For years historians tended to ignore the Conservative Party in favour of the left-wing Parties. It had been labelled ' the stupid party' in the nineteenth century - and the slur stuck. But in the last fifteen years or so there has been a sea-change. A Party that reshaped Britain under Margaret Thatcher surely could not be so stupid after all. A lot of detailed research has been done,and the books that have resulted occupy quite a bit of shelving.
I have contributed a little to the process: a thick and not very readable tome on the 1880s when the Tories trounced Gladstone's Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule; and, perhaps a little easier to digest, a history of the Carlton Club, the Party's first central headquarters outside Parliament, published last year to mark its 175th anniversary. Succulent meals produced by a French cook were among the club's early attractions, but it was as a formidable political force that it swiftly made its mark: ' within a few years of its foundation in 1832', it has been said by a leading historian,' the club contained the substantial strength of conservatism in England'.
The Carlton is just one milestone in the Party's long history. How could that long history, stretching back through the pre-1832 Tory Party to the period of the Civil Wars and Oliver Cromwell (definitely not a Tory!) in the seventeenth century, be made more readily accessible to people?
It seemed to me that a swift tour through the centuries, highlighting the principal formative events and the main players, might be the answer. That is how A Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives came to be conceived.
Change is the key to understanding Britain's Conservative Party. It seems at first sight a paradox. A conservative party would surely want to stop things changing. The genius of the Conservative Party in Britain embodied in its greatest leaders - Peel, Disraeli, Stanley Baldwin, Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher - has been to recognise that each generation needs to amend the social and economic systems it inherits to keep abreast of changing times. Sometimes the changing times are pretty dramatic: think of Margaret Thatcher.
Is David Cameron in the same mould as the Party's most successful leaders in the past? Having known him for 20 years, I have no doubts.
Alistair’s book, A Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives, traces the course of the Conservative Party’s development from its Tory roots in the seventeenth century until today. Lavishly illustrated, it is 35 pages long and contains a foreword by David Cameron.
Copies at £5 can be ordered by emailing Joanna.Hindley@conservatives.com
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