September 6, 2015

Finest Hour 168, Spring 2015

Page 40

Timothy Heppell, The Tories From Winston Churchill to David Cameron Bloomsbury, 216 pages, $104.50, Kindle $20.22

Review by William John Shepherd

A politics professor at Leeds University studies the postwar Tories in a book without illustrations and one of the most outrageous prices we have seen. Heppell offers a good index and an impressive bibliography, though readers should note the use of in-text references listed parenthetically, as opposed to standard footnotes or endnotes.

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Heppell examines electoral strategies, governing approaches, and ideological thought of the Conservative Party over five postwar periods. The first (1945–64) involved successful adaptation of the non-ideological “one-nation” strategy after the Second World War, with an orientation to the state and appeal to median voters. The Edward Heath era (1964–75) was characterized by failure of statecraft, as Tories were unable to dominate political debate or demonstrate governing competence.  The Thatcher era (1975–92) embraced the free market while moving away from the state, taking advantage of disarray in the rival Labour Party and winning four successive general elections. The post-Thatcher phase includes includes the John Major government (1992–97) and opposition years (1997–2005), including three devastating electoral defeats at the hands of Tony Blair’s revamped “New Labour.”  The fifth and current period, following Blair and his successor Gordon Brown, is David Cameron’s “Big Society” strategy, combining Thatcherite skepticism towards the European Union with a liberal social outlook.

Churchill features only in the first chapter, a rehash of Kevin Theakston’s thesis from Heppell’s earlier book, Leaders of the Opposition. The questionable argument is that Churchill was an indifferent Leader of the Opposition, embittered by electoral defeat, diminished by old age and ill health, and distracted by his war memoirs. His younger deputies, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and R.A. Butler, provided the ideas and energy that allowed the party’s return to power in 1951. The thesis continues that Churchill’s problematic leadership was further compounded by his obsession to settle Cold War matters through a summit meeting with the Soviets and Americans, a plan viewed with little enthusiasm by anybody else. Finally, at age 80 in 1955, Churchill resigned, and the long-suffering Tories were free to move forward without his hindering influence.

Heppell’s book is not a Churchill polemic like so many other recent works, but it is blindly dismissive of his significant party leadership, ignoring the fact that Churchill was the leader who set the overall tone, delegated authority as needed, and made the big decisions, whether they worked out for good or for ill. This book is a useful and timely postmortem on the Tory Party, but scant complement to Lord Blake’s erudite 1988 masterpiece The Conservative Party from Peel to Major.