In the early 1900s, the Conservative and Unionist party’s mounting panic about defeat by the Liberals led it into a familiar place: the gutter, from where it repeatedly warned of the danger posed by people entering the UK from abroad. “The whole scum of Europe may come to this country,” said one particularly charming pamphlet, “by merely concocting stories about being political or religious ‘refugees’, however improbable their stories.”
A century on, this particular song remains much the same. As opinion polls and local election results highlight the Tories’ vertiginous slide from their landslide win in 2019, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, speciously connects people who cross the Channel in so-called small boats with crime, and says they “possess values which are at odds with our country”. Her ministerial colleague Robert Jenrick echoes those poisonous arguments, and insists that “the number of people who are willing and able to reach the UK today is astronomical, and vastly outnumbers what we are capable or willing to take as a country”. Whatever the past worries voiced by Conservatives about their reputation as the nasty party, the Tories have seemingly relapsed – tilting towards the far right, but also tapping into a nasty element of their own enduring political soul.
As this fluently written survey of Tory history explains, this is only one of a seemingly endless array of recurring themes that link the party’s distant past to its present. Outwardly, it may look very different from the tweedy setup of yesteryear, fronted by the first British-Asian prime minister, and already looking ahead to its third female leader – who may, if either Braverman or Kemi Badenoch get the job, also be a woman of colour. But as Samuel Earle sees it, all these “transformations” and conflicts only mask basic Tory attitudes and instincts that are as ingrained as they ever were: to quote the Italian novel The Leopard, everything must change so that everything can stay the same.
By way of emphasising this continuity, Earle – who has had his work published in such outlets as the New York Times and New Statesman, and is studying for a PhD at Columbia University in New York – mixes up Tory history, in chapters that are about such broad themes as the British ruling class, our rightwing press, and how Tories have always portrayed the righteous, nostalgic country they claim to protect from radicals and leftists. Conservatism, he says, is always about “maintaining power, resisting the redistribution of wealth, and safeguarding the legitimacy of the nation’s elites”. Whenever it seems to go somewhere new, moreover, it tells itself stories that smooth over any sense of rupture, some of which have been truly mind-boggling.
The best one here comes from Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer. Some landed Tories worried about her beginnings in a Lincolnshire grocer’s shop, and her petit-bourgeois zeal for the free market. But others, Moore says, spread a rumour that she was actually descended from an aristocrat named Harry Cust, thanks to an affair her grandmother supposedly had while working as a servant on the family’s estate. As the Conservative MP Julian Amery saw it, there was “blue blood there, no doubt about it”.
This is a parable about the Tories’ periodic bursts of reinvention never really being what they seem. Thatcher, Earle argues, essentially wanted to avenge the collectivism embraced by her immediate predecessors, and return to the small-state attitudes that had prevailed before the second world war. In the same way, the Conservative belief in Brexit is all about returning control of the UK to Britain’s old elites. “Conservatism is often pitched as the opposite of radicalism,” he says, “but radicalism is permitted – even encouraged – so long as it is in pursuit of restorative ends.”
On the page, this is an elegant enough theory, but does it really stand up? By historical Conservative standards, both projects were remarkably ideological, playing their part in the creation of a modern Toryism that is almost revolutionary in spirit. In 2019, let us not forget, one survey of Conservative party members found that 63% were prepared to accept Scotland becoming independent if it secured Brexit, and 54% wanted us to leave the EU “even if it meant the destruction of their own party”. The long slipstream of the 1980s and the 2016 referendum, it seemed, had pulled the Tories away from Edmund Burke and Robert Peel, and pushed them closer to the mindset of Mao Zedong.
As well as a tendency to allow the narrative tail to wag the factual dog, this oversight comes from paying too much attention to the Tories’ past, and not quite enough to their present and future: as evidenced by the fact that, now on to their fifth leader in seven years, they have become an unstable, volatile force, and Earle’s account does not really address that big shift. His other big fault is a tendency to resort to high-handed explanations of the Tories’ potent appeal to millions of people (founded on their trumpeting of “personal ambition, hard work and taking responsibility for your own situation”), devoid of the voices of actual Conservative voters, and thereby almost reduced to the level of a con trick. His lofty perspective is also reflected in a habit of portraying the political left as angels, which reaches its nadir in an unconvincing and completely superfluous defence of Jeremy Corbyn’s time as the leader of the opposition.
Nonetheless, Tory Nation capably explains two innate Conservative traits that are beyond doubt: an unquenchable lust for power, and a deep belief in stooping to conquer. When the party hits trouble, they become even more pronounced - which explains why, even after endless disgrace and its recent seismic loss of councillors in many of its old Middle English redoubts, the possibility of this amazingly successful political institution winning an unprecedented fifth term in power has not quite been snuffed out.
Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over by Samuel Earle is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
