Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Well, folks, this is it. My last ConHome column. Eleven years of writing for this site might very well make me its longest-running contributor, excluding staff. Still, nothing in this sublunary life is forever, and the time has come to move on.
Move on to what? I’m glad you asked me that, because it sets me up for this week’s column. I am writing a history of Toryism from the very beginning. Incredibly, no one has tried it before. There are wonderful histories of the Conservatives out there, generally starting with either Pitt the Younger or Sir Robert Peel (I especially recommend Robin Harris’s 2013 magnum opus). And, naturally, there are histories of the earlier Tories, most recently George Owers’s gripping The Rage of Party.
But no one, as far as I can make out, has attempted to tell the whole story from the seventeenth century to the present day, bridging the chasm of the 1760s and 1770s when there was no organised Tory Party (though there were plenty of Tories, some of whom sat in Parliament). I’ll be spending more time in the Bodleian Library, withdrawing from the ugly politics of the present into the altogether more congenial worlds of Clarendon, Bolingbroke, Salisbury, Eden, and Thatcher.
All of which tees me up to consider the question that so many pundits are asking. Is the Conservative Party finished? Has the oldest party in the world (I date the start of our two-party system to the vote on the Grand Remonstrance in November 1641) run its course?
Hmm. Don’t be too quick to write it off. It may not continue in precisely its present form, but that is nothing new. Over the past three-and-a-half centuries, the Tories have been through lots of mergers and demergers, and have called themselves all manner of names. A section of the population is drawn to order, property and the continuity of our institutions, above all Crown, Parliament and Church; our party has always spoken to and for that section of the population.
Oddly enough, one name that we have never formally used is “Tory”. Our candidates have stood as the Church Party, Conservatives, Unionists and Nationals, but the word Tory was used by our opponents, and taken up only informally and as an example of semantic reclamation, like “Yankee”, “Suffragette”, or “Impressionist”. Indeed, for all but the last 26 years of our history, we did not have any legal existence at all.
I don’t think we are yet finished. Labour was widely thought to be done when 28 of its MPs defected to the SDP, one after another, in 1981, pushing into a poor third in the polls. Labour had to work its way back into people’s trust, but it went on to win three successive elections.
Obviously, longevity does not guarantee survival. As I say, nothing in this sublunary life is forever. But don’t dismiss the resilience of a party that has outlived all its Leftist rivals by standing, not so much for doctrines, as for values: patriotism, distrust of bureaucracy, suspicion of excessive social change, strong families and so on.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume (from our party’s perspective) a realistic worst-case scenario. Reform surges, and we are reduced to three or four dozen MPs, mainly in the Home Counties and, slightly more anomalously, rural Scotland. Maybe we have agreed some kind of electoral pact with Reform, allowing both parties to win more seats. Maybe we have duked it out, hurting both parties and leaving Farage short of a majority.
Perhaps we go in with Reform, forming an electoral coalition that might eventually lead to a merger (qv Liberal Unionists, National Liberals). Perhaps we wait for them to fail and hope to come back as the party of fiscal responsibility. Whatever the precise details, one thing can be said with some certainty.
Eventually, unless our electoral system changes, a single party will emerge as the dominant force on the Right. Whatever the exact lineage of that party, I can guarantee that, before long, its opponents will take to calling its supporters “Tories” – and, after a while, its supporters will fall into the habit themselves.
Don’t believe me? Consider what happened in Canada, where the ruling Conservatives were obliterated at the 1993 election and, some years later, gobbled up by Reform. The two parties eventually merged and, after various names on the way, became the Conservative Party of Canada.
And how are they referred to in the press? That’s right: the Tories. Don’t underestimate the power of a very old brand.