Three decades ago Martin Hutchinson sat down to write a ‘coffee table’ book about the significant figures in Conservative history.  Not a remarkable ambition in itself, perhaps.  To many on the right of the Party the Heathite Corporatism of the early 1970’s looked like the end of the ideological road.  For all its allegedly free enterprise vision of ‘Selsdon Man’, Heath’s Tories had proved wholly unable to think outside the post-war economic consensus.  While direct taxes were cut to a certain extent, both major parties remained committed to a public sector vastly larger than anyone would seriously advocate now.

The eleven-year, partial and, therefore, temporary revival of the right under Margaret Thatcher still lay in the future.  It was the moment to think historically of Conservatism - and the moment no doubt, amid the sound and fury of Saltley and the three day week, to conclude that its like might not be seen on our national stage again.

But in his historical approach Hutchinson started from a position of equal resignation.  He eschewed all the normal assumptions of what it meant and had meant to be a Conservative.  He took issue with all but a limited number of the usual, well-thumbed histories, having formulated the clear and incontrovertible view that they had been written by Whig historians of both parties and presented to the student of history as “a steady Whig progress towards social democracy.”

From such an analysis the most un-Whiggish Hutchinson dissented with sufficient violence to doggedly pursue his alternative not just for the two or three years most first-time authors invest in a maiden project but for thirty.  That he did so can only have benefitted him intellectually, for of coffee tables there is no sign.  Great Conservatives is 770 pages of scholarship, a factual tour de force with nothing more redolent of Starkey-esque pop history than the remark, “Grey was a stupid man.  At Oxford, he had graduated with fourth class honours, having apparently worked quite hard to get them.”  Hutchinson, it should be noted, had a first at Cambridge.

Certainly, for the reader the fact that Hutchinson remained faithful to his task for so long and, finally, found a publisher in the United States is something for which all Conservatives pondering their Party’s fortunes today should be grateful.

The central precept of Great Conservatives is that “Conservatism, the political expression of self-love and reason, played the major role in the outstanding British achievements of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire.”  Indeed, without the peculiar admixture of such Conservative fundamentals as the rule of law, social stability, a respect for property rights, laissez-faire economics, scientific freedom and encouragement, individual freedom, religious and ethical tolerance et al the genius of the British people could never have been set free to create all it did in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Hutchinson’s vision of British history, so traditional as to be idiosyncratic, then goes one satisfying step further.  Just as he apprehends the Conservatism which arose slowly out of good kingship and the ending of the English feudal system as the vivifier of our individual freedoms and national achievements, so he identifies the growth of radicalism and Reform as antipathetic to these things and, in turn, the bringers of national humiliation and decline.

Conservatism as a constructive force ended, for Hutchinson, with the Ministry of Liverpool.  Of him Hutchinson writes that he “above all had the intellectual power and public authority to engraft the new doctrines of Smith and Ricardo onto a social order that was still rightfully dominated by the ‘Gentlemen of England.’”  This rescue of Liverpool’s reputation from the “Arch-Mediocrity” to which it was consigned by the self-serving Disraeli in 1844 is a worthy achievement.

After Liverpool, whose long Ministry ended in 1827, such Conservatism as was practised in high office was increasingly defensive and preservational in character.  It lacked the vitality and confidence to lean into the radical gale and prove its argument that a stable social order and the constitutional balance of interests were the optimum means by which to increase the freedoms and prosperity of the people.  Instead, Conservatism was blown along and has, in consequence, come to look at times today like so much political litter.

This division of Conservative advancement or retreat is a fundamental of Hutchinson’s entire analysis, for he judges the salient figures of British history accordingly.  They stand or fall by the Conservatism, or lack of it, with which they addressed the events and challenges of their time.

Let it be said that in this regard, Hutchinson is somewhat prone to present a case closed.  The very structure of the book arises from his (to my mind) pretty flawless but summary historical judgement.  It proceeds via closely-argued but never-overworked examinations of successfully Conservative kings and ministers, interspersed with brief chapters – digressions, Hutchinson calls them – in which those of failing Conservative mein are firmly despatched.  He does not much equivocate.

Thus Henry VII starts the Conservative wain rolling in 1485 – a justly popular date with right-wing historians.  Forty-nine pages detail the next twenty-four fruitful years of his reign.  But his grand-daughter Elizabeth’s forty-five year reign is done and dusted in just six digressive pages.  Well, Great Conservatives is the title of this book and if Elizabeth is not, as Hutchinson contends, a great Conservative then why put the focus there?

In fact, one should properly view Great Conservatives as eight political biographies, each hedged about with the travails of lesser men and women, Conservatively speaking.  The eight are Henry VII, Charles II, Walpole, Pitt the Younger, Castlereagh, Liverpool, Palmerston and Salisbury.  Among those weighed and found wanting are Disraeli, Peel (to whom Hutchinson ascribes the catchy appellation, Conservatism’s Undertaker), Curzon (betrayer), Churchill and Thatcher.

Hutchinson reveres that mature Conservatism that flowered with the first Ministry of Pitt the Younger.  Before Pitt, Conservatism was little more than a collection of general principles which could be, and often were, practised by politicians from both traditions.  Equally often, though, “political life had,” as Hutchinson puts it, “been a battle between aristocratic factions.”  Pitt forged a great political institution out of principle, and it’s worth right-minded thinkers reflecting that today we only pay lip-service to those principles whilst the aristocracies of modern liberalism dispose of our affairs to their pleasing.

Pitt set the nation on the road to unrivalled economic greatness.  He dealt with the Jacobin perils arising out of revolution in France.  Constitutionally, he maintained a fine balance between the rights of merit and property.  He it is, therefore, who earns Hutchinson’s ultimate plaudit, summarised in Great Conservatives thus:-

Before his time, the economic laws that govern so much of political life had only been dimly understood, and governments had instituted Conservative policies in the economic area only by chance.  After his death, the effects of the French Revolution and the wars that followed gradually wore away at the fabric of a Conservative society, the benefits of which were not fully appreciated.  Under Liverpool and Castlereagh Conservative politics were followed, but only against strong opposition, and after 1832 Conservatism was reduced to a rearguard action.  But under William Pitt both economic and social Conservatism combined to produce a era of achievement unmatched in British history.  He stands, therefore, not merely supreme but alone, in his personal Valhalla.  Prime Minister at 24, battler against internal and external subversion and instigator of the Industrial Revolution, he will remain an inspiration to Conservatives for all time.

This floodtide of Conservatism endured less than five decades.  Thereafter it suffered death by a thousand cuts, the deepest being the Reform Act of 1832.  But die it very definitely did, according to Hutchinson.  Nevertheless, he concludes his book with words of some hope.  His three-part final chapter is subtitled, Can Conservatism Live?  It is a question that occupies everyone who has the power of thought and calls himself Conservative.  Hutchinson, being an economist and a practical thinker, delivers a practical answer.  But I want you to read this truly engrossing and enlightening history.  So I’ll leave the question hanging.

All of this, be it Conservatism’s history or its potential future, is far away from us today.  Let’s end, then, with two Hutchinsonian blasts at figures from our own age.  In his scheme of things they are digressive notes.  But they may help us to understand just how high Hutchinson sets the bar for genuine Conservatism and how surely magnificent were those whom he judges to have leapt over it.

Of Churchill, the saviour of Britain and of human rights in the world, the BBC’s “Greatest Briton”, he concludes:-

In his last term, Churchill made no attempt to bring the trades unions under control, leaving that problem to fester, damaging the British economy and freedom itself until Thatcher’s time.  Most damagingly, he did nothing about the emerging problems of Commonwealth immigration, thus condemning Britain to a high crime multi-cultural society whether the electorate wanted this or not.
    There is no question that Churchill was a great war leader, and an immensely talented and on the whole admirable man.  The nearest comparison is to Chatham, two centuries earlier, another great war leader, another immensely talented and admirable man.  However, neither man was a Conservative, and it is ironic that in both cases unintended consequences of their leadership proved immensely damaging to Conservatism and to Britain: in Chatham’s case, leading to the loss of the American colonies, in Churchill’s case to the bankruptcy and dismantling of the British Empire.

Of the Iron Lady, the sainted Margaret, he concludes:-

“Thatcher was in the end undone by lack of support within her own Cabinet, and within the “Conservative” Party as a whole, unprecedented given her success in winning elections.  It is one of the greatest criticisms of her that, since she knew she needed ‘six strong men’ to succeed, she did little or nothing to secure them.  In eleven years, her 1979 Cabinet was almost entirely replaced … She was unlucky in losing Parkinson to scandal, Tebbitt to the IRA and, at the end of her Ministry, Ridley to cancer and media assassination … The fact that Ridley was never Chancellor, that Carrington, Pym, Howe, Major and Hurd were her Foreign Secretaries, and above all that John Major was her chosen successor demonstrates that in personnel management Thatcher was inept.
    Thatcher was not fully a Conservative, and her career ended in failure and defeat.  However, she changed Britain, almost wholly for the better, and she deserves to be remembered for centuries to come – Churchill, after all, left Britain considerably weaker and poorer than he found it.  Considered as a whole, her career was thus not a tragedy but a considerable if qualified success, and if not a Great Conservative she was still, in terms of her positive effect on Britain, by some distance the greatest twentieth century Prime Minister.

Great Conservatives by Martin Hutchinson is published by Academica Press.