So. Farewell then conservatism The last train of the old life has finally departed

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

I saw official London when it was still black and battered, a great imperial capital. I saw the Church of England when it still possessed majesty, dominion and power. I saw, on a sultry August day in 1960, the final astonishing relic of British global naval might, the Royal Navy’s last battleship, towed to the breakers, a modern version of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. The scene was made more melancholy when the colossal vessel, reluctant to die, grounded on the Portsmouth mud. A great lump rose to my throat, and I still feel a sense of deep half-understood loss when I recall it.

But the nation swiftly got over it, as it had got over the Suez failure in 1956 and our (still unrepaid) default on our First World War debt to the USA in 1934. I felt and heard and lived amid a completely different set of rules from the ones which now exist. British people of that time had been formed by a completely different set of morals, manners and standards. I remember how they spoke and carried themselves, how they expressed disapproval, how even in their hours of relaxation they filled each moment with purposeful activity.

And for many years I thought I might persuade others that it was a pity this rather admirable society had gone and that it might be worth rescuing, and even restoring. But life without these old restraints was much more fun, especially if you were reasonably well off, than it had been before. It would take many years before the social costs of our weakened morals would begin to show. It is fascinating that the Conservative Party never made any serious attempt to reverse or even moderate the social revolution of the Sixties. It turned out that easier divorce, feebler criminal justice, devalued examinations and the rest were actually quite popular.

The most successful song in the music charts in 1967, the supposed Summer of Love, was the appalling dirge “Please Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck. It kept the Beatles’ release of “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” (on the same disc) off the number one slot. It was inescapable. It was an anthem to divorce, which everyone knew was about to become vastly easier the following year. In a similar betrayal of the rules that had created it, the British middle class positively loved comprehensive schools, or thought they did, because they no longer had to worry about their children failing to win places at the much better grammar schools. Again, they found out later that many of the new schools were really not very good. A softer, more absent police force was also welcome in a world where illegal drugs were increasingly common in the schools and homes of the well-off. Easy abortion, likewise, was welcome if the alternative was a shotgun marriage. It was around this point that official Christianity, much like the Tory Party, began to make more and more compromises with the modern world — leaving first the Roman Catholic Church and then only its more determined core to defend principles which had been non-negotiable throughout Christian Britain 50 years before.

Until quite recently, this country boasted a kind of half-timbered theme-park nostalgia for some aspects of itself, but this was pretty shallow. Nobody really misses all those horse-brasses and toby jugs that used to clutter our pubs, and the hunting enthusiasts — when it came to it — could find little support when the Blairites spitefully banned their picturesque if bloody gallops across the countryside. Great aristocratic houses are all very well for a day out, and I still share Evelyn Waugh’s melancholy over their wanton destruction. But they are slipping out of the national consciousness, their original purpose a mystery, like most of our history.

It is almost funny that conservative media protests against the political correcting of the National Trust and the destruction of statues for dogmatic reasons. Alas, most people under 30 have no idea what the fuss is about, as nobody has told them any history. The parish churches of England are an unmatched storehouse of beauty and I fear for their future as their congregations wither. For what does any young person make of them? They are written in a language as unreadable as Assyrian, and the stories they tell are of long ages of which most of us know nothing and, I fear, care less. Thus, the English countryside is a beautiful effigy of its former self, preserved by the last generation which understood it, but not at all guaranteed to survive much longer.

The man who strove hardest to preserve conservatism was the late Sir Roger Scruton. His experience is instructive, especially the way the Conservative Party turned savagely on him when he was falsely accused of some Wrongthink or other by a Left-wing magazine. This was typical of that party, happy to wear Sir Roger in its lapel as a trophy, but terrified that he might actually do something dangerous.

Sir Roger’s life perhaps provides us with a clue as to what will happen in the end to conservatism. For his greatest achievement was to go to the aid of Czechoslovak dissenters under icy Communist rule in the Eighties. He and a band of equally brave men and women travelled dangerously to Prague and other Czechoslovak cities, smuggling unobtainable books, giving tutorials in philosophy, and otherwise aiding the survival of free thought in those sad regions.

Nobody knew then that this great castle of lies would fall so soon. Oddly when it did, conservatism did not really prosper much. One of the successes of Communism was (with few exceptions) its systematic blocking and poisoning of the wells of Christianity from which true conservatism springs. The peoples of the USSR and Eastern Europe did not want to be free in the old-fashioned English way espoused by Roger Scruton. They wanted to be free in an American Way. So, we had a double paradox. The collapse of the USSR freed the Western Left, which in Western Europe and North America could no longer be accused of sympathy with the enemy. But it did not liberate conservatism in the former Soviet Empire, a conservatism which now barely exists.

The nearest thing to it, and it is not very near, is the populist nationalism now so strong in Poland and Hungary. And perhaps it will not be long before these countries are sending us civilising missions of philosophers, and parcels of books, to see if they can revive or sustain the sinking fires of Christian conservatism in England. I doubt it. For we too, in the form of Noisy Nigel and his raucous followers, have decided to prefer the populist and nationalist path to the conservative one.

Why wouldn’t we? Surely the foundation of our world, in the unchosen but indispensable alliance of the free world with Stalin in 1941, was the end of all serious hope of conservatism or of any kind of true principle. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is the only serious work to have dealt with this, and even Waugh recoiled from taking it to its conclusion.

Its first volume, Men at Arms, begins with Guy Crouchback, last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service — but greatly moved to righteousness by the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades. He never imagines, during his training and early service, that by the end of the war he will be Stalin’s ally.

Towards the end of the trilogy, in Unconditional Surrender, a Jewish refugee — who Guy is unsuccessfully trying to protect — reproaches him with his early illusions. She says to him that there had been a general will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish.  “Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war,” she says.  Guy, by this time utterly without illusions, replies: “God forgive me. I was one of them.”

I have always thought that the book should have ended there. But it plods on into a sort of happy ending with English middle-class life seemingly restored. So it seemed to be. But there was, as we now see, no substance to it. There was no call for it.

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Peter Hitchens is a journalist, author, commentator and columnist for The Mail on Sunday.

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