The Conservative Party’s Genius: Enduring
Since the birth of the political party, in 17th-century England, perhaps none has been quite as unsuccessful in its constitutional struggle as the Tories. Time and again, this most English of interest groups has been on the wrong side of history, advocating for a status quo that has slowly been eroded by the steady tide of human advancement.
And yet the Tories have survived at each turn, their genius lying not in an ability to conserve, but in an ability to adapt—reluctantly accepting reform and, over time, embracing the ancient, eternal nobility of the new settlement as if it had always been there.
Britain’s Conservative Party—the modern incarnation of Toryism, and its most dominant and persistent political force—does not burn bright, but it endures. Its cause is not ideological, but temperamental. Its strength is that while other political philosophies come and go, the conservative temperament remains, skeptical, tribal, cautious. Its allegiances are here and now, not abstract or academic: monarchy, Church, country.
The primary Tory duty is to govern in order to check the utopian passions of the tidy mind. “The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power,” writes Robin Harris in The Conservatives. “It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected … It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul.”
Set in this light, Britain’s current crisis over its withdrawal from the European Union is just the latest entry in the long roll call of political upheaval that English Toryism has faced and—so far—outlived. Its challenge now is to do so again in the age of Brexit, Donald Trump, and a surge in nationalism across the Western world, which are threatening to upend the basic political divisions in the United Kingdom, from class and economic interest to identity and place, just as Britain embarks on a mission to reimagine its global standing.
After giving the country a referendum on its EU membership, the Conservative Party has found itself with the job of trying to enact the result—one its past two prime ministers did not want and did not expect. Boris Johnson, the third Conservative prime minister in three years, though the first who campaigned for Brexit, is now tasked with taking Britain out of the EU on terms acceptable to his party, a majority in Parliament, and the country, each of whom has different, often competing, goals and desires. And he must do so before an October 31 deadline that he has insisted is “do or die.”
As the Conservative Party gathers for its annual conference in Manchester, it faces a set of challenges as daunting as any in its history. Squeezed from the right by
