Those who find themselves on the right in politics are often not very conservative. In fact they can be extremely destructive of tradition and reckless in their experiments. The examples of Margaret Thatcher and the almost entirely uncreative destruction that finance capitalism has brought around the world would prove that even without the spectacle of the Trump White House. Conversely, those who care about tradition and attempt to keep it alive are surprisingly often on the left in politics.
This is in part because tradition is deeper and covers more than political philosophies ever could. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons and a former Tory MP, has announced that Donald Trump will not be welcome there because of his racism, his sexism, and his opposition to an independent judiciary. These are not party political points. They are a defence of the everyday decencies that underlie democracy. Mr Bercow’s position is a fine example of how to adapt to the times without radical change: he was elected by fellow MPs rather than placed there by the executive.
There are other conservatives in this sense who find themselves in positions of larger political power. One such, Richard Chartres, has just retired as bishop of London after 22 years in what is the third most important job in the Church of England – and, although he has started out on the wrong side of almost all the big questions in the church, from the ordination of women to the reaction to the Occupy movement, he has nonetheless ended up on the right side of many of them. He managed to combine a hieratic and theatrical presence which suggested that he was in close touch with another world with a sharp-edged appreciation of the realities of this one. “The trouble with Rowan is that he’s too damn Christian,” he remarked about the last Archbishop of Canterbury’s treatment of his enemies. Mr Chartres presided over the only diocese of the Church of England to have bucked the trend of pervasive tending to catastrophic decline, but he did not fit at all into the role of a decisive manager. What made him a successful conservative was the combination of a keen and awkward intelligence with loyalty to an institution whose folly and failings he was uniquely well placed to understand.
Much the same could be said of Ken Clarke, whose interview in this paper was a magnificent defiance of the smelly little orthodoxies that have captured his party in favour of the kind of nonideological pragmatism that makes small-C conservatism attractive. His cheery, brutal realism in the face of the Brexit disaster deserves to be quoted: “There is no constitutional standing for referendums in this country. No sensible country has referendums – the United States and Germany do not have them … I have made no commitment to accept a referendum, and particularly this referendum.” That is how constitutions should be defended, even constitutions like the British one, which is nowhere written all in one convenient place.
The most vital conservative politician in the world today, Angela Merkel, a woman whose cautious but indomitable determination to do the right thing commands respect from everyone who does not want the international order turned upside down and freedom dissolved into anarchy. Progressives will always believe in the power of imagination to transform the world. We know in our bones that things don’t have to be the way they are, and that millennia of injustice can’t be sanctified simply by great age. Against this, the realism of our adversaries can seem malevolent as well as frustrating. But the defence of institutions can also be a way of defending the vision that went into building them. For all their stupidity and occasional dysfunction, institutions can learn, traditions change yet still remember hard-won lessons from centuries ago. Let’s hope for real conservatives to arise to replace Mr Clarke, Mr Chartres and, in time, Mrs Merkel. They will be wrong, but we will need them.
