Conservative Cavalcade - 1

The Conservative party has played such a major part in public affairs during my lifetime that I need more than one post to have my say about them.

When I was little, there was a National Government, and its prime minister was Ramsay MacDonald. I didn’t understand, then, that this ‘national’ government was really an overwhelmingly Conservative one – or, indeed, that there was such a thing as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Insofar as I became aware of political things, I just took ‘the government’ for granted.

I suppose the first incident that aroused my still childish interest was the abdication of King Edward VIII which, indeed, riveted the entire country. Royalty was still widely revered in those days, and the notion that our King should want to marry a common American woman, and a divorced one at that, shocked Britain to the core. By then, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister, widely regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’, and temperamentally a social healer who was sometimes over-complacent. His skilful navigation of the switchover from the erring Edward to the model family monarch George VI won the plaudits of almost everyone except Winston Churchill and a handful of romantic ‘King’s men’.

The next big political event to invade my budding consciousness of the wider world beyond our family life was the Munich crisis. Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain, a prim, narrow-minded but basically decent man, dramatically flew for the first time in his life, not once but twice, to Germany in the space of a few days plead with Hitler to avert a European war. The dictator didn’t think much of this Victorian throwback, and is supposed to have said "If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers". Nonetheless, Chamberlain emerged from the lion’s den with what he optimistically announced was Hitler’s pledge of “peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." But he must surely have known, as well as nearly everyone else did, that this was a hollow hope.

Nowadays, ‘appeasement’ has a bad name and Baldwin and Chamberlain are both execrated for their foolish complacency. But there was much support for their policies at the time; the senseless bloodbath of the 1914-18 trench warfare was only a few years behind, with its tragic loss of almost a whole generation of youth, and most British people were appalled at the thought of another war. Fortunately, though, Winston Churchill was sounding the alarm throughout the 1930s. But he and his small band of supporters were in a minority although I am glad to say my family believed - however reluctantly - that he was right.

Apart from renegade kings and upstart dictators, the National Government of the pre-war decade was a far better one in many respects than it has since been given credit for. When it came into office, the country was almost bankrupt and in the grip of a severe economic depression. This was partly the result of post-war exhaustion, and more immediately a consequence of the great 1929 Wall street crash which resulted from reckless speculation on the American stock market. While accelerating, though still inadequate, rearmament in the last years of peace helped, the National government had been laying the groundwork for economic recovery even earlier, with the abandonment of free trade and the introduction of tariff protection for Britain’s basic industries which, without this, would have been even worse equipped to fight the 1939-45 war. Unemployment was also a nagging problem about which more should and could have been done. But in retrospect, and for all their sins of omission, the ‘men of Munich’ have had an excessive amount of blame heaped upon them by political opponents and historians. Popularity plummets all too swiftly, and Baldwin – who had been hailed as a national saviour after the abdication – became even more unpopular than Chamberlain when the war erupted in earnest in the summer of 1940. He was reviled for not having warned the nation of its peril, and many rejoiced in mean fashion when his beautiful wrought iron ornamental gates at Bewdley [he was an ironmaster] were seized for scrap. His old age was lonely, and I felt pity for him when, as an undergraduate, I saw him glumly hobbling around the Senate House courtyard in procession as Chancellor of Cambridge University.

My own political consciousness only blossomed [if that is the right word!] during the war, when I was a schoolboy with a fascination for history and a keen awareness of the increasingly bitter global struggle. Winston Churchill’s government was a coalition of the three main political parties, and more genuinely ‘national’ than its predecessor had been, though the majority of MPs were still Conservative. During his long political career Churchill himself had been by turns a Conservative, a Liberal, and then a Conservative again. Because of his presumed ‘disloyalty’ during the 1930s, he was disliked and mistrusted by many Conservatives, both in and outside parliament, and only became prime minister on the insistence of the Labour Party, who refused to serve under his rival Lord Halifax.

Churchill’s heroic stance as the implacable British bulldog snarling at the Nazi foe and as the prime architect of Allied victory won the bulk of his party over so that many regarded him as their main asset. When he was unexpectedly defeated in the 1945 landslide general election which swept Labour not only into office but, for the first time, into power he was solidly supported by most Conservatives in his new and unfamiliar role as leader of the opposition. [Indeed, the stalwartly Tory mother of a college friend of mine refused to recognise this unpalatable turn of affairs, and made a point of always referring to Mr Churchill as “the prime minister” throughout the six years that he wasn’t!] During my university days and for some time afterwards I was a pretty strong Churchillian Conservative, because I believed that the Tories, more than Labour, stood for the freedom of the individual to live their personal lives as they chose – something I was perhaps wrong about.

I remained a Conservative until the Suez crisis of 1956, when it became painfully apparent that Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, had not only secretly colluded with France and Israel in attacking Egypt and attempting to seize the Suez Canal, but also had told a whole pack of lies to parliament and the country about the fiasco. At which point I ceased to be a Conservative [writing a pompous letter of resignation to my local MP], and have ever since had no particularly strong party allegiance, though inclining towards the Liberals [now LibDems] primarily because of their stance on civil liberty issues and voting reform.