, Thattleeism, you might say.

Charmley – who is plainly simpatico with the Tories – further argues that by the 1990s “the Conservative Party had been too successful for its own good” which is a clear case of wishful drinking. He identifies a dearth of long-term thinking or planning after the Blair landslide, lamenting that the Conservatives didn’t offer voters “experience and tough pragmatism” to bring down Labour. Instead, they were too busy indulging in ’80s-Labour style ideological infighting.

Only when they learned to shut up about Europe and pretend to embrace Britain as it is – rather than as a country of old maids cycling to church and warm beer – did the Tories again present a credible alternative government. As they do now, with David Cameron, praised in this book as “instinctively a liberal conservative [with] a healthy appetite for power”. Forget ideology, what Cameron wants to preserve is not the past, but a Tory in Number 10.

The trouble with long lead times – even for a paperback like this – is that they make a mockery of judgments. So Charmley ends his vista of Toryism from Peel to the present day with a verdict that must be many months old: “The odds remained on a Labour victory whenever the election took place.” Such conclusions demonstrate why historians should stick to history, and leave political journalism to the experts.

Paul Routledge