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Strange Death of Tory England

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"The Strange Death of Tory England" was written in what seemed to be a dark age for the British Conservative (or Tory) Party. Under the moniker of "New Labour", Tony Blair has stolen the wind from the Tories' wings, and co-opted the Thatcherite Revolution, and defeated the Conservative Party in three successive elections. Wheatcroft's book is about the causes for the Tory failure, but it is also a statement of belief in the party's power to reinvent itself and to resume its relevance. The belief seemed to have been vindicated by recent events, under the leadership of a young, articulate, and remarkably Blair-like leader (David Cameron), the Tory party has done very well in the recent local government elections - the victory of Conservative Boris Johnson in the London mayoral race has been noted world wide.

Wheatcroft's book is very English; it is full of English idioms and of allusions to English history and culture that are somewhat opaque to merely amateur anglophiles such as myself. I was able to follow the plot, but I admit to be baffled by some of the details; if you're unfamiliar with the politics of the United Kingdom, "The Strange Death" isn't for you.

Wheatcroft's book is also unusual in not being a straightforward history or analysis of the trends he discusses. Instead, it is something like a meditation, jumping from topic to topic and through the ages as he portrays various aspects of British Conservatism.

The main theme of Wheatcroft's book is the buregoisification of the Tories - how an aristocratic party became the party of the middle classes; how Libertarianism became the prominent ideology and how, in a critic's phrase, "the plebian virtues of self reliance and self help ... [replaced the] patrician ones of chivalry and noblesse oblige" (quoted on p. 164). Perhaps most surprising for an outsider, in Wheatcroft's story of the 20th century Tory party, the star isn't Winston Churchill - it's Margaret Thatcher.

Wheatcroft's account of Thatcher's rise, and indeed of her accomplishments, is ambiguous. Roughly, Thatcher has been the representative of the so-called "dry" Tories (as opposed to "wet") the Libertarian wing of the party. As part of the world wide movement to the right (Right wing parties took power in the US, the UK, Israel, Latin America, and anti-Communists became significant players in the USSR) of the 1970s and 1980s and as part of a rebellion against the aristocratic leadership of the party, Thatcher became the leader in 1975. Thatcher promoted a genuine, if imperfect, libertarian and nationalistic line against an out of date Socialist and Pacifistic Labour - its 1983 manifesto has been called "The Longest Suicide Note in History". After an uneasy start, Thatcher as PM revolutionized Britain, fighting in the Falklands, undermining the Unions, Cutting Taxes and promoting Euro-skepticism.

The very success of the Tories has been their undoing, Wheatcroft argues. The Tories have exhausted their agenda, and saw that agenda not only co-opted but also completed by the New Labour, which took the significant step of granting independence to Britain's Central Bank. Not only was the Tory agenda exhausted, but its sense of purpose has disappeared with the fall of the Socialism in Britain and in the world. After disposing of Margaret Thatcher in a coop, a series of weak leaders led the Tories to a single victory against a not-yet-organized Old Labour and three defeats against Tony Blair and the New Labour.

Wheatcroft opened his book by reminding us that the Tories have survived rough patches before, and it seems to me, and admitted novice to the British scene, that the malaise Wheatcroft diagnosed in the Tories can now be seen in the Labour. No longer united behind the charismatic Tony Blair, the Labour party is more committed to the unpopular Iraq War than the Tories. It's arguable that leadership in new issues of British politics (such as the environmentalism) is to be found in the Conservative party. And with the downturn of Britain's economy, the British people may well vote for change.

Wheatcroft's book is aimed at insiders, and it's hard for an outsider to judge it fairly. I enjoyed "The Strange Death of Tory England" but the idiosyncrasy proved a barrier to deeper understanding.

If you were a member of the Tory part in the UK today, what strategy would you employ to surmount Labour's commanding lead? When I asked this of a Tory MP a few years back the answer I got was, "we'll implement better." An honest answer, but so much for the philosophical divide. I don't know I could have answered any better, let alone as well, but I do know that understanding the Tory disadvantage is aided enormously by Mr. Wheatcroft's survey. As the title of his book suggests, it was not just the Tories as a a party, but Tory England iself that declined. The fox hunt, the Church, and all the values once associated with being a Tory are culturally passe in the 21cUK. As a party, the Tory party, as the right-wing in general, by and large won the political wars; so much so, that we find on questions of policy little discontinuity between Lady Thatcher and Tony Blair. In fact, the National Review correspondent Denis Boyles seems more correct than not in arguing that Blair's chief critics are to be found on the left. With private capital essential, big government suspect and chivalry risible the world seems tailor-made for Labour. What the party won politically; it lost culturally. While there is consensus on the former, today's British voter quite clearly prefers the latter. Compare that with the United States. The distance on "value questions" between the two parties is much greater than on policy questions, but on values the Republican's enjoy the same ascendancy in conservative America that Labour enjoys on the other side of the less conservative Atlantic. There is much more to Wheatcroft's book than this single theme. In fact, much of his account concerns the internal political dynamics of the Conservatives, commencing with Macleod's refusal to serve under Home in the sixties, the latter having risen to power through the cabal of an innermost "magic circle." Large sections of this survey were, in honesty, new to me. Other, particularly American readers might find themselves on foreign ground as well, but tread on. Differences between Europe and the United States show no sign of diminishing in importance anytime soon and Wheatcroft's well-written analysis of our most steadfast of EU allies is well worth knowing.