It Could Be Said #66 The Many Lives and Deaths of The Tory Party

Will argues that the Tory Party is older and more flexible than most people realise

The rise of Reform UK in the polls since Nigel Farage return to frontline politics a year ago has raised the spectre of the far-right replacing the Tories as the main rivals to Labour and the other progressive parties. Such talk is then of course followed by astonishment at how disinterested the likes of Kemi Badenoch seem whilst presiding over the death of the West’s oldest political party.

But that raises the question. Just how old is the Tory Party? Because like any good monster its taken many names and experienced many forms.

Send In The Tories

Famously the word “Tory” was introduced as an insult for those MPs who formed an inchoate pro-King faction in the various arguments that ultimately lead to The Glorious Revolution. The success enjoyed by the Whigs and their handpicked monarchs then destroyed the Tories as an organised faction for the obvious reason that you can’t be the King’s posse if you are somewhat ambivalent about the current King.

However if there was a iron law of English politics in the pre-democratic world its that the King would ultimately fall out with the most powerful aristocrats, and so look to smaller landowners in the broader gentry as an alternative political base. This would happen under George III who would appoint William Pitt the Younger as his anti-Whig Prime Minister in 1793. While Pitt would never call himself a Tory, it was around his ministry that what is commonly called the Second Tory Party would be formed, with his former ministers and one notable military commander dominating politics in the 1810s and 1820s. This party would fall apart as Irish Catholics and the British Middle Class became increasingly assertive against a state repression which could no longer be justified by the Napoleonic Wars. The Tories would lose the 1830 election and then slump to just 175 MPs in the first election held after the Great Reform Act extended the franchise.

Curiously this is the moment people would cite as the last official death of the Tory Party as famously Sir Robert Peel comes forward with his Tamworth Manifesto that proclaims a new Conservative Party. But his party was far less new than say New Labour had been, after all it was still dominated by all the people who had been ministers in the 1820s. And it was arguably shorter lived than New Labour with the party splitting over Free Trade in 1846. The split would see Peel and his supporters go into exile, becoming one of the many parliamentary factions that would be fused with the Whigs to form the Liberal Party in 1877.

The reality is that the true character of the revived Tories was there in 1783. The strength of the party’s old base in deep England supplemented by infusions of talent from its erstwhile opponents and a strange ambivalence about its name. The next such infusion would begin with the multifaceted crack-up of the Liberals in the mid-eighties with Lord Hartington and Joe Chamberlain somehow finding themselves both in the new Tory-aligned Liberal Unionist breakaway party.

(This by the way would make for a cracking prestige television drama with the twist that the Whigs end up in the same party as the man that first provoked them to leave the Liberals being one of the best in political history. Come on Netflix…Timothée Chalamet can pull off a monocle).

The Liberal Unionists would provide Lord Salisbury with a swift replacement to Randolph Churchill as Chancellor during his second premiership, and would enter into a full-blown coalition with him in 1895. Together the two parties would be commonly referred to as The Unionists and would ultimately merge in 1912. After the merger both of Joe’s sons would become leader, with Neville even becoming Prime Minister.

The youngest Chamberlain would be at the heart of the next change of identity as he negotiated with the King and Ramsay MacDonald to replace a Labour Government struggling to agree a package of welfare cuts with a cross-party National Government. This would split both Labour and Liberals with breakaway parties shielding under a Tory coupon for a remarkably long time with the National Liberals actually returning more MPs throughout the 1950s than the “real” Liberal Party. They even had Gwilym Lloyd George as a ‘Liberal and Conservative’ Home Secretary in the mid-1950s.

Of course his father twice almost achieved a similar fusion. During lengthy cross-party negotiations beween the two general elections in 1910, David Lloyd George confounded not just his reputation as the leading radical within the Government but his behaviour at the start talks to make a strong push to resolve the a coalition between the Liberals and Tories to resolve the parliamentary stalemate by agreeing an ambitious coalition programme. Whilst ultimately unsuccessful, this gambit would not only demonstrate that under the pressure of events Lloyd George was the ultimate pragmatist, but alert the Tories to the fact that he was actually a man they could do business with.

They would conspire with him to replace Asquith at the height of the crisis in the First World War and then effectively co-opt him when they contested the 1918 General Election on the basis of a slate of candidates endorsed by both Loyld George and their own leader’s joint coupon. The alliance would however proved an uneasy one, with the great mass of Tories visibly uneasy with Lloyd George’s imperious and improvisational nature. Andrew Bonar Law successfully managed these tensions but retired due to illness and was succeeded by Austen Chamberlain. Ironically, the Chamberlain brother that loved Lloyd George failed in fusing their two parties together, whereas the one that hated the Welsh Wizard came very close to success. Famously, on the eve of war with Turkey, Bonar Law would return from retirement to give his blessing to Stanley Baldwin’s rebellion against continuing the Coalition.

This is often seen as the beginning of the Conservative Century, with the perennial underdogs of British politics finally becoming the “natural party of government”. But this is wrong, the failure to consumate the marriage with Lloyd George, would mean a newly reunified Liberal Party still had the strength to twice deny the Tories victory in the 1920s. Those two initial Labour Governments would help decisively move British politics to the left.

You’ve Got A Friend In Me…

So when did the modern Tory Party come into existence? Well the Scottish and English parties only merged together in 1965 whilst the National Liberals were finally wound up in 1968. But famously the national party had next to no legal identity until William Hague and Archie Norman imposed order on a chaotic range of parallel and subsidiary organisations in the late 1990s.

And you would never guess what happened. Just like in 1915, 1931 and 1951 their return to Government involved entering into an alliance with liberals as the inconclusive result of the 2010 election led to David Cameron’s “big, open and comprehensive offer” for Nick Clegg to join him in Government. But as comfortable as the two men found governing together they couldn’t make the alliance stick in the long-term with the lack of an electoral alliance meaning that the Liberal Democrats were nearly wiped out in 2015. The party reborn from the smouldering wreckage has inevitably decided that if there’s one thing they will never do again, its working with the Tories.

And that really is why the Tories are in such dire straights. Ever since it was reborn under Pitt the Younger it has existed as a platform for liberals to add imagination and sophistication to the policies and practice of a party that has frequently earned its nickname of being “The Stupid Party”. If Nigel Farage really can force march his ragtag band of mostly fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists to the very top of British politics, then he will be reaping the rewards for his polling and by-election strength successfully forcing Cameron to move to the right at the very moment he should have been consumating his marriage with centrist liberals such as Nick Clegg, David Laws and Ed Davey.

But I can’t help but suspect that rather than ending the Tories, success would merely make Farage a chapter in their story. One could easily see a situation where Reform UK is rewarded for establishing themselves as Labour’s by jibes that they’re the same old Tories with a new frontman. Farage objecting to such taunts from his progressive opponents would be at least be one thing he had in common with William Pitt the Younger, the man who really did bring the Tories back from the dead over two hundred years ago.