Geoffrey Wheatcroft at the End of the Tories

I owe Geoffrey Wheatcroft something of a debt. Before getting hold of John Ross's Thatcher and Friends, which argued that the blessed Margaret's 1983 triumph was symptomatic of a decades-long secular tendency toward decline, there was The Strange Death of Tory England. An irascible and funny condemnation of the Conservatives by one of their own, for Wheatcroft is a Tory journalist. And unusual for his tribe, an honest one. Strange Death was and remains an important book because it tries to get to grips with the party's crisis from the right, and eschews the drivel and comfort thinking of more recent lesser efforts. Having also written a book on the subject, I was interested in what Bloody Panico!: Whatever Happened to the Tory Party? - Wheatcoft's latest tome - had to say.

And the unfortunate answer was ... nothing much new. It is a brisk, short read packed with obscure anecdotes of Tory Party lore, and withering observations of the miserable cadre of Conservative politicians this country has suffered. Particularly of the fraudulent Boris Johnson. But knowing his explanation for why the Tories are facing their final crisis depends on being familiar with the earlier book. Wheatcroft himself dubs Panico as less a sequel, and more a coda or afterword. It reads like one. We are taken on a whistle stop tour of everything that has happened to the Tories since Michael Howard piloted the Tories to a third successive electoral defeat, and with the curled lip of disgust deals with all his successors up to publication in early 2024. Kemi Badenoch is therefore sadly absent. There are insights and tales of scandals to whet the salacious appetite, but without the original book you're left thinking Wheatcroft puts the crisis down to bad politicians being bad at politics.

In Strange Death, the end of the Tories began in the 1960s. This was the period where the interwar generation of patrician Conservatives were gradually displaced and shunted aside by a rising generation of petit bourgeois and professional politicians. This was a cohort that had only known rising living standards and growing affluence, but simultaneously did not see, or as is more likely, did not respect the foundation on which this was built: the compact between capital and a massive, active labour movement. Thatcher typified this trend, hating both the unions and the patrician Tories in the party that "caved" to them. But she was not the source of the Tory sin against reasonable conservatism. What did it was the abandonment of the conclave method of selecting a Tory leader by a ballot of the parliamentary party. The occasion was the fall of Alec Douglas-Home, and voting was brought in as a reaction against his appointment by preferment. In the first exercise of inner party democracy in the Tories' history, Ted Heath came out on top. And as the parliamentary party became more "professional" in composition, the ballot ensured the grip of the Old Etonians was broken. Its future was no longer guided by gentlemen of good judgement, but by rootless MPs easily swayed by faddism and popularity. This more than anything else sealed the Tories' fate.

There is something to this argument, but it is a shame that Wheatcroft didn't recapitulate it for Panico as it might have encouraged some of his more superficial readers to think deeply about the Tory crisis. Instead, all we get is a lament for a decent conservatism that once was. This implies, not unlike Peter Hitchens's frequent criticisms of the Tories, that they're no longer conservative. But whereas Hitchens argues it's because conservatism has been displaced by an amorphous progressivism (if only), for Wheatcroft - though he doesn't explicitly say it - they are a party, standing naked to the world, that supports class power, privilege, and inequality. And no party so exposed cannot last very long.

Panico therefore comes with a recommend, if only for the novelty of a Tory not putting the roots of their crisis at getting rid of Johnson, or not stopping the boats, or letting Brussels rule Britain for so long. But for the full spectrum and dimensionality of the crisis, there is another book and a blog for that.

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