How to survive the Tory apocalypse Pessimists should pick up a copy of Parade's End

Ford’s story introduces us to Christopher Tietjens — that’s Cumberbatch — an aristocratic Government statistician appraised as both “the most brilliant man in England” and “the last Tory”. Married to a compulsively unfaithful wife, frustrated by the ineptitude of his colleagues and disturbed by the onset of modernity, Tietjens has an Anglican approach to morality and a High Tory approach to tradition. At least self-aware, he observes: “I’ve no politics that did not disappear in the 18th century.”

Ford’s own politics were by turns antique and radical. A conservative by habit, he called himself an “ardent suffragette”, backed the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and despised Mussolini. Disillusioned by what he considered the Conservative Party’s abandonment of its former values, he creatively dubbed it “the Stupid Party”, and wrote of “the true Toryism which is socialism”, marrying support of common ownership with a patriotic streak and suspicion of the industrial.

A great deal of this politics makes it into Parade’s End. While Tietjens places God, King and Country above all other responsibilities, and describes himself as a Tory to anyone who’ll listen, he is still accused by other characters of being a “socialist” for his distrust of bureaucratic hierarchies and aversion to market forces. Capitalism, or at least the version of it ascendant in the world Christopher inhabits, has no reverence for continuity or rootedness. When he develops amnesia after leaving the trenches, it parallels Ford’s view of Britain’s collective forgetting of its own history.

Today’s Conservative politicians, consumed by factionalism and engaged either in plotting or sinking-ship-jumping, would do well to remember that there is radical history within their own party. Tietjens is arguably a successor not just to the 18th century but also the 19th-century Young England group of Tories, spearheaded by Benjamin Disraeli — even if in the third volume of Parade’s End he disparages Disraeli as a “jerrybuilding Jew”. Members of Young England opposed the market-driven impulses of the new world and sought something closer to the old feudal system, with more power placed in the hands of Crown and Church.

Some of Disraeli’s Toryism, specifically its treatment of the collective, survived in modernised form in the One Nation philosophy of David Cameron’s premiership, most clearly in his Big Society. A decade on from Cameron’s time in office, however, the fragments of this vision remain scattered. Conservatism soon came to define itself through the language of personal freedom and individual aspiration, with the culmination of this reached during the ministry of Liz Truss, as un-Tietjens a Tory as Britain has ever seen.

By contrast, one modern political figure who bears some similarities to Ford’s protagonist is a Tory in exile: Rory Stewart. He too is upper-class, mournful of a lost political tradition, and exasperated by the personal and professional failings of others around him. Whether one thinks Stewart’s worldview is motivated by conservative codes or self-importance, it is hard to deny that his is an idealism absent from the present government. Some of the solutions put forward in his 2023 memoir Politics on the Edge — appointing specialists to head up Government departments; giving ministers time to implement change; ending Westminster’s culture of toadying and cronyism — sound pretty appealing. One can imagine Tietjens approving, even if he might find The Rest is Politics tediously liberal.

For far from solely offering a view of a misty Tory past, when one looks beyond the feudalism and the fussiness, Ford’s novels also provide a glimmer of the Conservatives’ future. Much polling from the last two years bears out the idea that British voters broadly lean Left on economics and Right on culture. We have entered the age of the uniparty, where Conservative and Labour offerings on immigration, employment and the economy can appear disconcertingly similar, and the only substantive difference lies in managerial competence. Principles have taken a backseat to political expediency, and Parliament increasingly resembles Tietjens’s characterisation of England’s new ruling class: “a dreary wilderness of fellows without consciences or traditions or manners”.

But this nadir for the Conservative Party — borne out in the dismal results emerging this morning — is at the same time a chance for regeneration. The American critic James Longenbach noted that, in Parade’s End, Ford begins “to perceive the war not as the apocalypse but as an event in history”, one continuous with all that has preceded it and all that is yet to come.

Today’s MPs are just one incarnation of a party which has undergone so much reinvention as to be unrecognisable from Disraeli’s, or the Tietjens Toryism of Ford Madox Ford. As this government enters its last months, Conservatives might find some comfort in the fact that this isn’t their first apocalypse. It requires a pretty hard squint to spot the radicals in the modern Tory Party, but destruction is a precondition of reconstruction, and thoughtful Conservative voices may yet emerge from the rubble. Ford wrote in Parade’s End that we are “higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden”. On present evidence, the Tories still have some climbing to do.

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is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie