The Conservatives by Robin Harris: a review by Kwars Kwarteng
Many Conservatives like to think that their party has had a continuous history for 400 years. Much like the assertion of 19th-century Oxford dons that the university was founded by Alfred the Great, the claim is a little strained.
Robin Harris’s incisive and entertaining book struggles with the origins of the party. Rather than being a progenitor of Toryism, Charles I despised democracy and would have hated the notion of political parties. Edmund Burke boasted that he was a Whig; the younger Pitt described himself in the same way. When Lord Liverpool told the Prince Regent in 1812 that his government would be founded on “Whig principles”, Harris excuses this embarrassing statement as being “defensive”. This reviewer is not so sure.
The real origin of the Conservative Party, as opposed to the more nebulous and ill-defined Tories, occurred after 1830. With their customary lucidity, the French came up with the phrase “le parti conservateur” to describe a Right-wing faction in their July Revolution of 1830. This term, we learn, was quickly smuggled into Britain, where little attempt was made to disguise its origin. Indeed, the first Conservatives were known in the early 1830s as “Conservators”....
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