The Conservative Party needs a hero Thatcher alone won't rescue them

As aspiring leaders of the world’s most successful political party, the exaltation of so many American Presidents — more than British prime ministers, of which the Conservatives can claim 22 since the Great Reform Act — is a surprise. It’s also unlikely to be fruitful. Developments in the conservative traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, which have often interacted or been in one another’s slipstream, have led them to very different places. British and American conservatisms just don’t sound like songs from the same hymnbook anymore — and when they have, most recently in the libertarianism of Liz Truss, it hasn’t ended well for the Tories.

Harking back to the Thatcher years, as three of the candidates did, is a more promising path for the next Conservative leader. Britain’s first female prime minister won three elections on the bounce, two of them with three-figure majorities, and reshaped Britain more decisively than any prime minister since Clement Attlee. But the Tory tradition is much older than the 50 years since Thatcher became leader of the party — and much richer, too. If Conservatives limit themselves to drawing inspiration from the Thatcher years — or worse, the myths that have grown up around them — they will only be scratching the surface of their party’s history and its canon of “heroes”. Instead, they should look further back. But to whom?

After the worst election result in their history, the Tories need a hero of reinvention. And as such, the next party leader could do far worse than put Benjamin Disraeli on the hero’s pedestal. In so many senses an outsider (he was descended from Jewish immigrants from Italy), Disraeli climbed the greasy pole through a process of personal and political reinvention. He transformed himself into a beacon of Victorian Britain — an Anglican, friend of the Queen, and cheerleader for the Empire — and remade the Tory Party in his own design. By the time he died in 1881, Disraeli had set the Conservatives on the path to dominate the next century of British politics.

The test of any reinvention, though, will be success at the ballot box. Here, aspiring leaders could draw upon the record of another Tory icon, Winston Churchill. On the face of it, Churchill is an unlikely hero of electoral recovery. The man widely labelled the “Greatest Briton” for his wartime efforts never won the popular vote in a general election. But after the Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats in the 1945 election, he kept buggering on as leader of the opposition. Five years later the Tories gained 90 seats and were on the brink of returning to power. No other post-war Conservative leader would make as many gains in a single election until David Cameron in 2010.

Yet if the party is to have any hope of returning to power, the next Tory leader will need to double Churchill’s success and then some. Once again, then, they will need to build a strong shadow cabinet and give its members the chance to shine. Churchill’s top team represented a broad range of Tory thinking and talent, and featured two future election-winning prime ministers.

Few, in Churchill’s team, were as able as Rab Butler, whose efforts in the 1945-51 parliaments made him a hero of the party rebuild. As head of Conservative research and policy, Butler re-established the intellectual foundations of the Conservative offer. He set about attracting the best and brightest on the centre-right to engage with the party, educated the grassroots about political issues of the day and created a comprehensive new agenda to take the Conservative Party into the second half of the 20th century.

Butler’s great insight was to recognise that the new context in which the Tory Party would have to survive and thrive was wholly different from the country it had governed before the war. To follow his lead today would be to avoid redeploying the playbooks of the Eighties or the 2000s, but to look with fresh eyes at the challenges of the 2020s. This is a much harder task. It requires analysing the mistakes the party made in office and the challenges it failed to confront. But, as Butler knew, this tougher road is the one back to office.

Then, as now, homebuilding and homeownership were high on the agenda. And here, the present crop of aspiring leaders could find inspiration from the largely forgotten Noel Skelton. A Scottish Unionist MP and icon to many young Tories in the early 20th century, Skelton pioneered the concept of “property-owning democracy” in conservative thought. In The Spectator in 1923, he called for Conservatives to set out a vision for the country as “master of its own life, made four-square and secure and able therefore to withstand the shrill and angry gales which, in the new era’s uneasy dawn, sweep across the world”. He was very much addressing the challenges of the interwar years, but his ideas have had a permanent resonance in Tory politics, especially in a country that today has too much precarity, too little home ownership, and too few people who feel they have something worth conserving.

What Skelton set out in the pages of a magazine, Conservative politicians refined and helped make a reality later in the century. Chief among the stars of this story is Harold Macmillan — a hero of delivery. In 1951, Churchill asked Macmillan to “build the houses for the people”, warning it would “make or mar” his political career. His job was, as many Conservative leadership candidates claim to recognise, to deliver on what the party said it would do. It said it would build 300,000 homes a year; and he did so. Even Thatcher, whose own views weren’t always aligned with her predecessor, praised his record: “He didn’t say ‘no, this can’t be done or this will be blocked by the civil service’. He did overcome. He dominated his civil servants — they didn’t dominate him.”

If the Conservative Party wants to dominate again, its next leader must dig deep within the conservative tradition — to Thatcher, yes, but on to Macmillan, Butler, Churchill, Skelton, Disraeli and scores more, as well. A party as old and successful as the Conservatives can find ample inspiration for its future in the heroes of its past. It just has to look for it.

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Lee David Evans is an historian of the Conservative Party and the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London.

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