Despite his association with the Victorian era, Disraeli came of age during the Regency period. Born in 1804, he was steeped in Blake and Beethoven and all the other Romantics. Later, of course, he created the modern Conservative Party, yet he is arguably most famous now for being the only Jewish prime minister this country has had. Metaphorically, then, Disraeli did remove, or at least move, mountains. And as a Romantic, and a novelist to boot, he did so by using his imagination to self-fashion an identity that gave him the confidence, the “firm persuasion”, that a middle-class Jew needed to lead a resolutely Christian Tory party.

No book is better on this aspect of Disraeli than Adam Kirsch’s 2008 biography, which taught me two things. First, that a degree of self-mythologization is probably necessary for most worldly success, and unequivocally fundamental to political success. Second, that this process is primarily an imaginative undertaking, which is why a contemporary American literary critic could write so illuminatingly about a 19th-century British prime minister.

Early on, Kirsch notes how formative the exotic, Romantic figure of Lord Byron was for the young Disraeli. After leaving his unremarkable London school, Disraeli tried out a career in law, but gave it up for reasons articulated by the protagonist of his first novel Vivian Grey, who muses (probably correctly) that “to be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.” He then embarked on a Grand Tour, following Byron’s footsteps to Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. His path was set: a Byronic life of Romantic action over bourgeois stability.

From the beginning, Disraeli’s imagination powered both his literary and political career. And it soon became obvious that letters alone would never satisfy him. As he wrote in his novel Contarini Fleming, “Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Caesar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts.”

These words are spoken by Contarini’s father, but Disraeli was making the argument for himself. And this is the point. More than literary endeavors, his novels were the arena in which he worked his as yet incoherent theories — often contradictory and occasionally nonsensical — into a worldview that gave him the psychological basis for action. It is no coincidence that his greatest contribution to political thought, the development of One-Nation Conservatism, was articulated not in a political tract but in his novel Sybil.

The young Disraeli dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably resulted in catastrophic debts that dogged him for decades. He also suffered a nervous breakdown that laid him up for two years. This period of Disraeli’s life again recalls Byron, who once wrote of “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” To make matters worse, Disraeli also suffered public humiliation when it was revealed that the anonymous “man of fashion” who authored Vivian Grey, supposedly an insider’s account of high society, was in fact 21 years old, middle-class and — perhaps worst of all for Victorian England — a Jew.

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Through all of this, Disraeli still lacked a goal toward which he could channel his vast abilities, especially his imagination. Whether through books or politics, its lava had to erupt, or else he would continue to suffer earthquakes of the mind. Most powerfully cathartic for Disraeli, Kirsch argues, was confronting his Jewishness, which was both “the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine”. The adult Disraeli was technically not a Jew: following a minor row with Bevis Marks Synagogue, his father, the gentle and scholarly Isaac Disraeli, had Benjamin baptized into the Church of England at the age of 12. It was a fit of pique that changed history. The right to sit in Parliament still required an MP to take an oath “upon the true faith of a Christian” (and would until the 1858 Jews Relief Act some 20 years after Disraeli first became an MP).

Despite his baptism, Disraeli’s Jewishness remained the central, unignorable fact about him. With his “olive complexion and coal-black eyes, and the mighty dome of his forehead (no Christian temple, be sure),” one contemporary remarked, “I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.” (And when people weren’t remarking on his Jewishness, it was his Mediterranean background). It didn’t matter that Disraeli had been converted, his very name screamed Jew — and it would anyway have been unthinkable to deny what he was. As Kirsch observes, “self-contempt was alien to his nature.” Disraeli’s preferred formulation was to claim that while his religion was Christian, his race was Jewish.

Nonetheless, he remained caught between two models of Jewishness in the English mind: the bloodthirsty, avaricious Shylock, and the grubby street peddler. These quasi-medieval tropes persisted because most British people at this time would never even meet a Jew. The community numbered around only about 25,000, concentrated mainly in London, as well as in provincial cities like Liverpool and Manchester. It was dominated by a mostly Sephardic elite descended from families who had fled Iberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, alongside a smaller Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern European origin. The Sephardic community into which Disraeli was born was privileged. Largely middle-class, it engaged in trade, finance, and the professions, and was socially integrated to a degree uncommon for Jews elsewhere in Europe.

But legal disabilities and social prejudice persisted. Disraeli’s response, with characteristic chutzpah, was to create a third model. He simply claimed that his Sephardic Jewish family traced its roots back to ancient Phoenician settlers in Iberia who predated even the Norman barons of 1066. No mere merchants, Spanish Jews were landowners, as proven by a decree from the Emperor Constantine. This founding myth of Jewish noble lineage would justify Disraeli’s eventual adoption of a heraldic coat of arms complete with “Tower of Castille” crest.

It was, of course, a pile of old hogwash. There is no evidence that the Disraelis even came from Spain. Kirsch notes that as far as is traceable, the family came from the town of Cento in the Papal States; further back, they likely hailed from the Middle East. But it didn’t matter. What mattered is that this fiction provided Disraeli with the psychological armor to withstand a life of ceaseless antisemitic attacks. In 1835, when the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell attacked Disraeli for his Jewish heritage in the House of Commons, Disraeli’s response was unhesitating. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he replied, “and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

All the while, Disraeli the outsider became an acute observer of the British class system. So completely did he understand how ancestral pride drove the aristocratic establishment running the Tory Party that he was eventually able to lead it. Not that anyone could really begrudge him inventing a pedigree when everyone else was at it too. Disraeli described the process simply: make a pile in banking, buy a peerage and throw a “halo of imagination” over “a humble or obscure origin.” Like Orwell, he understood that the English aristocracy was never a purely hereditary class but one constantly replenished by parvenus.

Disraeli’s own “halo of imagination” was able to transmute his Jewishness from a potential source of shame into a source first of pride and then of nobility. So powerful were Disraeli’s dreams of Jewish prestige and power that, at one point, they included fictionalized fantasies of restoring Jewish sovereignty to Palestine. Kirsch places two of his novels, Alroy and Tancred, alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the proto-Zionist canon. But these ideas remained fantasies. For Disraeli, as for Alroy, to become the “patriarch of a pastoral horde” in an Ottoman province was no substitute for leading the world’s great power. Like Blake, Disraeli would build Jerusalem here at home.

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Disraeli characteristically outlined his fantasies of Jewish success through his fiction — personified in the form of Sidonia. An international eminence grise who moves between parliaments and royal courts, Sidonia knows everyone and makes everything happen, albeit behind the scenes. Impossibly intelligent, sophisticated, and, in true Romantic style, jaded, Sidonia appears as a secondary character in Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred.

As Kirsch observes, Disraeli intended Sidonia to be a “figure of great power and glamour.” But Disraeli’s wish fulfillment about domestic Jewish success was ultimately incontinent. As magnetic as he is, Sidonia is also an antisemitic stereotype: the unseen, controlling Jew whose tentacles are everywhere.

Great power and glamour were, though, what Disraeli wanted for his own life, and for this he had to reconcile his Jewishness with being a practicing Christian, which required yet more imaginative sophistry. As ever, he worked it out first in his fiction. As an Anglican priest argues in the novel Sybil, “the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement… Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing”. The meaning, here, was clear. “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” Disraeli later asserted. Theologically suspect it may have been, but Kirsch explains how “psychologically necessary” it was for Disraeli to “pull off the delicate balancing act required of a Jew seeking to lead a Christian nation.”

And lead it he did. Serving as Prime Minister from February to December 1868, and again from 1874 to 1880, Disraeli was always willing to refashion himself for political purposes. In the 1840s, he made his name as the champion of the Tory landed interest against Sir Robert Peel’s repealing of the Corn Laws. Yet when he gained real power, in the 1850s, he quietly accepted free trade as irreversible, shelving attempts to restore tariffs in the name of political survival. In 1867, after years of warning that extending the vote would endanger the social order, he piloted the Second Reform Act through Parliament, dramatically expanding the electorate to working-class men. In this, he understood what Karl Marx never did: emancipate the working classes and they will often vote for conservatives.

And the engine for so much of this achievement? A pre-eminent Romantic passion: love of glory. As Disraeli told his constituents in an 1844 speech, “I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country.”

Yet if Kirsch’s biography is partly compelling because Disraeli was an extraordinary man, his story also illuminates our national character. After all, this country has long bred Romantics. Consider Boris Johnson, the middle-class, Etonian scholarship boy and surely the most overt example of Disraelian self-creation in recent times. Where Disraeli had his novels to work out his politics, Johnson relied on the Classics, climbing his very own Cursus Honorum all the way to the top. If he seemed anachronistic, he knew it. He understood that this is not the 19th century. Britain is no longer the global hegemon, and the ambitions of a Disraeli would sound ridiculous today. So, instead, Johnson took his Romantic temperament, his pathological ambition, and subverted them through a P.G. Wodehouse-style schtick that made everyone laugh.

Conversely, Rory Stewart is a politician who took Disraelian self-fashioning too literally for contemporary tastes. Publicly fashioning himself through books — a solo walk across Afghanistan; governing an Iraqi province — Stewart explicitly used his writing as the imaginative ballast for his political career. “I had once dreamt,” he writes in his memoir, “of modeling myself on a classical hero.” Stewart told the world what a Romantic figure he was: and that was his undoing. Stewart did not, I suspect could not, leaven his self-image with self-deprecation. So while Johnson became PM, Stewart now spends his days getting patronized on a podcast.

The real problem, though, is when self-deception becomes unmoored from morality — and indeed reality. Just over eight years after I read Kirsch’s book, Donald Trump took office, and I saw that one, albeit extreme, conclusion of Disraeli’s self-fashioning had emerged in the near-pathological dishonesty and self-delusion of a man who credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power Of Positive Thinking with much of his success. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” What’s striking about this (banal) quotation from Disraeli’s Coningsby is how much it sounds like the self-help guff that Trump imbibed, and which spurred him to become the world’s most powerful man.

How, in the end, do you reconcile “firm persuasion” with reality? Stewart’s problem wasn’t that he was deluded; both Trump and Disraeli illustrate that egregious self-delusion can drive colossal success. It’s rather that he couldn’t tailor this self-mythologization, or self-delusion, to his circumstances, so different from the snobby, class-obsessed world of the Pax Britannica, where personal belief in individual greatness and destiny found its concomitant in Britain’s global primacy. For Kirsch, then, Disraeli was one of those rare humans “who imagine a life for themselves, and then actually bring it into being”. His statesmanship and his novelistic output are finally impossible to separate because both grew out of the profoundly Romantic conviction that the most important thing a man can create is himself. And that is why almost 200 years later history remembers him, just as it does Byron and Blake.

Today, these words ring just as true in late neoliberal America. And it is the Democrats, formerly the party of the people, who occupy the place of the “Tory establishment”, with all the same lordly arrogance but with none of the Old World aristocratic charm.

The Democrats could learn from this comparison as they attempt to rebuild. For just as Disraeli concluded that the Tories should seek to harmonise class differences rather than flattening them, so too can Democratic elites serve ordinary citizens while acknowledging the chasms that exist between them.

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

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This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

According to its leading exponents, national conservatism is simply the opposite of liberal internationalism. It believes nations are distinctive and should seek to protect this distinctiveness instead of pursuing universal ideas such as global free trade, human rights, international law and the like. It believes that conservatism entered into an alliance with liberalism in the Seventies in order to defeat socialism, but took its eye off the ball in the Nineties, allowing liberalism to then triumph. This, in its view, has led to the erosion of national institutions, Western culture and even morality itself. In short, they argue, it is time for conservatives to rediscover conservatism.

The phenomenon of conservatives criticising the failures of conservatism is not new — it is a recurring theme in the Party’s history, flowering whenever there is a feeling of national drift and failure, as there surely is today. In the 1840s, Benjamin Disraeli relentlessly mocked the new-fangled “conservatism” of Robert Peel, who had won power by accepting the Great Reform Act of 1832, even though he had once opposed it. In his great novel, Coningsby, the future prime minister wrote that Peel’s about-turn was an attempt to “construct a party without principles”. It called itself conservative but what did it actually want to conserve? “The prerogatives of the Crown, provided they are not exercised; the independence of the House of Lords, provided it is not asserted; the ecclesiastical estate, provided it is regulated by a commission of layman. Everything, in short, that is established, as long as it is a phrase and not a fact.”

Similarly, in the Seventies, Margaret Thatcher railed against those conservatives who had forgotten their convictions. “For years now in British politics, this word consensus has reared its head,” she said. “I often think that when you’re going for consensus that those who believe as I believe tend to give in to the Left wing and steadily move further and further Left.”

In a sense, both Disraeli and Thatcher identified the same problem inherent in conservatism: without an idea of what it is actually trying to conserve, of the kind of society it believes in, conservatism is little more than an ineffectual brake, unable to stop the drift towards the type of world it ultimately opposes. And yet, a conservatism that retreats into some kind of romantic defence of lost causes does not win power and conserve anything either.

The Conservative Party has spent a fair amount of time out of power, watching as reforms it once opposed were introduced: between 1846 and 1874; 1906 and 1915; 1997 and 2010. Each time, the party was forced to reinvent itself, accepting the reforms of its opponents. Despite his mockery of Peel, Disraeli did exactly this, dragging his party back to power by not only accepting the Great Reform Act he once opposed (as well as the repeal of the Corn Laws) but actually authoring a second major expansion of the franchise himself, having the genius to see how the lower classes might actually prove allies of the conservative cause rather than radical opponents.

Disraeli, as a result, is often criticised as a typical Tory, unmoored from principle. But this caricature seems unfair. Here was a Tory ultra who rebuilt the Conservative Party as an electoral force not simply by accepting electoral reality, but by helping to change that reality. In doing so, he gave the Conservative Party much of its essential character today — and much of that character is what we might call national conservatism or what has also been called Tory democracy.

Almost every Tory leader after Disraeli has been able to paint his or her opponent as divisive, factional, unpatriotic or somehow a bit foreign, even after the moral disaster of appeasement. Disraeli presented his opponents as “Venetian Oligarchs”; Churchill dismissed the party of Attlee as “Labour weaklings”. Thatcher played the patriotic card during the Falklands; David Cameron did the same to Ed Miliband; Boris Johnson to Jeremy Corbyn. Whenever the Conservative Party has been successful, it has built a broad coalition of support among cutting across all classes, uniting all those opposed to radical reform and supportive of those whom they see as the party of order, property and the national interest.

National conservatism has also been the Tory answer to the problem of change ever since Disraeli. “The great question is not whether you should resist change,” he argued, “but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” Disraeli described these options as being between a national system and a philosophical system, with the Conservative Party as the party of the former.

What did conservatism amount to beyond this, though? In a Punch cartoon from 1872, Disraeli is asked to define his Conservative programme. He responds: “Ah, yes! Quite so! Tell them that we propose to rely on the sublime instincts of an ancient people.” It is impossible to read this and not think of Boris Johnson, 150 years later, yet its sentiment — trust the people — echoes throughout the party’s history.

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Just over a decade after that cartoon was published, Lord Randolph Churchill argued that the difference between the two great political parties of England was that the Tory party clinged “with veneration and affection to the institutions of our country” while their radical opponents regarded them “with aversion and distrust”. The Tory Party, he summarised, must always “trust the people” — a motto which would later be adopted by his son, Winston. Even this week, when I asked one Conservative MP who attended NatCon if he could define the essence of conservatism, he replied: “Trust the people.”

The most glaring problem with the national conservatism on display this week is that it’s not entirely clear it still does. National conservatism is not inherently ludicrous or sinister, as its critics argue. It is perfectly reasonable to differentiate between conservatism and liberalism, which are distinct philosophies, and to argue that more conservatism is needed. The problem is that, beyond this analysis, what does British national conservatism amount to? Listening to this week’s speeches, it all feels so inchoate and, ironically, alien from the people.

The convention is a spin-off of similar NatCon events in the US, established by an Israeli-American conservative who believes a return to religious education and scripture is necessary to save Western society. While part of its appeal is that it correctly identifies a latent frustration among voters that national politicians and parties do not seem to like them or their opinions very much, yet they surely risk doing the very same thing themselves.

National conservatism is not going away. But if the Tory Party is to remain a potent force, it will have to evolve into something more than what is on display this week in London. It will, to put it simply, have to answer a centuries-old question: does it trust the people or not?

Sound familiar? It should do. It is now, and it is us.

On the one hand, we have a property-owning class with a particular interest in restricting housing supply at the expense of those who want to get on the property ladder. On the other, we prioritise pensioners at the expense of all other welfare recipients: between 2010 and 2020 the value of the state pension increased by around 8%, whereas unemployment benefits have fallen by 6%. Real disposable incomes are set to fall by 7.1% over the next two years – but not for pensioners, who are, as ever, protected by the triple lock. Economic pain for thee, but not for me.

These conflicts overlap heavily with what feels like the main divide in society: of the old vs the young (although the “young” increasingly stretches up to 50). We are engaged in intergenerational economic warfare. Younger people are forced into a worse quality of life than their parents’ generation. They are expected to live with less space, and spend more for the privilege. They are expected to work for less, and travel further to do so. They are expected to wait longer to buy a property, and rent in an increasingly unstable market while they save up. They are expected to pay ever-more tax, to fund a generation who are actively hostile to their interests.

This two nation country is the result of 12 wasted years of Conservative government. Instead of fixing the roof while the sun was shining, as George Osborne told us he would, the Conservative Party has built “a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners”: a voter base that relies on increasingly tetchy boomers who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. Fundamentally, the Conservatives have presided over the intensification of a two-nation country.

It is a particularly baffling state of affairs given most of our most recent Conservative prime ministers have described themselves as one-nation Conservatives — Cameron, May and Johnson have all laid claim to that mantle. Sunak has been cagier, but he did win the support of the One Nation group of MPs.

Even Ed Miliband tried to appropriate the ideology! He saw one nation as “A vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses through the veins of all and nobody feels left out. It was a vision of Britain coming together to overcome the challenges we faced.”

In his Autumn Statement, Jeremy Hunt (another self-described one-nation Conservative) told us that “You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services”. And in a sense he’s right – we do not need to choose either of them, because we have chosen to have neither.

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This is not some abstract policy debate. Presiding over a two-nation Britain is dangerous for the Conservative Party and for society. As Disraeli also said: “The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing. It is not a confederacy of nobles, it is not a democratic multitude; it is a party formed from all the numerous classes in the realm.”

CCHQ should be petrified of that fact that a Tory voter under 50 is almost as rare as an affordable property in London. A recent YouGov survey found that just 14% of 18-24s and 13% of 25-49s would vote Conservative, compared to 59% for Labour among both groups. Recent polling by Ben Ansell finds that just 15% of all private renters would vote Tory, and among under 50s just 14% of undergraduates and 10% of postgrads would go blue. Demography is not destiny for any political party, but these are worrying numbers.

A two-nation system is bad for society. It is not for nothing that Disraeli warned against it: a perpetuation of the unfair status quo would, he feared, lead to social instability. Improving the lot of the people was not only morally right, it was also a clever act of self-preservation on behalf of the Tory elite.

The real kicker is that it does not have to be like this. We do not have to worship at the altar of the NIMBYs. As far back as 2010, the Conservatives were level-pegging with Labour in terms of winning the support of 18-24-year-olds. Across Europe, young voters often back parties of the Right. There is no iron law that says the Conservatives cannot win the youth vote. It’s a demographic they need desperately to win over.

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To do so does not mean they need to look to the past. As Stanley Baldwin noted in 1934, “The responsibility – and it is a great responsibility – that rests with a leader is to try and adapt the policy according to the deep-laid foundations of the Party principles to meet whatever may come in this world.” The Tories they need to recognise that the status quo is not working. And if they want, as they profess, to be the party of one-nation principles, they need to change, and fast.

The key thing is to address intergeneration unfairness. This would mean stronger protection for renters and higher standards demanded of landlords. It does not mean rent freezes, which have consistently been shown to crash supply and reduce quality, but it does mean that extortionate fees, demands for up to 12 months’ rent in advance, and onerous deposits should be ended. Of course, the housing market will not be fixed until the planning system is fixed. There is a plethora of ways to do this, but a move to zoning, alongside design codes and allowing councils to benefit more from changes in land value due to planning permission decisions all seem like good places to start. Areas with increased house building should be rewarded.

A one-nation platform would also mean re-evaluating some of the punitive elements of our current system. The sky-high interest rate on student loans, the five-week wait for your first universal credit payment, and the two-child limit on child benefit should all go. Nobody in receipt of welfare should be living in absolute poverty – as a country, we are better than that. We currently spend more on pensions than we do on education (which somewhat reflects this government’s priorities) and it is not unreasonable to look at means testing pensions, which come in at around 10% of total spending and 5% of GDP.

Levelling up would also be key, recognising how much pride people feel in the local. This would mean investing both in physical and cultural infrastructure. Ratcheting up council tax for funding is not the answer, given the inherent unfairness in the model. A proportional property tax, of around 0.5% of the current value of a property (double for empty second properties), would see 77% of households pay less tax, but increase the overall tax take. There should also be some element of redistribution between councils, in recognition of the fact that some places have a greater need than others. We should all be in this together.

One-nation Conservatism is often seen as being on the Left of the party – a home for bitter remainers, wets, or secret social democrats. That is not true. It is simply a recognition of the core principle of conservatism: a nation cannot survive if it is at war with itself. The Conservative Party has forgotten this important insight, and sadly Sunak and Hunt are unlikely to remember it anytime soon – this is boomer Britain, after all.

The contest had already started before Pinchergate and Partygate. It was apparent in the disputes about the ending of pandemic lockdowns. Back then, the paternalism of some was at odds with the libertarianism of others. The policy differences reflected even deeper philosophical divisions, not least over how to approach the economy. These ultimately surfaced in different approaches to inflation, with rival positions staked out by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Given the nature of the conflicts within the party what does it mean for the future of Conservatism? Johnson marked a new direction of travel, marrying a brand of patriotism boosted by Brexit with a redistributive economic policy. His rhetoric of “levelling up” indicated the way forward, implicitly abandoning Tory principles that had been in place since Margaret Thatcher. A party of low tax, low inflation, a small state and fiscal rectitude yielded to a programme of enhanced equality, public spending, and government investment in infrastructure.

These commitments, however, did seem to be nominal rather than substantial. Yes, taxation levels in the UK are headed for an all-time high since the Forties, but much of this reflects the costs incurred by the pandemic and anticipated damage from the stand-off with Russia. The same applies, in general, to levels of borrowing and spending. Under Johnson, though, there was no clear plan for future investment in public services, and little coherent thinking about the means of levelling up. Instead, there were promises, gestures and a plethora of slogans.

Slogans do matter, though. A fresh slogan licenses a new agenda, even if substantial change is endlessly deferred. And the reality of regional inequality in the United Kingdom is such that it will continue to fuel demands for targeted redistribution. Such calls generate wider pleas for social equality. In turn, this marks a potential long-term shift in the posture of Conservative politics. The idea that low tax will deliver growth, and with that an expansion of economic opportunities, is being challenged by complaints about persistent disadvantage. The old ideal of a rising tide of prosperity for all will have to respond to ongoing appeals for a baseline of equality.

As a result, Conservatism has changed tack. But this is not only because a new slogan has gained traction: the composition of the Conservative vote has also altered. Most obviously, going into future electoral campaigns, the Party cannot ignore the importance of the Red Wall. At least in the short term, Bolsover, Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland will be a factor in Conservative policy calculations if they want to win the next election. Having passed to the Conservatives in 2019, the Party will have to work to keep them from Labour the next time around.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Johnson, then, while not representing seismic transformation, does offer lessons in understanding non-revolutionary change. Modern parties are institutional as well as ideological entities. Their persistence over time suggests an element of durability. But the longevity of the Conservative Party is also a product of its adaptability. However, its constant flexibility is masked by appeals to the past, especially to ideas associated with classic thinkers.

There is nothing exceptional about Johnson’s deviation from Tory orthodoxy; the history of conservatism is a succession of deviations. The Conservative Party is not an enduring institutional edifice. Behind the image of a timeless corporate identity lies the reality of endless incremental adjustments. Equally, there are no conservative principles which have retained their integrity through the ages. Instead, apparently similar doctrines changed their meanings as circumstances evolved.

Even the origins of conservative principles are contested. The etymology of the word Tory stretches deep into the 17th century. It originally referred to Irish miscreants and was later associated with Papist rebels more generally. Given this miscellaneous background, a significant number of historians trace the beginnings of the Conservative Party to English monarchists who defended the rights of James II when his title to rule was challenged by the Whigs in the 1680s. Yet for many, since the Tories made their peace with the Glorious Revolution, the roots of the Conservative Party are better traced to the era of Viscount Bolingbroke in the early 18th century.

However, when Bolingbroke’s campaign against Walpole’s Whigs was flourishing in the 1720s and 1730s, Toryism was more a set of ideals than an organised party structure. The Tories attracted a following, but they lacked the means of enforcing discipline. Moreover, their main advocate was associated with bottomless hypocrisy. Having supported the Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, Bolingbroke came to seek reforms under the Hanoverian regime by mobilising one-time Whiggish ideas. Equally, he rallied in public to the defence of High Church Anglicanism while circulating in private his freethinking opinions.

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The lesson of l’affaire Huang

By Will Lloyd

Given Bolingbroke’s wayward character, and his apparently boundless opportunism, the sources of conservative principles are more often traced to Edmund Burke. There is no shortage of Tory publicists since the final decades of the 19th century keen to point to Burke as their primordial inspiration. In fact, by the Fifties, in the United States no less than the United Kingdom, the Irish statesman became a staple of Cold War conservatism in general.

Yet there has always been something odd about this deliberate appropriation. To begin with, throughout his political life, Burke was affiliated with the Whigs and not the Tories. Specifically, he was a partisan of the Rockingham Whigs from 1765 to 1782, and from then until the French Revolution he was closely allied with Charles James Fox.

Despite this, it seems that Burke, of all people, is most easily identified with modern conservatism because of his avowed hostility to the French Revolution. In the popular imagination, the events of 1789 mark the start of Left-wing politics. Burke, as a dogged critic of the new regime in France, is habitually branded as an adversary of all reform. Accordingly, he is painted as an opponent of the forces of progress and categorised as the high priest of tradition.

But given the erratic course of the Revolution, adopting it as a benchmark for right thinking is surely misguided.

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Trashy Tories should read Roger Scruton

By Giles Fraser

In any case, it is inevitably distorting to view Burke’s career exclusively through the lens of the French Revolution. To begin with, his years as a Member of Parliament were largely spent in opposition and devoted to a vast array of reform measures. He was an avid defender of religious toleration, an opponent of increases in ministerial power under the crown, the foe of profiteering by the East India Company in South Asia, and a proponent of the rights of the American colonists against parliament. This last included support for their resort to arms against the British government. In fact, down to the last, Burke endorsed the general right of revolution against the state.

It is hard, then, to find in Burkean principles the origins of conservatism. Nonetheless, decontextualised precepts extracted from his writings are frequently deployed to guide conservative thinking. There is nothing peculiarly problematic about this procedure. It is a standard means of conferring an appearance of antiquity on new ideas. By these means, notably different undertakings can be absorbed into the semblance of a tradition. This is an inevitable part of the process of political change. Parties are most securely renewed by girding themselves with reassuring antecedents. Sober analysts, however, do not have to fall for the trick.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

The current contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party is already being conducted in the language of Thatcherism, with candidates campaigning for a low-tax economy and advertising the virtues of a patriotic Brexit. This is because, most immediately, they need to appeal to the Party membership. But the new leader will then have to reanimate the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli since success at a general election will need an injection of one-nation Toryism. Disraeli’s “Tory Democracy” won new constituencies for the Conservatives, and Johnson’s successor will likewise have to appeal beyond the dependable cohort of southern middle class voters.  For this reason, the north midlands and northern England cannot be taken for granted. Once again, the Johnsonian ability to expand the Tory electorate will continue to impose a challenge on his successors.

In examining this process, the student of politics ought not to conduct themselves like political contenders or party managers, concerned with pedigree instead of the actual course of history. We should not be captivated by the mantras of Left and Right, or the slogans of Conservatism and Labourism. Parties try to orient their followers by brandishing jingles. Every healthy democracy will inevitably draw upon such stratagems. But there also needs to be space for sober reflection in which we are able to call the prevailing trademarks into doubt. Political pundits too often pander to the rallying cries of politicians. Serious commentary should stand back from this daily froth and aim for a subtler appreciation of the real forces in play.

The famous steelworks closed almost four decades ago and saw my hometown become one of the first to be given the unwanted label of “post-industrial”. A town that gained much of its meaning from the industry lost it all and with it 4,500 jobs. For a time it suffered the highest rate of unemployment in western Europe and it still has a justified feeling of righteous anger about the way it was treated. Big promises of re-training and re-investment didn’t amount to nearly as much as promised, and the town took several years to get back on its feet.

Consett isn’t some kind of post-industrial dystopia today – much good regeneration work has been done by the local council and others. It is surrounded by some of the most beautiful countryside in England and, after a substantial dip in population, has now attracted many new residents who commute to work in Newcastle and Durham. But many of the new positions created in the town itself aren’t exactly like-for-like replacements for the high-skilled jobs that gave workers pride and dignity in their labour.

My hometown is one of many scattered around the country that has come to be labelled “left-behind”. All too often, these towns suffer from appalling transport links, decaying town centres and community spaces, ageing populations and a lack of skilled work. Old industries, often with well-paid work that instilled pride and dignity, have often been replaced with employment that is insecure, low-paid and low-skilled. Meanwhile successive governments have further hollowed out these towns by actively encouraging talented young people to leave for university.

It was the revolt of long-forgotten towns like Consett that drove the referendum result – a rebellion by voters who politicians had long stopped listening to and caring about. Little wonder that a message as compelling as “Take Back Control” reached receptive ears. Communities felt that things were done to them, and that any economic miracle the country experienced was something that only impacted other people and other communities.

Following the referendum, the political class started talking about places like Consett again and the media began visiting. But the interest soon waned and people became obsessed with the horse trading of the Brexit negotiations, forgetting about the factors that resulted, in places like Consett, in a decisive vote to Leave. This vote wasn’t just about genuine discontent with the way that the EU worked, but also a desire for a new economic settlement. Now is the time to deliver on that decisive message that came from places like Consett.

Laissez-faire liberalism has little to add to the structural issues that so many towns suffer and a state simply “stepping aside” would run the real risk of making divisions worse. A failed top-down socialism, which through its obsession with nationalisation and centralisation contributed to Consett’s decline, simply cannot provide the prosperity and dynamic private sector that these towns need. Between them laissez-faire liberalism and old-style socialism have contributed to high levels of estrangement and alienation.

Our country today is perilously at risk of becoming the “two nations” that Disraeli warned about and a new, genuinely One Nation approach is need to tackle the issue. In my new book, Little Platoons, I set out what such a new settlement should look like.

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Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

A new One Nation settlement

One Nation is used as a buzzword by everyone from Labour leaders to hardcore Thatcherites, to such an extent that its true meaning is at risk of being lost. To many in the media, it is now synonymous with being pro-European, while others portray it as neo-liberal economics with some social liberalism attached. Both of these definitions are preposterous, given that the whole point of One Nation Conservatism is a domestic agenda of social reform.

“One Nation” means strongly believing in the market mechanism as by far the best way of creating wealth, while rejecting the more utopian elements of capitalism. It is based on the concept that prosperity should reach all parts of society, and for this reason Disraeli deplored the early excesses of laissez-faire and the fact that while “immense fortunes were accumulating… the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty”.

Iain Macleod also eloquently warned that “you cannot ask men and women to stand on their own two feet if you give them no ground to stand on”. One Nation Conservatives understand that the state can be used intelligently to help create the basis for economic revival in communities that have long known only hopelessness and economic decline.

Two nation economic divisions are all too evident in today’s Britain. The City of London has a gross added value per head of over £300,000 while County Durham has one of £16,000. Since the banking crash, the FTSE 100 has risen by around 60 per cent, CEO salaries have soared and workers’ salaries have barely risen at all.

An equally stark divergence has occurred between the diminishing ranks of property owners, the number of which has fallen by 14 per cent in the past 19 years, and the rising number of people stuck paying expensive private rent (up 17 per cent in the same period) and unable to get on the housing ladder. If a One Nation approach isn’t found to these issues, then a more divisive one will surely fill the void.

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Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

Tory objections to laissez-faire economics are also centred around the impact of an unfettered market on those institutions that conservatives care the most about. In itself the market has little respect for tradition, family, community or nation – it is a dynamic and often atomising force. Too many social divisions can be seen in a country where some communities have become fractured, important institutions that brought people together have been in decline and issues such as alienation and loneliness have become more profound and worrying.

The un-conservative impact of unbridled economic liberalism was understood by Hayek, when he explained “Why I Am Not A Conservative” – arguing that “the liberal position is based on… a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead”. It was that “preparedness to let change run its course” that resulted in so many towns like Consett feeling left behind.

Whereas One Nation conservatives believe in the importance of place, continuity and the familiar, in contrast a free market that isn’t moored by social norms can emphasise the new and the faddish. One Nation Tories understand that, in the words of Sam Rayburn, “any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a good carpenter to build one”.  Communitarian conservatism is based around restoring local communities as well as local economies.

A One Nation agenda for a renewed economic settlement should be bold and audacious, with the goal of transforming long declining local economies, empowering communities and bringing prosperity and a sense of control. Young people should be encouraged by the opportunities to stay in their hometown and those who have left should be excited by the opportunities of returning – because social mobility and “opportunity” shouldn’t be the same thing as “escape”.

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The exploited underclass is revolting

By James Bloodworth

A programme of national reconstruction would ensure that towns as well as cities have world class road, rail and digital infrastructure. Devolution should also be accelerated, and the most radical devolution and most substantial investment should be focused on economically stagnating towns.

The industrial heritage and emphasis on skill in many “left behind” towns should also be used as a foundation to build a new settlement. It’s clear that deindustrialisation has gone too far, with Britain doing so more than any other country in the G20. We should look to reindustrialise some forgotten towns with an ambitious industrial strategy that encourages and incentivises industrial investment.

An audacious vocational education revolution should also be developed, with new and ambitious vocational educational institutions established in partnership with the private sector.

Making our country One Nation again means turning around long-forgotten towns, strengthening communities and empowering people who have long felt disempowered. It would mean that towns like Consett were at the centre of political and economic thinking, having spent too long at the periphery. This would build a new One Nation electoral coalition for the Conservatives, transforming society and politics for decades.

Little Platoons: How a Revived One Nation can Empower England’s Forgotten Towns and Redraw the Political Map is published by Biteback