Powellism, Thatcherism and the Conservative Party, 1945-87: the party as the site of ideological transition

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POWELLISM, THATCHERISM AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY, 1945-87:
THE PARTY AS THE SITE OF IDEOLOGICAL TRANSITION

by

Jamie William John Simcox

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Jamie William John Simcox
ii

Acknowledgments
I wish to thank, first and foremost, the members of my dissertation committee at
the University of Southern California—my advisor and chair, Dr. Jefferey Sellers, my
‘outside member’, Dr. Philip Ethington, and Dr. Anthony Kammas—without whose
advice, mentorship, encouragement and thoughtful criticism this project would not have
been possible. I must also express my gratitude to Dr. Ann Crigler, who served as my
primary advisor during the first two years in the Political Science and International
Relations programme, and Dr. Steven Lamy, who, at short notice, kindly agreed to sit on
my qualification examinations committee.
I should further like to thank the Department of Political Science’s staff—
Veridiana Chavarin, Catherine Ballard, Jody Battles and Aurora Ramirez—for the stellar
work they do for students on a daily basis with genuine ardour, and, of course, the USC
Graduate School. Not only was financial support both generous and dependable
throughout my time at USC as a College Doctoral Fellow, but the opportunity afforded
through this package to teach has aided greatly my professional development.
In the United Kingdom, extended thanks must go to the staff at the Conservative
Party Archives and Bodleian Library at Oxford, Staffordshire Records Office,
Wolverhampton City Archives, and Walsall Local History Centre, and to the 1922
Committee and Powell Literary Trustees for permission to view closed collections and
documents containing sensitive material.
Finally, I owe the most immeasurable of debts to my parents.
iii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ii

List of Tables iv

List of Figures v

Abstract vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. The Party as the Site of Ideological Transition 18

Chapter 2. The Case of the Post-War Conservative Party 78

Chapter 3. The Short and Unhappy Life of Consensus Politics 148

Chapter 4. Enoch Powell, Powellism, and the First Challenge 199

Chapter 5. The Populist Challenge: 1968-74 258

Chapter 6. Model or Approach? 323

Bibliography 384

iv

List of Tables
Table 2.1: Applied principles of Middle Way Conservatism,
Powellism and Thatcherism. 82
Table 3.1: Elements of the post-war settlement and the parties’
respective electoral perspectives. 163
Table 4.1: Effects of institutional change on leadership selection
outcomes. 212
Table 6.1: Presence for each studied transition of crisis (a
prerequisite) and the four factors determining success at the
challenge stage. 375

v

List of Figures
Figure i: Political-electoral realignment and social forces—the
traditional realignment thesis. 12
Figure ii: The party as the initial site of ideological transition. 12
Figure 1.1: Two models of the chronology of ideological
transitions. 30
Figure 1.2: Trends in ideological transitions over space and time. 38
Figure 1.3: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the
challenge phase of ideological transitions. 70
Figure 1.4: The institutional focus of challengers at each stage of
an ideological transition. 71
Figure 1.5: Intra-level processes during the consolidation and
ascendency phases of an ideological transition. 75
Figure 2.1: The Conservative Party organization. 106
Figure 2.2: The institutional focus of the Thatcherite transition. 112
Figure 2.3: The institutional focus of the Middle Way transition. 115
Figure 2.4: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the
challenge phase of the Middle Way transition. 126
Figure 2.5: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the
challenge phase of the Thatcherite transition. 127
Figure 2.6: Intra-level processes during the consolidation and
ascendency phases of the Thatcherite transition. 130
Figure 4.1: Operationalization of different political economic
stances from same core principle and intermediate construction. 234
Figure 4.2: Operationalization of antonymous policies in foreign
affairs from same core principle and intermediate construction. 234
vi

Figure 4.3: Derivation of similar programmes from incompatible
or unrelated core principles. 238
Figure 5.1: Origins of letters of support sent to Powell after
Birmingham speech. 291
Figure 5.2: Topics that animated Powell’s correspondents. 296
vii

Abstract
This dissertation contends that the politics of ideology within political parties are
crucial in determining the substance and early prospects for success of ideological
challenges seeking to transform the state system in representative democracies. The focus
of this dissertation is the politics of the party; that is to say, the objective of studying the
wider conjuncture is to illuminate the often complex effects of intra-party politics on the
state system, and vice versa. The politics of ideology within the party help to determine
the timing, tactics and content of transitions in the state system. Moreover, the initial
intra-party purchase of ideas may preclude transitions, in spite of sociological forces
indicating such realignments to be viable.
The dissertation presents a model of intra-party ideological transitions, periodized
according to the institutional focus and strategic aims of challengers at three stages—
referred to here as the challenge, the consolidation, and the ascendency. At each of these
stages, the effects of ideas are ‘coupled’ with those of institutions at three levels—the
high political, the grassroots, and among the wider electorate—and the interaction
between them can be drawn out in narratives which map our model onto various cases.
Owing to events and institutions outside the party and the huge internal variation
between parties, each transition will be substantively unique and its constituent stages
will differ in duration. Yet it is proposed that our model’s three stages are transferable
analytically across ideological transitions in ‘establishment parties’—especially such
parties that are physically large and ideologically diverse, but also smaller, more
viii

programmatic, parties, so long as their leaders subscribe to constitutional rules and they
are ideationally linked through their core principles to the broader societal ideology.
This second attribute separates the ‘establishment party’, which this dissertation
concentrates exclusively on, from the merely constitutionalist party, for which certain of
the model’s facets may potentially require revision.
*
Three literatures which overlook the party as the initial site of transition in the
process of political and ideological change are examined. Realignment theorists and their
critics have traditionally concentrated on electoral churning, rather than on the social
forces at work in driving ‘switchers’ into the opposing camp, or, to complicate matters
further, the changing electoral ideologies expounded by parties, which may be a cause, an
effect, or epiphenomenal to the realignment of voters. Even when political scientists do
move beyond the surface and quantifiable symptoms of political change, it is argued that
they neglect the vital ways in which the societal tectonics that precede and produce
upheavals are mediated by the party-as-institution.
Historical institutionalists, meanwhile, have made significant contributions to our
understanding of political development and institutional functionality, but their analyses
are limited in scope by an overly narrow focus on the central institutions of state. The
role of political parties—the key link in civil society between what Andrew Gamble
terms the ‘politics of power’ and the ‘politics of support’—as sites of ideological
contestation, and therefore as integral elements of any wider conjunctural change, has
been neglected.
ix

Though the few recent studies of parties as organizations have, by examining
changes to party functions such as mobilization and fundraising, offered compelling
accounts of long-term institutional change, they have, unfortunately, neglected the
dynamic process through which ideas are promulgated within relatively static
institutional settings in the short-term.
This dissertation’s model of ideological transition takes the internal politics of the
party as its point of reference, and is based on the following five assumptions or
theoretical premises:
• The party is the initial site of ideological development and contestation in
parliamentary democracies, and we must look inside parties in order to understand
larger changes in the state system.
• The respective and relative effects of ideology and the institutional configuration
of the party differ according to the stage of transition.
• During each of these stages, the different levels of the party—modelled in this
dissertation as the realm of high politics, the grassroots level, and the broader
electorate—are involved in the process of ideological change to differing degrees.
• Ideas are sold differently to the grassroots and, in turn, to the wider electorate,
than they are among the parliamentary party.
• The content of operational ideologies helps determine the success or failure of
challenges—First, the core principles of a party’s ‘ideological seedbed’ frame the
debate, set its terms, and limit the pool from which ideas can be drawn or
recycled, and second, aside from the skill with which ideologies are sold, core
x

principles must be operationalized into a package of policies which seems
compelling in light of events.
Building on the realignment synthesis, this dissertation offers an account of
realignment writ large. During the initial stage of transition, the challenge, the aim of
‘ideological entrepreneurs’ is simply to win leadership of the party due to the political
power afforded those occupying key posts. For a challenge to emerge, conjunctural crisis
or disconnect between society and the state system must exist, along with a dominant
faction or group within the party associated with the existing political economy. Once an
alternative is operationalized from one or more principles from the party’s ideological
seedbed, the success of challenges depends on four interconnected variables: the
configuration of party institutions; the manner in which challengers conduct their
campaign within this setting; the attraction of the challengers’ ideology vis-à-vis the
electoral perspective of the old order; and the strength of the old order and its tactical
decisions, including modification of its own operational ideology.
In the subsequent consolidation and ascendency stages, the challengers must
retain their newly-acquired hegemony within the party, sell their operational ideology to
the electorate as an alternative to the status quo, and seek as far as possible to implement
policy in line with their realigning project. The shift of attention away from the intra-
party struggle—the assumption being that the challengers’ position becomes more secure
as the transition progresses—and towards these later goals marks the boundary between
the consolidation and ascendency stages.
xi

The current study applies this model to the case of the post-war Conservative
Party. Chapter two discusses at length the content and operation of the Tory Party’s
‘secular Anglican’ seedbed, asserting that the party is not only constitutionally
acquiescent, but also ideologically aware. The model is then mapped onto the two
successful Conservative challenges of the post-war era: Middle Way Conservatism and
Thatcherism, which displaced the former as the dominant Conservative ideology in the
1970s and 1980s.
The bulk of the dissertation’s substantive sections concentrates on Enoch Powell’s
failed challenges to Middle Way hegemony from 1963 to 1974. Since the attention of
challengers is paid almost exclusively to the party during the challenge phase, this period
has most relevance to the politics of ideology within the party—the central topic of this
dissertation.
Comparison with the Thatcherite transition allows for the systematic study of
intra-party variables which, all other factors being equal, account for the almost total
collapse of one challenge and the swift takeover of the party by another group just a
decade later. Thus, the determining influence of the party-as-institution over the viability
of ideological challenges is established.
Finally, the external validity of the model and its concepts are discussed in
relation to three historically quite different challenges: Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff
reform campaign of 1903-6; the transformation of the Republican Party in the last quarter
of the twentieth century in the United States; and the emergence of New Labour under
Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair in the 1990s. As our model is adapted to other
xii

transitions, one of the most important questions that must be asked is: What are the
relationships between the levels of the party and how does interaction take place? Only
then can we begin to understand the flow of ideas within the particular party being
analyzed.
1

Introduction
In June 1997, two months after leading the Labour Party to its biggest landslide
election victory since 1945, Tony Blair invited a throng of celebrities who had supported
the campaign to celebrate at 10 Downing Street. Rock musicians, footballers, radio DJs
and alternative comedians mingled with barristers, newspaper editors and senior civil
servants in this nexus of power and popularity. Several commentators at the time, and
many more a decade later, bemoaned the slick presentation and cynicism encapsulated by
the spectacle, angered as much by the vapidity of New Labour as its reformulation, or
abandonment, of Socialism.
1
Fewer understood, however, that the meritocratic though
inequitable, aspirational yet gauche world of Cool Britannia was not a rebellion against
Thatcherism, but affirmation of the neoliberal realignment of the state system, society
and climate of opinion it had ushered in. Blair’s champagne soiree was as significant for,
and as representative of, the politics of power and its public face in the post-Thatcherite
world as previous Labour prime ministers’ ‘beer and sandwiches at Number 10’ with the
bosses of the Trades Union Congress had been during the post-war era.
True, New Labour’s 1997 manifesto promised devolution of power to the nations,
including Ulster, and emphasized the party’s commitment to improving and increasing
spending on public services—the oft-neglected parenthetical clause of Labour spin doctor
Peter Mandelson’s infamous sound bite ‘we are intensely relaxed about people becoming
filthy rich (as long as they pay taxes)’. Moreover, as John Gray and others have pointed

1
Buckwell, A., ‘Cool Britannia Dumps Blair’ in the Daily Mail (May 1, 2007).
2

out, neoliberal economics unleashed social and cultural forces quite antithetical to such
ostensibly Conservative principles as social organicism and the particular brand of
moralism espoused by Margaret Thatcher herself.
2
But qualifications, inconsistencies and
uneven development should not detract from our appreciation of the thoroughgoing
redefinitions of the economic, social and cultural terrain brought about by such realigning
projects as Thatcherism, and the fact certain ideological entrepreneurs and their
associates can change fundamentally their nation’s state system.
3

While this dissertation returns briefly in its concluding chapter to changes in the
Labour Party’s direction as a response to the Thatcherites’ successes in redefining the
political economy, it is to the ideological challenges to post-war consensus politics within
the Conservative Party that we turn in order to illustrate the following point: The politics
of ideology within the party-as-institution are crucial in determining the substance
and the early prospects for success of ideological challenges seeking to transform the
state system in representative democracies.
Modelling Change and Continuity
It need hardly be said that analysis of the entire conjuncture—events and
institutional alignments in society, civil society, the political system and government—
must necessarily precede any complete understanding of transformations in the state

2
Gray, J., ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher’ in The London Review of Books (Apr. 22, 2010).
3
‘State system’ and ‘politics of power' are used quite interchangeably, and, given that the topic of the
dissertation is intra-party politics and realignment, this should not cause too much confusion. However,
there is a slight distinction in the literature. ‘State system’ is referred to by Marxist sociologists Jessop et.
al. as the state writ large, including its extra-governmental reach and linkages down to the private citizen
made possible by the administrative capacity of the modern state. ‘Politics of power’ is a concept
developed by political theorist Andrew Gamble that refers to the politics surrounding this
extended state system.
3

system. But if such a volume, or, more likely, collection of volumes, were to be
compiled, it would have to cast its analytic net so broadly as to obfuscate the salient, or
define its terms and justify its omissions so thoroughly as to become merely a exercise in
pedantry. In either case, it would soon attract the ire of specialists in a fragmented
academy who felt their sub-discipline could add to the narrative or that without its vital
input, any account could at best be only partial. If one adds to this the immense room for
quite legitimate differences of interpretation and revision, it is little wonder serious
surveys of the state system and realignments of it rarely surface from modern academia.
4

The ‘coupling’ of structural factors, leadership and contingency are shown by
John Kingdon to have been instrumental in the formation of America’s ‘unusual’ political
culture, and Dennis Kavanagh’s Thatcherism and British Politics (1987) offers a similar
account of the Thatcherite transformation with reference to the interplay of ‘leadership’,
‘events’ and ‘climate of opinion’—the third being a conception of the public mood that
lies beyond the aggregate of public opinion but at a shorter range than the shared
narratives and symbols we have come to understand as political culture.
5
This dissertation

4
See Semmel, B., The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: classical political economy the empire of free trade
and imperialism, 1750–1850 (Cambridge; 2004) for a notable exception of a work that is able to deal
comprehensively with a gamut of sources from across various levels and compartments of society and the
state system. The complexity of the twentieth century state possibly excludes such a feat being
accomplished by historians of the period. It is unsurprising, then, that the standard texts on Thatcherism
assigned to undergraduates are Dennis Kavanagh’s Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of
Consensus? (Oxford; 1987) and Eric Evans’s Thatcher and Thatcherism (London; 2004)—both multi-
level, multi-faceted and highly accessible monographs exploring the phenomenon—while the text most
cited by scholars is Thatcherism: Personality and Politics, a collection of academic essays, edited by
Kenneth Minogue and written by various specialists with aim of explaining one fragment of an
unmanageable whole.
5
Kingdon, J., America the Unusual (Worth; 1999), 15-16. Lichbach, M.and Zuckerman, A., (Eds.)
Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure (Cambridge; 2009), 44-6.

4

works very much in this vein, but offers a multi-stage, multi-level model that can better
help distil the impact of such variables.
Five core assumptions inform this model:
• The party is the initial site of ideological development and transformation in
parliamentary democracies, and we must look inside parties in order to
understand larger changes to the state system. Just as those seeking to model
the actions of states in the international system, and thus the ‘ordered anarchy’
of international affairs, examine first and second ‘image’ factors such as
internal organization and the beliefs and ambitions of statesmen, we must do
the same for parties. While factors exogenous to the party are important in
facilitating or enabling change, their effects are directed inwards in the first
instance by ideological entrepreneurs.
• The relative effects of variables differ depending on the stage of the ideological
transition. Since ideological realignments diffuse outwards from the site of the
party into the wider governmental and state system, there is a temporal
dimension to ideological transitions which must be examined. Different
leadership skills and structural impetuses are required at each stage of a
successful challenge, and the aims and tactics of challengers differ from one
period to another.
• During each of these stages, the different levels of the party are involved in the
process of ideological change to differing degrees. Most activity during the
initial challenge phase transpires at the high political level. (The few recent
5

studies of parties as organizations have tended to trace organizational changes
over time, focussing on party functions such as mobilization and fundraising
rather than the dynamic process through which ideas are promulgated within a
given set of institutions).
• Ideas are sold differently to the grassroots and, in turn, the wider electorate,
than they are among the parliamentary party. The further one moves from the
inner sanctum or ‘magic circle’, the simpler the ideological message becomes.
At each level, however, the portrayal of strong leadership is essential.
• The content of ideas matters to this process. First, the core principles of a
party’s ideological seedbed frame the debate, set its terms and limit the pool
from which ideas can be drawn or recycled. Second, aside from the skill with
which ideologies are sold, core principles must be operationalized into a
package of policies and their narratives must seem compelling in light of
events.
Party institutions and the content of operational ideologies themselves are thus coequally
important in determining the success of ideological transitions.
The model of ideological transitions presented in this dissertation comprises three
stages, each of which is defined by the aims of the challenger during that period. In the
first stage—the intra-party ‘challenge’—ideological entrepreneurs attempt to shift the
balance of power within the party hierarchy decisively to their advantage. The structure
of the party, its organizational ethos, its ideological seedbed and exogenous factors
determine the particulars of this process, such as the role of the party grassroots and the
6

institutions of the party targeted, but as long as challengers accept the constitutional rules
of parliamentary representative democracy, this strategic aim is key.
6

For a challenge to occur there must be significant conjunctural crisis. Dramatic,
though often self-contained, events such as war or political scandal are elements and
examples of conjunctural crisis, and can certainly lead to changes in government or the
leadership of parties. But in order for ideological challenges to occur, such events and
any political advantage accrued from them must be linked to a larger practical political
programme, derived from one or more core values lifted from the party’s ideological
seedbed. Challengers must offer an alternative to the existing politics of power, and a
recognizable faction or tendency within the party must be associated with the status quo
and ideological justifications of its main tenets.
In modern democracies the realm of political economy is large, owing to the
state’s extra-governmental reach and the administrative capacity of its bureaucracies.
Hence, crises that induce ideological challenges and the alternatives offered are likely to
encompass myriad issues and to address the fundamental political question: which groups
are privileged in the operation of the state and the mode of capitalism it undergirds
(Keynesian welfare state; neoliberalism, etc.)?
Once challengers have secured their position in the hierarchy of the party,
commanding its policymaking apparatus and key administrative posts, the ideological
challenge is directed outwards, towards the state system itself and the end goal of
foundational transformation. During the ‘consolidation’ and ‘ascendency’ phases, the

6
The application of the model to non-parliamentary systems is discussed in chapter six.
7

challengers’ aims are threefold. First, hegemony within the party must be maintained and
counterrevolution prevented. Second, an electoral coalition must be built around the
challengers’ programme, consisting primarily of classes or groups in society that are
relatively disadvantaged, or feel themselves to be so, under the established political order.
Third, the party under new leadership starts to redefine the nation’s political economic
terrain.
The boundary between the consolidation and ascendency phases is marked by a
reversal of priorities in the pursuit of these aims. As we shall see, consolidation of
hegemony in a party often occurs before power is attained, and there is thus, by default,
little or no attention paid during this phase to the third aim. Conversely, even though
there have been instances of ascendant ideological regimes collapsing under the weight of
sharp crises and well-strategized challenges, hegemony within a party is usually secure
enough at this stage for the new order to concentrate on the related aims of expanding and
deepening its electoral base, and pushing forward with its realigning agenda. As in the
challenge phase, the relative importance of such factors as grassroots involvement and
division in the opposition party or parties will vary from transition to transition, and since
the aims in these phases pertain to institutions of government, the structure of that
government, the party system and the political culture of the country, differences in
process will likely be greater. Yet the strategic imperatives still hold true for challengers
in parliamentary democracies, where dominance in the party must be maintained for the
duration of the transition.

8

Outline
Chapter one of this dissertation identifies a significant gap in the realignment
literature and historical institutionalist accounts of change and continuity in the
arrangements of the state system. It suggests this can be filled by studying the role of the
party as the initial site of ideological development and vehicle for the propagation of
ideas. Once it is established that ideas can be transformational as well as constraining,
and that only by studying the activities of ideological entrepreneurs within the
institutional bounds of parties can we understand the nature and timing of transitions
from one state system to another, the chapter works towards a model of intra-party
ideological challenges that can be applied to multiple cases.
Chapter two introduces the ideas and internal structure of the post-war
Conservative Party, which, as Britain’s ‘non-ideological’ party, might initially seem a
curious choice as the test case for a model of ideological transition. The Tory Party, it is
argued, is as intensely ideological as other parties in representative democracies, though
its particular ‘ideological seedbed’, presented here as a form of secular Anglicanism,
tended to preclude the fratricidal conflict witnessed in the Labour Party during the period
under review. In fact, so broad is the ideological pool from which Conservatives can
draw ideas, and so embedded in the institutional history of the country is the party, that
Tories are ideally situated to formulate operational ideologies that address the whole
gamut of issues associated with the political economy of the modern state system. The
final part of this chapter compares two successful ideological transitions within the
Conservative Party: the first from interwar liberal Conservatism to a Middle Way
9

position reconciled to the post-war consensus, as advocated most notably by Harold
Macmillan, and the second being the Thatcherites’ challenge to, and overthrow of, the
Middle Way regime and the subsequent transformation of British politics and society. We
shall see, for example, that in both cases the wider electorate acted only to rubber stamp
changes which had taken place within the party years earlier, though the relative lengths
of time between periods differed. This comparison serves the dual purpose of
demonstrating how the core assumptions and phases of the model fit two cases while
showing that within these parameters, a variety of internal and external factors determine
such particulars of the transition as the institutions targeted and the delineation of stages.
The next three chapters narrow the focus onto the first stage of the intra-party
ideological transition: the challenge. This stage is the most important in showing the
relevance and indispensability of ideological transformations in parties to realignments in
the state system, for it here that ideas are formed and, depending on the ideas themselves,
the institutional setting, and the skill of ideological entrepreneurs in selling them within
these confines, either afforded a vital platform from which to compete electorally in later
stages, or nipped in the bud before they enter the mainstream of inter-party politics.
The chapters concentrate on Enoch Powell’s challenge to Middle Way
Conservatism from 1963 to 1974, when Powell left the party due to disagreements over
Europe and the Conservative government’s prices and incomes policy. Throughout
chapters three and four, aspects of Powell’s challenge will be compared and contrasted
with similar points or processes identified by our model in the better known and better
researched from a scholarly perspective Thatcherite transition. The historical comparison
10

between Powellism and Thatcherism is also vital in order to demonstrate that ideas
matter, along with the way in which they are sold.
During the challenge phase, I show that while certain structural and historical
factors such as generation and regime legitimacy might have worked slightly to
Thatcher’s advantage, this is far from certain, and in other areas, such as social class and
grassroots involvement, the backdrop to the Thatcherite challenge was identical to
Powell’s earlier bid. The conundrum becomes, therefore, why Powell failed to secure the
party leadership while Thatcher succeeded. Variables that shall be discussed are:
dexterity of leadership; generation of challengers as opposed to the old order; personality;
and tactics.
Though the comparative study of Powellism and Thatcherism is required in order
to gauge the importance of the various institutional factors, along with the skill with
which ideas are sold and compromise is reached, to the success of challenges, much
greater attention is paid in the substantive chapters to Powellism than to the Thatcherite
transition. Part of the reason for this is the lack of systematic analysis of Powell’s thought
as an ideology of Conservatism in the existing literature. At the time of writing, over
thirty full biographies of Thatcher have been published, as well as at least nine volumes
dealing with one or more elements of the politics and ideology of ‘Thatcherism’. Partial
attempts to better understand the operationalization of Powell’s arguments from core
principles and to set them against those of his opponents were made by T.E. Utley and
Humphry Berkeley at the height of Powell’s notoriety, but, as the former conceded in the
preface to his 1968 book Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking, these were far from
11

‘exhaustive and scholarly stud[ies] of his political and economic philosophy’.
7
Utley’s
own work, as important as it is to historians as a primary source, was but an early attempt
by an astute commentator, working with incomplete access to transcripts, to assess a
contemporary phenomenon that he believed, writing after Powell’s Birmingham speech,
would ‘disturb the peace of the Tory Party...for many years to come’. This dissertation
sets out to fill several gaps and to offer a more comprehensive appraisal of ‘Powellism’
before analyzing Powell’s challenge alongside the by now well-known narrative of
Thatcherism.
The primary reason for its concentration on Powell, however, is theoretical. The
dissertation’s claim that the internal politics of the party-as-institution must be integral to
any understanding of the occurrence, substance and successes of ideological challenges
rests on its demonstration that, in spite of configurations of social forces that might be
expected to precipitate political realignment, those offering an alternative to the existing
state system can be effectively sidelined during the intra-party challenge before having
put their case to the wider electorate. The substantive chapters on Powellism’s failure
indicate the paucity of a traditional realignment literature which, even when it does
concern itself with the social forces behind complex electoral and political shifts, ignores
the mediating role of the party as the primary site of transition.

7
Utley, T.E., Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking (London; 1968), 9.

Fig. i: Political-electoral realignment and social forces
Fig. ii: The party as the initial site of ideological transition
Chapter three shows how the prerequisites identified in our model for a challenge
to the established hegemony had been met by the time Sir Alec Douglas
Conservatives to a close defeat at the polls in 1964, and in chapter four, the formation and
sale of Powellism through the established channels of the Conservative Party are traced.
Powellism as an ideology
racism, owing to Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned of the dangers
large-scale Commonwealth immigration allegedly posed to local communities. Following
this, Powell became a pariah among
believed to be a ‘vast majority that groans under the tyranny of small, but elusive,
electoral realignment and social forces—the traditional realignment thesis.
: The party as the initial site of ideological transition.
Chapter three shows how the prerequisites identified in our model for a challenge
to the established hegemony had been met by the time Sir Alec Douglas-
to a close defeat at the polls in 1964, and in chapter four, the formation and
sale of Powellism through the established channels of the Conservative Party are traced.
as an ideology has become in the British lexicon synonymous with
racism, owing to Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned of the dangers
scale Commonwealth immigration allegedly posed to local communities. Following
this, Powell became a pariah among colleagues but the self-declared champion of what he
believed to be a ‘vast majority that groans under the tyranny of small, but elusive,
12

thesis.

Chapter three shows how the prerequisites identified in our model for a challenge
-Home led the
to a close defeat at the polls in 1964, and in chapter four, the formation and
sale of Powellism through the established channels of the Conservative Party are traced.
has become in the British lexicon synonymous with
racism, owing to Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which warned of the dangers
scale Commonwealth immigration allegedly posed to local communities. Following
declared champion of what he
believed to be a ‘vast majority that groans under the tyranny of small, but elusive,
13

minorities’.
8
There are two possible interpretations of the Birmingham speech: first,
recognizing his insurgency had failed, Powell knowingly sacrificed his shadow
ministerial post to deliver a speech that might shock the government into taking action on
immigration; and second, Powell externalized his challenge, knowing that the leadership
of the Conservative Party was off limits until at least 1970, and appealed to latent racial
sentiment which he believed could generate overwhelming support that colleagues in the
party would be unable to ignore, and which could in turn garner influence and create the
impression of a prime minister in waiting.
9

Chapter five marshals evidence from Powell’s personal correspondence to suggest
the second interpretation is correct, and that the failure of this populist spell of his
challenge was mainly due to his inability to convert the emotions his hard-line stance on
immigration unleashed among the public into support for his larger operational ideology.
This, in turn, had much to do with the intangibility of the core principle at the heart of
Powellism: the Crown-in-Parliament. It was thus the same intransigence and aloofness
which made Powell so unsuited to the political game within the party that prevented him
from mobilizing external support across a range of issues, let alone directing it back
inwards, as he ultimately intended to do.
The final chapter of the dissertation shows how the model can be applied to a
variety of cases across time and political-constitutional systems. While every ideological
transition is historically unique with regards the relative lengths of each phase of

8
Powell, E., Speech delivered to an audience at East Grinstead, May 4, 1973.
9
The first interpretation is offered by Powell’s sympathetic biographer, Simon Heffer, in Like the Roman:
The Life of Enoch Powell, (Orion, London; 1998), Chapter 28.
14

transition and the tactics used by challengers, the strategy remains remarkably similar. It
is shown that, despite the core principles and intra-party institutions of the Labour Party
differing from those of the Tories, the shift from James Callaghan’s conservative
Socialism to New Labour comprised stages similar to the Thatcherite transition’s periods.
Labour’s left wing gained unprecedented power within the party as a result of the
economic crisis that, at the same time, led to the development of liberal market ideologies
in the Conservative Party. But the right was never defeated, and Michael Foot filled the
leadership vacuum as a compromise candidate rather than a stalwart of the hard left.
Consecutive defeats discredited both wings of the party, and New Labour emerged as a
radical solution to the party’s electoral woes that accepted the neoliberal reforms of the
1980s.
Next, an examination of Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform—often
noted for its superficial similarity to Powellite demagoguery—at the turn of the century
shows that, in spite of six decades of party and party system development, our model is
still relevant. Although Chamberlain ultimately failed to realign his party’s economic
policy permanently, his relative success in the challenge phase does demonstrate that
when a key populist issue is linked to a larger programme and then directed inwards, it
can be a valuable asset for challengers.
Finally, an examination of ideological changes in the Republican Party in the
United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century shows how even in non-
parliamentary systems, where the institutions of parties are fragmented and the links
between parties in civil society and government are weaker and less direct, the party is
15

still a key site of ideological development and contestation. Indeed, the case of the
neoconservative ideological transformation of the GOP suggests such wider institutional
differences might help facilitate ideological transition, particularly when the challengers’
realigning project concentrates heavily on well-defined policy areas. As champions of
‘traditional’ post-war liberalism against the ‘new liberalism’ they claimed had gained a
foothold in the Democratic Party at a time of cultural and economic uncertainty, a small
group of intellectuals—whom, by the late 1970s, were identified widely as
‘neoconservatives’—were able to transform significant tracts of Republican policy over
the coming decades. Factors indicating a successful outcome for challengers in British
politics, such as engagement with the party’s ideological seedbed and organizational
entrepreneurship, are directly translatable to this case, but the vertical and horizontal
separation of powers adds unfamiliar but important dimensions to the party’s internal
configuration.
Historiographical Contributions
This dissertation is cognizant of, and seeks to address, important theoretical blind
spots identified by social and cultural historians in traditional political history, to wit: the
sites at which ideas and political narratives are constructed and received; the mechanisms
of political and ideological change; the interconnectedness of politics as a multi-level
communal endeavour; and the impact of state development on popular politics.
10

10
Lawrence, J., ‘Political History’ in Writing History: Theory and Practice, S. Berger, H, Feldner and K.
Passmore (Eds.) (Bloomsbury USA; 2010).
16

Aside from its primary theoretical focus, the dissertation engages with, and will
hopefully add to, the historiography of Powellism, Thatcherism, and British
Conservatisms as ideologies. Scholarly and high journalistic work on Powell’s career has
concentrated on his Birmingham speech and its consequences.
11
This dissertation
recognizes the centrality of Powell’s post-Birmingham populism to both his career and
legacy, but interprets it as an extra-parliamentary tactic employed in a second challenge,
which was, perhaps ironically, undergirded by the core principle of parliamentary
sovereignty which remained consistent throughout his life. As American urban historian
Gilbert Osofky pointed out, the historiography of the recent past is ‘malarial’; it is ‘too
new to be history, too stale to be current events’.
12
The almost forty years that have
passed since Powell departed the Conservative Party will hopefully allow the historian
the detachment needed to produce an account of Powellite ideology set in its complete
biographical context.
While scholarship on Thatcherism is already far more extensive than that on
Powellism, it is only now that private papers from the early part of Thatcher’s
premiership are being made available to researchers at the Thatcher Archives. This
dissertation shall make use of this new material when examining high political conflict.

11
There are exceptions. While the longevity and influence of pollster Douglas Schoen’s 1977 study of
Powell and the Powellites, which reduced Powellism to an electoral ideology whose legitimacy could be
ascertained through the endless reproduction of opinion polls and voting data, have paled alongside T.E.
Utley’s and Humphry Berkeley’s penetrating journalistic analyses of Powellism’s coherence, oppositional
status, and political efficacy, it remains the most in depth academic study of Powellism to date.
12
Quoted in Hirsch, A.R., ‘Second Thoughts On The Second Ghetto’ in the Journal of Urban History (29:
2003) 298-9.
17

Finally, the dissertation challenges the view espoused largely in passing or
implicitly by other authors that Powellism was a sort of proto-Thatcherism. While the
monetarist theme and many of the liberal economic policies that so often appear bound
up with it were anticipated by Powell in the 1960s, it is shown that the principles of
Powellism as directed towards society’s institutions were quite distinct from those of his
supposed heirs.
18

Chapter 1.

The Party as a Site of Ideological Transition
This chapter works towards a model of intra-party ideological transition, starting
with a discussion of the significant gaps in the literature on realignment and parties, and
the inability of recent historical institutionalist scholarship to fill them, and thus to
account fully for ideological transitions.
After arguing that such changes as Thatcherism are never completely mediated by
forces exogenous to the political party, it is suggested that parties, as the key links in
parliamentary democracies between what Andrew Gamble terms the ‘politics of power’
and the ‘politics of support’, are indispensible to any understanding of realignments in the
state system and the ideologies that accompany and facilitate them. This is particularly so
at the early stages of transition. Here, the party is the primary focus of the challengers
and, as we shall see in the case of Powellism, oppositional ideological challenges which
emerge out of conjunctural crisis—the confluence of events in the wider society, such as
war, social unrest and the business cycle—can be quashed before their externalization
into the wider electoral marketplace.
Finally, I put forward a multi-stage framework which models ideological
transitions within parties according to the strategy pursued by challengers during three
distinct periods: the challenge; the consolidation; and the ascendency.

19

Realignments and Change
Though several comparative structural studies of political realignment in
European politics have been published since Lipset and Rokkan presented their ‘cleavage
model’ of party system development in the 1960s, the theoretical literature on
realignment in the United Kingdom is far less developed than that concentrating solely on
realignments in American politics.
13
There are three reasons for this.
First, the Rankean historicism which holds that history can only be understood on
its own terms still permeates the thinking of British historians and students of politics,
who are wary of Whig teleology and ostensibly universal laws or theories.
14
As such, the
conclusions reached by David Mayhew in his damning 1998 appraisal of the realignment
genre, in which he suggests the debate over the definitive criteria that constitute
realignment is irresolvable, riddled with subjectivity and of limited theoretical value,
were, and still are, uncontroversially accepted by students of British politics and political
history.
15

Second, much of the U.S. realignment literature emerged out of an interest in
explaining the major shifts occurring in the American South as the discipline of political
science developed. As I shall show, regional economic polarization may have played a
role in securing an electoral base for the consolidation of the Thatcherite transition, but
this largely reflected changes in the class system, which is still, in Britain, as in the rest of

13
Sitter, N., ‘Cleavages, Party Strategy and Party System Change in Europe, East and West’ in
Perspectives on European Politics and Society (3.3: 2002), 426-8.
14
Lawrence, J., ‘Political History’, in Writing History: Theory and Practice, S. Berger, H, Feldner and K.
Passmore (Eds.) (Bloomsbury USA; 2010), 17-24.
15
Mayhew, D. R. Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (Yale; 2002), passim.
20

Western Europe, the predominant structural factor in determining political allegiance.
16

In comparison to the significance of the South, which ‘remain[ed] the region with the
most distinctive character and tradition’ and whose entire politics ‘revolv[ed] around
the position of the Negro’, regional disparities and their potential to generate critical
realignments in the U.K. seemed trifling.
17
While the West Lothian question loomed
large in Scottish politics and politics in Northern Ireland were idiosyncratic, in England
and Wales, whose combined parliamentary constituencies accounted for ninety percent of
seats nationally, strong regional identities and the kinds of ethnic and religious individual
attributes both V. O. Key and the Michigan School believed could facilitate realignment
were largely absent.
Third, the attainment of universal manhood suffrage in the U.K. was a slow
process. The great electoral-political shifts of the Victorian and Edwardian periods were
not so much realignments among a given set of electors as the product of the cooptation
of newly enfranchised classes of male voters by the existing parties around salient issues
or promises. With America’s historically broad franchise, the U.S. case seemingly
provides a much longer timeframe over which ‘realignment’—if we use Key’s definition
of a secular process or critical instance of electoral churching—can be studied.

16
Giddens, A., Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford; 1994), 4-8, 97-102. Kriesi,
H., et al., ‘Globalization and the Transformation of the National Political Space: Six European
Democracies Compared’ in European Journal of Political Research (45: 2006), 934-42.
17
V.O. Key, Southern Politics State & Nation (Univ. Tennessee Press; 1984), 1. Also see Keefe, W.J.,
‘Southern Politics Revisited’ in Public Opinion Quarterly (1956), 407-412, for a sympathetic reappraisal of
Key’s thesis, and Bullock III, C.S., et. al., ‘Regional Variations in the Realignment of American Politics,
1944–2004’ in Social Science Quarterly (87.3: September, 2006), 494-518, for a discussion of the electoral
effects of idiosyncrasies in regions other than the South.
21

Rather than theoretically distilling the core components of realignment and using
them as the yardstick against which to evaluate transitions, students of electoral and
political change in Britain have tended to produce monographs on particular aspects of
such changes, be they sociological, biographical, institutional, generational or, indeed,
narratives with multiple entwined causal roots.
18

One branch of British political science termed ‘psephology’, which developed out
of the University of Essex election studies of the 1960s and seeks to account for trends in
voting, has attempted to reconcile two models of voter partisanship: the Downsian
economic model, whereby parties compete rationally for support across given ideological
terrain, and the ‘sociological’ model developed by the Michigan School and adapted to a
British setting by Butler and Stokes, which holds that political allegiances are largely
inherited through socialization and dependent on socio-economic factors. Psephologists
Clarke et. al. suggest that as class loyalties have ebbed and the salience of ‘valence’
issues has increased, British electoral politics resemble more closely Downs’s political
marketplace than Butler’s and Stokes’s ossified socio-electoral system.
19

Yet while the dichotomous terms ‘left and right’ and ‘Conservative and Socialist’
are widely recognized and allow researchers to measure, for example, the extent of
correct party ideological identification among the electorate as a proxy for political
engagement, their use in the context of psephology sidesteps the issue of their substance
and origins. The ways in which some scholars have framed the Downsian and

18
Russell, A., ‘Parties and Party Systems: Realignment or Readjustment?’ in Parliamentary Affairs, (57.2:
2004).
19
Carke, H.D., et. al., Political Choice in Britain (Oxford; 2001), Chapter 1.
22

sociological models tend to imply that, according to the former, parties tailor their
ideological appeals to prefigured demands (or to the demand of the ‘median voter’),
while, by the latter’s reckoning, voters divide along class lines into ideological camps
staked out by parties. But neither theory dictates that this is the case, nor, indeed, requires
any reflection on the part of the researcher as to the process by which operational
ideologies are produced.
This timidity in grappling with the multidirectional linkages between social
forces, ideology and partisan realignment has not been overcome in recent comparative
work. Kreisi et al., for example, present a neat thesis regarding the emergence of a new
cultural cleavage in European politics. Before the 1980s, claim the authors, European
politics had one dominant cleavage—the economic battle between classes, which became
institutionalized in the party systems and society during the early part of the twentieth
century. However, the integration of global economies created new groups of economic
winners and losers. Since no clear economic commonality existed between
globalization’s losers, parties wishing to take advantage electorally of this group of voters
had to develop non-economic appeals.
Kreisi et al. are adept at using issue-spatial models to demonstrate the clustering of
issues around poles, but despite ingenuity in how the results are presented, the methods
by which they are attained—and, hence, what the data actually show—present serious
problems when inferring causality. According to the authors’ model, politicians may
define the political space and manoeuvre their parties along contours they have pre-
23

determined.
20
But, equally, parties could collectively define the political space, and
politicians follow. One might ultimately ask: where does agency lie? This hints at the
need to ‘bring the party back in’, but the most glaring flaw in the research is that the
structural change which, according to Kreisi’s thesis, is said to trigger realignment, is
completely overlooked, as the authors shy away from historical or ‘soft’ social scientific
methods.
It is unsurprising that political scientists have preferred to concentrate on the
realignment of voters, rather than on the social forces at work in driving ‘switchers’ into
the opposing camp, or, to complicate matters further, the changing electoral ideologies
expounded by parties, which may be a cause, an effect, or epiphenomenal to the
realignment of voters. Votes, after all, are quantifiable, election data is easily obtained,
and the direct connection between election to office and change in government policy
seems to ensure that such an approach is relevant to real-world politics. But underlying
forces are rarely far from the surface of any discussion of realignment, particularly when
this is of the less spectacular secular variety. For example, Key’s classic study of the
gradual trend towards Republican voting among German Americans in Ohio in the
1920s, which, when extrapolated over time onto the national level, was as significant as
any switch at a critical election, might reasonably suggest to the reader a deeper process
of cultural acclimatization, with the corollaries associated with it coming to bear on an
individual voter’s political economic outlook.
21
Yet the institutions and ideas behind the

20
Kriesi, H., et al., ‘Globalization’, 932.
21
Key, V.O., ‘Secular Realignment and the Party System’ in Journal of Politics (21.2: May, 1959), 198.
24

process are neglected by Key, who seems content to imply (but certainly not to explore
the fact) that realignments of this type are the product of impersonal social, economic and
cultural forces. That autonomous action at the various levels of government by politicians
of both parties, who were acutely aware of the changing place of European ethnics in
American life, might have been an essential determiner of which direction groups such as
Key’s subjects turned in their partisanship, and the relative pace and smoothness of the
transition, is weighted lightly in this analysis.
In his 1970 book, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics,
Walter Dean Burnham offered a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model of partisan shift among
the electorate, which attempted to connect theoretically the electoral spark of the
traditional literature and the slower movement of societal tectonics which produces it.
Realignment occurs, claims Burnham, as a four-stage process: first, tension emerges
between interests within a society that are not reflected in the party system; second, a
third party challenge, or proto-realignment, takes shape, whereby challengers to the
orthodoxy mobilize; third, there is a flashpoint or critical event, accompanied by a critical
election; and finally, the party system regains equilibrium in altered form. While his
study (along with studies of realignment more generally) was dogged by post hoc
theorizing, subjectivity and subtle qualifications, Burnham’s assertion that this process
transpires in thirty to thirty-six year cycles brought to the fore the idea that generational
change might account for some of the major phenomena studied by political scientists.
Paul Allen Beck’s 1974 ‘socialization theory of partisan realignment’, which
holds that the generations most likely to bring about change are those socialized in
25

periods of political normality, is just one example of a study building explicitly on
Burnham’s generational thesis, in this case relating the intensity of the political
socialization process, rather than the message itself, to prospects for radicalization.
22

Moreover, it is not just studies of the party system that have employed the concept of
generational change. Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Surveys research, whose core
claim is that with increased wealth the values of societies shift from what might be
termed materialist and survival-oriented to post-modern and lifestyle-oriented, employs
two hypotheses which undergird an unmistakably generational framework:
A scarcity hypothesis. An individual’s priorities reflect the socioeconomic environment. One
places the greatest subjective value on those things that are in relatively short supply.
A socialization hypothesis. The relationship between socioeconomic environment and value
priorities is not one of immediate adjustment; a substantial time lag is involved for one’s basic
values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s pre-adult years.
23

Ingleheart uses GDP per capita as a proxy for socioeconomic environment and supply of
goods. While this is not methodologically unproblematic, it does, shows Inglehart,
produce curvilinear patterns in which relatively small increases in GDP per capita at low
levels produce major shifts in values, resembling, perhaps, Bunham’s flashpoint.
Even those theories of change that do not rely on generation as a causal variable
may, in fact, be exploring the surface effects of generation. Sundquist’s six models of
realignment, which suggest the emergence of salient issues leads to different types of
partisan realignment, seem to contradict directly Burnham’s earlier claim that electoral

22
P. A. Beck, ‘A Socialization Theory of Partisan Realignments’ in The Politics of Future Citizens, R.G.
Niemi (Ed.) (1974), 209.
23
Inglehart, R., ‘Globalization and Values’ in The Washington Quarterly (23.1: 2000), 215-228.
26

turnout is a much more significant indicator of critical elections than a shift of voters.
24

Yet the same societal forces could be the underlying cause of Sundquist’s realignments,
with the issue that divides or splits parties being simply a trigger that unleashes their
effects.
It is impossible to dismiss generation as a causal factor in almost any aspect of
politics or life in general, as Karl Mannheim showed in his groundbreaking philosophy of
generations as locations and actualities. But Mannheim also demonstrated, in discussing
generations as subdivided units, that the picture is more complicated than it may initially
seem. Even if generation is a major, or, indeed, the primary, driving force behind change,
intervening institutional factors, along with historical contingencies, will, to a lesser or
greater extent, render the surface process of change uneven and complex.
25

Bringing the Party Back In
This is certainly true for the process of ideological transition. Contrary to claims
made by political commentators such as Tony Benn and Alan Clark, the rise and fall of
ideological orders, factions and regimes is neither smooth nor coincident with the passing
of time and generations, as depicted in the first graph of Figure 1.1.
26
Instead, crisis at
different levels of the state system, global factors and, as I shall argue forcefully in this
dissertation, the ability of ideological entrepreneurs to sell their visions within parties as a

24
Sundquist, J. L. Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the
United States (Brookings Institution Press; 1983), 13-18.
25
Remmling, G.W., The Sociology of Karl Mannheim (Humanities Press; 1971), 43.
26
Benn, T., The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (Hutchinson; 2005), 480-4, and The End of an Era: Diaries
1980-90 (Arrow; 1994).
27

necessary prelude to structural change enacted through policy, all play a part in
determining the success of such transitions.
Following Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol, who sought to ‘bring the state
back in’ as a response to behavioralism’s dominance in the social sciences, authors
working in the same theoretical tradition, such as Jacob Hacker, Daniel Carpenter and
Paul Pierson, have focused largely on the state and its constituent parts and institutions,
believing this to be the site where embedded power relations and the sequential causes of
path dependence are most readily discernible.
27
Paul Pierson questions some of the
assumptions of this relatively new field, accusing traditional institutionalists of
functionalism, and of failing to appreciate that the institutions of the state may not reflect
accurately or instantly a given set of power relations in the society. Indeed, the
institutions of the state, according to Pierson, may act conservatively to prevent or stall
realignments in the state system which might otherwise be expected as a result of
conjunctural change.
Pierson’s own view of historical conjunctures is, nevertheless, excessively
narrow, overlooking the confluence of a number of causal factors, from exogenous crisis
through to the entrepreneurship of individual agents. Moreover, his appraisal of the
institutionalist approach fails to probe the possibility that the state, meaning the
administrative apparatus through which resources are distributed and regulated, might not
be the only site of political contestation, or the only institutional setting that determines
the success or failure of realigning projects. While accepting that the impetus for change

27
Pierson, P., Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (Princeton; 2004), 13-14.
28

often comes from outside traditional definitions of the state, the direction of actors’
efforts and the likelihood of transition occurring are, according to Pierson, still
overwhelmingly dependant on changes in one of the state’s features, such as rules or the
relative strength of political forces in its representational institutions.
28

Recent institutionalist scholarship has taken on board the fact that structural
change can be pursued by a variety of agents, and that ideas are indispensible as
facilitators of this process. As such, the explanatory narratives scholars are constructing
are increasingly rich and complex. Ira Katznelson, for example, in When Affirmative
Action was White (2006), incorporates into his account of state power the personalities,
intentions, and idiosyncrasies of those holding office. Charles Tilly’s 2004 study of social
movements continues to regard the configuration of state institutions as the ultimate
determinant of the success or failure of mass movements, though its effects are
complicated by the variety of forces in a globalized world, with Tilly’s acronym WUNC
(Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment) representing a variety of opportunities
for activists to determine their own fortunes within fairly broad parameters. Both books,
nevertheless, overlook parties as organizations that straddle the divide between the
exercise of power and classes, groups and associations in the wider society, and,
therefore, as essential platforms that ideological entrepreneurs in representative
democracies must work through in order to enact change.

28
Hacker, J., The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United
States (Cambridge; 1999) and Pierson’s 1996 study of welfare state retrenchment for examples of this
earlier, more mechanical approach.
29

Parties exist in the wider political system, with its rules and institutions, along
with the nature of the conjuncture and what might be termed the ‘logic of social flux’.
This is not to say a crisis must produce a ‘left-wing’ or a ‘right-wing’ realigning project,
though it seems possible that certain conditions or events might favour projects that fall
under one such rubric, whether they are considered collectivist or atomistic, egalitarian or
elitist, and so on. However, the ability of politicians or ideological entrepreneurs to
identify the unpopular state system with the other side (as we shall see, ‘enemies’ need
not reside only in the ranks of the opposition party) leads us back again to the question of
events within parties at the point of realignment and the direction of conjunctural forces
inwards.
One can no more treat the political party as a black box within the political system
than one can the political system within the broader state system, or (pace Kenneth
Waltz) the state system within the international system of states. Opening the party up in
order to explore the part its internal structure, processes and ideology play in facilitating,
permitting, or acting as brakes on broader conjunctural change should not, however,
imply an intention to offer a complete account of that change. The focus of this
dissertation is the politics of the party; that is to say, the objective of studying the wider
conjuncture is to illuminate the often complex effects of intra-party politics on the state
system, and vice versa. While mention of the state system and society is unavoidable, it is
necessarily selective.

The Generational Model

Advocated by Socialist political commentator Tony Benn and
Conservative historian Alan Clark, the generational model
supposes that ideas gain ascendency, but as time transpires and
the prestige of ideologies diminishes, ideas that once seemed
radical gradually enter the mainstream, replace the existing
ascendency as the hegemonic ideology, and their champions
become the guardians of commonly accepted wisdom.

Old Order New Order
An Alternative Multi-Stage Model

While generational factors are important in determining when
challenges will arise and the success they will be met with, other
systemic and situational factors make the process of ideological
change uneven and one in which breakage points or critical
junctures mark off distinct stages of the transition from one
another.

Challenge Consolidation Ascendency
Fig. 1.1: Two models of the chronology of ideological transitions.
29

29
The vertical axis of each graph could conceivably represent the percentage of ministers subscribing to each ideology, or the percentage of manifesto
policies or of passages in Queen’s speech on opening of Parliament reflecting a certain set of ideologically-operationalized policies.
30
31

As new sites of analysis are explored, familiar conundrums, such as those
regarding leadership, are transmuted in these settings, while altogether new questions
emerge. If, as is contended in this dissertation, the construction of ideas as electoral
ideologies is integral to political and social change, then, it could be asked: where do new
ideas come from? How are they constructed? Are there limits to the pool of ideas from
which ideological entrepreneurs can draw? Is the efficacy of electoral ideologies
dependent on their internal consistency? Why should they come to the fore at a given
time?
Since ideas must be promulgated, we should also consider the ideological
entrepreneurs who promulgate them. What kind of people become ideological
entrepreneurs, and are these personalities necessarily the most likely type to win success
in the particular institutional setting and political culture of a party? How does this affect
the way they draw on ideas, or their leadership style or image when in government?
Once operational ideologies are formed, whether as electoral perspectives or
electoral ideologies, what kind of institutional and ideational constraints does the party
itself, independent of conjunctural factors, place upon the ability of their progenitors to
oppose others within and outside the party? What tactics can be used to overcome these,
and how do they relate to a larger strategy or war of position?
In order to make sense of such questions, only some of the most pertinent of
which are posed above, we need to organize them into a scheme or model that might
explain ideology in parties, rather than simply answer them on an ad hoc or thematic
basis. First, we must look to the party as a formal institution, a set of informally-bound
32

organizations, or any structure falling somewhere between these two extremes. As a non-
corporate association of professional and voluntary bodies with no official constitution,
the Conservative Party resembles distinctly the second type above, but it is sufficient to
say at this point that, like all mass parties in parliamentary democracies, it is stratified
vertically, with elite and grassroots members taking on different duties and accruing
different (highly unequal) levels of influence over policy and the act of governing.
This dissertation continues in the same institutionalist vein as the abovementioned
authors, but will open up the political party as the central institutional focus. Ideas of path
dependence are certainly relevant here—ideological conflict is, after all, a potentially
dangerous business electorally—and the critical junctures at which there is sharp change
come about not only as a result of changes in the parliamentary party itself, but also
because of the myriad factors outside it that institutionalist scholars are beginning to
recognize.
The Party-as-Institution
The indispensible institution of modern parliamentary democracy, aside, of
course, from the parliament itself, is the political party. Despite their changing roles in
civil society regarding recruitment, training, socialization, education, campaigning,
canvassing and so forth, political parties in Britain and elsewhere remain essential to the
following processes and tasks: candidate selection; policy formation; parliamentary
organization and discipline; and voter mobilization.
30
This is to say, without strong, well-
funded, well-organized and ideologically aware political parties, it would be difficult to

30
Scarrow, S., Parties and their Members (Oxford; 1996), 12-13.
33

envisage the effective functioning of representative democracy. Much work bears out the
first three attributes. Yet the role of parties as sites of ideological contestation, and
therefore as integral elements of any wider conjunctural change, has been neglected.
The amount of research conducted on parties has, on the whole, been in modest
decline in recent years, as scholars turn more to processes and smaller, less unwieldy
institutions or actors. What is more, the work that is done now almost exclusively focuses
on a specific role of parties, such as parties in the legislature. Work on party
organizations, or the more general scholarship that characterized the discipline of
political science’s first fifty years, is now virtually absent from American journals.
31

Scholarly case work on ideological transitions within parties might help spur a rebirth of
work on parties as dynamic organizations or, more realistically, highlight a vital
institutional link in the process of realignment, particularly in parliamentary systems.
Herbert Kitschelt’s work has evolved since his study of Green parties across
Europe in the late 1980s to take into account the agency of politicians and ultimately to
typologize parties in terms of their structure and relation to the electorate. In his 1993
book Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy, Kitschelt demonstrates how
the decline in working class occupations as a percentage of the working population in
Western European countries was, for the most part, unrelated to the fortunes of social
democratic parties and, furthermore, that the most successful centre-left parties were
often the most constrained in terms of their class base.
32
This link to the electorate is

31
Reiter, H. L., ‘The Study of Political Parties, 1906-2005: The View from the Journals’ in The American
Political Science Review (100.4: Nov., 2006), 614-15.
32
Kitschelt, H., The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1994), 51-4.
34

fleshed out in later work, where Kitschelt differentiates between three ideal party types:
charismatic, clientalistic and programmatic.
While in theory the three models are mutually exclusive and contradictory, in
practice, Kitschelt concedes that the existence of hybrids, or even parties employing all
three types of electoral tactic, might be possible.
33
As a large, broadly churched,
organizationally decentralized but politically centralized party, it is likely the
Conservative Party could succeed in doing this at various points in time and under
various conditions. Indeed, the two most incompatible electoral linkages—a political
programme and charismatic leadership—might actually help reinforce one another during
periods of ideological transition.
Such hybrid models of electoral appeal sit well with Otto Kirchheimer’s ‘catch all
party’ thesis. Kircheimer bemoans the ubiquity of the bourgeois ‘catch all party’, which
eschews the political mobilization and socialization functions adopted by the pre-war
social democratic parties in favour of bringing diverse socio-economic and interest
groups into its large tent, thereby increasing its share of the vote and, hence,
parliamentary representation.
34
While a well-articulated and distinct political programme
might have been suitable in the interwar years when the newly enfranchised electorate
was split more discernibly into blocs, other vote-winning tactics and means of holding a
coalition together, such as a return to charismatic leadership or clientelism, cannot now
be ruled out. The fact attributes of Kirchheimer’s ‘catch all party’ are visible in

33
Kitschelt, H., ‘Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities’ in Comparative
Political Studies (33.6-7: 2000), 850-1.
34
Krouwel, A., ‘Otto Kirchheimer and the catch-all party’ in West European Politics (April, 2003).
35

Conservative Party history and its ethos was present in Conservative rhetoric long before
Kirchheimer believed the transition took place could lead us to suggest the party has
always been a hybrid of Kitschelt’s types.
35

We must be careful, however, to distinguish between Kirchheimer’s empirical
demonstration of the function of ‘catch all parties’ in the electorate, and his largely
normative claims about their supposed lack of internal democracy and thus, implicitly but
necessarily, their organizational elitism. Scholars studying parties as organizations such
Susan Scarrow, Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski, and Whitely et. al. have begun to
(partially) challenge the elitist, top down view of parties presented most unyieldingly by
Roberto Michels in his 1923 classic Political Parties, in which he argued:
Yves-Guyot justly remarked that the individual belonging to a modern party acts after the
same fashion as did the mediaeval monks, who, faithful as they were to the precepts of
their masters, called themselves after St. Dominicus, St. Benedictus, St. Augustinus, and St.
Franciscus, respectively, the Dominicans, the Benedictines, the Augustines, and the
Franciscans... As a rule they mean merely that a new leader has entered into conflict with the old,
and, thanks to the support of the mass, has prevailed in the struggle, and has been able to
dispossess and replace the old leader. The profit for democracy of such a substitution is practically
nil.
36

Scarrow rejects Michels’ claim that what appears to be intra-party democracy actually
reflects a lack of democracy in the wider society, demonstrating correlation between
participation at both levels.
37
The organizational setting for ideological transitions in the
Conservative Party was an undemocratic one in the period under review. However, this is
a result of the party’s political culture and organizational tradition, rather than an inherent

35
Charmley, J., A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830, (Palgrave Macmillan; 2008), passim.
36
Michels, R., ‘Some Reflections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties’ in the American
Political Science Review (Nov, 1927), 776.
37
Scarrow, S.E., ‘Parties and the Expansion of Direct Democracy: Who Benefits?’ in Party Politics (Jul.,
1999), 354-9.
36

feature of modern parties per se. We cannot assume intra-party democracy, or a lack of it.
As we adapt our model to other transitions, one of the most important questions to ask is:
what are the relationships between the levels of the party and how does interaction take
place? Only then can we begin to understand the flow of ideas within it.
38

An implicit assumption throughout the above discussion has been that intra-party
politics are dynamic, and, in particular, that ideological transitions within parties are
processes with a temporal dimension. If time is the fourth dimension of intra-party
politics, how do we incorporate it into our understanding of ideological transition? Do all
elements of the transition occur simultaneously in what Pierson describes as a type of
variable soup, or are there stages?
39
In other words, should our model attempt to
periodize the transition, or should it model it either as a snapshot in time, or,
alternatively, as an unbroken process unravelling evenly over a given time? The fact the
party, like the state, is composed of enabling or conserving organizations and is
populated at its various levels by enabling or conserving individuals would suggest
strongly that intra-party ideological transitions are more complicated than a steady
diffusion of ideas.

38
Many of the studies best dealing with this dynamic relationship between grassroots and leadership, along
with ideological entrepreneurship, have come from political sociologists and students of parliaments. Peter
Nugus, for example, analyzes the various rhetorical strategies used by Australian parties in a deliberative
democratic setting to draw on commonly understood national symbols and in turn to create a popular
ideology of either monarchism or republicanism. In Britain, Andrew Russell has examined the official lines
of parties regarding their youth movements and concludes that, for the time being, the possibility that social
capital can be increased by bringing young people into the institutions of the party, rather than addressing
rhetoric to existing groups or the population en masse, is slim indeed.
39
Pierson, Politics, 3-4.
37

Ideological transitions are distinct from the trends in organizational development
mapped out by Scarrow, such as those towards the centralization of decision-making and
an open and low-commitment form of membership and identification. Such change
occurs at a glacial pace, and, for most parties, takes decades to detect. (Scarrow found
that institutional development has been almost non-existent in the Conservative Party,
perhaps due to its leaders’ reluctance to change a machine that, until 1997, seemed so
effective, but also perhaps because the party was already, at the outset of her study, the
most inclusive and centralized).
40
Neither does Scarrow discuss the difference (if, indeed,
there is one) between ideas formed at the elite level and those consumed among the
grassroots.
The kinds of intra-party political processes we are interested in here take place at
a much faster pace and involve more than the organization of the party. The Thatcherite
transition, for example, occurred within the space of some fifteen years; the timescale of
Scarrow’s study is half a century. While changes in the organization of the party might
play some part in facilitating ideological change, they represent a minor element of the
narrative. Indeed, the organizational setting can remain remarkably stable as operational
ideologies grow and recede in importance and politicians seek to gain ascendency within
the party for themselves and their ideas.
The party-as-institution does, as we shall see, have a major impact on the
promulgation of ideas within the party. As structures and collections of rules which came
into being as a means of facilitating the transmission of ideas through civil society and

40
Scarrow, Parties, 14, 156-60.
38

the state system, and whose existence depends on their continuing effectiveness in doing
so, it is impossible to see how this could be otherwise. Let us start with some general
trends over the dimensions of time and space which might be hypothesized about
ideological transitions within political parties:

Time

T
Consistent with the view of the party as a platform for the formation of
operational ideologies is that such ideologies are realized as realigning projects
gradually as they work their way through the institutions of
government and into the broader state system and society.
The conclusion of this process would be the remaking of society
itself, beyond civil society and into the sphere of voluntary action.

Institutional space

Time
As the realigning project affects ever-wider swathes of the state and
social systems, we might suppose that the ideology that justifies it, and
which is, according to Hall, an essential prerequisite for its spread in
the first place, comes to affect thinking. If successful, it becomes the
‘new common sense’ among those living and working within these
institutions. One might conceive the endpoint of the realigning project
as the fundamental transformation of the political culture and social
thought of the nation.

Ideational space

Fig. 1.2: Trends in ideological transitions over space and time.

Such figures as the above are often used in natural science textbooks to illustrate
phenomena such as waves dispersing over time from a point, with each second of time
bringing a corresponding and constant amount of dispersion. There are many reasons for
believing that, as a general trend, operational ideologies are sold differently (simplified)
as we move away from the political elite and creative centre, and it seems patently logical
39

that politicians seeking to change the state system and society work from the core
outwards.
Yet, as models, they explain very little about change in the state system, less still
the particular part of that change that occurs within the party and the chances of success
for ideological entrepreneurs at this stage. Without knowing the key institutions that must
be captured in order to secure the base from which a realigning project can be furthered,
it is impossible to understand tactics, or the reasons for success or failure. When,
however, such institutions are taken into consideration, it is possible to appreciate not
only why changes should take place at a particular juncture, but also, based on the target
institution, what changes in tactics, focus, and rhetoric are likely to entail. Conjunctural
events affect the progress of a realigning project, particularly as it begins to reach further
into the state system. But during its nascent phases, when its immediate opponents are
confined to within that party, it is the institution of the party that is most salient for the
challengers and of greatest interest to those analyzing the ideological transition from its
outset.
It is not within the scope of this discussion to engage in the debate over
periodization that has recently broken out among historians and those working in the
historical institutionalist field of political science. Mayhew’s concern that periodization
tends to simplify, aggregate and downplay the exceptionalism of discrete historical
developments and the events contained within them is, of course, well-founded.
41
In

41
Mayhew, D.R., ‘Suggested Guidelines for Periodization’ in Polity (37: 2005), 531-5. Paper presented at
conference of the Northeastern Political Science Association.
40

highlighting the unique configuration of institutions in each transformation and asserting
that the particular reasons for success or failure during various stages should emerge
inductively from a rich understanding of the case at hand, this dissertation incorporates a
reasonable degree of variability into what is, nevertheless, a self-consciously periodized
scheme.
Principles, Seedbed, and the Politics of Ideology
This dissertation claims that the content of operational ideologies helps determine
the success or failure of challenges. The assertion that ‘ideas matter’ rests on a particular
understanding of the way in which core principles from a party’s ideological ‘seedbed’
are operationalized into a programme to be sold to different audiences. The role of this
process in the formation of electoral ideologies, their articulation, and in constraining the
ideological entrepreneurs who construct them from a soup of existing ideas is outlined
below.
Politics of Ideology
The most basic way in which ‘ideas matter’ to transformations of the state system
is the part they play in the genesis of challenges—the way they motivate challengers to
launch their assaults on the dominant position in the party occupied by ideological
opponents. The point can be made, of course, that ideology functions in intra-party
challenges simply as a mystification of class interests in the wider conjuncture, or, if we
are to downplay large structural forces in favour of the analytic approach of traditional
political history, a foil for self- or group-interest at the high political level. According to
this view, rather than true believers selling fixed operational ideologies they cannot, for
41

reasons of conviction, change, politicians are simply competitors for power irrespective
of ideas beyond the advantage they accrue in the politics game.
42
In Britain, the idealized
and often self-serving conception of politicians as public servants derives from ministers’
temporary stewardships over long-established government departments, which are staffed
with experienced and supposedly politically neutral teams of permanent civil servants.
43

In this context, politicians might be seen either as responding deterministically to
conjunctural forces or, as members of a political class, competing among themselves
based on personal ambition.
By contrast, this dissertation claims that the politics of ideology in the party help
determine the timing, tactics and content of transitions in the state system, and, moreover,
that the initial purchase of ideas may preclude transitions, in spite of sociological forces
indicating such realignments to be viable. Ideas, it is contended, are required in order to
reconcile often disparate constituencies during the phase of policy implementation. But
even before ideology serves such tangible purposes, core principles and the programmes
operationalized from them motivate individuals to press for change, or to respond in
different ways to one another during times of crisis.
The politicians in the cases reviewed in this dissertation are power seekers within
their respective parties and, in turn, in the political system, but power is never an end
purely in itself. The high political game is played with a vision of the state in mind.

42
The conceptual separation of politics and ideology has been expounded both seriously and succinctly in
relation to modern politics by Kenneth Minogue. See Minogue, K., Politics: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford; 2000), 91-8.
43
Dowding, K., The Civil Service (Theory and Practice in British Politics) (Oxford; 1995), 108-114.

42

Realigning projects and the counter-measures taken by groups within the party supportive
of the existing state system are pursued with the intention of reforming, radically
overhauling, or conserving the state system in line with these convictions as power is
attained or retained. That material rewards are comparatively low (as compared, for
example, to those accrued from careers in the private sector) for the vast majority of
individuals entering politics as vocation in Britain may suggest the role of public servant
encourages ideological engagement more than it does unmoored self-advancement.
44

Built into the model of ideological challenge and transition presented in this
dissertation, then, is the Weberian premise that any debate which pits ideals against
ambition involves a false choice: that even an Aneurin Bevan must deal in power politics
as a means of implementing a programme, and even a Richard Nixon must have a cause,
wherever it might have come from and to whatever extent it is compromised in the
pursuit of power or abrogated over the course of a career. The actual content of a leader’s
cause mattered little to Weber. It was pragmatism and the restraint required to temper the
pursuit of a it—‘responsibility’, as he put it—which Weber admired most.
45
But ideals,
passion, ideology, emotional commitment and anything else we would associate with the
concept of a ‘cause’ were also, for Weber, required of those partaking in the vocation of
politics in mature and stable representative democracies. As political theorist Geoffrey
Hawthorn remarks, a politician who possesses no other driving force than self-

44
Ibid., 121-2.
45
Weber, M., ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in Max Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge; 1997), 347, 351-4.
43

aggrandizement or the quest for power for power’s sake is a mere administrator, and
often more dangerous than the zealot.
46

The term ‘ideological entrepreneur’ encapsulates accurately the role of the
vocational politician in the post-war era, and the location of ideology in the ‘tactics’
column of our model rests on the understanding that ideas can be tailored to
circumstances without, on the one hand, merely reflecting power struggles, or, on the
other, becoming completely elastic. If cause and responsibility are flip sides of the same
coin, the skill with which challengers as ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ move between one or
the other side is of greater relevance to the topic of ideological challenges than whether
the labels ‘cynic’ or ‘true believer’ are most apt to be applied to a particular politician or
group.
Throughout this dissertation we encounter two principal ways in which the
politician is able to navigate successfully a path between ideologically-oriented action
and political expediency. First, at various times, pursuit of a programme’s components
must be postponed, or more radical policies moderated in the interest of the larger
realigning project. The multi-stage model presented here accounts for the incrementalism
of challenges in complex representative democracies, as well as the dynamic tactics of
challengers according to their changing institutional focus.
Second, challengers must arrange priorities hierarchically. An operational
ideology which finds little automatic resonance among, first, parliamentarians, and, later,
the grassroots and general electorate, is likely to disadvantage challengers severely,

46
Hawthorn, G., Lecture delivered at old Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Oct. 29, 2003.
44

especially if the electoral perspective of their status quo-oriented opponents has not
already been completely discredited. Yet potentially unpopular policies or ideas that are
deemed less than central to the project may be deemphasized, qualified, or jettisoned.
Conversely, popular though peripheral ideas may be afforded greater prominence in the
rhetoric or manifestos of challengers than their import would normally justify, acting as a
rallying point and focus for more central facets of the programme that, when presented
separately, would be unable to garner attention or generate enthusiasm. The Powell case
illustrates nicely the pitfalls of dogmatism at the wrong times and on the wrong issues.
Operationalization
Given that there is instability in the state system and flux in the politics of
support, ‘the central task of party management becomes...determining whether the state
should be subordinate to the nation, or the nation to the state’.
47
Depending on which is
deemed to be the case, the party must formulate either ‘electoral ideologies’ or ‘electoral
perspectives’. Electoral ideologies attach great importance to popular sentiment (what
Gamble here refers to as ‘the nation’), echo the climate of opinion, and call for change.
Electoral perspectives, on the other hand, advocate for the prevailing state consensus in
the most appealing terms possible and seek to assuage public discord. Finding the correct
balance between reform and conservation, between the nation and the existing state
system, is a particularly salient task, if not the raison d’être, of all political parties who

47
Gamble, A., The Conservative Nation (Routledge and Kegan Paul; 1974), 5.
45

regard as their goals the maintenance of stability and the continuation of their own status
as a viable party of government.
48

As Gamble points out, even if reformist fervour does grip the party, ‘a mode of
production cannot be legislated away by the government. It is the objective structure on
which the state rests, and which the state exists to uphold’.
49
Clearly, the depth of crisis
determines the likelihood of parties breaking with the state consensus, along with the
chances of radical change being produced in the event they do. But even the most
extreme transitions in the state system that arise from disconnect between consensus
politics and the politics of support fall far short of root and branch change to that system,
notwithstanding promiscuous use of the term ‘revolution’ across the spectrum of
literature from serious historiography to tabloid boosterism. Despite this hyperbole,
which at times proves invaluable for challengers, more of state system is, ultimately, left
intact than is overhauled in such transitions. Middle Way Conservatism, for example,
reconciled the Tory hierarchy to a post-war state system where comprehensive public
services were built on top of an economy in which total private sector employment was
larger than that in the public sector, and where, in recognition of liberal conceptions of
choice, private provision of services precluded total state monopolies in health and
education.
50
Likewise, the right turn advocated by Powell did not dispute the notion of a
developmental state, but rather placed the emphasis for development on the state

48
Seldon, A. and Snowdon, P., The Conservative Party (The History Press; 2004), 23-6.
49
Gamble, Nation, 7.
50
Webster, C., National Health Service: A Political History (Oxford; 2002), Chapter 1.
46

providing an environment conducive to rises in overall productivity, rather than actively
brokering what he believed amounted to zero-sum settlements between interest groups
while itself making major decisions in the productive sphere.
The limits placed on ‘responsible’ politics by the constitutional order of which
they a part were referred to by Weber in his famous 1919 lecture at Munich University,
which he conceded would ‘necessarily disappoint’ his audience of radical students.
51
For
Gamble, too, parties become wedded in their programmes to the existing state system
through their attainment of government and the exercise of power. This dissertation
accepts the idea of constitutionalist or system parties, and its case studies deal exclusively
with them. But, as we come to gauge the chances of success for challenges and the role of
parties in transformations of the state system, the mechanisms through which ideological
entrepreneurs within such parties come to operationalize ‘acceptable’ realigning
programmes, and, hence, reinforce their party’s status as a serious contender for power,
are explored further.
Harry Eckstein’s argument that government performance increases proportionally
with congruence between the functioning of government and ‘authority patterns’ in the
wider society is particularly instructive here. Eckstein’s congruence theory and his later
work on political change allow for transitions in the state system such as Thatcherism
which may align the operation of government and the state more closely with social

51
Weber, ‘Politics’, 321.
47

cleavages and the relative strengths of social forces.
52
Echoing Roger Scruton’s statement
that ‘just as the past constrains the future, so does the future commandeer the past’,
Eckstein and others have emphasized that the break from one political-cultural
ascendency to another is never clean and often messy.
53
The special case of
democratization, in which successful democratic governments incorporate into their own
functioning patterns of authority that exist as societal hangovers from pre-democratic
eras, demonstrates that those seeking to transform politics do not start off with a blank
slate, and institutions must often be built upon and adapted rather than discarded
wholesale.
54

Firsthand experience of constitutional norms and legislative and governmental
processes may, as Weber and Gamble imply, discipline ideological entrepreneurs and
force acquiescence in a conservative and partial mode of political transition. But Eckstein
suggests that ideas regarding authority which appear natural to the point they are rarely
questioned can ensure congruence and, thus, that government performance and stability
in the polity remain high.
55
To assail this unstated ‘political culture’, as Eckstein terms
what is conceptually very similar to Mannheim’s ‘total ideology’, becomes in these

52
Eckstein, H., ‘Congruence Theory Explained’, working paper for Center for the Study of Democracy
(Irvine, CA; 1997), 1, 6-7. Eckstein, H., ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’ in the American
Political Science Review (83.3: 1988), 790-3.
53
Scruton, R., The Meaning of Conservatism (St. Augustine’s Press; 1981), 33. Greenstone, D.J., ‘Liberal
Bipolarity and American Political Development’ in Studies in American Political Development (1: 1986),
1-49.
54
Orren, K., and Skowroneck, S., In Search of American Political Development (Cambridge; 2004), 23-7.
Eckstein, ‘Congruence’, 17-19.
55
Eckstein, ‘Culturalist Theory’, 802.
48

circumstances an act of subversion.
56
This dissertation posits that—quite independently
of any positive acceptance on the part of individual politicians of the constitutional
boundaries and the rules of the representative game before entering politics under the
banner of an establishment party— parties as institutions are themselves ideationally
welded to the total ideology of their respective societies through their ideological
seedbeds. The ideological seedbed of constitutionalist parties is a storehouse of the
nation’s political culture, albeit spun and refracted through the prism of the particular
party’s experience and its foundational core principles.
Often, ideas derived from political theories and philosophies are enshrined in
parties’ constitutions. Socialism, for example, is the official creed of the Labour Party,
despite the amendment to Clause IV of its constitution in 1995 which symbolically
eliminated the party’s commitment to public ownership of the means of production,
distribution and exchange.
57
The question, of course, follows: then what is Socialism if
not public ownership? The retort of Bennites in the 1980s was ‘nothing’,
58
but it is
neither insignificant nor a matter of window-dressing that five quite distinct candidates in
the party’s most recent leadership contest in 2010 declared themselves Socialists.
59

Socialism is, as it always has been, for the Labour Party, an ideological pool or
seedbed, rather than a doctrine or set of fixed premises to be cast wholesale onto any set

56
Mannheim, K., Ideology and Utopia (London; [1936] 2004), part 1.
57
The Labour Party, Refounding Labour (2010), 1.
58
Adams, J., Tony Benn: A Biography (Biteback; 2011), 116-9.
59
Labour Leader Debate, Sky News, September 5, 2010.
49

of political problems.
60
The party’s commitment to ‘Socialism’ frames debates within it
and provides for ideological entrepreneurs a pool of historical symbols—of solidarity, of
class struggle, of parliamentarianism, of reformism and so forth—that may appear to the
political theorist or dogmatic Marxist inconsistent or mystifying, but whose recycling and
re-articulation offer a means for the innovation and construction of electoral ideologies
and perspectives vital to representative government. Events, heroes and applied ideas
from the party’s past—themselves particular to the Socialist experience in Britain—grant
challengers an identity or sets of values with which to connect to their fellow partisans,
and, in turn, with the state system as it has evolved and as it exists.
Within neatly periodized epochs could be causal germs from previous regimes
whose effects might only be felt (or felt in a completely different manner to that
expected) after lying dormant for a significant amount of time. Observers of American
politics might note the total abrogation in the latter half of the twentieth century of the
kind of states’ rights arguments that had been in active circulation in the Democratic
Party for the first half. There are, however, several unique aspects to this development,
not least the length of time over which it transpired, and the fact that, because these ideas
were so regionally specific, they were able to be transferred almost wholesale to the GOP

60
Wicks, D., Political Ideas and Policy in the Labour Party, 1983-97, Unpublished doctoral dissertation
(University of Birmingham; 2010). Callaghan, J., ‘Political Ideology in the Labour Party’ in Party Ideology
in Britain, L. Tivey and A. Wright (Eds.) (Routledge; 1992), 56-7.
50

as southern Democrats entered the party.
61
In fact, such episodes may serve, if anything,
to illustrate the durability of strands of a party’s heritage in the face of controversy and
concerted effort on the part of an ascendant order to eliminate them completely. The
secular Anglican analogy fleshed out in this dissertation holds that conflict in the
Conservative Party is not fratricidal, and those ousted in a transition continue to subscribe
to a tradition which percolates as an undercurrent which future ideological entrepreneurs
can draw on.
Aside, then, from motivating individuals to launch challenges in the first instance,
ideas matter to transitions in that they provide the ideological substance for challenges
while ensuring that, when they are derived from the seedbeds of constitutionalist parties,
such challenges fall within the bounds of the acceptable. Change in the state system takes
place in the context of stability, which in the responsible party is privileged over more
radical designs. Seedbeds build up over time, can be added to and taken from, and, in a
small way, help to define society’s unstated but subconsciously normalized total
ideology. It is this small stake in steering the course of the nation’s political economy and
the normative assumptions underpinning it for which establishment parties trade to so
great an extent their ideological freedom.
Such is the conscious integration of the Conservative ideological seedbed into a
broader national ideology, and so enthusiastic are Tories of quite divergent stripes to

61
The thesis presented by Nicol C. Rae in Southern Democrats (Oxford; 1994) challenges the familiar
narrative of southern Democratic partisan realignment. Rae suggests that, rather than collapsing or
migrating to the GOP, a Democratic faction with direct ideological links to Southern Democratic forebears
still exists, integrated into a new political consensus as a result partly of its own moderation on civil rights
issues, but also the complex rightwards cultural realignment that forged the late twentieth century
American political scene.
51

promote the image of a national party, that Conservative challengers have unreservedly
subscribed to the notion that theirs is a non-ideological party. The electoral function of
such claims, and the analytic usefulness of the labels ‘non-ideological’ and ‘apolitical’,
will be discussed at length in chapter two, but the significance of this equation of British
(or, just as frequently, English) ideals with Conservatism serves as a bold illustration of
the moderating role of the seedbed in this most turgid of establishment parties.
Old, broad church parties, such as the Democratic and Republican Parties in the
United States, whose size and internal pluralism are institutionalized through the
country’s representative institutions and electoral mechanisms, are also notable for their
large ideological seedbeds. Like the Conservative and Labour Parties, they act, in the
overwhelming majority of modern cases, as platform and sounding boards for challenges
and operational ideologies that accord with their country’s liberal political-cultural
heritage.
62
But even small parties, such as the Greens and the Scottish National Party in
Britain, whose focuses have traditionally been on niche clusters of issues, have, in
competing as serious contenders for political power at the council level and in the newly
formed parliament at Holyrood respectively, adapted over quite short periods not only
their political behaviour, but also the contents of their ideological seedbeds.
63

Though this dissertation deals with transitions in the state system which originate
as ideological challenges in constitutionalist parties, contained in the seedbed approach to
ideology are implications for the operationalization of programmes and intra-party

62
Banning, L. ‘The Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited’ in William and Mary Quarterly (43: 1986), 16.
63
Mitchell, J. et. al., The Scottish National Party: Transition to Power (Oxford; 2011), 117-37.
52

politics in anti-system parties. Shorn of the constraints imposed by a stake in the evolving
state system, challenges in non-establishment parties might be assumed to occur rapidly
in succession, with refreshment at the party’s doctrinal source being a hallmark of
legitimacy. Since wholesale opposition to the perceived injustices or contradictions in the
existing state system is the party’s raison d’être, small movements in the conjuncture
will likely produce radical new appraisals, critiques and counter strategies that have less
to do with personality and personal ambition than in parties competing for power within
the existing system. Finally, because such parties are small and allow for radical and
dogmatic conflict, factionalism is more likely to be terminal, resulting in splits and
frequent disintegration. Recent studies of the politics of ideology in parties such as the
British National Party and UK Independence Party on the right, and the Respect and
Socialist Workers Parties on the left, bear out these inferences.
64

Propagation and Reception
Challengers are both constrained and enabled by the content of their party’s
ideological seedbed. The contention of this dissertation’s ‘seedbed approach to ideology’
is that each party has an ideological seedbed from which challengers draw, and that the
old order must refresh its own electoral perspective defending the existing political
economy in a similar way. Which ‘core principles’ are utilized, the choices the old order
makes in redefining or refining those already operationalized as its electoral perspective,
and the terms in which these are ‘conveyed’ again depend on the tactics employed by

64
Rhodes, J., ‘The Political Breakthrough of the BNP: The Case of Burnley’ in British Politics (4:1
2009), 22-46. Clark, A. et. al., ‘More Similar than They'd Like to Admit? Ideology, Policy and Populism in
the Trajectories of the British National Party and Respect’ in British Politics (4: 2008), 511-34.
53

their opponents in the party. This process of competitive ideological articulation and
rearticulation continues through to the ‘retail’ side of the later stages of transition.
The purchase of ideas depends also, of course, on conjunctural events. To accept
the post-structuralist claim that traditional political history overly concerns itself with the
realm of high politics and Namierian intrigues at the expense of alternative sites of
discourse construction is not to take the position that ideologies are unbound from
historical contingency and events of national significance.
65
Existing configurations of
power, such as the regional distribution and social stratification of wealth, the depth of
crisis, and the extent of the discontent among the public with existing distributional
politics, frame the possible and set the terrain on which ideas are sold. (In turn, ideologies
drive politics and create new historical contingencies). Success in promoting an ideology
before the general electorate depends not only on favourable political circumstances, but
also on the ability of politicians to sell their ideas within that political reality, and for
their policy agenda and its associated ideology to address inconsistencies in the existing
state system. The further a realigning project reaches into the reform of social relations,
the more complicated is the task of reconciling disparate interest groups and tailoring
ideology to multiple recipients. Unanticipated events, it would seem from the cases
reviewed, play a greater role in determining success or failure at this stage than in the
more self-contained environment of intra-party politics.
While compromise and prioritization are vital as ideological entrepreneurs
formulate their programmes, the ‘sale’ of a set of policies, once operationalized from one

65
Lawrence, J., ‘Political History’ in Writing History, 221-4.
54

or a collection of core principles, is equally important. Both challengers and their
opponents must at each stage sell their ideology and programme to recipients with
differing levels of political awareness and involvement, and with different connections to
the party’s ideological seedbed. Since no party can be organized vertically on a perfect
continuum, to understand, for example, the gradations of complexity the successful
politician might employ in his rhetoric, we would need to examine the stratification of
levels of the party, the degree of commitment and involvement required of each level,
and the proximity of the lowest level to the general electorate. Neither, of course, do
ideas themselves exist on a continuum of complexity, ranging from the sub-theoretical
through on down to the vulgar. Though it is unlikely the debates editorialized in the New
Statesman and Spectator, in committee at the grassroots level and even on the conference
floor will be consumed by the majority of voters, the simple cues of the Party Political
Broadcast or Daily Mirror headline are easily digestible and universally available to all
members of society and the electorate. This further complicates the task of message
differentiation during later stages of transitions, where mass media campaigning is
widespread.
The strategy of presenting ideologies at various stages of the transition is the most
prominent, and analytically most challenging, example of the ‘coupling’ of the effects of
ideas and institutions explored in this dissertation. While the interplay between factors
varies according to the particular historical circumstances of the party, evidence from this
dissertation points to three broad types of ideological contestation in distinct arenas—
referred to here as the high political, the grassroots, and the electoral levels.
55

Among senior politicians, writers for the quality press and periodicals, and
intellectuals in the academy or, increasingly, think tanks, debate ensues early on in the
challenge about the future of the party. Here, direct references are made to the core
principles of the party’s ideological seedbed. Such is the understanding at the elite level
of the contents of the seedbed, and such is the legitimacy accrued by those able to claim
the mantle of its principles, that deliberation takes the form of a ‘battle for the soul’, the
‘conscience’, or the ‘values’ of the party. Challengers inveigh against the electoral
perspective of the establishment and what they claim to be a betrayal of the party’s, or, in
the case of parties such as the Conservatives where the link between seedbed and national
ideology is touted as a key asset, the nation’s, values.
Though backbench MPs in Britain are overwhelmingly committed to their
respective parties and the advancement of their parliamentary fortunes, such figures do
not, for the most part, engage in the high political battle, instead consuming, and
mobilizing on behalf of, the electoral ideologies and perspectives operationalized by
elites.
66
Parliamentarians might be forced to side openly with one or another faction, are
likely to be drawn into the fray early on, and may be afforded a greater or more clearly
defined role in determining the outcome of a challenge than grassroots members of the
party. But the manner in which ideas are sold to, and received by, these two groups is
similar, as are their respective connections with the seedbed.
Grassroots members and the majority of constituency MPs are politically and
ideologically aware, but are less historically attuned to the development and nuances of

66
Kam, C.J., Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics (Cambridge; 2009), 190-4.
56

the party’s seedbed.
67
Understandings of ideology will be different from that debated in
policy papers and the high journals. The detailed process of operationalization is less
important at this level than linkage of the realigning project to easily-graspable values
with which the party grassroots identify. The policy positions of normal party members
are thus comparatively malleable, and ideological contradictions are less important than
for elites, so long as a programme and ideology can convincingly be portrayed as
authentically ‘Conservative’, ‘Socialist’, and so forth.
Herbert McClosky’s and John Zaller’s work on the American Ethos (1992)
confirms that robust competition exists within the quite narrow parameters of a national
ideology. In the American case, oft-conflicting strands or bundles of principles within an
hegemonically liberal national consensus, such as equality of opportunity, due process
and political democracy against limited government and property rights, are claimed
enthusiastically by party activists.
68
These ‘opinion leaders’ work on behalf of parties
whose programmes can be linked to simple value labels, but are readily prepared to
assign to the party hierarchy the job of operationalizing a programme from core
principles, and to trust their assessment of the politically possible. We shall see in this
dissertation that discussions at the grassroots level focus on the most conspicuous
elements of the challengers’ operational ideology—with Thatcherism, for example, the
core principle of individualism and attacks on unions, rather than its constitutional

67
Richards, P.G., Honourable Members: A Study of the British Backbencher (Faber and Faber; 1954), 248-
53.
68
McClosky, H. and Zaller, J., The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy
(Harvard; 1984), 11-14, 143-7.
57

implications or the detrimental effects it might have on the civil society it ostensibly
sought to reinvigorate.
We might assume that operational ideologies become simpler still as challenges
move in later stages from the lower echelons of the party into the electoral market. This
seems reasonable, owing to the lack of time for research and commitment among casual
party workers and voters, and the need for simplification in the communication of
identifiable messages.
69
A long tradition in U.S. public opinion research holds that
ideology does not order the political beliefs of the vast majority of the population.
Beliefs, as measured at any one time by surveys and questionnaires, do not cohere with
what, in the American context, are identified by political scientists as consistent ‘liberal’
or ‘conservative’ positions.
70
Conceptions of ideology among McClosky’s and Zaller’s
‘political class’—the equivalent, by their definition, of what are referred to here as the
party grassroots—may be vulgarized versions of those developed at the high political
level, dichotomized as they are into neat categories that evade the foundational questions
that animate debate among, for example, traditionalist and liberal Conservatives and their
even more finely demarcated subtypes. But the fact commitment to some form of

69
Rosenstone S.J and Hansen J.M., Mobilization, Participation, and American Democracy (Longman;
[1993] 2002), Introduction.
70
McClosky and Zaller, Ethos, 142-9. Converse, P. E., ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in
Ideology and Discontent, D.E.Apter (Ed.) (New York; 1964), 206-261. Converse argues that as we move
down the socioeconomic scale, constituencies—particularly those with a history of disenfranchisement—
are more loosely organized and less ideologically aware. This explains why left-wing parties across the
world have had such difficulty mobilizing voters and consolidating viable coalitions compared to
conservative and liberal groups. It often takes a major event that individuals have a tangible stake in, or the
emergence of a charismatic leader, before those of lower social statuses begin even to discuss politics, let
alone possess a clearly identifiable opinion on concrete political issues.
58

ideology drives political action among the grassroots separates them from the mass of
ideologically apathetic public opinion.
In 1952, political scientist Bernard Berelson lauded the ‘cushion’ provided by
mass apathy and limited public involvement in politics which, he claimed, served the
essential function in representative democracies of absorbing the political currents
generated in the discourse between different interest groups and parties.
71
Without this
cushion, political stalemate would ensue. As a consequence of dealignment born of
increasing ‘self-sufficiency’ among citizens, the relationship between parties, the state,
and the public has, according to Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg, changed
significantly since Berelson wrote.
72
‘Parties without partisans’ can be seen as the logical
culmination of the move towards the ‘catch all party’ noted by Kirchheimer over half a
century ago. Though these trends have been more pronounced in presidential systems,
Paul Whiteley has argued that in Britain, too, disengagement has increased as a result of
changes in society and the predictability of the first-past-the-post electoral system, with
parties now resembling more public utilities than mass movements.
73
The re-emergence
of charismatic party leadership and the inexorable and seemingly universal trend towards
centralization traced out by Scarrow are the internal manifestations of this same process.

71
Berelson, B. “Democratic Theory and Public Opinion” in Political Opinion Quarterly (Fall 1952), 323.
72
Dalton, R. and Wattenberg, M., Parties Without Partisans (Oxford; 2002), 22.
73
Whiteley, P., ‘Is the Party Over? – The Decline of Party Activism and Membership across the
Democratic World’, Presented to panel on party membership and activism at meeting of the Political
Studies Association, University of
Manchester, Apr. 2009. Biezen, I. van., ‘Political Parties as Public Utilities’, in Party Politics (10: 2004)
722.
59

Whether theorists view such developments with suspicion, disinterest, or enthusiasm, the
upshot of the increasing remoteness of political parties from the everyday experience of
most voters is, for challengers, an electoral marketplace perhaps even more volatile in its
aggregate opinions over time, and ideologically more inert than the pioneers of the
discipline believed it be.
Nonetheless, lack of ideological awareness does not, according to Zaller, make
the public resistant to the influence of elites.
74
On the contrary, public opinion’s
fickleness and malleability present challengers with the opportunity to ride trends in its
ebb and flow, and to build support for a larger programme around issues whose initial
salience they have little control over. We shall also observe in our case studies that
depiction of strong leadership is just as important in garnering attention as the themes on
which challengers speak.
Inevitability
Before tracing out a periodized model of ideological challenges, we must deal
with the question of inevitability and limits to the party’s relevance to social change,
irrespective of its internal dynamics. The structure-agency debate is surely more
treacherous than that surrounding periodization, and we shall deal with it only as it may
pertain to our limited cases.
While the emergence of new issues need not induce ideological change if parties
are able to incorporate their stances on such issues into their established narratives, when
high profile issues cut across cleavages, voters and party programmes are likely to shift.

74
Zaller, J., The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge; 1992), 311-15.
60

Are the causes of this purely structural, or are political actors important in pushing for
change and articulating new ideas? Burnham’s model of realignment emphasizes
sociological forces, but the intergenerational timing of these realignments and the trauma
which accompanies them seems to suggest a place for positive action on the part of
politicians.
Stephen Skowronek’s highly influential work on the institution of the American
presidency has, too, tended to emphasize the structurally deterministic aspects of
transformations in the state system. While the presidency remains, despite its neglect in
the political science literature, according to Skowronek, the central institution of the
American state, individual presidents are largely hostages to circumstance, or, as he puts
it, their situation in cyclical ‘political time’. Presidents do not ascend to office on equal
terms to those of their predecessors, able to use a given set of powers and prerogatives to
pursue their agendas as they see fit. Rather, they seek to transform, or work with, regimes
or orders whose health and durability they have little control over.
75
Thus, to compare
Andrew Jackson with Ronald Reagan, both of whom were, to varying degrees, able to
remould ‘the very terms and conditions of constitutional government’, makes more sense
in ‘political time’ than to compare Reagan with Jimmy Carter, who struggled to revive
and rearticulate the principles of a New Deal order drawing its last desperate breaths,
despite the latter’s temporal proximity.
76

75
Skowronek, S., The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Harvard;
1995), 33-4.
76
Ibid., 32, 57, 410.
61

Skowronek has justifiably been criticized for treating chronological ‘secular
time’, over which such changes as increasing bureaucratic complexity and ‘thickening’
interest group competition take place gradually, as an inert backdrop to the familiar
cycles of ‘political time’.
77
Due to the qualitative and fundamental shifts in the operation
of government that are themselves consequences of a more general political
modernization, the comparability of two administrations, despite supposedly falling at
similar points in a regime cycle, is limited, along with any comparison’s analytic
usefulness. The historicist truism that history must be judged on its own terms applies to
ideological transitions as much as it does to American presidencies. This is borne in mind
as we work towards a model of transition that allows for, and incorporates into its
account of this phenomenon, the inevitably unique attributes of different cases.
The basic problem of structure and agency most relevant to this dissertation,
however, is the rigidity and determinism of Skowronek’s periodization of ‘political time’,
which seems to have been derived from a few key cases and then mapped onto complex
reality, rather than emerging inductively from the whole span of presidential history
studied. The presidency, for Skowronek, is a ‘blunt, disruptive force in politics’, and it is
only in extraordinary times of regime breakdown that the office can be used to construct
a new constitutional order.
78
The individual politician can, by Skowronek’s reckoning, at
best recognize his predetermined role and play it out well, and at worst flail hopelessly
against the tide of fortune.

77
Ibid., 315.
78
Ibid., xiv.
62

This dissertation accepts and accounts for the role of crisis in providing an
opportunity for challengers, but does not, as Skowronek appears often to fall into the trap
of doing, equate regime breakdown with transformation and vice versa. His treatment of
the ‘Republican era’ (from Civil War to New Deal), which lasted twice as long as his
other periods, is illustrative of this flaw. Why this regime lasted for so long is never fully
addressed. Perhaps, as Bruce Ackerman has suggested, the Progressive Era saw a shift in
constitutional legalism which fell short of the kind of total institutional innovation
Skowronek regards as transformative.
79
On the other hand, perhaps no incumbent
possessed the will, the capability, or the audacity to grasp the opportunities provided for
‘reconstruction’ by what were, as others have asserted and Skowronek concedes, signs of
advanced decay in the state system of the late Gilded Age.
80
Skowronek’s reverence for
strong Progressive reformers seems to suggest sympathy for the first interpretation, but
this sits uneasily with a ‘political time’ that, for the most part, compels agents to, short of
wholesale ‘reconstruction’, preside supinely over a politics of ‘articulation’ or
‘disjuncture’.
81
This dissertation treats crisis, or discordance between the state system and
society, as the floor for political action, not as a driving force and a component of neatly
compartmentalized ‘political time’. It provides a window that may remain open for
considerable periods of time, coming slightly further ajar as crisis deepens. But even in
periods where the legitimacy of the old political-economic order has been severely

79
Ackerman, B., We the People (Harvard; 1993), chapters 1, 3-5.
80
Ibid., 64. Skowronek, Politics, 249.
81
Milkis, S.M., ‘What Politics Do Presidents Make?’ in Polity (Spring 1995), 490.
63

sapped, ideological and political work is required on the part of challengers to advance a
realigning project such as Powellism or Thatcherism.
It is possible to suggest that Thatchersim was inevitable—that the neoliberal
project was a response to, and its success a product of, the universal processes of
globalization, technological change, flexible modes production and the dismantling of
national corporatist forms of representation that conflicted with the functioning of the
new global economy. With Thatcher and the Thatcherites or without them, Thatcherism
as a set of reforms and associated values would have won through and transformed
society irrespectively.
82
There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
First, neoliberalism was not the only response to the global capital crisis of the
1970s. Those left strategists inclined to structural explanations sought to counter
Thatcherite influence at its weakest links, or when it overreached. Indeed, much of the
disagreement on the left was between those who emphasized the power of reactionary
ideas themselves, and those who regarded them as foils for a war of structural position,
and debate centred on the best allocation of resources and intellectual attention in the
construction of an alternative to Thatcherism.
83
Left-wing opponents of Thatcherism
understood that contradictions in the post-war settlement made that system unworkable,
that a return to it was impossible, and in many cases they celebrated the demise of the
Keynesian welfare state and ‘Labourism’. Part of the process of Labour’s coming to

82
This argument, it should be noted, is neither necessarily of the left nor right. Francis Fukuyama’s End of
History and the Last Man (1991) presents from the right an essentially similar argument to that offered by
David Held on globalization and Anthony Giddens in Beyond Left and Right, 97-102.
83
See the Jessop et. al. debate with Stuart Hall in Marxism Today.
64

terms with membership of the Common Market and later European Union was its
development of a strategy that could bring about egalitarian outcomes through
supranationalism rather than a head on confrontation with Thatcherism that may have
consigned the party indefinitely to the political wilderness.
84

Second, even if the ‘logic of capital’ did point in a rightward direction, the ‘great
moving right show’ took on vastly different complexions in different countries,
depending on their representative institutions. As many have pointed out, the severity of
the break with the post-war settlement in Britain possibly owed most to the flimsy nature
of the institutions that had been put in place to manage economic development following
the Second World War—in particular the threadbare patchwork of corporatist agencies
set against parliamentary supremacy. The failure of ad hoc dirigisme and tinkering
allowed Thatcher simply to sweep away the house of cards, leaving a type of ‘corporate
liberalism’ shorn of the unions blamed by the right for everything from stagnating
productivity to social turmoil.
85

Third, accepting that neoliberalism in its unbridled form would come to transform
the British state system, we are still left seeking to explain the particulars of the
transformation. While Geoffrey K. Fry discounts the idea that Britain stood on the brink

84
Jessop et. al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Blackwell; 1987), 186. Jones, T., Remaking the
Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair (Routledge; 2007), 134-7.
85
Utley, T.E., Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking (London; 1968), 111-16. Gamble, A., ‘The Free
Economy and the Strong State: The Rise of the Social Market Economy’ in Socialist Review (1979), 21.
Writes Gamble: ‘This consensus maintained a remarkable social peace through the long boom, but now that
the problems of managing capitalism loom so large it is visibly failing. The revival of the perspective of
liberal political economy is one response, and is proving extremely powerful, reinforced as it is by its easy
translation into the themes of populism where all economic ills are seen both as the result of an overbearing
and inefficient state, and as the work of ill-intentioned, subversive minorities who disturb order and
threaten security’.
65

of revolution in the 1970s,
86
the eerie realism of Chris Mullins’s 1982 novel, A Very
British Coup—in which Harry Perkins, a northern Labour left-winger is elected prime
minister, but a spiralling series of events culminate in helicopters over Downing Street in
what the reader is left assuming to be a CIA-backed coup against his government—is
reminiscent of what David Wright MP termed ‘a more extreme, polemical style of
politics [than those of 2011]’.
87
The neoliberal revolution did, of course, transpire
through parliamentary means, and this makes the party indispensible to any explanation
of its particular features. Had the Callaghan government been re-elected in 1979 and then
been successful in quashing left-wing challenges to its authority, Denis Healey’s fiscal
conservatism and tight monetary policies would have been instrumental in responding to
the economic crisis, and a far cry from the religious monetarism of the first Thatcher
government.
88
Would Labour have ushered in a type of Third Way avant la lettre?
Most relevant to the assumption that intra-party politics matter, we can also take
the counterfactual of a William Whitelaw victory in the Conservative leadership election
of 1975 and his subsequent election as prime minister in 1978-9. Would the
transformation have occurred as rapidly, or at the time that it did, under Whitelaw’s
leadership? Would he have been more open to Middle Way pleas for moderation and
done more to patch up the existing system?
89

86
Fry, G.K., The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution: An Interpretation of British Politics 1975-1990
(Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), 15.
87
Interview with author, Aug. 16, 2011.
88
Pearce, E., Denis Healey (Little, Brown and Company; 2002), 465.
89
Perhaps out of loyalty to Thatcher, Whitelaw in his Memoirs (Aurum Press;1989) insists that the
Thatcher government of which he was a member was correct on the essentials. This does not, of course,
66

Finally, the phenomenon of Thatcherism represents more than economic and
social policy. As we examine Thatcherism and Powellism as realigning projects in the
context of the party, we interchangeably refer to leadership styles, the statements of key
actors (not only Thatcher and Powell), and policies. To the extent this introduces
inconsistency, it is hoped that the historiographical complexity of Thatcherism and
Powellism as electoral ideologies is also illustrated, and that a fuller understanding of
their effects on intra-party politics can thus be gleaned. Certainly, even if the neoliberal
revolution and collapse of the post-war settlement were inevitable in both party and
country, Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell, as ideological entrepreneurs and political
tacticians, must be central to any understanding of the intra-party process.
Thus, unless we are to ascribe complete agency to socio-economic forces—either
dominating through a neutral state apparatus, à la Ralph Miliband, or containing within
them the state system and, thus, the entire political process, à la Nico Poulantzas—
conjunctural change must involve, to a greater or lesser extent, autonomous action in the
political realm. Here, the politics of support can be translated into significant changes in
the politics of power. Even if we are to embrace ‘ideologism’ as a framework for
understanding change, granting, for instance, Stuart Hall’s characterization of
Thatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism’,
90
the institutional setting in which such ideas are
formed, the broader conjuncture into which they are cast and then received, and the

indicate that the pace of change inaugurated under her premiership reflected completely his judgment of
prudence. See Aitkin, I., ‘Loyal to a Fault’ in The Guardian (September 11, 2002).
90
Hall, S., ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ in The Politics of Thatcherism: Essays in the Study of Politics,
S. Hall (Ed.) (Lawrence Wishart; 1983).
67

stages of that process, must all be examined if we are to appreciate how they facilitate the
transition from one state system to another.
A Model of Intra-Party Ideological Transitions
Below is outlined a time-staggered model of ideological transition within parties
based on the aims pursued at each stage of the process. The tactics employed and, as we
shall see in the next chapter, the length of time each stage takes to complete, will differ
from challenge to challenge, owing, not least, to extra-party factors quite beyond the
control of challengers. But by stating which aspects of the process might, aside from core
aims, be considered integral to the periods of the model, and which aspects are case-
contingent, it is hoped this scheme can be adapted, or at least used as a starting point, for
the discussion of intra-party politics in different institutional, historical and national
settings.
Challenge
Aim: The aim of the challengers is simply to win leadership of the party, due to
the legitimacy this confers on the ideological tendency associated with the person of the
leader and, moreover, the political power it affords those occupying key posts. As we
shall see, the role of the lower levels of the party is sometimes more complex than this
might suggest, but the premise that challengers target the leadership is essentially sound.
Process: First, a crisis must occur in the state system. This may be a secular
process, but it is likely to contain one or several notable events which both worsen and
highlight the gap between the politics of power and the politics of support. As mentioned
previously, in order for a realigning strategy to transform the state system, the schism
68

must be severe enough so as to induce in the minds of significant portions of the nation
the desire for change. How radical that change is may be roughly in proportion to the
magnitude of the crisis.
Assuming the schism in the conjuncture is not deep enough to generate
widespread revolutionary fervour, successful challengers must subscribe to the existing
electoral and parliamentary rules and, even if they wish to initiate radical constitutional
changes as part of their programme, accept the basic institutions of state as the means
through which this can be achieved, and compete within their bounds.
Second, a group within the party associated with the failing consensus—through
the policies it has pursued during spells in government, its electoral perspective, and its
personalities—must be readily identifiable and vulnerable to attack. Its recent record both
in and out of government should highlight the staleness of the consensus and its own lack
of electoral legitimacy.
Third, challengers must propose a new politics of power and an electoral ideology
to justify it. We can expect the challengers to formulate an alternative accumulation
system for national capital, and to offer a different role for government in relation to the
productive economy.
91
The challengers must pinpoint contradictions in the status quo,
and address an ideology to these contradictions which frames them as irreconcilable and
deleterious to the welfare of the whole nation, rather than simply political arrangements
which benefit some groups at the expense of others. This is not to say the values and
arrangements of the new order need be free of contradictions. On the contrary;

91
Jessop et. al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Blackwell; 1987), 145-6.
69

operational ideologies should be flexible enough to appeal to groups whose interests
conflict, and to downplay these conflicts by appeals to common unity. As Roger Scruton
points out, Conservatives, like Socialists, concern themselves with the state system in its
totality, as opposed to Liberals, who dichotomize the state and the individual.
92
(This may
well be reason why it was the Tory and Labour Parties, rather than the Liberals, who
inherited the politics of the twentieth century). At this early stage, the articulation of a
recognizably oppositional ideology is more important than its internal consistency or
completeness of vision. Indeed, contradictions between ideas and action and between key
constituencies are the lifeblood of electoral ideologies at every stage of the transition.
Fourth, the electoral ideology must be formulated within the bounds of the party’s
ideological tradition in order for it to acquire intra-party legitimacy. This facet of the
transition reflects the constraining and enabling effects of ideas upon ideological
entrepreneurs.
Finally, an intra-party battle waged by ideologically-conscious tendencies or
factions gives victorious challengers legitimacy, for it indicates support in the party for
change as it moves into the consolidation phase where this is essential. The respective
roles of the various levels of the party in this power struggle depend on the organization
and traditions of the party. Some parties may be constitutionally bound in their
parliamentary actions by decisions taken democratically by assembled members, whereas
others, such as the Conservatives, have traditions of centralized decision-making and
deference.

92
Scruton, Meaning, 36.

When we get a rupture in the politics of power, or disconnec
state system, what determines the success of the emergent electoral ideologies? Figure
1.3 illustrates the institutional
can be considered requirements for a challenge to take pl
when an alternative within the party has been articulated. As we shall see, ‘determinants
of success’ are not mutually exclusive, but instead reinforce one another. For example,
Powell’s unwillingness at this stage to campai
organizations, ‘coupled’ with his unease with the formalized leadership selection
procedures ushered in after the 1964 election defeat, served to weaken the attraction of an
already complexly operationalized and easily misinterpreted ideology. The effects of
each factor should be analyzed carefully, but narratives that examine them in isolation are
misleading.

Fig. 1.3: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of ideological transitions.

When we get a rupture in the politics of power, or disconnect between nation and
state system, what determines the success of the emergent electoral ideologies? Figure
institutional location of the factors outlined above, and whether they
can be considered requirements for a challenge to take place, or determinants of success
when an alternative within the party has been articulated. As we shall see, ‘determinants
of success’ are not mutually exclusive, but instead reinforce one another. For example,
Powell’s unwillingness at this stage to campaign through oppositional factions or
with his unease with the formalized leadership selection
procedures ushered in after the 1964 election defeat, served to weaken the attraction of an
already complexly operationalized and easily misinterpreted ideology. The effects of
analyzed carefully, but narratives that examine them in isolation are
Fig. 1.3: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of ideological transitions.
70
t between nation and
state system, what determines the success of the emergent electoral ideologies? Figure
location of the factors outlined above, and whether they
ace, or determinants of success
when an alternative within the party has been articulated. As we shall see, ‘determinants
of success’ are not mutually exclusive, but instead reinforce one another. For example,
gn through oppositional factions or
with his unease with the formalized leadership selection
procedures ushered in after the 1964 election defeat, served to weaken the attraction of an
already complexly operationalized and easily misinterpreted ideology. The effects of
analyzed carefully, but narratives that examine them in isolation are

Fig. 1.3: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of ideological transitions.
71

Consolidation
Aims: The aim of the consolidation phase can be seen either as multifaceted, or as
a collection of causally related aims at different levels, pursued with intermediate
objectives in mind.
First, enemies within the party must be outmanoeuvred. Overt challenges to the
position of the leader are rare in a party that values the veneer of unity as one of its key
strengths, but what might be seen as counterrevolutionary attempts to undermine the
authority and legitimacy of the challengers must be dealt with. This means adopting a
forward strategy regarding the new programme, combined with rearguard action against a
disgruntled establishment. It is argued that, since other aims depend on its fulfilment, the
party is still the site of ideological contestation to which most attention is paid by the
challengers at this stage. (See Fig. 1.4).

The party

Level of
attention
paid

The state system

CHALLENGE CONSOLIDATION ASCENDENCY
Fig. 1.4: The institutional focus of challengers at each stage of an ideological transition.

72

The above diagram represents and simplifies the trend towards greater focus on
the challengers’ external realigning project as the transition progresses. In reality, this
will involve momentary shifts in degrees of attention, depending on the particular
election cycle, periodic rebellions by the old order, and so forth. Neither should it be
implied that no attention at all is paid by the farsighted or ambitious among the
challengers to the implementation of policy and the war of position before power is
attained. However, this can be overstated. By definition, during the challenge phase of
the transition the party is under the control of a dominant faction whose electoral
perspective works in defence of the existing state system. Even if the party is in
government, the challengers have neither the platform to advance their radical agenda
rhetorically before the public, nor control of the key posts within the establishment
government needed to inaugurate a break with past practice. Instead, given their
conviction that the dominant faction’s policies are damaging to the party’s and the
country’s wellbeing, they are likely in earlier phases of the transition to intensify their
primary effort to unseat the leadership.
Second, the battle for hearts and minds must be won at the popular level. This
does not involve a change to the programme, but, instead, redoubled efforts to claim
public legitimacy, build an electoral coalition around the new project, and challenge at
the popular level the assumptions of the old state system.
Third, tentative legislative steps must be taken to implement the programme and
to construct a new politics of power more congenial to the electoral ideology of the
challengers.
73

Process: The following processes are hypothesized to occur in tandem as the
strategy outlined above is pursued. Since the site of transition we are interested in is the
party, these processes can be classified as central, contributory or peripheral to the
struggle within it. Unsurprisingly, processes at the high political level are most
imperative in this regard. However, policy implementation is also important in that it
reinforces at the intra-party level the viability of the challengers’ programme in the
country at large.
As the balance of forces changes in favour of the challengers, the power struggle
among elites gets bitterer as no faction can claim intra-party ascendency.
Among the grassroots we should see greater awareness of the ideological
differences between the old and new orders in the party. Motions and signs of conflict
may not only involve personalities and sects, but also ideology. Depending, again, on the
institutional arrangements of the particular party, the grassroots may have no formal
power—though, in this case, their ability to embarrass the government in public forums
may lead to efforts to induce unity by the challengers—or be well positioned to play a
role in determining whether, at this stage, the challenge will fail.
This dissertation does not engage in the debate over what constitutes electoral
realignment. However, it does insist that during the consolidation stage, efforts are made
to build a substantial electoral coalition that can provide the challengers with, first,
legitimacy, and second, the requisite time in government to effect significant change in
the state system.
74

Exploration of the Thatcher transition presents us with an interesting
counterfactual: Can consolidation occur outside of government? In the extraordinary
circumstances of the post-war period, consolidation did, in fact, take place quickly, and in
opposition. Whether, without processes that occurred outside of the party, the
Thatcherites could have consolidated their position within it, is questionable.
Ascendency
Aims: The hallmark of ascendency within the party is a reversal in the importance
of goals. With the challengers’ position now stable, greater emphasis is placed on
implementing their programme and permanently changing the politics of power.
This is not to say intra-party affairs are neglected completely. If a resurgence of
the old order is to be prevented, legislative successes should be harnessed to secure
further the position of the challengers.

Fig. 1.5: Intra-level processes during the consolidation and ascendency phases of an ideological transition. 75

the consolidation and ascendency phases of an ideological transition.

76

Process: The old regime is not annihilated, though the degree to which older ideas
are submerged, either through formal discipline or by custom, depends on the party.
During the ascendency we are likely to see a more ambitious electoral strategy to
match the greater political reach of the project. New groups must be targeted and brought
into the coalition. As a result, the ideology which justifies the new state system becomes
more complex and perhaps more contradictory.
We can also expect the Opposition—or, in more fragmented party systems than
Britain’s, opposition parties—to become more divided during the ascendency stage, and
for it to adapt its own ideology to the new electoral setting and politics of power. This
may be partly in response to events themselves in the governing party, and partly due to
flux in the conjuncture brought about by the early stages of policy implementation by the
challengers. Division and possible splits are outward manifestations of disagreement in
the Opposition over how to respond to an aggressive realigning project.
*
When new ideas challenging basic assumptions of the existing political economy
are introduced in response to crisis, the skill with which those ideas are shepherded
through the institutions of the state and into the wider society is a key determiner of the
likelihood that those articulating them will succeed in their project. The party, as the
initial site of ideological contestation in parliamentary democracies and directly
connected to the promulgation and implementation of policy, is an essential link in this
chain. While, owing to events and institutions outside the party and the huge internal
differences between parties, each transition will be unique and its constituent stages will
77

differ in duration, a model of intra-party ideological transitions can be derived from the
aims pursued by challenges at three common stages: the challenge; the consolidation; and
the ascendency.
Chapter two compares the Thatcherite and Middle Way Conservative transitions
in order to show how variation can exist in this framework, along with some of the
reasons why it may arise, even when transitions in the same political party are separated
by just thirty years. The subsequent three chapters on Powellism seek to add weight to the
primary theoretical contention of this dissertation: that the party-as-institution and the
politics of ideology within it not only act to give nuance to ideological transitions already
underway, but at an early stage can actually determine their success or failure.
78

Chapter 2.

The Case of the Post-War Conservative Party
Having discussed the implications of parties’ structures, their ideological
seedbeds, and intra-party politics for transitions in the wider society and state system, we
come now to apply the tentative model developed above. This chapter serves two
purposes. First, the Conservative Party is introduced as an institution suitable for study as
a site of ideological contestation. As the party of the establishment and Britain’s ‘natural
party of government’, that the Conservatives should be committed to the rules of
representative parliamentary democracy, acting as a bridge between the electorate and the
politics of power, comes as little surprise. But the notion of the Tories as an ‘ideological’
party, or as interested in ideas to the same extent as their Socialist rivals, is an
historiographically more contentious point.
The argument is made that Conservative ideologies in Britain are operationalized
from core principles that form part of the party’s ideological seedbed. The chapter does
not claim to offer a new interpretation of Conservative philosophy, but, through the
analogy of secular Anglicanism, a more expansive way of understanding the pool from
which Conservative ideological entrepreneurs draw these core principles, as well as an
account of the process of contestation within the party which, due to its traditionally non-
fratricidal nature, has tended to undergird the myth of non-ideology. Conservative
79

operational ideologies in Britain are derived laterally, and applied to and across the entire
state system.
The second part of the chapter tests the model comparatively against the
Thatcherite and post-war Middle Way transitions, showing, as predicted, that while the
relative lengths of periods and the tactics utilized were unique, the strategy and the aims
pursued at each stage were similar. This comparative analysis introduces the ideology
which Powellism set out to challenge and to supersede, along with the liberal market
alternative which, a decade later, succeeded where Powell, as a result of the obstacles he
faced in the party during the challenge phase, had failed.
The Conservative Party: Ideology and Institution
The first past the post electoral system in the United Kingdom has tended to push
radical forces into one of the two major parties or into coalition with one of them, thus
defanging their ideas and educating their leaders in parliamentary action. Meanwhile, an
apathetic public and anti-revolutionary political culture have also worked to create a
relatively placid, but also inclusive, political system.
93

The Conservatives more than any other party express reverence for national
institutions and the established political process. The cynic might with some justification
remark that it is precisely because these institutions are rigged to serve Conservative ends
that such affinity exists, citing the disregard for the rule of law shown by some
Conservatives at times when these interests were threatened, such as during the General

93
Bogdanor V., The New British Constitution (Hart; 2009), chapters 1,2. This recent polemic offers a
refreshing slant on a well-worn debate.
80

Strike of 1926 and the Home Rule Crisis of 1910-14.
94
Nonetheless, it remains that in
recent times, both parties have subscribed to stable and generally understood
constitutional arrangements. What was so remarkable about the Trotskyist Militant
Tendency, which rankled successive Labour leaders from the 1960s through to 1987, was
that it took so long for the leadership to crack down on it.
Indeed, the congruence between the Conservative seedbed and a broader national
ideology was extremely neat, making the Tories an almost ideal form of the
establishment type party for which our model seeks to explain ideological challenges in
the first instance. That being said, because of Britain’s stable two-party system, the bar is
set low for the articulation of oppositional ideologies that fall within the constitutionally
sound ideological frameworks of the established parties. In the sense that both parties are
relatively open to ideological challenge within the context of institutional and ideological
stability in the wider society, they can be seen as ideal test cases for our model.
There are, of course, significant differences between the Conservative and Labour
parties, not least in terms of their respective organizations, but also with regard the
operational nature of their ideological seedbeds. Whether there has been enough
organizational and ideational convergence in recent years as to render Conservative
ideologies and New Labour ‘Socialism’ operationally similar is discussed in chapter six.
In the period under examination, however, the differing effects of Socialism and what I
term ‘secular Anglicanism’—the seedbed of Conservative ideology—on intra-party
politics and the promulgation of ideas are noticeable. It is quite inconceivable, for

94
Marr, A., A History of Modern Britain (Macmillan; 2009), 112-15.
81

example, that debate in the Conservative Party in the 1960s and 1970s could have been
framed either by Conservatives or critics as one between orthodoxy and revision, since
orthodoxy, in the sense that the Socialism of 1945-8 gained that status in the Labour
Party, was, if it existed at all, a much slippier concept in the Conservative Party.
This is not to claim certain ideas about the nation did not gain ascendency in the
party and that there was no ideological conflict. Nor does it accept the often self-serving
premise bandied by Conservatives that theirs is a non-ideological party. The historical
evidence demonstrates clearly that Conservatives engage with ideas just as readily and
extensively as their political opponents.
95
By partaking in the rough and tumble of
politics in a representative democracy, Conservatives must propose solutions to problems
with ethical components, debate their opponents, and present to mass audiences a
convincing political programme that is recognizably Conservative. Though Conservatives
‘may have largely (but not entirely) eschewed formal statements of political belief…a
hinterland of rhetoric, values, and received ideas, which may be expressed in day-to-day
political argument, speeches, correspondence and legislative acts’ open up a window onto
Conservative thought. For example, in railing against the un-Conservative nature of
Thatcherism, Iain Gilmour was implying that an authentic set of Conservative principles
did exist, despite his earlier assertion that Conservatism was ‘not an ideology or a
doctrine’.
96
True, it may have been that Gilmour believed Thatcherism was un-
Conservative precisely because it was ideological, but the fact he attacked its social,

95
Green, E.H.H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford; 2002), 3-5.
96
Ibid., 8.
82

Table 2.1: Applied principles of Middle Way Conservatism, Powellism and Thatcherism.

political and economic agenda suggests that it was the content of the ideology he found
most objectionable.
Before working towards a more holistic approach to the content of Conservative
ideologies and the intra-party politics of ideology than currently offered in the theoretical
literature and historiography, let us briefly examine the distinctions identified in this
dissertation between Middle Way Conservatism, Powellism, and Thatcherism. Table 2.1

97
Marquand, D., ‘The paradoxes of Thatcherism’ in Thatcherism, R. Skidelsky (Ed.) (Blackwell; 1988).
149-53.
Constitution State Civil Society Individuals
Middle
Way
Pragmatic.
Institutions
should be
reformed to meet
needs of era. E.g.
1958 and 1963
Peerage Acts
Viewed as benign.
Must play essential
role in delivering
public services.
State sector clearly
delineated from
market.
Corporatist.
Focus on large
institutions of
civil society that
can be brought
into partnership
with state.
Paternalistic. In
return for
privileges must
accept duties
and
responsibilities
to state and
nation.
Powellism The Crown-in-
Parliament,
advised by
ministers, is
supreme, eternal
and ensures
freedom. Church
and Union bound
up with it.
Limited. Expresses
Oakeshottian fear
of rationalistic
planning and
scepticism towards
efficacy of state in
public provision.
Strong, shared
institutions
ensure national
character is
preserved amidst
flux of market.
Intervention to
prevent their
disintegration.
E.g. Welsh
Heritage.
Libertarian. Left
to make choices
in economic and
social affairs,
but play
constitutional
role in
exercising
sovereignty
through
Parliament.
Thatcherism Constitutional
order to be
moulded to
ideological
dictates. E.g.
Presidential style,
decline of Cabinet
government and
centralization of
power in
Whitehall.

Institutions of
welfare state
despised out of
ideological
conviction and
belief they sapped
moral fibre of
people. Yet ‘strong
state’ that
preserves law and
order.
Professed belief
in civil society,
but openly
hostile to trade
unions.
Indifference to
small business in
practice. Civil
society’s
institutions
‘pushed to
breaking point’.
Contradictory.
Idea of strident
individualism,
but with the
individual
adhering to state
sanctioned
moral codes,
contributing
unassisted to
family and
community.
97

83

provides an overview of how the core principles (which are sketched out below) of these
three post-war Conservative ideologies were operationalized with regards the various
levels of the state system.
Middle Way Conservatism: Having experienced the tumult of the interwar years,
Middle Way Conservatives placed stability—achieved through relative equality of
income, fairness in employment and access to services, and a pragmatic approach to
government—at the heart of their vision of the political good.
Powellism: Throughout his life, Powell regarded many things as eternal or
transcendent. Having abandoned Germanic culture and spirit in 1933, he came to regard
the ‘indissoluble’ bond between the British and Indian peoples in a similar manner.
Following 1948, parliamentary sovereignty, the nation, its borders and the Union became
collectively the ahistorical fetish to which he clung.
Thatcherism: Thatcherites held to a romantic vision of a nation lost that could be
redeemed. It was militantly patriotic—the transcendent values of British life were
freedom, thrift, idealism, vigorous individualism, charity and moral uprightness.
Beyond Binary Typologies
In his seminal Ideologies of Conservatism (2002), E. H. H. Green sets out to fill a
significant gap in the historiography of Conservatism in twentieth century Britain.
Surveys of conservatism as a political philosophy have been numerous and, despite
matching neither in quantity nor scope similar works on the Labour and Liberal Parties, a
renewed interest among academics in the Tory Party as an institution led to the
publication of a steady stream of books on Conservative Party history during the 1990s
84

and 2000s.
98
Yet ‘as the ‘Conservative century’ drew to a close, the same thing could not
be said about ‘Conservative ideas’ and how these influenced and were influenced by the
‘logic of the situation that Conservatives faced at different times’.
99
Green was, in short,
attempting to provide an account of the operationalization of Conservative principles
according to circumstances—a process indispensible to any ideological challenge as
mapped out by our model.
Having challenged the notion that Conservatives are non-ideological, Green
devotes the first four-fifths of his book to disentangling, using a series of short essays
intended to provide historical snapshots of pertinent episodes, the nexus of ideas,
institutions and personalities in twentieth century Conservative politics.
100
Green leaves it
until his final essay to draw the strands of his study together and to present us with his
view of what constitutes Conservative ideology. Green suggests that the distinction
drawn by political theorists such as W. H. Greenleaf
101
between ‘paternalist’ and
‘libertarian’ Conservatism is simplistic and of limited use for those seeking to better

98
See Green’s historiographical summary in Ideologies, fn. 2, 1-2. See also Gernett, M. and Lynch, P.
(Eds.) The Conservatives in Crisis (University of Manchester Press; 2003) for a collection of thematic
essays on the challenges facing the Tory Party in the Blair era, and Lee, S. and Beech, M., The
Conservatives Under David Cameron: Built to Last? (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), for a similarly structured
appraisal of Tory prospects at the end of the 2000s.
99
Green, Ideologies, 2.
100
Green, Ideologies, 64.His second essay, for example, illustrates, using the correspondence of senior
Tories and exploring the political economy of little known political theorist Arthur Boutwood, how English
Idealism, centred on Balliol College, Oxford, was key to the development not only of the New Liberalism,
but also of Tory social reform policy. Here, Green suggests that the difference in much of Tory and Liberal
thought on social reform was one of emphasis rather than content, though many of the Conservatives had
read and associated with the historical economists who ‘shared the German head for Spirits’.
101
Greenleaf’s typology, set within his broader theory, is more complex than assumed by Green, and
anticipates some of Green’s analysis of civil society as the focus of Conservative political action. See
Greenleaf, W. H., The British Political Tradition : Volume 2 (1981-3), 278-312.
85

understand Conservatism as an ideology or, rather, a collection of various interlinked
systems of thought:
In examining this gamut of ideas it is important to avoid an oversimplification of categories of
opinion that emerged. It is tempting to slip into using a framework of ‘Statist’ and ‘anti-Statist’,
but this would draw an overly straightforward divide in Conservative thought and leave too little
room for nuance.
102

The vocabulary of this binary approach may be useful, according to Green, for it helps us
distinguish tendencies among individuals and within the party. However, Conservative
thought is not directed at the state itself. If the state was all that divided paternalists and
libertarians, then why, asks Green, are the positions individuals take not more consistent?
How can individuals hold paternalistic and libertarian views on different issues at the
same time?
Instead, Green suggests we need to look more closely at civil society—the
panoply of voluntary organizations and agencies performing valuable social functions
that are not formally part of the state:
If Conservatives have seen these agencies as socially effective they have wished the State to play a
minimal role, but if they have seen them as ineffective or failing then they have regarded State
intervention as necessary.
103

It follows that some agencies will be functioning well at a given time while others are
seen as struggling. Though Conservatives are inclined to caution with regards state
activity, they take a pragmatic approach to policy, subsidizing and providing assistance to
agencies of civil society where necessary while intervening directly in the economy only
as a last resort. Thus, according to this scheme, there was no contradiction, still less any

102
Green, Ideologies, 240.
103
Ibid., 241.
86

hypocrisy, in Macmillan’s ‘demand management’, macroeconomic approach to industry
during the affluent 1950s and his government’s later shift to microeconomic dirigisme
and planning in the ‘slow-growth’ early 1960s.
Green posits examples from earlier chapters that lend support to his civil society-
based interpretation of Conservative ideology, arranging them into a neat chronological
narrative spanning from the turn of the twentieth century through to the Thatcher years.
He shows adeptly that, in the cases under review, Conservative rhetoric emphasizes the
virtue of civil society and Conservative policy is directed towards strengthening its
institutions. The problem, however, lies not with what Green claims, but with what is left
out of his interpretative framework. In outlining the statist–anti-statist dichotomy as he
does, Green sets himself up a straw man.
Political theorists often find left-right or paternalist-libertarian dichotomies useful
in understanding Conservative ideology. Many use the now ubiquitous four-quadrant grid
which differentiates between state activism in the economic and ‘social’ spheres,
believing this constitutes a more nuanced ideological barometer.
104
Yet any serious
observer of Conservatism or, indeed, politics, must necessarily go beyond these simple
categories, defined, as they are, in relation to the state. For the state has to act upon
something, be it individuals or particular organizations between itself and the private
sphere and, assuming the government sees its role as political rather than blindly
technocratic, it must act on behalf of something. Put simply, the state is a starting point

104
Leach, R., Political Ideology in Britain (Contemporary Political Studies) (Palgrave Macmillan; 2010),
84-7. Driver, S., ‘“Fixing Our Broken Society”: David Cameron’s Post-Thatcherite Social Policy’ in
Conservatives Under David Cameron, 80-96.
87

for the discussion of Conservatism as a political creed (or a set of related operational
ideologies).
Green’s interpretation of Conservative ideology, it must be emphasized, need not
be incorrect. In the realm of economic policy, which he focuses almost exclusively on,
the extent to which government can augment and supplement civil society as an
alternative to wholesale intervention is no doubt of paramount concern to Conservatives
of all stripes. Nevertheless, the vagueness of this framework presents three problems.
First, Green seeks to add nuance to the paternalist-neoliberal dichotomy, but his
scheme provides little. Indeed, presented with the same information about the functioning
of an industry or branch of civil society, paternalists are more likely to opt in favour of
greater state supplementation or, to approach the matter from the opposite direction,
exhibit more scepticism towards the institutions of civil society. Green has not explained
what it is about the paternalist worldview that engenders such scepticism or why, in the
libertarian mind, there are mounds of potential in the agencies of civil society.
Second, Green does not indicate which agencies of civil society Conservatives are
most inclined to engage with and which they are most ideologically predisposed to let
alone. In his final essay, for example, Green collapses organizations in wide ranging
sectors of industry into the amorphous terms ‘British business’ and ‘the unions’, leaving
us to wonder whether particular businesses, irrespective of productivity, or specific
unions, irrespective of politicization, were looked upon more or less favourably by
Conservatives in general or by particular tendencies or groupings within the party.
88

Finally, Green’s focus on political economy leaves unexamined a plethora of
important issues that are potentially critical to any understanding of Conservative
ideology. European integration, at first economically in the European Economic
Community, produced notable cleavages within Conservative ranks during the later
periods examined in Green’s book (though hardly to the extent they did in the Labour
Party in the 1970s and among Conservatives in the 1990s), and this is only the most
obvious example of such an issue. Foreign affairs are touched on just briefly in the
context of Appeasement and tariff reform, while immigration and the divisive social
reforms of the 1960s are absent. Perhaps the above issues could be incorporated into an
expanded version of Green’s ideological framework based on the institutions civil
society. But in excluding them, either through oversight or by design, Green draws
attention to the limitations of his interpretation of the Ideologies of Conservatism.
At several points it becomes clear that Green views Conservative politics as
programmatically rather than reflexively ideational. Green uses the phrase ‘political
economy’ throughout his book as it pertains to the outlook of individuals and groups.
Gilmour’s political economy, and hence his Conservatism, stood in direct contrast to that
of Keith Joseph and the Thatcherites; Balfour’s middle position on tariff reform was
rooted in his political economy, which was honed under the tutelage of Henry
Sidgwick;
105
Macmillan’s ‘political economy represented a lifelong quest for the middle
way...[having] distinct inflections of Edwardian Conservatism’.
106
Green’s understanding

105
Green, Ideologies, 24.
106
Ibid., 186,188.
89

of the phrase ‘political economy’ is inherently ideological, containing within it notions of
justice, and hence an ethical code. Furthermore, he at times presents a Conservative
worldview that moves beyond economics into the realm of social and constitutional
affairs:
That Balfour did hold strong political beliefs cannot be gainsaid. Defence of the Union with
Ireland stands out as a particularly powerful theme in Balfour’s career, and the security of private
property and the maintenance of established institutions (Church, Crown, Empire, aristocracy)
were also intrinsic to his weltanschauung.
107

In his appraisal of Thatcherism as an ideology in his later book Thatcher (2004), Green
discusses the extent to which Thatcher had intellectual pretensions, her close association
with bona fide intellectuals such as Joseph, Enoch Powell, Angus Maude and Shirley
Letwin, and her desire to form closer links with friendly university teachers and
researchers. What made Thatcherism an ideology, for Green, was not its ideas per se, but
rather ‘the social and political purchase of those ideas’, which ensured that Thatcherism,
like Chamberlainism and Gladstonianism, became ‘part of everyday language’.
108

Though these Victorian –isms fell out of common usage long ago,
109
they resemble
Thatcherism in that they became popularly recognized terms of their day, owing to their
representations of commonly understood worldviews.

107
Ibid., 23.
108
Ibid., 214.
109
The present author finds no evidence of either ‘Chamberlainism’ or ‘Gladstonianism’ in common usage
today. Terms with similar, though not identical, meanings that hold much greater purchase in the twenty-
first century would be ‘protectionism’ and ‘classical Liberalism’. However, ‘Beconsfieldism’ was recently
revived and used appropriately by American political commentator Sam Tenenhaus as shorthand for the
‘Burkean-Disraelian politics of adjustment, [which] devoutly supported the existing political order,
[against] the revanchist politics of counterrevolution, which sought to bring that order down’ in his polemic
on the radical right in American politics. See Tenenhaus, S., The Death of Conservatism (Random House;
2009).
90

Ideologies must offer their adherents the following: a shared identity which is
widely understood and recognized; an ethical code, or a vision of the political good
informed by some consideration of morality; a political programme whose distributive
effects are couched in the language of morality; and an historical narrative that frames
and explains the past in terms congenial to a particular vision for the future.
110
In his
historical snapshots, Green comes close to showing that ideologies of Conservatism,
particularly when on naked display in times of crisis, meet these criteria. Nonetheless, he
is reluctant to present Conservative ideologies such as Thatcherism in terms of core
principles.
Before we can explore an alternative, more comprehensive, interpretation of
ideology and Conservative politics, we must examine Green’s understanding of
Conservatism and the theoretical limits it places on his analysis.
The Incompatibility of Philosophy and Ideology
At the centre of Green’s theory of Conservative ideology is the political
philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. It is not surprising that Green chooses Oakeshott as his
reference point. Oakeshott is widely regarded as the foremost conservative political
philosopher of the twentieth century, and his essay ‘On Rationalism in Politics’ is
presented to undergraduates as part of the cannon of conservatism (if not political thought
in general).
111
Furthermore, this ‘antiquarian, local, peculiarly British’ philosopher mixed

110
Freeden, M., Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford; 1998), 77-82.
111
Kelly, P., British Political Theory in the Twentieth Century (Wiley-Blackwell; 2010). D. Boucher and P.
Kelly (Eds.) Political Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present (Oxford University Press USA; 2009).
Heywood, A., Political Theory: An Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan; 1999), 139.
91

with Conservative intellectuals and was ‘revered in the abstract as Mr. Tory
Philosopher’.
112
Oakeshott built his vision of conservative politics around the
‘disposition’ of ‘the man of conservative temperament’. The conservative is, for
Oakeshott:
...a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be
indifferent to loss...To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the
tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the
near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present
laughter to utopian bliss.
113

Yet the conservative recognizes that change often must occur, not least as the material
circumstances of society change. The onus, nevertheless, should be on the advocates of
change, and certainly on the ‘innovators’ pushing for change, to demonstrate that their
schemes will be relatively undisruptive, rather than on conservatives to defend what
already exists. Since unintended consequences inevitably make change more disruptive
than anticipated, the conservative ‘prefers small and limited innovations to the large and
indefinite’.
Oakeshott defines two kinds of knowledge: ‘practical’ and ‘technical’. The former
is learned from experience, cannot directly be taught and is less liable to change over
time with circumstances; the latter can be codified, passed on as a guide and is likely to
change to meet the whimsical demands of the present. The former depends on familiarity
and enjoyment; the latter on rationality and ambition. The former is inherently better
suited to leadership than the latter. Good leaders possess the wisdom to ‘provide a

112
Casey, J., ‘The Revival of Tory Philosophy’ in the Spectator (Mar. 17, 2007).
113
Fuller, T., ‘Foreword’ in Oakeshott, M., Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (Liberty Fund; 1991),
xviii.
92

vinculum juris for those manners of conduct which, in the circumstances, are least likely
to result in a frustrating collision of interests’.
114
This can only come from experience
built up over generations, according to Oakeshott.
115
Yet the temptation has been, at least
since Machiavelli wrote his handbook, to substitute abstractions and Rationalist schemes
for practical knowledge in the affairs of state.
116
The Rationalist in politics exists in a
permanent state of crisis, proposing solutions to political problems as does an engineer to
a machine. Politics become mechanical. Since tradition is messy, complex and imperfect,
‘It must be destroyed. And to fill its place the Rationalist puts something of his own
making—an ideology, the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational
truth contained within the tradition.’
117

For Oakeshott, civil society is a delicate, living organism composed of individuals
pursuing their own Rationalist ends. The art of leadership is setting the rules of the game,
making them known, and having the restraint to stand back—to not let one’s ambitions
affect how one exercises power. Indeed, ‘an “umpire” who at the same time is one of the
players is no umpire... [And] the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny’.
The highest political virtue, believes Oakeshott, is stability, which is attained through
legislating only to prevent the chaos of civil society consuming itself—to prevent
atomistic individualism from imploding. Where, then, does the line fall between
intervention on behalf of stability and the imposition of one’s own passions, one’s

114
Oakeshott, M., Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (1991), 24.
115
Ibid., 32.
116
Ibid., 22, 343.
117
Ibid., 8-9.
93

personal Rationality, on the society? It is clear that radical reaction can be as destructive
to the social fabric as progressivism, yet how much leeway is afforded the conservative in
government to steer a path between the two and to oversee orderly development?
118

Oakeshott gives little indication of how a conservative might govern because he is
deeply sceptical that those of a ‘conservative disposition’ can govern in the modern
world. There are several reasons for this. First, since the zeitgeist is on the side of the
Rationalist, those who resist his schemes open themselves up to ridicule and censure;
second, because Rationalism is so established in the intellectual life of modern societies,
the sense of permanent crisis it feeds off is regarded by many as the natural state of
politics; third, the dominant classes in post-Renaissance politics, by which he means the
respective representatives of capitalists and workers, rely on Rationalist schemes to
compensate for their lack of generational experience of governing; and fourth, the
temptation to enter politics is too great for the young to resist precisely because of the
ideological drive which makes them at the same time so unsuited to politics as a vocation.
If the above are insurmountable difficulties for the conservative in politics, they
are at least practically insurmountable. For Oakeshott, however, real world politics and
political philosophy are by their very natures mutually incompatible. Writing as a
philosopher, Oakeshott is resolute in his belief that philosophy cannot be applied, arguing
that political philosophy is an exercise in reflection ‘that takes a certain direction and
achieves a certain level, its character being the relation of political life, and the values

118
For a discussion of conservatism as a situational ideology, see Huntington, S., ‘Conservatism as an
Ideology’ in the American Political Science Review (51.2: June 1957), 458.
94

and purposes pertaining to it, to the entire conception of the world that belongs to a
civilization’.
119
When political philosophy is applied to the particular, it loses its
connection to the ‘entire conception of the world’. It thus ceases to be philosophy and
degenerates into political ideology—something that, as we saw above, is Rational and,
hence, un-conservative—with its focus on prescriptive concepts and their injunctive
force. In this case ‘all chance is lost of learning something about the philosophical mode
of thought’.
120

Oakeshott does not deny that there are conservatives in politics. But not all
Conservatives (i.e. members of the Tory Party) are conservative, and conservatives need
not be Tories. Indeed, as Oakshott points out, Rationalism is the hegemonic force in both
political parties. It is impossible to define a positive political programme, for instance,
that of a Conservative Party manifesto, as conservative. For Oakeshott conservatism is a
matter of temperament—a disposition that cannot be expressed in ideological terms, and
which instead is quite inimical to them.
121

The distinction between conservatism as a political philosophy and Conservatism
as an ideology espoused by the Conservative Party in an official capacity, or by a group

119
Ibid., This quotation reflects Oakeshott’s view of civilization as a conversation—open and constantly
engaging. See ‘Political Discourse’ in Rationalism, 70-95.
120
Ibid., 298.
121
Oakeshott’s preference for Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Pascal and Hume over Burke (Rationalism,
432) is understandable when we consider that by engaging in politics, Burke was forced to articulate
conservative principles which went beyond mere scepticism. Indeed, as an Old Whig, Burke held to a quite
clearly delineated set of positions that might be considered an ideology. As Dick Howard puts it, ‘This
possibility that norms may change means that traditional values cannot be assumed to be naturally valid;
they have to be imposed by the conservative politician’. See Howard, D., Primacy of the Political
(Columbia University Press; 2010), 311.
95

of Conservatives, is overlooked by Green. Green uses Oakeshottian conservatism as the
yardstick by which he judges whether an ideology can be considered conservative. This
misinterpretation of Oakeshott is most clearly visible in the contorted debate over
Thatcherism as an ideology. Green asks ‘whether the Conservative Party in the last
quarter of the twentieth century abandoned Conservatism’. By ‘Conservatism’, Green is
referring to conservatism in the Oakeshottian mould, combined with notions of an
organic society defined as conservative by philosopher Anthony Quinton, which he
believes tie in well with Oakeshott’s scepticism and preference for the real over the
conjectural. Green identifies Thatcherism as a neoliberal creed based on free market
principles, and proceeds to offer arguments for and against categorizing it as
‘Conservative’—Free-market economics entered the Conservative Party before Thatcher;
market non-intervention, according to Hugh Cecil, was the only way of ensuring
government policy was ‘free of ethical content’; but do not liberal economics, with their
abstractions and deductive reasoning, assume rationality on the part of individuals?; since
there are predictable material outcomes to all transactions, is non-interference just as
much an ethical decision as intervention?
And so the debate goes on, tautologically, without possible resolution, for what is
being argued over is not a mathematical proof, but political morality. Green concludes by
agreeing with John Gray that even if Thatcherism was ‘Conservative’, its political
individualism acted as ‘a solvent of social bonds’, thus undermining civil society and
‘stretch[ing] organicism to breaking-point’.
122
In doing so he sidesteps this tautology and

122
Green, E. H. H., Thatcher (Hodder Arnold; 2004), 50-1.
96

fails to question the appropriateness of using Oakshottian conservatism to evaluate
ideologies.
Operationalization as Populating the ‘Ecosystem’
The above discussion has shown that in order to understand the nature of ideology
in the Conservative Party we must move beyond Oakeshott and, in the sense he defines it,
political philosophy itself. As Jesse Norman puts it:
There is a missing category in Oakeshott, which echoes what is missing in Hobbes...A civil
society is based on procedure, a framework of laws between sovereign and citizen, but it is
nothing more. Everything else must be filled in. Each must be given an ecosystem: each must be
populated with living, loving and dying human beings who come together in groups or institutions
of every imaginable kind.
123

It is the substance of civil society, the institutions most valued, and the common
wellbeing as articulated in line with the political good that mark out the contours of
ideology in the Conservative Party.
If Norman regarded Oakeshott’s model of a nation based on laws as incomplete,
his attempts to fill the gap are not extensive. Yet in defining institutions not just as
agencies of civil society and economic instruments such as ‘a common currency, readily
available credit, secure property rights and an established and enforceable law of
contract’, but also as commonly understood, though intangible, ‘norms and conventions
and nudges’, he echoes the work of Conservative thinker Roger Scruton. According to
Scruton, a nation built solely on laws is one built on process, and is thus the product of
liberalism. Conservatives, he argues, must look to the ‘ends’ of institutions and laws,
rather than just to the means they provide for the citizen to pursue the ends he sees fit.

123
Norman, J., The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics (University of Buckingham Press; 2010),
156.
97

The Conservative values institutions and practices which may seem irrational or
obsolete, but which provide the opportunity for ‘ceremonial re-enactment’, allowing the
individual to immerse himself in a society whose values transcend the present and whose
preservation, through the performance of ritual, is an end in itself.
124
Ceremonial re-
enactment may occur wherever there is tradition and is thus a feature of everyday life.
However, ‘the state is where authority, allegiance and tradition are brought together and
the citizen becomes a subject’.
125
Subjecthood is, believes Scruton, superior to
citizenship, and, since ‘every tradition of any importance in the life of the citizen will
tend to become part of the establishment of a state’, political action must necessarily
‘extend beyond the bounds of economic management’.
For Scruton, as for Burke, Conservative politics acquire different inflections as
circumstances vary and, contrary to common misreadings of both thinkers, Conservatism
is not synonymous with stasis. Indeed, history can advance at a rapid pace and the
institutions of a society change, but what Burke calls nature and Scruton calls tradition
are beyond the realm of the political.
126
While the process of politics (especially the
pomp and ceremony surrounding offices of state) reinforces traditions, the Conservative
politician attempts positively to ‘reassert the identity of the society that he seeks to

124
Scruton, R., The Meaning of Conservatism (St. Augustine’s Press; 1981), 36.
125
Ibid., 39.
126
For Burke, ‘traditions’ are the institutions through which society changes in line with ‘nature’. English
common law is the first example Burke cites of tradition as a facilitator of change. Scruton’s use of
‘tradition’ resembles loosely the Burkean ‘natural’, in that transcendent values beyond the reach of human
society can become instilled in the form and operation of institutions. To a lesser or greater extent, these
institutions fall in line with the ‘natural’.
98

govern’.
127
Yet this identity is contested by Conservatives, and at the heart of different
visions of the nation are differing views of the transcendent. The numerous institutions
Norman cites are indeed central to Conservative ideology; they are the building blocks of
the political programme. But the contents of that programme are a product of the nation
as conceived by the thinker.
The nation, for Conservatives, is a constitutional one in the broadest sense of the
term. As the primary facilitators of social cohesion and repositories of the nation’s
symbols, the state, its institutions and the way they function—what we traditionally refer
to when we talk about constitutions—are important to Conservatives as both means and
ends in themselves. But concern for the transcendent values that lie beyond politics
means constitutionalism stretches much further for Conservatives. As guardians of these
values, Conservatives occupy themselves with the effects not only of the institutions of
state or even the formal organizations of civil society, but also the ‘Little Platoons’, the
‘intermediate institutions’, and, ultimately, the behaviour of the subject. The idea that
Conservatives see transcendental values permeating downwards through the constitution,
the institutions of state, civil society, and what liberals might call the private sphere, is
conceptually bound up with our model of ideological challenges within the party.
Secular Anglicanism: Seedbed and Mode of High Political Contestation
To state that the Conservative Party is ideological and, moreover, that
Conservative ideologies are concerned with the constitution of the whole society is not to
assert that Oakeshottian scepticism cannot form part of, or, indeed, exist as the basis for,

127
Scruton, Meaning, 42.
99

the political thought of individuals and groups within the party. But it is not synonymous
with Conservatism. If Balfour’s laconic lament ‘Nothing matters very much, and few
things matter at all’ was emblematic of his Conservatism, Thatcher’s ‘I am in politics
because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will
triumph’ was no less an exposition of hers.
128
For alongside the party’s sceptics, its
pessimists and those who, as Green supposes of Conservatives in general, believe
successful political action must by nature be circumscribed and focus on the functioning
of civil society, the party also possesses its libertarians, its romantic reactionaries, its
paternalistic patricians, its hardline defenders of national sovereignty and its neo-
imperialists—political dreamers and radicals of divergent stripes, each with their own
core principles and a set of policies derived from them.
In a 2005 survey of The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945,
editor Kevin Hickson tasks four political scientists with outlining the basic parameters of
four ‘broad ideological positions’ in the modern Conservative Party: Traditional Toryism,
the New Right, the Centre, and One Nation Conservatism. The resulting picture is one of
stark modes of political thought, seemingly distinct from, and incompatible with, one
another. While it may be in the scholar’s interest to demarcate his niche area of study, the
primary reason for such contrasts is that the authors deal with different aspects of
Conservative Party history and speak across one another theoretically and
historiographically. David Seawright, for example, writing on One Nation Conservatism,
collapses the ideology of One Nation into the form and fortunes of the dining group,

128
Marr, A., Making of Modern Britain (Macmillan; 2009), 43.
100

formed in 1950, that adopted the Disraelian term as its moniker, and thus overlooks the
construction of political meaning at the grassroots level, along with the complex
processes by which ideas are received and filtered by opinion leaders.
129
Meanwhile,
Arthur Aughy relies on quotations from Conservative politicians and intellectuals to
construct a Traditional Toryism that moves conceptually little beyond the Oakeshottian
‘disposition’. The common weakness of these academics’ interpretations of Conservatism
is a failure to examine, as our model suggests is necessary, the process of
operationalization and articulation at the elite level, which must necessarily precede their
permeation downwards through the institution of the party and beyond. By treating
ideologies of Conservatism globally and largely ahistorically, the authors obscure the
ideological work of intellectuals and politicians that determines to such an extent the
strength of ideological tendencies vis-à-vis one another, thus preventing the development
of an account of the dynamic politics of ideology within the party.
The second part of the book, which sees three senior Conservative politicians and
journalist Simon Heffer, each happy to self-identify with one of Hickson’s ideological
groups, in turn offering a normative defence of these positions as they pertain to post-war
politics, is in this regard more instructive. While the policies these politicians endorse and
their attitudes on various issues and towards society in general differ profoundly, it
becomes clear that the Conservative ideologies Hickson identifies all have at their centre

129
See Simcox, J., ‘Review of David Seawright, The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics’ in
Political Studies Review (Summer 2012).
101

a set of core Conservative principles and a clear conception of the political good based on
their interpretation of the national experience.
Beginning ‘at the top with the Church and Monarchy’, Heffer states that politics
should reflect reverence for, and encourage deference to, these inseparable institutions
above and beyond economic dictates, for they, better than anything else, ‘symbolise the
nation [in this] old country’. Like Heffer, John Redwood, opposes British membership of
the European Union, but his hostility to the EU is born more out of the ‘freedom-loving’
Thatcherite fear that Europe’s bureaucratic tendencies are at odds with Britain’s liberal
political economy than of the perceived threat it poses to the nation’s symbolic
institutions.
130
Visions of the nation vary between Conservatives. Sometimes, as in the
case of Heffer and Redwood, similar political positions will be reached despite such
differences. However, in those instances where different core principles lead to
divergence in the political programmes advocated by Conservatives, factions within the
party may form.
131

The question of why individuals come to hold the views of the nation they do and
how this, in turn, leads to the formation of ideological groups or tendencies within the
Conservative Party is one that is rarely asked, less still examined in detail, by historians
of the party. Social historian Arthur Marwick suggests class differences as a possible

130
Hickson, K., et. al., The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan;
2005), 207-12.
131
The debate over whether ideological groupings in the Conservative Party should be classified as
‘factions’, ‘tendencies’, ‘groups’, ‘clubs’ and so on is often debated. Since this dissertation historicises the
construction of ideology, this debate, which tends to petrify categories as absolutes, is eschewed. The terms
‘faction’ and ‘tendency’ are used interchangeably.
102

source of ideological conflict within both parties, correctly pointing out that there were
more arriviste names in Thatcher’s cabinet than in the cabinets of previous
administrations, though the differences may not have been as marked as they initially
seemed, either in terms of numerical composition or of the backgrounds of those
considered lower middle class.
132
Another potent factor underlying worldview seems to
be generation. Experience of the ‘hungry thirties’ convinced the immediate post-war
generation of Conservative leaders that the party’s fortunes suffered under conditions of
bitter social and economic inequality, and also that Britain should become a nation not
only of fair play, but of fairness.
133
Yet generation, like class, may account for less than is
commonly assumed, and the personal idiosyncrasies of senior politicians might provide
just as many clues into the formation of ideological tendencies as structural factors.
As the party most concerned with power, the art of government, and continuity in
the institutions of the nation, the pool from which Conservative ideological entrepreneurs
can draw ideas is large. It is also a deep pool: an ad hoc repository of traditions. In a
memorable speech in the House of Commons, Father of the House, Peter Tapsell, pointed
to his party’s legacy of taming the ‘overmighty subject’:
In the 18th century, it was the Indian nabobs, denounced by Edmund Burke. In the 19th century, it
was the ruthless industrialists, humanised by Shaftesbury. In the 20th century, it was the trade
union leaders, tamed by Lady Thatcher.
134

132
Marwick, A, British Society since 1945 (Penguin; 2004), 376.
133
Macmillan, H.M., The Middle Way: A Study of the Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free
and Democratic Society (London; [1938] 1978) 222. Green, Ideologies, 169.
134
Quoted in ‘Hansard source: H C Deb (14 September 2011), c1032’. Burke, of course, was not a Tory,
but an old Whig; But Tapsell’s point still stands.
103

For Quintin Hogg, the seedbed of Conservatism was so varied and integral to the essence
of the nation that he felt able to proclaim, ‘being Conservative means simply being
British’.
135

In a religiously and politically apathetic country, the Conservatives were unlikely
to receive the kind of support from Canterbury that European Christian Democratic
parties enjoyed from the respective hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church in their
countries. Yet this is not to suggest sentimental and ideological linkages did not exist
between the Church of England—perennially referred to until recently as ‘the Tory Party
at prayer’—and the Conservatives. As the established church, it was associated with, and
legally part of, the established social and political order. Upper middle class Tories were
naturally Anglicans, and the same deference that played some part in driving the lower
middle classes into the ranks of the Tory grassroots also ensured their presence on the
pews of Anglican churches.
The ideological parallels between Anglicanism and Conservatism as embodiments
of the nation’s essence and institutions would alone make for an intriguing research
project.
136
The purpose of this dissertation is not to contend that the Church and

135
Durham, M., ‘The Right: The Conservative Party and Conservatism’ in Party Ideology in Britain, L.
Tivey and A. Wright (Eds.) (Routledge; 1992), 51. Much debate has taken place in recent years over
whether Toryism is, in fact, a quintessentially British creed, or, rather, an English one. Writing in 1948 at a
point when, as Addison notes in No Turning Back (Oxford; 2009), ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ were used
interchangeably, such distinctions would not have occurred to Hogg, but in an era where even the British
constitution groans under the weight of devolutionary pressures, neither political theorists nor politicians
can ignore them. See Hickson, K., et. al., The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945
(Palgrave Macmillan; 2005), 14-29.
136
Anglicanism, as the national faith, seeks to implant what it regards as transcendental values into the
nationwide institutions of the Church, just as Conservatives regard the state and the institutions of society
as sites where the national essence and the political good can be realized through positive political action.
For both Conservatives and Anglicans, ‘values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time’,
104

Conservative Party constitute ecclesiastical and political components of a single national
religion, or that the party has in some way displaced the Church in this regard. It does
suggest, however, that Conservative ideology operates as a national faith, and that
ideological contests at the elite level resemble theological disputes within the Church of
England. The term ‘secular Anglicanism’ is used here to refer to the pool of ideas
Conservative ideological entrepreneurs draw from, and the mechanism by which they do
so.
137

As adherents of a reformed faith, Anglicans are encouraged to develop individual
notions of piety, but the episcopal structure of the Church introduces politics, and groups
of individuals with similar values form to contest power struggles for the institution of
the Church. Within the Anglican tradition, therefore, we find tendencies, or loosely
organized groups whose respective fortunes change with circumstances and the skill with
which their leaders are able to attract churchmen to their theological and liturgical
positions. Certain groups will attain ascendency at particular points in time, but, short of
opponents to the establishment voluntarily renouncing the faith (in modern times a
trickle, not a deluge) or excommunication (virtually unheard of), such ascendency can
never be permanently consolidated, and the Anglican Church remains a broad one.
138

(Enoch Powell, 1982) but their operation and reinforcement cannot be separated from the institutions of a
national community.
137
Social historian Arthur Marwick used the phrase ‘secular Anglicanism’ to describe what he regarded as
the tendency of British society towards accommodation and pragmatic consensus. See Marwick, British
Society, 376. His is the first academic usage of the term the present author can find.
138
In Last Rites: The End of the Church of England (Granta; 2006), 53-4, Michael Hampson paints an
altogether bleaker picture of the work of tendencies within the Church.
105

The resemblance to Conservatism could not be more striking. Competition
between ideological tendencies is protracted, acrimonious and often takes on personal
intonations, but no tendency, regardless of the seeming consensus it has built around an
issue, can silence opposing voices whose origins may be traced to past ascendancies.
Thatcherites and their similarly Eurosceptic allies could no more eradicate pro-EU
sentiment in the party than low churchmen were able to lay Anglo-Catholicism to rest
with William Laud. Even the heretical is tolerated in the party so long as the institution is
strong and stable, and Tories display outward unity.
The Grassroots
In keeping with the secular Anglicanism analogy, the grassroots role in
ideological development and change in the party is negligible. Ideology is formed at
disparate sites, but the formation of tendencies occurs largely among the party’s elite and
its rising stars. Most members of the party faithful, including the majority of MPs, tend to
flock around existing tendencies formed elsewhere and with little input from themselves.
There can be no long march through institutions of the Tory Party. Even if we accept
wholesale Richard N. Kelly’s belief that Conservative conferences allow for an educative
two-way flow of information between platform and floor,
139
thus allowing the grassroots
to communicate their desires to the leadership, three clarifying points must be made:
First, and most obviously, the leadership is in no way obliged to act on even the very few
firm displays of grassroots discontent; second, even minor conferences happen only

139
Kelly, R.N., Conservative Party Conferences: The Hidden System (Manchester University Press; 1988),
Chapter 2.
106

sporadically, in between which significant developments can transpire at the elite level;
and third, the substance of most grassroots demands has been a call on the leadership to
meet or accentuate pledges already laid out.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the institutional structure of the post-war Conservative Party:

PARTY LEADER

Voluntary Party Parliamentary Party Professional Organization

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL CABINET/ SHADOW CABINET PARTY CHAIRMAN
OF NATIONAL UNION

CENTRAL COUNCIL GOVERNMENT MINISTERS/ CONSERVATIVE CENTRAL OFFICE
OF NATIONAL UNION SPOKESMEN

AREA COUNCILS M.P.s PEERS AREA OFFICES AREA AGENTS

CONSTITUENCY CANDIDATES CONSTITUENCY AGENTS
ASSOCIATIONS

BRANCH ASSOCIATIONS

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS

Fig. 2.1: The Conservative Party organization. Adapted from Kelly, R.N., Conservative Party Conferences
(University of Manchester Press; 1988), 22, and Ramsden, J., The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath,
1957-75 (Longman; 1996), 136.

The organizational structure of the Conservative Party is pyramidal and authority is
distributed hierarchically. Incorporating the constituency and branch associations, which
107

act as the first and only points of contact with the party for the majority of individual
members, the voluntary party is the largest, though least influential, arm of the party, kept
in check by the professional organization, which is tasked with the representation of the
interests and dictates of the leadership in Parliament.
With no constitutionally-defined role for the grassroots and no grand statement of
principles, the leader of the Conservative Party in the post-war period enjoyed immense
organizational power over the three arms of the party. Advised by a cabinet or shadow
cabinet wholly of his choosing and informed at semi-regular intervals of backbench
opinion by the Executive of the 1922 Committee, he was also able to set policy or
formulate the official Opposition’s response to government action. The relationship
between the voluntary party and the leader was generally deferential. In times of tension,
ministers addressed the National Union Executive Committee directly, in the full
expectation of receiving a resolution in support of the leadership’s actions, as occurred in
the months following the Suez Crisis. But in the normal course of events, non-binding
resolutions passed by that body were ‘forwarded to’ the party leader, chairman, relevant
conservative parliamentary committee or minister to peruse or discard at his discretion.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the process of electing the party leader
was formalized, but it remained closed to the party grassroots. The process of selection
was actually widened when Stanley Baldwin ascended to the leadership in 1923 to
include adopted parliamentary candidates and peers alongside Conservative MPs in the
consultations, and by 1963, even key figures in the National Union were canvassed for
advice. The introduction of leadership election rules, however, confined the vote once
108

more to present Members. In 1998, the Campaign for Conservative Democracy
succeeded in convincing the leadership that, in the wake of the New Labour landslide of
1997, radical intra-party reform was needed. Most significantly, this included grassroots
participation in a vote for the party leader between two candidates put forward by Tory
MPs in the event of a formal vote of ‘no confidence’ or the resignation of a sitting leader.
When William Hague resigned the position following the Conservatives’ second
landslide defeat in 2001, a bitter contest ensued, resulting in the election by grassroots
members of right-winger Iain Duncan Smith.
140
The contest was widely regarded as
calamitous.
141
Grassroots favourites were excluded from the outset, and tactical voting in
the later rounds ensured Michael Portillo, who stood on a reformist platform hoping to
make the party more inclusive, was eliminated, so that party members were afforded a
vote between Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke, the ex-chancellor whose pro-European
views made him unacceptable to many.
142
The fact almost two-thirds of Conservative
MPs at no stage voted for Duncan Smith, and that his short tenure as leader proved
luckless, convinced key parliamentary players that a repeat of the 2001 leadership
election could not be risked. Thus, Michael Howard was elected unopposed in 2003, as
Tory MPs arguably circumvented the democratic procedures minted only five years

140
Alderman, K. and Carter, N., ‘The Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2001’ in Parliamentary
Affairs (55.3: 2002), 569-83.
141 Hayton, R. and Heppell, T., ‘The Quiet Man of British Politics: the Rise, Fall and Significance of Iain
Duncan Smith’ in Parliamentary Affairs (63.3: 2010) , 436.
142
Alderman and Carter, ‘Leadership’, 573-4.
109

earlier.
143
That such flawed reforms appeared radical even in relation to the party Scarrow
analyzed in 1996 is indicative of the institutional torpor of the post-war Conservative
Party.
The above is not to suggest grassroots opinions cannot be useful in indicating to
challengers the viability of electoral ideologies. But they need not be, and their educative
function is severely diminished by lack of regular contact and their un-representativeness
of the broader electorate. In any case, they are not the creative force behind those
ideologies. The task of development falls to oppositional politicians, such as Thatcher
and Powell, and also to allied institutions, such as the Centre for Policy Studies (in the
case of Thatcher).
The grassroots of the party may have played no role in the instigation of
ideological challenges and had little direct impact upon their successes and failures, but
within the voluntary party were several forums where opinion was aired relatively freely
on a range of topics by ordinary members. These are useful for students of ideological
challenges, for they allow us to gauge attitudes among the most solid of supporters
towards the electoral perspectives put forward by the leadership, as well as coincidence
or disconnect between the politics of support and the politics of power, and thus the
general health of consensus politics.
144

143
Denham, A., ‘From Grey Suits to Grass Roots: Choosing Conservative Leaders’ in British Politics (4.2:
2009), 231-3.
144
Kelly critiques the traditional literature on Conservative conferences, believing the constitutional bias of
social democratic academics leads them to overlook the significance of power held by conference
representatives. As shall become clear in the course of this dissertation, the deferential account holds more
empirical weight, but Kelly’s following point can be seen as a weaker statement of his thesis: ‘No
consideration was given to the thought that the conference might ‘get a government of its own leaders into
110

The annual meeting of the Central Council of the National Union took place in
March and, like the more high profile Annual Conference, was addressed by the party
leader. Over several days, delegates from the constituency associations would deliver
speeches and discuss motions. The conference was large, with delegates numbering up to
1,200, and it was here that elections took place for the much smaller Executive Council
of the National Union, which dealt with everyday organizational matters and directed,
under the guidance of Central Office, the campaign work which remained the
responsibility of the voluntary party.
145
There was no equivalent in the Conservative
Party of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, which, in theory, though
notoriously not always in practice, was constitutionally responsible for articulating policy
which was voted on at Conference and by which the Parliamentary Labour Party was
bound.
146

Though the National Union attempted to convince its members of their own
political efficacy—stating, for example, in the 1947 Central Council programme, that ‘it
may be mentioned that it is only of comparatively recent years that the Executive
Committee of the National Union, as such, takes part in the formal proceedings of
electing the Party’s Leader’—the party’s multilayered structure reinforced the ideological
and cultural deference of a largely lower middle class voluntary party to the party in

office’ by keeping in touch with electoral opinion and popular sentiment, and that by ignoring such advice,
Tory governments endanger their survival (vide 1905)’. (14) At various points in the narrative presented
below, conference and the grassroots acted as intermediaries, or information conveyers, between public
opinion and party decision makers. But it was their position as part of mass public opinion, rather than an
intermediate level between the two camps, which allowed them to perform this role.
145
Kelly, Conferences, 23.
146
McKenzie, R., British Political Parties (London; 1964), Chapter 2.
111

Parliament which was overwhelmingly upper middle class.
147
At the party’s Annual
Conference, held in the autumn, up to 4,500 representatives from the grassroots party
gathered at one of the seaside towns to hear their own members propose and defend
motions, and for ministers or shadow ministers to respond.
148
For the leadership,
Conference provided a high profile platform from which to espouse its message to a
broader audience, to re-enthuse campaign workers in the constituencies and to indicate
the direction the party planed to move in over the course of the following year.
149

The conferences were politically sedate, and only on rare occasions did more than
one hundred representatives rise to force a balloted division on these motions, or did the
Party Chairman deem this necessary. Unlimited motions could be submitted by the
constituency associations, and a handful were chosen to be debated by an organizing
subcommittee of the Executive Committee of the National Union. The party’s Chief
Whip and the Secretary of the National Union had a large say in which motions
eventually made it to the floor debate, thus allowing for the weeding out of potentially
troublesome topics or phraseology. Nonetheless, amendments could be made, two
motions were chosen in a ballot of representatives present, and, most importantly for
those seeking to better understand the mood of the party, all motions submitted were
published in a Conference handbook.

147
Minutes of the Central Council of the National Union: Central Council 1947, Conservative Party
Archives, [NUA 3/1/3] microform slide 43.16. Pugh, M., ‘Popular Conservatism in Britain: Continuity and
Change, 1880-1987’ in the Journal of British Studies (27.3; 1988), 271. Whiteley, P., et al., True Blues:
The Politics of Conservative Party Membership (Oxford; 1994), Chapter 5.
148
Biffen, J., ‘Party Conference and Party Policy’ in The Political Quarterly (32.3: 1961), 261.
149
Kelly, Conferences, 172-3.
112

Thatcherism and the Middle Way: Periods, Tactics and Strategy
Different stages of an ideological transition involve the pursuit of different aims
and their own political and economic contradictions. Left strategy during the 1980s was
to identify contradictions at each stage of the Thatcherite transition and to anticipate the
tactics of the Right as each stage of its transition was consolidated. The hope was to halt
the progression of an aggressive realigning project and, in turn, to offer an alternative that
went beyond the moribund post-war consensus. The ultimate goal of the Thatcherites,
meanwhile, was to transform society and the state system.
Institutional Focus over Time
Below is a simplified version of the institutional focus of a successful ideological
challenge, working within the British political and state systems over time, with dates
demarcating the stages of the Thatcherite transition:
CHALLENGE CONSOLIDATION ASCENDENCY
PARTY
PARLIAMENT
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ STATE/ SOCIETY

1975 1982/3
Fig. 2.2: The institutional focus of the Thatcherite transition

Although changes in other institutions affect the tactics of challengers and no doubt
complicate them—the greater the number of constituency and institutional interests to
113

account for, the more ideological work needed to reconcile them—the party is the initial
site of contestation and remains an element in the challengers’ strategy throughout the
transition. Whether we accept that the Thatcherite transition is consolidated in the state
system or believe, to paraphrase Mao, that not enough time has yet elapsed to tell, we can
periodize the transition as it relates to the party well in advance of any resounding
conjunctural triumph.
For each transition or partial transition, the relative length of each of the arrows in
a diagram such as the one above is different. Most obviously, without regularly scheduled
elections, a party may remain in opposition for a relatively short period of time after a
break in the party’s orthodoxy, such as the four years from Thatcher’s victory in the
leadership contest of 1975 through to her election as prime minister in 1979, or for a
much longer time, as can be seen with the Labour Party during its modernization phase,
which is generally understood to have begun in 1983.
150
Similarly, owing to
parliamentary and governmental factors such as the presence of a substantial majority and
resistance from civil servants, the gap between attaining government and implementing
significant programmes varies. All three arrows overlap, since events on one level affect
and effect events on the others. However, because the party is the initial site of
transformation, intra-party politics affect the momentum and trajectory of the transition at
all stages.
This is not to deny that success is often self-reinforcing, and that with every
advance in the transformation of the state system comes a diminution of the chances of

150
Thorpe, A., A History of the British Labour Party (Palgrave Macmillan; 3
rd
Ed., 2008), 201-2.
114

counter-revolution in the party. Indeed, this process of locking in gains is a key feature of
the consolidation and ascendency phases of transition. But even in a phase where an
ascendant regime is reformulating the politics of power in line with its vision,
contingency allows for major splits within the party to explode the wider project. The
collapse of a seemingly ascendant and reformist Unionist party in 1906 under the weight
of Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform, and the Liberal split over Home
Rule a generation earlier, are cases in point. A more recent international example is the
storm whipped up in the Democratic Party in the U.S. over the Vietnam War and inner
city violence in 1967-8. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the
division and backlash present in the nation cut to the core of a party which only three
years earlier seemed to be, at the national level at least, firmly under the control of
traditional Democratic liberals enacting ambitious reforms in line with their
worldview.
151

The lines on the diagram above mark the points at which the respective aims of
the challenge and consolidation periods have been accomplished by the Thatcherites, and
that a reorientation of strategy occurs. The horizontal (institutional) and vertical
(temporal) lines will be arranged differently for every transition or partial transition
according to their institutional setting and contingent events. For example, the
representation of Middle Way Conservatism as a challenge to interwar hegemony would
look as follows:

151
Isserman , M and Kazin, M, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (2004), 230-5.
115

CHALLENGE CONSOLIDATION ASCENDENCY
PARTY
PARLIAMENT
STATE/ SOCIETY
1945-6 1947
Fig. 2.3: The institutional focus of the Middle Way transition.
The most striking difference between the Middle Way transition and that of the
Thatcherites is that, for the former, the consolidation phase was much shorter, being
completed well in advance of the party gaining parliamentary power. It might also be
noted that the implementation of the Middle Way programme coincided exactly with the
attainment of government, rather than ascendency within the party. Finally, whereas for
the Thatcherite transition the date of intra-party ascendency is historically harder to pin
down and more open to debate, and the date the challenge starts to be consolidated is
simple to locate, the opposite is true for the Middle Way. We might ask why the dates
marking the boundaries between challenge, consolidation and ascendency are chosen, and
why there is the potential for disagreement over where these boundaries lie.
By examining some of the reasons for such differences, we begin to see the ways
in which institutions, personalities, contingency and the wider political and state system
order the temporal parameters of transitions.
Challenge into Consolidation
The much shorter consolidation of Middle Way Conservatism, which was
completed well before the party re-entered government in 1951, undoubtedly owes a
116

great deal to defeat in the election of 1945, in which Labour famously won a landslide
victory and almost twice as many seats in Parliament as the Conservatives, with twelve
million votes nationally. Labour had promised to construct a cradle to grave welfare state,
including a Health Service funded out of direct taxation rather than the insurance
principle, while memories of the slump and Appeasement undermined trust in the Tories,
who built their campaign around Churchill’s wartime popularity. The message of the
election was clear to a younger generation of Conservatives: collectivism was not
anathema to the British public, for whom Churchill’s outlandish and offensive prophecy
of a coming ‘Gestapo-state’ demonstrated how out of touch the Tories were with ordinary
people’s desires for a more secure and civilized future in return for the sacrifices asked of
them during the war. It was clear that a return to the pre-war state system was neither
desirable nor possible.
Discredited by the past and their numbers weakened through attrition, the High
Tories of the interwar years were unable to muster effective opposition within the party in
the face of what seemed like a sea change in public opinion. It was also the case that the
hard anti-collectivist tendency in the party had, in the interwar years, been tempered by
coalition and the moderate leaderships of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—
men who, like Andrew Bonar Law, were employed in trade, but for whom the latter’s
crusading anti-Socialism was out of proportion with the alleged constitutional threat
117

posed by the labour movement.
152
In many ways, much ideological ground had been
ceded to the nascent Middle Way before the war.
As important as these conjunctural events were, it is impossible to explain the
ease with which Middle Way Conservatives took the reins of their party without
examining the intra-party institutions of the post-war period and the tactics employed in
taking control of them by the challengers. Since the party leadership wielded such great
power in Conservative politics, its capture by challengers normally marks, and is required
for, a decisive break in the struggle for power. Its agenda-setting capacity and its ultimate
control over ministerial and shadow ministerial appointments and of the machinery of the
professional and voluntary arms of the party were, if anything, only enhanced by the
legitimacy accrued to the leader as election to the position became more democratic and
open in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, such was the responsibility of leading the
Conservative Party that T.E. Utley believed it futile to speculate about the
transformations the position would have impressed upon Powellism, especially in light of
Powell’s conversion from free market idealist to competent administrator during his spell
at the Ministry of Health, one of Whitehall’s major spending departments.
153

However, unlike during Thatcher’s challenge, where the post was occupied by an
unpopular leader who, by 1974, was indelibly linked to the values, goals and politics of
the post-war settlement and where, moreover, his legitimacy in that post appeared to
depend on the assent of Conservative MPs, Churchill was a relatively non-ideological

152
Fry, G.K., The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution: An Interpretation of British Politics 1975-1990
(Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), 5-6.
153
Utley, T.E., Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking (London; 1968), 73-4.
118

leader
154
whose position as popular figurehead seemed secure as a result of his wartime
leadership. The unique circumstances of Churchill’s tenure, his unwillingness to step
down despite openly voiced frustrations among senior colleagues, and his half-hearted
interest in domestic affairs, meant capture of the leadership—or, indeed, the actions of
the existing leadership—was not the major element of transition it would ordinarily have
been. Instead, we must look to activities at the sub-leadership levels and in the
professional party, and to policy pronouncements. It is here that room opens for debate
regarding the fulfilment of the Middle Way challenge phase.
The institutional groundwork of the Middle Way transition was done within the
professional party where, most notably, the progressive R.A. Butler reorganized and
greatly expanded the Conservative Research Department, which, until the war, had been
something of a personal fiefdom of the leader.
155
Under Butler, the CRD began to provide
detailed studies and briefings to Conservative front bench spokesmen who, unlike their
Labour counterparts in government, did not have the advantage of the permanent
government of civil servants offering advice and guidance. It also took the lead in
enunciating Middle Way ideas in the regular pamphlets it printed and distributed to
constituency associations and the press.

154
Churchill had incurred the wrath of Socialists for his heavy-handed role in putting down the South
Wales strikes as Minister of Labour, but while certainly instinctively anti-Socialist, he was not vehemently
so, and the comparative moderation of his views is perhaps attested to by the remarkable lack of discussion
of his ideology in his now more than fifty biographies. Roy Jenkins, who, in his politically-oriented
Churchill: A Biography (Hill and Wang; 2001), 70-4, 843-6, does address the question of Churchill’s
ideological leanings, concludes that throughout his career, Churchill was a moderate reformer.
155
Howard, A., RAB: The Life of R.A Butler (Jonathan Cape; 1987), 54.
119

This renewal of institutions continued into the period of Opposition and helped
consolidate quickly and effectively the Middle Way project. In 1948-9, David Maxwell
Fyfe chaired the committee which made numerous suggestions regarding the
restructuring of the Conservative electoral machine, which was badly run-down due to
neglect in the interwar years.
156
Among the recommendations of the Maxwell Fyfe
Report were that parliamentary campaigns should be funded by the party organization
(the maximum individual donation to constituency associations being capped at £25) and
that Conservative Central Office should provide a list of accepted candidates from which
the constituency associations were free to select parliamentary candidates.
157

The reforms were modest, the constituency associations continued to defer to
social rank in their choice of candidates, and the old prejudices against self-made men,
women, non-conformist Protestants, Catholics, Jews and trade unionists died hard. But
the intention that talented men and women should not be put off seeking the nomination
of constituency associations was at least partially realized, and the 1950 election saw the
intake of a cohort of professional men of modest means, the majority of whom shared the
progressive tendencies of mentors such as Maxwell Fyfe, Butler and Quintin Hogg. It
was also, perhaps ironically, this reform of candidate selection that allowed grocer’s
daughter Margaret Roberts to contest Dartford in 1950 (and in 1951) and Enoch Powell
to win Wolverhampton South West at the same election.
158

156
Ramsden, D., The Age of Churchill and Eden: 1940-57 (Longman; 1995), Chapter 3.
157
Ibid., 117,
158
Shepherd, R., Enoch Powell: A Biography (Pimlico; 1996), 186.
120

Thatcher’s capture of the leadership in 1975, on the other hand, did indicate the
culmination of the challenge phase of the Thatcherite transition. There has been
significant debate in the academic literature and between journalists about whether
Thatcher’s election represented a ‘peasant’s uprising’—with Members voting in the first
round for the Shadow Environment Secretary as an unknown entity whose only
discernible quality was that she was not Heath—or a ‘religious war’—in which right-
wing MPs elected one of their own in a conflict widely recognized at the time as
ideological.
159
The traditional account held that, after winning the first ballot as an anti-
Heath candidate and forcing the leader to concede defeat, Thatcher’s momentum was
unstoppable as she entered a second ballot against a field of lacklustre moderates.
160

In recent years, however, this has been questioned by historians who point to
Thatcher’s close and visible association with known right-wing thinkers and activists
well before the leadership election, as well as the delight evinced in the purported
statements of liberal market Conservatives on hearing news of her victory.
161

Approaching the issue systematically, political scientists Cowley and Bailey attempt to
prove that ideology was the primary factor determining how Members voted in 1975,
testing statistically the connection between right-wing beliefs and a vote for Thatcher in

159
Cowley, P. and Bailey, M., ‘Peasants' Uprising or Religious War? Re-examining the 1975 Conservative
Leadership Contest’ in the British Journal of Political Science (30.4: 2000), 604-7.
160
Eccleshall, R. and Walker, G.S., Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers (Routledge; 2007),
364.
161
Wickham-Jones, M., ‘Right Turn: A Revisionist Account of the 1975 Conservative Party Leadership
Election’ in Twentieth Century British History (1997), 74-89. ‘She’s won, she’s won’, shouted Alan Clark,
supposedly running elatedly out of Westminster Hall. Quoted in Cowdrill, D.A., The Conservative Party
and Thatcherism, 1970-1979: A Grass-Roots Perspective, Unpublished MPhil Thesis (University of
Birmingham; 2010), 8.
121

one or both rounds. There are, nevertheless, significant methodological problems with
this work, and the conclusions reached are far from incontrovertible. Voting was
conducted secretly, and the authors rely on a variety of sources to piece together what
remains a rather incomplete, sometimes inconsistent and, given the myriad reasons those
who voted would have to obfuscate after the fact their true behaviour, possibly an
incorrect set of data. More troubling, Cowley and Bailey use ideological classifications
developed by other authors for purposes unrelated to the question at hand, or which may
otherwise provide inappropriate or misleading measures of ideology. For example,
groups defined as ‘loyalists’ and ‘critics’ of Thatcher—based on parliamentary votes in
the 1980s, which thus raises issues of temporality and causation—are treated as separate
ideological camps for the purposes of analyzing the 1975 vote, thereby blurring the line
between personality and ideology, which is, of course, a distinction crucial to the
question the authors attempt to address. This highlights the need for, and arguably the
near impossibility of providing, theoretical precision in a situation where many
significant variables such as ideology, region and social background overlap
conceptually.
This is not to suggest ideology played no major part in the leadership contest of
1975. That the institutional changes necessary in order for MPs to initiate a challenge to a
sitting leader who chooses not to resign voluntarily were forced upon Heath by a review
conducted in 1974-5 by a committee chaired by the former prime minister and party
leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (whom Heath, as a reformer, had replaced in 1965),
might point in this direction. Moreover, constituency association interviews at the time of
122

the second ballot highlighted feelings among the grassroots that, unlike her nearest rival
William Whitelaw, Thatcher ‘means what she says’, was not a ‘complete useless sell-out
to the Irish’ and would eschew the ‘airy fairy business’ that left the previous leadership
unable, or unwilling, to mount effective opposition against a Labour government moving
leftwards.
162
Or, as one long-time party member told the present author, ‘she was just
different to [the other candidates]’.
Thatcher expressed openly before the second round of the contest views that were
evidently to the right of those of her opponents. In a Panorama panel discussion,
journalist David Dimbleby asked Thatcher whether she was a right-winger, which, when
pressed, he defined as one paying ‘less heed to compassion, less attention to the hard up
people in society than you would to market forces, [and] to crude economic
judgments’.
163
Thatcher responded, arguing that ‘you can’t look after the hard up unless
you’re creating enough wealth to do so’, claiming that high taxes were one glaring flaw
in the system which hindered wealth generation. Thatcher also used much more
combative language than her opponents when talking about the unions as ‘powerful
special interests’, when lumping together the Labour left wing with Communist Party
fellow travellers and Trotskyist infiltrators of the party as a ‘mortal threat’ to democracy
and a free society, and in claiming that the ‘whole philosophy of the Conservative Party
is based upon the freedom of the individual’.
164

162
‘BBC Panorama: Tory Leadership Contest’, broadcast on BBC1 Television, Feb. 10, 1975.
163
‘BBC Panorama: The Alternative Prime Minister’, broadcast on BBC1 Television, July 11, 1977.
164
Ibid.
123

Nonetheless, several MPs who admitted voting for Thatcher during the contest
later recanted, stating they had misjudged the nature of her ambitions. Other historians
have also demonstrated convincingly that Heath’s support came as much from those who
felt personal loyalty to him, having been appointed to government positions during his
premiership, and from newly elected MPs who did not regard his leadership as a threat to
their own chances of re-election, as it did from those on the left of the party.
165
In light of
this, the following assessment of the election put forward by Cowley and Bailey in what
appears a revision of their earlier assertions seems most reasonable:
This is not to argue that there was a coherent body of Thatcherites backing Thatcher, or that the
left was clear about exactly what it was that they objected to. But it is to argue [for] the...presence
of an ideological divide between the left and the right of the party...The votes of the right alone
would not have delivered the leadership of the party to Thatcher. But the right gave her a cohesive
and substantial bloc of support, on to which she could add votes from the centrists and left-
wingers dissatisfied with Heath's leadership.
166

It also hints at the broader fact that a significant body of right-wing opinion existed on the
backbenches that could be mobilized from the outset of the consolidation phase to secure
the Thatcherites’ dominant position in the party. This, in fact, is precisely what occurred,
as the new leadership attempted from a very early stage of the consolidation to whip up
‘more vocal support’ from reluctant backbenchers through the persuasion of well-
positioned right-wing allies Edward du Cann and Winston Churchill, grandson of the

165
Norton, P., ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party: Another Institution “Handbagged”?’ in
Thatcherism: Personality and Politics, K. Minogue and M. Biddiss (Eds.) (Palgrave Macmillan; 1987), 31-
3.
166
Cowley, P. and Bailey, M., ‘Choosing the Lady: Another look at the 1975 leadership contest’ in the
Conservative History Journal (1: Summer 2003), 15.
124

former prime minister, who, during the same parliament, had risen to executive positions
in the 1922 Committee.
167

Few would gainsay Cowley’s and Bailey’s early conclusion that ‘Had Edward
Heath remained Conservative party leader, or had he been replaced by a less ideological
figure, such as William Whitelaw, the recent political history of Britain would almost
certainly have been very different’.
168
But implicit in their belief that ‘The sine qua non
of Thatcherism was its eponym’s victory in the leadership election of 1975’, is the
logically erroneous assumption that the contest itself must have been ideological. This
need not have been the case. Even if Thatcher’s victory was the outcome of a ‘peasant’s
uprising’, this did not render the challenge phase of the Thatcherite transition any the less
complete.
Figures 2.4 and 2.5 provide an overview for the Middle Way and Thatcherite
challenges of the underlying variables that indicate likely success at this stage of
transition, and the prerequisites that must be met in order for challenges to take shape.
Just as historical circumstances lead to differences between transitions in the length of
time each stage takes to complete, the ‘coupling’ of particular variables and the tactics
employed during the challenge stage are unique. Yet, as with the strategic periodization
of transitions, common factors, requirements and processes across challenges are
discernible.

167
Minutes of 1922 Committee, 1975-79, CPA, 1922/8, 76.
168
Cowley, P. and Bailey, M., ‘Re-examining’, 605.
125

Entering the Ascendency
Whether one argues that the Middle Way consolidation began in 1945 or 1946,
historians have been in remarkable agreement over the date the Conservative Party came
to terms with the new state system. In 1947, the party published its eleven-page Industrial
Charter, which committed future Conservative governments to the mixed economy,
retention of Labour’s framework for the regulation of industry and industrial relations,
and to some form of Keynesian demand management. This marked a bold turning point
in Conservative policy and represents in our scheme the consolidation of Middle Way
Conservatism in the party. Decades later, opponents of the Keynesian welfare state,
including Thatcher, would try to reclaim the document for monetarism, or quibble with
specific terms regarding free collective bargaining and so forth.
Similar tactics were used to undermine the general spirit of the wartime
government’s 1944 White Paper on Employment, which held that ‘a high and stable level
of employment’ was the responsibility of the government in the transition to a peacetime
economy and that this reorganization would involve regional planning to aid
development in areas of high unemployment. Yet the fact later challengers found it
necessary to engage with, and to claim as their own, these three-decades-old documents
underlines their enduring hold on the consciousness of the political class and their
significance as restatements of policy.
Why should the implementation of the Middle Way programme have commenced
exactly at the time the party attained government in 1951, rather than coinciding with its

Fig. 2.4: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of the Middle Way
126

: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of the Middle Way transition.

Fig. 2.5: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of Thatcherite transition.
127

: Prerequisites for, and determiners of success in, the challenge phase of Thatcherite transition.

128

ascendency in the party? The simple answer, of course, is that the command of
government is an essential prerequisite of project implementation, and ascendency within
the party was obtained before the 1951 election victory. This highlights further the
interaction of forces at the three levels of party, Parliament and state system, and
reinforces the fact it is the politics of the party that are being periodized (if we were
evaluating the whole conjuncture, the bar for claiming ascendency would be much higher
and the process of consolidation much longer, if not indefinite).
With the Thatcherite transition there was a close link between control of the party
(institutional level one of Fig. 2.2) and realignment of the state system (level three), with
the former providing a stable base for radical reforms, and the success of reforms feeding
back into the party to reinforce the ascendency of the challengers. But a parliamentary
majority (level two) and the command of the formal powers of government this affords
are not directly relevant to our periodization of intra-party transition. There are two
reasons for this.
First, ascendency within the party indicates that significant obstacles to policy
formation have been overcome, and that spoiling devices wielded by oppositional
factions have ceased to threaten the position of the challengers. Beyond a workable
majority in the House of Commons, Parliament is never fully commanded in the same
manner (nor should it be if the institution is to remain democratic and accommodate
opposition through its committees and its floor debates). Parliament is a tool for the
implementation of policy. As the representative core of government, parliamentary
organization and action must be the highest priority for parties. But, notwithstanding
129

occasional attempts to reform the House of Lords, the aim of even radical governments is
not to transform Parliament’s form, or to amend its constitutional prerogatives. This is the
case for neither the party nor the state system, both of which are targets for complete
transformation. This point was brought home all the more forcefully in the hue and cry
over government attempts in the 1980s to ‘Thatcherise’ the civil service and the
machinery of local government, both of which had been widely assumed, at least up until
the reorganization of local government in 1973, to be beyond the realm of everyday
politics.
Second, shifts in strategy for the challengers are not likely to occur as a result of
winning a parliamentary majority. Although election manifestos do not constitute
contracts with the electorate, and parties, once in government, are free to renege on
promises, convention has held that policies should be pursued in the spirit of these
documents, that the record of governments should be judged against the programmes they
are elected on, and that if deviations do occur, then they are obfuscated and do not
contradict the manifesto’s central planks. The next chance for major policy revision
comes with victory at the following election. The first term in government is spent
planning the second stage of the project and the shift in strategy that accompanies it.
Furthermore, whereas capture of the party leadership or key posts provides a platform
from which the challengers can address a new and wider audience—the party grassroots

Fig. 2.6: Intra-level processes during the consolidation and ascendency phases of the Thatcherite transition.
130

level processes during the consolidation and ascendency phases of the Thatcherite transition.

131

and electorate, rather than just elites—with election to government the audience remains
the same, if not shrinks as the apathetic lose interest following the campaign.
The beginning of the Thatcherite ascendency is more complicated than that of
Middle Way Conservatism. Resistance to the challengers was greater than in 1946-8, and
though the Cabinet reshuffle of 1981 eliminated Thatcher’s most dangerous opponents
among the ‘wets’, disquiet turned into rancour as the economy stalled under her
chancellor’s seemingly counterintuitive deflationary budgets.
169
Using the number of
‘Thatcherite’ and ‘non-Thatcherite’ MPs or cabinet ministers as an indicator of
completed consolidation nevertheless presents several problems. First, particularly when
focusing on Cabinet ministers, contradictions in statements and behaviour over long
political careers make classification difficult. William Whitelaw, for example, was
Thatcher’s chief opponent in the second round of the 1975 leadership contest and was
regarded as Heath’s heir apparent, but he entered her government in 1979 and became
one of her closest political, if not ideological, allies. Second, even where the attributes of
a particular operational ideology are clear and widely agreed upon, attaining the data
required for the ideological categorization of each MP, beyond House of Commons
divisions, is difficult.
Third, and most relevantly for our model, the membership or non-membership of
the Cabinet during the consolidation and ascendency phases of the transition does not
indicate the intensity of opposition among those of the old order, or the balance of power
in the wider parliamentary party. Official documents released recently by the National

169
Booth, P., Were 364 Economists Wrong? (Institute of Economic Affairs; 2006), 12.
132

Archives show that splits in Thatcher’s early Cabinet, particularly over future funding for
the regeneration of Militant-controlled Liverpool as an area of high urban deprivation and
deindustrialization, were sustained, bitter and ideologically undergirded.
170
Yet Iain
Gilmour and Francis Pym, the Middle Way grandees, appear to have been less assertive
than Michael Heseltine, whose social and generational attributes, political experience and
general ideology put him as much in line with the Thatcherites as the ‘wets’. The fact it
was Heseltine who continued his feud with Thatcher and key lieutenants following his
leaving the Cabinet under the cloud of the 1986 Westland Affair, while traditional Middle
Way figures retired to the fringes of public life, publishing the occasional broadside
against the direction in which the party was being taken, makes dating the end of
meaningful resistance even trickier.
171

As Philip Norton shows, at the height of the Thatcherite ascendency, most
Conservative MPs were loyal to the leadership, but few backbenchers, even among the
younger intake, could have been considered ardent Thatcherites.
172
The problem at the
high political level for the challengers thus became how to cement their ascendency
beyond one generation.
173
It has been suggested that Thatcher’s ultimate victory came,
ironically, after her own unceremonious departure from Downing Street, when Members
finally put to rest Heseltine’s dreams of implementing a partial ideological

170
Editorial, ‘North/South Divide: Thirty Years on, 'Managed Decline' is Still the Policy’ in The Guardian
(January 1, 2012).
171
Crick, M., Michael Heseltine: A Biography (Penguin; 1997), 364-82.
172
Norton, P., ‘’The Lady’s Not for Turning’ But What About the Rest? Margaret Thatcher and the
Conservative Party 1979-89’ in Parliamentary Affairs (43.1: 1990), 47-57.
173
Norton, ‘Handbagged?’ 31-3.
133

counterrevolution in the party when they voted for John Major, Thatcher’s preferred
successor, in the leadership election that followed in 1990.
174

Changes in Opposition policy might indicate the permanent effect of the
realigning project on the state system. During the ascendency period, the political terrain
is remade so as to induce a shift in the Opposition towards the ideology of the new order
if it wishes to remain a viable political alternative. The spectre of the early eighties still
haunts the Labour Party, and the sharp right turn that produced New Labour is still
controversial. However, the fact of Thatcher’s many successes in remoulding the politics
of power and, as a result, the ideology of an Opposition determined to return from the
political wilderness, is largely agreed upon by historians of the period. But using this to
gauge the ascendency of the challengers within their own party is problematic and
imprecise. Labour’s lurch to the left in 1981 was in part a response to early Thatcherism
and its effects on union opinion, but it also reflected a polarization and radicalization that
had been evident in the labour movement for a decade, and the party’s right turn in the
mid-eighties owed more to the discipline of the polls and threat posed by the breakaway
Social Democratic Party than to a careful appraisal of the balance of forces in the Tory
Party.
175

174
Cowley, P. and Garry, J., ‘The British Conservative Party and Europe: The Choosing of John Major’ in
the British Journal of Political Science (28.3: 1998), 485.
175
See Gamble, A., ‘The Impact of the SDP’ in Thatcherism, The Politics of Thatcherism: Essays in the
Study of Politics, S. Hall (Ed.) (Lawrence Wishart; 1983), for account of the SDP as an elitist,
constitutionally- —rather than society—oriented force in British politics and its potential influence on
‘Labourism’.
134

The defining characteristic of the ascendency phase, according to our model, is
the prioritization by the challengers of programme implementation over the intra-party
battle, which, by this point, has been largely won.
176
Sociologists Jessop et al. dated the
period of ‘high Thatcherism’ and the acceleration of its ‘two nations’ strategy to the years
directly following the 1983 general election, and it is widely acknowledged that the
landslide victory at that election convinced the government’s hardliners that they had
been provided a mandate to usher in new and more radical policies.
177
Thatcherism’s
most controversial programmes, such as the restructuring of the public housing sector and
the right-to-buy scheme, which saw the sale of some three million council properties,
accelerated after 1983. The reorganization of local government and the centralization of
education policy sidelined or simply eliminated rivals who might resist structural
changes, such as the Greater London Council, which, by 1981, had fallen under the
control of Labour left-wingers who, like the Thatcherites, regarded themselves as
combatants in an ideological war.
178

It was also only after the 1983 election that ad hoc and limited attempts at ‘de-
nationalization’ converged into a more exertive and ambitious, though hardly formulaic,

176
Or, if not in government, the externalization of the ideological challenge.
177
Jessop et. al., Thatcherism, 186-92. E.H.H. Green’s Thatcher is a well-researched thematic political
history of the Thatcher period, most useful to students of Thatcherism for its account of motives and
meanings at the high political level, though it offers little causative analysis. Conversely, Jessop et. al.
produce a theoretically dense and repetitive discussion of problems relating to the definition of Thatcherism
and the intricacies of the debate among contemporary Marxian sociologists, but muster little evidence
beyond the details of current affairs in support of their rather unwieldy theory of a ‘two nations’ hegemonic
project.
178
Hosken, A., Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone (Arcadia; 2008), Chapter 3.
135

programme of ‘privatization’.
179
Privatization’s constituent projects involved one or a
combination of: charging nominal fees for services; contracting out to the private sector;
liberalization of internal and external markets; and outright withdrawal from some
industries.
180
According to Gamble, Thatcherism sought to
strip away the encroachments of the state on market exchanges between individuals, and restore
the tarnished character of the British liberal polity. It wants to close the gap between the theory
and the practice of the British constitution, and bring back limited politics by drastically restricting
the scope and number of the decisions that are made by public bodies.
181

Gamble, writing in 1987, believed the Thatcherites had been most successful in forging
new distributional coalitions, but as a government were not ‘a credible vehicle for the
consolidation of a new limited state’. This was due to their reliance on buoyancy in the
markets, their inability, owing to electoral constraints, to dismantle the social democratic
functions of the state at the same time they dismantled several of its oppositional forms,
and the need for a strong and extensive law enforcement apparatus in order to enforce
contracts and quell the newly fomented social unrest.
182

There is still debate about the extent to which Thatcher’s successors, both in the
Conservative Party and under New Labour, altered the terrain of British political
economy, and how permanent such changes are likely to be. Simon Jenkins argues in his
widely cited Thatcher and Sons (2006) that Thatcherism was essentially successful in
changing the basic assumptions of the politically possible and the ideologically

179
Green, Thatcher, 214.
180
Gamble, A., ‘Privatization, Thatcherism, and the British State: The Crisis of Social Democracy’ in the
Journal of Law and Society (16.1: Spring 1989), 4-5.
181
Ibid., 16.
182
Ibid., 17. Gamble, A., The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Palgrave
Macmillan; 1994), 19-38.
136

acceptable in Britain, and Thatcher’s quip that her greatest achievement was New Labour
encapsulates nicely the fact of her successors’ acquiescence in a new consensus more
congenial to her own values.
That Thatcherism’s new distributional coalitions cut across traditionally rigid
class lines and that, as in Europe, there has been over the past thirty years considerable
socio-economic dealignment, is generally accepted.
183
Less well-examined, but no less
pronounced, have been changes in regional partisanship, which, as geographer R.J
Johnston showed, could not, by 1983, be accounted for solely on the basis of regional
class composition or ‘neighbourhood effect’.
184
The shift to a post-industrial service
economy, which gathered apace following the forced closure of coal pits and Thatcher’s
defeat of the miners’ resistance to that policy in 1985, further sharpened the cultural,
economic and political north-south divide. The once relatively prosperous industrial West
Midlands, whose small businesses and skilled workforce lent it certain southern
characteristics, fell squarely into the northern fold, with high unemployment and a
reliance on the public sector to drive modest growth. ‘As electors are socialized into their
communities’, argued Johnston, ‘they become part of the history and tradition of
those places, reproducing the cultural milieux which provide the socialization context

183
Kitschelt, H., The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge; 1994), 51-4. In his 1993
article ‘Class Structure and Social Democratic Party Strategy’, Kitschelt demonstrates how the decline in
working class occupations as a percentage of the working population in Western European countries was,
for the most part, unrelated to the fortunes of social democratic parties and, furthermore, that the most
successful socialist parties were often the most constrained in terms of their class bases.
184
Johnston, R.J ‘Class and the Geography of Voting in England: Towards Measurement’ in Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers (10.2: 1985), 249-53. In 1992, Labour failed to gain more than a
handful of seats in Southeast England, and by 1997, the Tories had lost all of their seats in Scotland.
137

for future generations of voters’.
185
If this is, in fact, the principal mechanism by which
regional consciousness emerges and is transmitted, then trends in this area might
conceivably be the most enduring.
On social attitudinal measures and those normally associated with political
culture, the picture is somewhat less conclusive. Surveys found little change in aggregate
perceptions among the electorate of their own political efficacy, which remained low, or
in their opinions on crime and sentencing, which were consistently conservative
throughout the eighties.
186
The one striking trend, which has been pointed to as evidence
that the public did not become Thatcherized in their basic attitudes towards social
responsibility and cohesiveness, was a marked increase in the number of people who
were prepared to pay higher taxes to reverse what large majorities considered to be
declining standards in education and the Health Service.
187

Given the difficulty of discerning the magnitude and depth of long-term changes
in the politics of support and social structure, scholars seeking to fit our template to
historical or contemporary ideological transitions may automatically look towards
ambitious policies as a sign that the challenge has been externalized. There are also good
theoretical reasons for doing so. Many of the trends that accelerated during the 1980s
were already underway as a result of other, often globalizing forces, and thus offer a poor
guide as to when the period of Thatcherite ascendency in the party began. Others were

185
Green, Thatcher, 218.
186
British Social Attitudes, Annual Survey (1984; 1988 and 1989). Hough, M. and Roberts, J.V.,
‘Sentencing Trends in Britain: Public Knowledge and Public Opinion’ in Punishment and Society (1:1,
1997), 11-13.
187
Marwick, British Society, 387-91.
138

simply by-products of, or provided a slight spur to, Thatcherism as a realigning project,
rather than being central to its progress. But even if such changes are directly indicative
of the success of an operational ideology, there is likely to be a marked time lag between
the challengers’ positive decision that conditions inside the party allow for greater
concentration on the realigning project and the conjunctural effects their policies
generate. The conscious effort required on the part of challengers to enact policy means it
is a more appropriate indicator of externalization than conjunctural trends, which may be
interesting and offer insight into the scope of change, but which are several degrees
removed from transformation inside the party.
The importance of the 1983 election to the Thatcherite transition cannot,
therefore, be overstated. The argument can be made, however, that the landslide victory
of that year, at which the Tories increased their number of Commons seats by fifty-eight,
rubber stamped a new balance of power in the party that had actually been ushered in by
the Falklands War a year earlier.
Statisticians have argued over the role of a ‘Falklands factor’ in producing the
1983 election result. David Sanders et al. measured a variety of macroeconomic variables
and ‘pocketbook’ economic expectations for personal taxation and consumer spending
against government popularity leading up to the election, claiming that these accounted
for 82% of the late ‘bounce’ in Conservative support, while the war accounted for just
3%.
188
But Harold Clarke et al. later critiqued this article, suggesting that the

188
Sanders, D., ‘Government Popularity and the Falklands’ in the British Journal of Political Science
(17.3: 1987), 281-311. See M. P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in America National Elections, (Yale;
1981), Chapter 3, for more on mechanisms of retrospective voting, and Nadeau R. and Lewis-Beck, M. S.,
139

development of public support is complex, variables are inter-correlated, and that the
authors’ model did not account adequately for time lags.
189
They therefore conclude that
the traditional interpretation is most likely correct.

If Geoffrey Howe’s popular budget of 1982, which followed three years of
austerity and increased taxes and unemployment, was the first determining factor and the
Falklands War was the second, historians have added a third reason: that Labour’s public
divisions over a left-wing manifesto dubbed the ‘longest suicide note in history’ meant,
as Thatcher stated, that ‘there was no alternative’ than a return of the Conservatives to
power.
190
This may at first glance appear unrelated to Thatcher as ‘populist heroine’. But
the fact the most bitter quarrels between senior members of Michael Foot’s frontbench
were over unilateral nuclear disarmament and the ‘concurrent phasing out of both NATO
and the Warsaw Pact’, and, furthermore, that it was these issues that featured most
prominently in press coverage of Labour’s ineffective campaign, might point to the
indirect effects of the ‘new patriotism’.
191

A change in the political climate and the manner in which messages were
delivered to the public also occurred at the time of, and in response to, the Falklands War.
The effects of this change on inter-party competition were most keenly observed at the

‘National Economic Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections’ in Journal of Politics (63.1: Feb. 2001), 178-9,
for use of macro- and personal-economic indicators.
189
Clarke, H.D. et al., ‘Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Popularity, 1979–83’ in the
British Journal of Political Science (20.1: 1990), 63-81.
190
Miller, W.L., ‘There Was No Alternative: The British Election of 1983’ in Parliamentary Affairs (37.1:
1984), 375-79, 383.
191
Ibid., 373-5. Hope, C., ‘Michael Foot: Labour's 1983 General Election Manifesto and 'the Longest
Suicide in History' in The Telegraph (Mar. 3, 2010).
140

election, but they were to prove more fundamental, extending beyond 1983. They also
acted to lock in the gains, and lock down opponents, of the Thatcherite ascendency
outside of the party and within it. Eric Hobsbawn believed Thatcher had adeptly captured
the popular ‘sense of outrage and humiliation’ at the Argentine invasion very early into
the crisis, and had succeeded in ‘turn[ing] it in a right wing (I hesitate, but only just, to
say semi-fascist) direction’.
192
A domestic war for domestic consumption had, claimed
Hobsbawm, been characterized by the government’s latitudinal connection with the
military and bureaucracy and its vertical one with the people. This had afforded Thatcher
and her speech-writing team the opportunity to communicate to the public through an
enthusiastic right-wing tabloid press the kinds of images of an heroic past that cultural
theorists such as Stuart Hall and Patrick Wright believe to be so pernicious yet
powerful.
193

Fear on Labour backbenches that the task force might become bogged down in a
bloody debacle created a minority voice of opposition. But an equally profound fear of
accusations of treason, which bubbled below the surface of public discourse, along with

192
Hobsbawm, E., ‘Falklands Fallout’ in Marxism Today (Jan. 14, 1983), 14.
193
Wright, P., Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Shocken; 1984), 172.
Wright argues, along with Hall and others, that often complex and multi-level ideologies must be packaged
and presented in an attractive way for mass consumption. According to Wright, collective history is
remembered ‘in reverse’. We start from a blemished present and look back to a past that becomes purer the
further removed it is. As a party able to trace its political, if not ideological, roots back to the seventeenth
century, Tory articulations of the national essence can credibly draw on a much larger, and more treasured,
stock of ideas than can those of their opponents. As Wright argues: ‘Starkly opposed to [‘egalitarian
collectivism...and bureaucrats’] ...the nation’ to which Thatcher learned to appeal is full of adventure,
grandeur, ideas of freedom, ceremony and conscripted memories (of childhood or war for example)’. This
type of rhetoric is particularly useful in presenting compelling narratives of threat and redemption in times
of perceived national crisis. Overall, Conservatives have, it could be argued, been more successful in
heightening the sense of fear that the national essence as it inheres in society’s institutions is under threat
and in turn portraying themselves as the only bulwark against these threats.
141

deeply felt anger at the junta’s usurpation of the islanders’ right to self-determination,
convinced the party’s parliamentary leadership to fall behind the government’s policy
and rhetoric. An uncomfortable reality that many on the anti-colonial and radical left
found hard to accept was that the Hitlerian analogy proved as genuinely congenial to the
majority of Labour MPs and as it did to the Thatcherites.
194

Hobsbawm does not elaborate on the first part of the comment ‘It enabled a sort
of take-over by the Thatcherites not only of the conservative camp but of a great area of
British politics’, but there are two ways in which the ‘Falklands fallout’ may have
undermined Middle Way Conservatism as a threat to the Thatcherite project. Most
discernible is the effect it had on the standing of Middle Way personnel in Thatcher’s
government and the policymaking community. If a Keynesian orthodoxy had manifested
itself at the Treasury as a result of the ideas propounded by the men who entered the
department during the war, the civil servants employed at the prestigious Foreign Office
remained typical in their upper middle class social and educational backgrounds.
195

Foreign affairs, and, in particular, the diplomatic service, remained the preserve of the
establishment, and this was reflected by the types of figures appointed as political heads
of the department by post-war prime ministers.
196
Thatcher’s choice for the position,

194
Christie, C., ‘The British Left and the Falklands War’ in The Political Quarterly (55.3: July 1984), 288-
9. White, M., ‘Michael Foot Died Just as Falklands have Returned to Prominence’ in The Guardian (Mar.
10, 2010).
195
This contrasted with the ‘Treasury View’ of the interwar years. See Moggridge, D.E., Maynard Keynes:
An Economist's Biography (1992), 235, for a description of the institution Keynes eventually entered in
1915.
196
Gray, R., ‘The Falklands Factor’ in Marxism Today (July 18, 1982), 8.
142

Lord Carrington, appeared to confirm ‘wet’ dominance in foreign policy at a time when a
radical neoliberal domestic agenda was being implemented.
Carrington’s decision to accept full responsibility for the FCO’s blunders and
ultimate failure to predict or prevent the invasion and, along with his loyal deputies
Richard Luce and Humphrey Atkins, to resign promptly for ‘reasons of honour’, gifted
the Thatcherites an opportunity.
197
Carrington was duly replaced by Francis Pym for the
duration of the war, but his ill-concealed criticism of Thatcherism’s excesses while sitting
in the Cabinet provided the excuse that was needed for his dismissal and replacement by
Geoffrey Howe. Pym was over sixty, and, with little chance of returning to the topflight
of politics under Thatcher, he set up the Conservative Centre Forward group, which
pushed for a revival of Middle Way ideas, but ultimately ‘proved to be a short-lived
experiment which achieved little of note and exposed those who were involved to
widespread ridicule’.
198
Pym declined to defend his Cambridgeshire seat in 1987 and
was elevated to the Lords. Meanwhile, Thatcherite ascendency had been established in,
and Middle Way influence expunged from, one of the great departments and a
symbolically key area of policy.
The unashamed propagation of what many regarded as tacky, if not dangerous,
jingoism as means of exploiting from a position of power the fads and rapid shifts in
public opinion, and, moreover, the manner in which Thatcher believed the ostensibly

197
Carrington, P. et al., Letters to persons leaving the Government (Atkins, Carrington, Luce), Apr. 5,
1982, Thatcher Archive.
198
Evans, S.,’‘A Tiny Little Footnote in History’: Conservative Centre Forward’ in Parliamentary
History (29.2: June 2010), 208.
143

neutral television media could be used in the process of establishing a direct connection
between people and prime minister, were also inconsistent with the experiences, if not the
values, of the older Middle Way generation. And if rumours of tension between the
Palace and Downing Street seemed to confirm that Thatcher’s ‘presidentialism’ was
incompatible with the traditional functioning of parliamentary democracy and cabinet
government, the employment of the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi was emblematic
of the assertive new approach to public relations.
199
Tim Bell, then managing director of
Saatchi and Saatchi, recalls how, under the direction of senior staff from Central Office
and with constant access to the leadership, for the first time, politicians were treating
volatility in the ‘electoral marketplace’ as a possible advantage.
200
Running professional
election campaigns with clearly defined objectives and targeting specific groups with a
variety of tailored messages may, claims Bell, have helped deliver the successive
victories achieved in the 1980s, though he believed Thatcher’s policies to be of far
greater import.
201

Be this as it may, Bell was recruited in 1984, alongside Thatcher’s ‘image
moulder’ Gordon Reece, to a publicity role at the National Coal Board, which involved

199
Harrop, M., ‘Thatcherism and the Media: The Blueprint for the General Election’ in Political
Communications: The General Election Campaign of 1983, I. Crewe and M. Harrop (Eds.) (Cambridge;
1986), 48.
200
Jennifer Lees-Marshment echoes this analysis, stating that Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first ‘market
oriented’ politician, conducting ‘market intelligence’ and ‘product adjustment’ from the feedback her
private pollsters received. The distinction drawn between ‘product-oriented’ and ‘market-oriented’ politics
appears more than occasionally somewhat strained, but Lees-Marshment’s research provides a decent
comparative account of parties’ media strategies in the last decades of the twentieth century. See Lees-
Marshment, J., Political Marketing and British Political Parties (Manchester University Press; 2001),
Chapters 1 and 3.
201
Bell, T., ‘The Conservative Campaign’ in Political Communications: The General Election Campaign
of 1979, R.M. Worcester and M Harrop (Eds.) (Harper Collins; 1982), 24.
144

formulating media strategy, designing press releases, and sending individualized letters to
miners in an attempt to sell the government’s point of view on the industrial dispute.
202

What had started as an experiment in electioneering and, at the most, manipulation of the
politics of support using new framing techniques, had, as a result of high profile and
dramatic events such as the Falklands War and the Miners’ Strike, found its way to the
heart of the normal political process.
The contrast between the world of advertising ‘tricks’—such as changes in tone
between flippancy and sombreness, the non-divisive appeal,
203
and the use of iconic
images such as the 1979 ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ billboard, which featured a snaking dole
queue—and that of the politics both Middle Way Conservatives and the Labour Party
were used to could not have been sharper. Following the 1979 election, Tim Delaney, the
publicist who had worked voluntarily on the poorly-funded and badly-organized Labour
campaign, complained that despite having stated emphatically that ‘the name of the game
has changed’, prejudices against ‘soap box techniques’ and bureaucratic jealousies
between ministers and Transport House prevented the mounting of a campaign to match
that of the Conservatives.
204

Barry Day echoed similar sentiments about his experiences working for Heath as
a publicity advisor and speechwriter. There was, claims Day, a similar distrust of

202
Winterton, J. and Winterton, R., Coal, Crisis, and Conflict: The 1984-85 Miners' Strike in Yorkshire
(Manchester university Press; 1989), 375.
203
For example, one quiz-style advertisement asked the largely female readership a series of rhetorical
questions, soliciting mainly ‘c’ answers: ‘Do this quiz to find out if you’re Labour or Conservative. Which
of these people is more likely to know what it’s like to do the family shopping? A: James Callaghan; B:
Your husband; C: Mrs Thatcher’.
204
Delaney, T., ‘The Labour Campaign’ in Political Communications: Campaign of 1979, 25-8.
145

advertising among Middle Way Conservatives, who believed the industry would cheapen
politics in the way many felt it had in America.
205
The Conservatives had, in 1970, been
the first party to utilize in their election campaign internal polling and commercial
marketing, but the scope was limited by the mindset of those charged with overseeing the
production of media. The posters and billboards which would later form the backbone of
the Thatcher campaign were automatically presumed by Central Office staff to
contravene election law, though, despite the fact paid television advertisements were
certainly prohibited, some original use was made of the publically funded Party Election
Broadcasts which had been neglected in the past. Compared, however, to the ease with
which the Thatcherites adapted to a new media environment and then pushed their
campaign to the limits of the strict legal framework, the Middle Way view of media’s
potential and proper role remained, for the ad men, frustratingly staid. Day presciently
suggested at the time that advertising would soon go beyond the campaign, becoming a
permanent feature of normal politics and a means of presenting ‘certain realities’.
206
The
Falklands War demonstrated the implications of this change, which Thatcherites believed
to be natural and democratic, but which many, including Middle Way Conservatives,
believed to be at best distasteful, and at worst dangerous.

205
Day, B., ‘Advertising in Politics’ in Political Communications: Campaign of 1979, 3-4. Day was Vice
Chairman of McCann-Ericson Advertising.
206
Ibid, 7. See Parkinson, C., ‘The Conservative Campaign—‘Just Plain Common Sense’’ in Political
Communications : Campaign of 1983, Chapter 5, for a explanation by Thatcher’s confidant of the Tories’
similarly disciplined 1983 campaign. The leader, claims Parkinson, was the ‘central element in the
campaign’ and its unifying force, despite the fact her divisiveness was by this point evident in polls and at
public appearances.
146

This is, of course, just one interpretation of the conclusion to the Thatcherite
consolidation and the emergence of its ascendency. Because so many institutions,
personalities and events are involved at the juncture of the consolidation and ascendency
periods, issuing hard and fast rules as to what constitutes realignment is not possible.
After all, if Powell had attained the leadership in 1965, or, in the event that Labour had
won the 1970 election, he had claimed victory in a contest held later that year, we would
have no trouble dating the beginning of the Powellite consolidation. But only a little
speculation should be enough to inform us that pinning down a date at which this process
could be deemed complete would be much trickier.
Of course, neither a Powellite ascendency nor a Powellite consolidation came to
pass, for events and institutions within the party combined to thwart his challenge during
its initial stages before externalization could occur. It is to the conjunctural setting of
Powell’s challenge that we now turn.
*
The Conservative Party was, during the period under review, much as it is today,
not only constitutionally acquiescent, but also tied through its ideological seedbed—
which is as developed, as varied, and as conspicuous in Conservative politics as Labour’s
‘Socialist’ seedbed is in the politics of that party—to the broader societal ideology.
Indeed, Tories have taken pride in this fact, celebrating their status not only as an
‘establishment party’, but as the party of the establishment. Yet Conservative ideological
entrepreneurs have disagreed over the manner in which what they regard as eminent
principles can or should be operationalized to meet the needs and conditions of the
147

present. Coupled with the Conservative seedbed’s depth and breadth and the ideological
engagement at the level of high politics in the parliamentary party, it is this ongoing
disagreement that led to the production and sale of conflicting Conservative ideologies
over the course of the post-war period. Pertaining as it did to the whole state system,
conflict was often multifaceted, protracted, and acrimonious, but the mode of ideological
contestation, characterized here as ‘secular Anglicanism’, meant it never became
fratricidal or terminal for one or another faction, as competition did in the more openly
doctrinal Labour Party.
The Middle Way and Thatcherite challenges were equally successful in displacing
the old order within the party and installing a new operational ideology as the
Conservatives’ official policy. In the case of the Middle Way, this took the form of an
electoral perspective reconciling the party to the political economy of the post-war
settlement, whose tenets are examined below, while for Thatcherites, the electoral
ideology which supplanted Middle Way Conservatism was externalized as a realigning
project which sought the overhaul of the existing state system. The particular historical
circumstances of the transitions meant the duration of stages and the length of time
between them differed, but the challenge, consolidation and ascendency were analytically
discernible for both transitions according to the strategic aims pursued, the levels of the
party involved in the process, and the presence of variables indicating likely success.
148

Chapter 3.

The Short and Unhappy Life of Consensus Politics
The first prerequisite for an ideological challenge to take shape, according to our
model, is crisis in the conjuncture, which in turn leads to disconnect between the politics
of power and the feelings of the electorate. Small differences between aggregate public
opinion and the electoral perspectives of the two major parties, as well as longstanding
disparities in enlightened and popular sentiments on self-contained cultural issues, mean
disagreement between the electorate and political class is a constant feature of
representative politics. Normal politics can accommodate, and are defined by, such
fluctuations over time. As one group of political scientists concluded, having conducted
time series analyses of British post-war elections,
even relatively modest changes in the economy and rather ordinary political events, especially
when they occur in combination, can rapidly and substantially alter the balance of public
support between long- established political parties. Although such effects are often ephemeral,
their strength and political significance at any particular time can be considerable...
207

In spite of the incumbent government’s prerogative in determining that the next election
is held at an opportune time, such volatility may lead to unexpected results, and,
therefore, shifts in government policy within the bounds of the existing consensus. This
process is connected to that of conjunctural change. Crises in the economy, changes in
the class structure and so forth are likely to produce electoral flux. But electoral shifts do
not necessarily imply transformations of the state system. With a trend towards

207
Mishler, W., et. al.,‘British Parties in the Balance: A Time-Series Analysis of Long-Term Trends in
Labour and Conservative Support’ in the British Journal of Political Science, (19.2: 1989), 215.
149

personality voting and the constant incorporation of new issues into the politics of a two-
party system, electoral volatility has long been a feature of British politics, despite often
being set against a backdrop of bipartisan commitment to a given political economy and
state system.
Yet when the disconnect widens across a range of topics and deepens in terms of
intensity of feeling at the various levels of the political system, opportunities for the
conversion of radical electoral ideologies into real transformations in the state system
arise. If the solidity of the post-war ‘consensus’ had prevented ideological entrepreneurs
on both the left and right from articulating such an ideology during the 1950s, by the time
the Conservatives entered opposition in 1964, sufficient flaws in the prevailing politics of
power had become apparent for Enoch Powell to attempt to do so.
This chapter demonstrates that, though the outward manifestations of conjunctural
crisis may have been more visible during the Thatcherite challenge, with such high
profile events as the IMF bailout and outbreaks of industrial strife indicating the
untenability of the state system as it had developed since the war, the prerequisite of
crisis for ideological challenges to take place had been roundly met by the early 1960s.
After defining the precepts of consensus politics and the electoral perspectives of
Labour’s right wing and Middle Way Conservatives, it is shown that by the time Powell
launched his challenge, the legitimacy or efficacy of most, if not all, of these tenets had
been called into question. As our model has it, the gulf between the politics of power and
the politics of support had widened to such a degree that the possibility of solutions from
within the post-war political order bridging it appeared increasingly remote.
150

The emergence of non-traditional forms of political-cultural activity, as well as
the increased electoral volatility (though not dealignment) that made for inconclusive
results at the polls, and, in the British context, a relatively regular turnover of
governments, indicate frustration with high politics and elite concord among the public.
Perhaps precisely because of their low levels of formal political engagement and
ideological awareness, the Conservative Party grassroots provide a valuable barometer of
discontent for the historian, and similarly fulfilled an educative function for the politician
and ideological entrepreneur. In Powell’s case, they also gave a glimpse of the
rhetorician’s power, as his early, often laboured, attempts at populism caught the crest of
several of waves of sentiment and indignation in the conference hall.
Having examined in detail this first prerequisite for transition, we turn to the
second prerequisite, along with the variable determining success in the challenge phase
over which, of the four our model specifies, challengers have least control. Both Powell
and Thatcher, it is argued, faced readily identifiable opponents whose operational
ideologies were associated with the post-war settlement and the conjunctural crisis that
dogged it. Indeed, that Harold Macmillan had introduced the term ‘Middle Way’ into
circulation at the elite level with his interwar book of the same name made his generation
of moderates even more conspicuous in their ideological commitments, and certainly
more steadfast in their moderate convictions, than Powell’s own contemporaries.
While both challenges involved ideologically cognizant opponents, the strength of
the old order was not identical. One of the ‘class of 1950’, Edward Heath, would, of
course, fail to suppress the Thatcherite challenge to the Middle Way and his own
151

leadership a decade later, but in 1965, Heath was able to ascend to the leadership, re-
operationlize a modernized Middle Way programme, and breathe some new life into the
moderates’ electoral perspective. Much of this hinged on the fact a good portion of the
public ire directed at Macmillan’s inner circle was class-based and ad hominem in nature,
thus deflecting attention from the political and economic failures of the post-war
settlement to which they subscribed. As a young professional of relatively humble
origins, Heath’s modernizing image and style counted for more in this setting than the
particulars of his operational ideology. By 1974-5, the Conservative leadership’s
authority in the party was severely diminished by consecutive election defeats and policy
failures. Moreover, Heath’s perceived U-turn, and in particular his dirigisme, left little
doubt of the direct ideological lineage that could be traced from his own government
back to the Middle Way pioneers. Aside from affability in place of Heath’s coldness,
along with the promise to establish better connections with colleagues and electorate, the
Heathmen putting themselves forward in the leadership contest of 1975 could offer
Members little but continuity and the stale politics of power to which they had become
accustomed.
Debate
The scholarly debate over the form and content of the post-war consensus, or
whether it existed at all, is a longstanding one. While it is beyond the scope of this
dissertation to offer a comprehensive appraisal of positions taken by political scientists—
who, looking at the larger structural picture, are generally more sympathetic to the idea of
consensus—and historians—who tend to problematize certain areas of supposed
152

agreement —we must define what is meant by consensus before discussing its initial
durability and subsequent disintegration.
208

In his path breaking study, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second
World War (1975), Paul Addison situated the roots of the post-war consensus in the mass
mobilization and collectivism spurred by the Second World War itself.
209
With the failure
of the Labour left to offer a radical and viable Socialist alternative in the years following
the slump, and the essentially orthodox liberal assumptions underpinning interwar
political economy having been discredited in the public mind for contributing to, and
impeding recovery from, the slump, conditions were ripe for the construction of a
peacetime political economy based on moderate collectivism in the provision of services
and the regulation of industry. Labour’s ‘New Jerusalem’, in the minds of moderates such
as Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and William Beveridge, would be free of the booms and
busts of the unbridled business cycle, and its beneficent state would soften the negative
consequences of the capitalist economy for society and the individual, while at the same
time leaving the subject’s traditional liberties intact.
210

Addison’s account of the rise of the post-war consensus in Britain tied in well with
the more general analytical work of liberal American social scientists such as Daniel Bell,
who famously proclaimed the End of Ideology in 1960, and Seymour Martin Lipset,
whose work on modernization and the political economy of high modernity led him to the

208
Seldon, A., ‘Consensus: a debate too long?’ in Parliamentary Affairs (47.4: 1994), 504.
209
See also Morgan, K.O., Labour in Power, (Oxford; 1985) Chapter 2, for further explication of this view
and evidence of collectivism in public opinion.
210
Barnett, C., The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities; 1945-1950 (Pan Macmillan; 1995). 44.
Beveridge, of course, a Liberal.
153

same conclusion that the big ideological questions had been answered.
211
Several
problems became apparent, however, with such assertions that laissez-faire liberalism and
Marxian Socialism had worn themselves out, and that in their place would emerge large-
scale mixed economies. Many of the modernization school’s leading lights were exactly
the type of left-leaning academicians whose responsibility it would be to formulate the
government programmes of the new progressive technocracies. Thus, charges of
ideological advocacy were just as easily levelled against them as they were against the
right-leaning intellectuals who, a generation later, celebrated the ‘end of history’.
212

What is more, when stated in universalistic terms, the path to modernization of
the authors’ imaginings obscured significant differences between the political economies
of developed countries and, in particular, their historical, social and cultural
underpinnings. Europe’s ‘social democratic compromise’ differed in content and
development from America’s ‘liberal consensus’, which, in turn, contrasted in many
respects with the ‘conservative Socialism’ that emerged in post-war Britain.
213
The
importance of institutional variables became apparent in the various ways countries
adapted their political structures to the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1960s and 1970s,
and changes in consumption patterns later in the century which appeared to undermine

211
Lipset, S.M., Political Man, (Doubleday; 1963), 407, and Lipset, S.M., ‘Some Social Requisites of
Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, in American Political Science Review
(53.1: Mar. 1959), 69-75.
212
Chomsky, N., ‘A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ in The New York Review of
Books (Feb. 23 1967), 22, 23-5.

213
Hartz, L., The Liberal Tradition in America (Mariner; [1955] 1991), 112.
154

the assumptions of growth-based progress illustrated the cultural blind spot of universal
accounts of high modernity.
Such concerns clearly influenced the work of scholars who felt the idea of
consensus was still useful in trying to make sense of developments in post-war political
economy (and, not least, the foundational changes which seemed to be taking place
during the 1980s), but who realized that meaningful analysis must narrow its focus to one
country. Anthony Seldon, Andrew Gamble and Denis Kavanagh explored changes and
continuities in British political economy, while Addison, in more recent work, has
examined the social history of the post-war period and the culture of deference that
allowed the ‘men in Whitehall’ to usher in from above sweeping reforms of the state
system without encountering major resistance from entrenched or mobilized interests.
214

Addison’s turn to social history has not only bolstered the convincingness of his
argument that the war was primarily responsible for the birth of the consensus
(notwithstanding the fact the liberal state system survived reasonably unscathed the mass
mobilization and spiritual cataclysm of the Great War), but has also helped him refine his
periodization of the post-war era, which now incorporates an intermediate period of
conjunctural instability between 1957 and 1974.
Nevertheless, a body of anti-consensualist scholarship has emerged in response
to the above work, which asserts that the closer one focuses on apparent agreement
between the parties, the murkier the reality becomes. Labour Party historian Ben Pimlott
argued that by imposing frameworks of agreement where little existed, historians have,

214
Addison, P., No Turning Back (Oxford; 2009), 43-67.
155

either inadvertently or by design, diverted attention from disagreements in policy and, in
turn, the causes of real political developments.
215
Consensus is not to be found, then,
among either party leaders or voters. Rather, suggests Pimlott, ‘The British post-war
consensus could be defined as the product of a consensus among historians about those
political ideas that should be regarded as important’.
216

The recent historiography of mid-century politics has developed Pimlott’s
sceptical line, challenging not only the ‘myth of consensus’, but also focusing on the
political and ideological functions of that myth. As E.H.H. Green notes, the idea of a
social democratic or Keynesian consensus is as important to those on the present-day left,
who advocate a return to a golden age of British politics, as it was to Powell and the
Thatcherites, who exhorted Conservatives to abandon what they considered a nefarious
settlement kowtowed to by a craven establishment within the Tory Party.
217
Others
working in the mould of the ‘new political history’, such as Lawrence Black, have
explored a range of ‘ideas, moments, identities, organizations and individuals that
intersect social and political change’ in the post-war era in order to expose the changing
boundaries of the political.
218
The widespread public apathy towards conventional
electoral and party politics may indeed have been symptomatic of consensualist torpor at

215
Pimlott, B., ‘The Myth of Consensus’ in The Making of Britain: Echoes of Greatness L.M. Smith (ed.)
(Macmillan; 1988), 140-1.
216
Quoted in Jeffrys, K., The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940-1945 (Manchester University
Press1995), 3.
217
Green, E.H.H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford; 2002), 237.
218
Black, L., Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954-70 (Palgrave
Macmillan; 2010), 2, 5.
156

the elite level, but it also, claims Black, points to the opening up of numerous alternative
sites of political-cultural contestation in the context of relative post-war affluence. The
fact these ‘apolitical’ forms of politics, which, as the seedbed approach to ideology
predicts, cannot easily be classified using ideological categories that make sense at the
elite level, emerged principally during the 1960s suggests a discontent among significant
sectors towards the traditional representative channels that was not present during the
1950s. Whether or not we choose to call the elite response to conjunctural events which
seemingly repelled sizable portions of the population the post-war ‘consensus’ depends
on the position from which we view, and the parameters which we apply to, that term.
Parameters and Perspectives
Qualifications or criticisms of specific tenets of the consensus model such as
those offered by Pimlott, Green, and Black are helpful in that they encourage us to re-
examine assumptions and to be more precise in our analyses of the post-war conjuncture.
But they do not fundamentally undermine the validity or usefulness of the concept of
consensus to any understanding the period. For example, recognizing that ideological
struggles took place outside the structures of high and party politics presents us with the
question of how, or whether, Powell mobilized resistance to that mainstream in a
superficially disaffected climate. Likewise, if we accept that ‘no protagonist in the debate
can be considered to be above the political affray’, or, in other words, that the idea of
consensus can never be ideologically neutral, we must ask how values load onto a given
definition of consensus used by challengers as they advance oppositional electoral
ideologies.
157

Most importantly, by recognizing that consensus is a purely historiographical
construct, we accept that the onus is on the historian to offer a working definition of the
concept at the outset. Since it is the role of crisis in bringing about intra-party ideological
transitions that we are interested in here, it is the breakdown of the high political
consensus, or concord among elites, that should be the focus of our analysis.
According to our model, agreement among elites is neither cheerful (the
Westminster system requires by default a theatricality of presentation and rhetorical
adversarialism) nor, moreover, philosophical. It might be more accurate to use either the
word ‘settlement’ or ‘compromise’ as a signifier for the elite politics of the post-war era,
since the noun ‘consensus’ implies a breadth and intensity of agreement which did not, in
fact, exist.
219
Our model allows for differences in rhetoric, policy emphasis, dissent on
the backbenches, and anti-consensualist noises from the leaders of both parties while in
opposition, and also for the fact individuals in both the Labour and Conservative Parties,
in drawing from different ideological seedbeds, often had genuinely divergent
understandings of the implications of the post-war settlement. Indeed, it was the ability of
moderate groups within the parties to see potential in the settlement for the furtherance of
Conservative or Socialist ideals, and to present the settlement in congenial terms to
supporters, which allowed them to maintain their dominant positions.
Some electoral perspectives were easier to convey and appeared more natural than
others. For example, Middle Way Conservatives had far fewer problems selling to their

219
Fraser, D., ‘The Post-war Consensus: A Debate Not Long Enough’ in Parliamentary Affairs, (53.2:
2002), 453.
158

grassroots and supporters in the constituencies the settlement’s Unionist component than
did Labour moderates, whose critics on the left included Scottish, Welsh and Irish
nationalists. But at the same time, they encountered difficulties reconciling the levels of
inflation that seemed built into Keynesian political economy with the feelings of their
middle class base.
Nonetheless, the balances of power within the parliamentary parties and, hence,
the content and stability of their electoral perspectives, favoured those committed to the
settlement throughout the 1950s. Proto-electoral ideologies challenging the prevailing
politics of power were developed even by moderates while out of office, but Her
Majesty’s Government remained Her Majesty’s Government. As Seldon put it, ‘Party
ideologies remained widely divergent in the post-war period, but when it came to giving
these ideologies voice when in office, the differences dried up’.
220

Many authors have posited their own schemes outlining the contents of the post-
war settlement, and much heat has been unnecessarily generated over whether the
consensus did or did not exist precisely because of differences in definitions. It stands to
reason, after all, that when the parameters of consensus are set in broad, constitutional
terms, one is unlikely to encounter foundational differences between establishment
parties whose ideological seedbeds and experiences of the practice of government bind
them to the rules of the game and the basic ideas that sustain them.
221
Meanwhile, on

220
Seldon, ‘Consensus’, 505.
221
As Kent Worcester does when bemoaning the fact ‘Labourites remain firmly attached to the rituals of
the old order: the House of Lords; public bodies filled with the “great and the Good”; a deferential
press; closed government’. See Worcester, K., ‘Ten Years of Thatcherism’ in World Policy Journal (6.2:
Spring 1989), 300-1.
159

details of policy it would be disconcerting not to find debate of some vibrancy. When we
restrict our definition, however, to agreement between dominant groups within the two
parties on the fundamentals of political economy—growth strategy, industrial relations,
enforcement of laws, representation of interests, and social services—there is surprising
overlap in the work of historians and political scientists. Table 3.1 outlines the key
elements of the post-war settlement, along with the electoral perspectives of the Labour
Party, controlled by ‘right-wingers’ or ‘revisionists’, and the Conservatives under Middle
Way leadership.
222

If the emergence of the post-war consensus was cumulative though punctuated,
the same can certainly be said of its demise. Furthermore, the respective tenets of the
consensus did not disintegrate in tandem, or to the same degree. This is unsurprising,
since agreement in certain policy areas was always much more robust than in others. The
factor most determining the strength of consensus in a given area was not, it appears, how
radical the transformation from the previous order was, but the extent to which
organizations, groups and classes adapted their interests to the new setting (or moulded it
to their interests) and subsequently acted to impede change.
223

The example of the Health Service is illustrative of this fact. The Labour
government, with its large parliamentary majority, placed the establishment of the Health

222
Foreign affairs are excluded from this scheme, despite the fact Atlanticism as a default foreign policy
was subscribed to by consensualist moderates and opposed by many of their domestic critics. While the
effects of foreign policy on domestic state systems and vice versa have been well documented by scholars
of international relations, the key dynamics determining foreign policy remain rooted in the international
balance of power, and are thus, for the most part, quite exogenous to the operationalization of ideologies in
domestic affairs. Arising largely from trends beyond the effects of central government, culture and value-
politics are also absent from the chart.
223
Pierson, P., ‘The New Politics of the Welfare State’, in World Politics (48.2: 1996), 151-3.
160

Service at the heart of its agenda from the time it took office in 1945, and pushed through
sweeping and radical legislation in order to bring into being what Attlee’s Health
Minister, Aneurin Bevan, believed amounted to ‘pure Socialism’. Wholesale
nationalization was opposed by the British Medical Association, but Bevan’s concession
that consultants could accept lucrative private work alongside dealing with NHS patients
was felt acceptable by the majority of its members, and the BMA became one of the
Health Service’s staunchest defenders.
224
As civil servants in Whitehall accommodated a
giant new spending department, and as many non-clinical staff made their careers in the
Health Service, bureaucratic interests soon coalesced around it.
Meanwhile, the NHS gained overwhelming approval from both the middle
classes, who felt aggrieved at the cost of care in private nursing homes, and the working
class, for whom the half-crown doctor’s appointment fee often proved a hardship before
the war. This support would remain unshakeable even throughout the Thatcherite
transformation, and the Health Service remains perhaps the only, and certainly the most
conspicuous, institution of the post-war consensus still intact.
225

Decline
In 1962, American political scientist Samuel Beer penned a startling article for
The Political Quarterly, suggesting that a future of ‘democratic one-party government’

224
Meldrum, H., ‘Open Letter to MPs from Chairman of Council of BMA’ in The Guardian (September 1,
2011). Ipsos MORI poll for BMA, Mar. 3, 2001, available at
http://www.bma.org.uk/healthcare_policy/nhs_white_paper/moripoll2011members.jsp, last accessed Nov.
25, 2011.
225
Ipsos MORI Fiftieth Anniversary Poll on NHS, available at http://www.ipsos-
mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/2048/NHS-50th-Anniversary-Poll.aspx, last accessed Nov.
23, 2011.
161

was possible and viable in Britain. Beer’s supposition that the Tories ‘will very probably
be in power for a long, long time to come’, turned out, of course, to be off the mark, but
his thesis, which examines ‘the historical forces tending towards this transformation’, is
important in illustrating the extent to which the survival of the post-war settlement, and
the Conservatives’ place within it, depended on continued economic growth.
226

Beer recites the familiar argument, in its highly simplified form, that the British
party system had been defined since the early nineteenth century by the socio-economic
structure, with the parties at each juncture representing the interests of either a rising
class or the established order. According to Beer, ‘Political formations have followed
social structure’.
227
At mid-century, the newly ascendant wealthy and confident
industrialists of the Midlands and North pinned their hopes for more equitable
parliamentary representation and free trade on the Liberal Party, just as leaders of the
recently enfranchised working class formed the Labour Party as their movement’s
political wing at the turn of the century. Following the Liberal schism over Irish Home
Rule in the 1880s, the Conservatives took Liberal men into their party and absorbed
Liberal measures into their programme, and thus came to represent propertied interests
generally against those of the urban working class. This system remained stable for the
first half of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s, class boundaries were becoming less
rigid and, as a result, politics were becoming more prosaic. Disagreements reflecting the

226
Beer, S., ‘Democratic One-Party Government for Britain’ in The Political Quarterly (32.2: 1961), 114.
227
Ibid., 123.
162

concerns of the various graduations within one socio-economic whole could be, claimed
Beer, contained within, and represented democratically by, one party.
Beer explained why it was the Tories who were better suited to this broad church
role. The supposed decline of class since the war had led, he claimed, to an instrumental
politics where ‘Issues between the parties have become marginal, statistical, quantitative;
questions of ‘more’ or ‘less’ rather than great moral conceptions in conflict’. The
Conservative Party’s successful reinvention after 1945 (and, one could add, their
electoral perspective, which seemed to have placated critics of the consensus among their
supporters) contrasted sharply with Labour’s fortunes during the same period. The
reason, believed Beer, was that adaption to the new politics required Labour to discard
the commitment to public ownership that had stood since 1918 at the heart of the party’s
ideology, and which was, even according to Attlee, fundamentally irreconcilable with the
profit motive. Gaitskell, Anthony Crosland and even Harold Wilson, in trying to alter, or
to revise to varying degrees, the place of nationalization in the party’s programme, were
attacking the sole source of their party’s unity—its particular understanding of Socialism.
The split between revisionists and Labour’s orthodox left was not only deep; it was also
terminal.

Policy Area Consensus Framework Labour Right’s Electoral Perspective Middle Way Electoral Perspective
Economic
Policy
Mixed economy with sizeable public
sector comprising mining, railways, power
generation, utilities, communications,
transport and several large manufacturing
concerns. Corporatist dirigisme through
National Economic Development Council
as growth slows in 1960s. Intervention to
generate growth in economically deprived
or disadvantaged regions. Ensuring a
strong pound through industrial exports.
In order for Britain to compete with other
countries and to keep a positive balance of
payments, rationalization of industrial output,
directed from the centre, was required.
Planning could also take into account the
needs of regions that suffered most during
the slump, and thus help to preserve their
unique industrial and cultural heritages.
Wholesale public ownership was no longer
synonymous with Socialism, but the
government should still keep the option of
further nationalization open.
A public sector providing minimum goods
and private companies producing
nonessentials retained room for enterprise
while guaranteeing the physical security of
the people. Socialist excesses (in road
haulage and steel nationalization) could be
trimmed at opportune junctures. Later,
Heath argued that the technological
revolution and the country’s joining the
EEC required the government to have a
detailed industrial policy. Tories, not being
beholden to the unions and ideological
commitment to nationalization, are better
able to manage new economy.
Industrial
Relations
Voluntarism for business leaders and
unrestricted bargaining for the unions in
1950s is superseded from 1966 by a series
of statutory prices and incomes policies.
Government should play, as Walter
Monckton told Tory backbenchers, the
‘role of mediator’, fostering a ‘spirit of
partnership in industry’.
228

Trade unions should be free to secure the
best deal possible for their members. The
Labour Party must facilitate negotiations that
might bring about a desirable outcome for
workers, and cooperate with union leaders at
the national level in the drafting of statutory
restraints if there is no alternative.
Free collective bargaining and voluntarism
consistent with Britain’s liberal constitution.
Turn to statutes a necessary evil to stem
inflation, which threatened to undermine
class differentials and middle class values,
without contributing to rises in
unemployment.
Employment Maintenance of a ‘high and stable level of
employment’, as set out in 1944
Employment White Paper, was the
primary goal of economic policy and
prioritized over price stability.
Comprehensive employment protection
legislation.
As the country’s largest and most productive
group, the primary concern of the working
class—employment—should be privileged
over the narrow sectional interests of the
salaried classes—most obviously inflation.
Bitter memories of the interwar years meant
the working classes would not allow any
government to renege on this promise.
Macmillan: ‘Even the social injustices
suffered by a minority in the post war
period-and they are very real - are more
tolerable than this major injustice’.
229

Table 3.1: Elements of the post-war settlement and the parties’ respective electoral perspectives.

228
Minutes of the 1922 Committee 1950-9, Conservative Party Archives, 1922/1/5, 81.
229
Quoted in Kavanagh, D, ‘The Heath Years: 1970-4’, in How Conservative Governments Fall: The Tory Party in Power Since 1783, A. Seldon, (Ed.)
(Fontana; 1995), 432.
163

Policy Area Consensus Framework Labour Right’s Electoral Perspective Middle Way Electoral Perspective
Services

Universal welfare provision and cradle to
grave social services, free at the point of
delivery.
Only a comprehensive social safety net and services
could eradicate the five ‘Giant Evils’ of squalor,
want, ignorance, disease and idleness.
The bulk of welfare spending is
directed towards deserving recipients.
Greater selectivity can be introduced
later if necessary.
Criminal
Justice
Reform of justice system with an
emphasis on rehabilitation. Measures put
forward by enlightened elite opinion
conflict with prevailing public sentiment.
Reform can help iron out the class biases that have
plagued the system in the past. Physical punishment
is a hangover from less civilized times, and its
abolition a sign of inevitable progress.
New studies show the inefficacy of
draconian punishments. Lighter and
discretionary sentencing, particularly
for youths, may prevent reoffending.
The most severe offenders can still
expect stiff penalties.
European
Integration
Cautiously observed progress of
European Coal and Steel Community in
1950s. Generally enthusiastic about
British role following 1957 Treaty of
Rome.
If Britain’s destiny is in Europe, it is up to the
Labour Party to ensure that the terms of entry and
its continued membership of the organization are
conducive to domestic Socialism.
Trade with Europe will encourage, if
not underpin, enterprise and a
competitive market economy at home,
while affording Britain a new
international role.
Imperial
Affairs
Recognition of the necessity of
decolonization, particularly after Suez
when the process accelerates. View to
creating Commonwealth of self-
governing nations.
Britain should embrace a new world order of
independent nation states and, beyond being a
diligent midwife in the birth of the new African and
Asian nations, accept its diminished role in world
affairs while cultivating its special relationship with
America.
Britain should take pride in its imperial
past and continue to help ready its
colonial subjects for the task of self-
government, its success in doing so
determining the pace of change.
Immigration Relaxed policy, becoming more
restrictive to meet public demands. Two-
tier system for Commonwealth citizens
and aliens.
As the party of working people, irrespective of their
origins, Labour is well-placed to manage integration
and, later, multiculturalism, to the advantage of all
communities.
Britain’s imperial past endows upon
her the duty of welcoming the subjects
or citizens of Commonwealth nations
to the mother country, irrespective of
colour.
Union Scepticism or outright hostility to
nationalist demands for devolution of
power from Westminster to the nations or
regions. Commitment to Ulster remaining
a full constituent nation of the United
Kingdom.
Nationalisms distract attention from the important
tasks of achieving economic growth across the
whole United Kingdom and raising living standards
for working people. A fair deal for Catholics in
Ulster could be achieved within the existing
constitutional arrangements.
The Conservative Party’s heritage of
staunch Unionism should continue, and
perhaps grow stronger as Britain sheds
its imperial pretensions and retreats to
its base as a European nation state.

Table 3.1, Continued.
164
165

That Wilson formed a fairly unified government two years after the publication of
Beer’s article suggests that the ‘ethical Socialism’ of the revisionists had considerably
greater operational potential and ideational appeal than Beer gave it credit for.
230
It could
also be argued that it was the very quality that drew support to the Tories and encouraged
in the party public loyalty to the leadership—its secular Anglicanism—that made it quite
unsuitable as a site for the pressure group competition Beer’s one party system required,
and that, conversely, it was Labour’s factiousness that allowed for a modicum of genuine
contestation. Also, the contentious Tory leadership ‘contest’ of the following year—in
which no great ideological precepts were at stake—would surely have made Beer
question the compatibility of intra-party Conservative politics with parliamentary
institutions.
Nonetheless, the fundamental problem with Beer’s article, which leads to his
erroneous conclusion regarding the future of Britain’s political formations, is its
mistaking flux in the class system brought about by economic success and Middle Way
distributive policies for a permanent softening of the class structure and genuine
dealignment. The welfare state had considerably reduced inequality of wealth and income
in Britain, but class was a multifaceted construct comprising, to list but its most salient
attributes: occupation; fringe benefits; schooling; lifestyle; region; and neighbourhood.
231

In contrast to Beer’s vision of a dealigned and, by implication, fluid, electorate, Butler’s
and Stokes’s psephological study of the 1964 general election painted a picture of a stable

230
Wicks, R., Political Ideas and Policy in the Labour Party 1983-92, Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
(University of Birmingham; 2010), 63-8.
231
Taylor, P., Sociology in Focus (Causeway Press; 2002), 25-3.
166

electorate divided largely along class lines, much in tune with Pimlott’s belief that,
‘Sandbagged in their electoral trenches, early post-war voters can be seen as the
anonymous infantry of two implacably opposed armies in an era of adversarial politics,
with the middle-way Liberals floundering in no man’s land’. What, if anything, could
have changed in the two years between this study and the publication of Beer’s article?
Winning the Workers
The British electorate during the 1950s and 1960s split roughly into occupational
segments of seventy percent working class and thirty percent middle class. The vast
majority of voters cast their ballots for either Labour or Conservative candidates. Class
cultural identities were strong; voting was considered by many an integral part of these
identities; and, as such, class was the most reliable indicator of a person’s party
politics.
232
In order to compete electorally, then, the Conservatives were required to
attract more working class votes than Labour had to attract those of the middle class. The
party managed to achieve this throughout the 1950s. Deference certainly played a part
here, but more important was the seeming success of the party’s accelerator-brake
strategy in bringing about economic growth and widespread affluence through
moderately redistributive policies.
233
Though shifting wealth more across generational

232
Evans, G., et. al., ‘Modelling Trends in the Class Party Relationship 1964-87’, working paper, Centre
for Research into Elections and Social Trends (1990).
233
Sociologist Richard Seymour, for example, reconciles Raphael Samuel’s model of ‘deference voting’
that seemed to describe well the phenomenon of ‘working-class Tories’ in the 1950s and 1960s with Bob
Jessop’s theory of positive Conservative value dissemination through visible institutions such as the
Church, the armed forces and the monarchy, by producing a dynamic account of political socialization in
which a new type of working class Tory, better suited in his beliefs to a post-paternalistic age, emerges
twenty or thirty years after the passing of the aristocratic order. Seymour, R., The Meaning of David
Cameron (Verso; 2011), Chapter 1. See also http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/10/working-class-tory-is-
something-to-be.html, last accessed December 29, 2011.
167

than class boundaries and falling short of bringing about Anthony Eden’s ‘property
owning democracy’, the Middle Way Conservatives had, during the 1950s, given the
working class a greater stake in the country’s economic life than ever before.
234

The embourgeoisement thesis—which holds, along the same lines as Beer, that
affluence generates among the working classes a shift towards values we associate with
the middle class, and, in some versions, emulation of their voting habits—has been
roundly criticized, and although the advent of consumerism and the boom in private
housing may have had such a dealigning effect around the edges—for example, two
worker families in the skilled manufacturing sector—the evidence for a more far-
reaching transformation is sketchy.
235
In fact, it seems the majority of working class
voters who supported the Conservatives in the 1950s did so with their noses firmly held,
accepting that the current system delivered and probably did so most effectively under
the Tories, but also retaining their class identities.
Churchill, Eden and especially Macmillan understood that while the party’s
middle class base could not be ignored, it was preserving the vital sliver of working class
support that had to be prioritized in this balancing act.
236
Confidence in the Conservatives
as the self-styled ‘natural party of government’ was surely reinforced among workers by
memories of the chaotic final months of Attlee’s second government in 1950-1, the
party’s adept use of the new and authoritative medium of television in the context of

234
Turner, J., ‘The Post-war Years: 1951-64’ in How Tory Governments Fall, 234-5.
235
Evans, B., ‘Thatcherism and the British People’ in Mass conservatism: the Conservatives and the public
since the 1880, S. Ball and I. Holliday (Eds.) (Frank Cass; 2002), 221.
236
Ibid., 265.
168

incumbency, and, last, but certainly not least, the fact the Conservatives had been true to
their word in leaving intact the state system which guaranteed to the working classes
increased job security and quality schools, hospitals and housing.
237
The middle class
base was secured through considerable perks. Salaries rose in real terms year on year,
allowing middle class couples to enter a booming property market before starting a
family, while inflation remained low, universal child benefits eased the financial burden
of raising children, and grants for those entering higher education were generous.
238

In 1961-2, this confident mood changed rapidly. As ‘slow growth’ set in, Britain’s
troubling economic indicators—particularly its lagging rates of productivity and the
structural weaknesses of its manufacturing sector—were first recognized, and then
pondered over, by the country’s economists, politicians and commentators. Believing
greater government intervention was needed to rectify shortcomings, and that ‘a little
dirigisme’ was compatible with Middle Way Conservatism, the Macmillan government
set up in 1962 the National Economic Development Council, which served as a platform
for consultations between government and the two sides of industry, and the National
Incomes Commission, which was charged with the responsibility of negotiating price and
wage caps as an antidote to rising rates of inflation. The NIC was largely ignored from
the outset by the unions, who were loath to co-operate with a Conservative government
even the best of times, while the NEDC, although a core component of Heath’s and

237
Cockerell, M., Live from Number Ten: Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television (Faber and Faber;
1988), 100-5.
238
Sandbrook, D., Never Had it So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles: 1956-63 (Little
Brown; 2005), Chapter 3.
169

Callaghan’s attempts at corporatist development in the 1970s, could not meet the high
expectations set of it, and was finally wound up in 1992 after years of neglect under the
Thatcher government.
In February 1963, the true state of Britain’s economy and the social effects of its
failings were vividly brought home to the public when the BBC aired Jack Ashley’s film
Waiting for Work, which documented the hardships faced by working class families in
Hartlepool as the town’s main employer, the shipbuilding industry, collapsed under
pressure from better-equipped foreign competitors. One in nine men in the town was out
of work, the administration of the benefits system was strained, and the effects of
unemployment were making themselves felt on community life.
239
Having stated that
moving to the more prosperous South East was out of the question, one unemployed
welder, referring specifically to the humiliation of the dole queue and looking directly at
the camera, said simply, ‘It’s about time somebody did something about it’.
The sorry situation offered as great an indictment of the Labour right wing’s
electoral perspective—that regional planning and munificent national assistance to those
falling victim to circumstance together alleviated the need for a full-scale command
economy—as it did that of Middle Way Tories—that the mixed economy was the only
way of guaranteeing stability in society and industry. After all, crisis in the conjuncture
affects all parties with an electoral perspective that seeks to sell the existing politics of
power to supporters whose operationalization of the party ideology leads to different
notions of the ideal state system.

239
Ashley, J., ‘Waiting for Work’, BBC Documentary (Feb. 14, 1963).
170

Yet it was the Tories who had governed the country for over a decade, and it was,
therefore, their record of competence that was reappraised by the working class voters
who had begrudgingly voted Conservative in the 1950s, and their electoral perspective
that began to be questioned by their middle class base. Contesting the 1964 election
under a new leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Tories placed considerable emphasis on
the government’s achievements in foreign affairs to deflect attention from the country’s
faltering economy, but enough of the former group abandoned the Conservatives to give
Labour a slim Commons majority, and Wilson a chance to rework the post-war
settlement.
The Squeezed Middle
While voters of both classes had an interest in growth, the distributive effects of
the growth strategy were equally important, and relative gains were keenly observed at
all levels of Britain’s rigidly stratified society. The growth of the 1950s had masked the
structural biases in the post-war economy towards large scale industry and its
organizational representatives such as the Confederation of British Industry on the one
hand, and organized labour on the other. In 1964, Edward Heath, as Trade and Industry
Secretary under Douglas-Home, shepherded through Parliament the Resale Prices Act,
which effectively abolished the practice of resale price maintenance as part of a
programme of modernization and rationalization in the retail sector. Although
manufacturers stipulating the minimum price at which retailers could sell their products
flew in the face of the free market mantras so often repeated by the small business
community, these arrangements allowed independent shopkeepers to compete with the
171

new self-service supermarkets, and were an example of how consensus style regulation
could work for what Thatcher called ‘our people’.
240
A bitter sense of betrayal thus
stayed with many small business owners throughout Heath’s tenure as Tory leader, which
was echoed on the Tory backbenches by a clear majority who personally opposed the
government’s reforms, but were unwilling to do so publically for as long as the
leadership remained electorally strong and politically credible.
241

Moreover, while salaries and wages had both risen during the 1950s, differentials
had decreased, largely due to the enhanced bargaining power of the unions in the
industrial relations framework of the post-war settlement.
242
That working class people
were in some cases taking home incomes comparable with those of the lower middle
class and seemed to be enjoying many of the fringe benefits previously associated with
non-manual occupations became glaringly apparent in the early 1960s, and jarred with
the middle classes.

The effect of inflation on middle class savings—the hallmark of
frugality and deferred gratification that many in the Conservative Party believed were the
‘virtues on which British civilization had been built and now depended’—added insult to
injury.
243
The link between price inflation on the one hand and public spending on
services that largely benefited the working classes, wage increases without commensurate

240
. Green, E.H.H., Thatcher (Hodder Arnold; 2004), 34. See Mike Wilson’s ‘Grassroots Conservatism:
Motions to the Party Conference’ in The British Right, R. King and N. Nugent (Eds.) (Saxon House; 1977)
for an exploration of class interest and grassroots ideology.
241
Minutes of the 1922 Committee 1950-9, Conservative Party Archives, 1922/1/5, 19, 171.
242
Addison, Turning, 223
243
Budgen, N., Letter to the Executive Committee of Wolverhampton South West Conservative
Association (17 July, 1974), Wolverhampton City Archives, LS 1042/3, 123.
172

rises in productivity, and the government’s overstaffing of the nationalized industries in
order to avoid unacceptable levels of unemployment on the other, was acerbically
emphasized by those on the right, including Powell, and, later, the Thatcherites. Although
not quite representing a dress rehearsal of the money supply debates of the 1970s and
1980s (neither Peter Thorneycroft, Chancellor of the Exchequer, nor Harold Macmillan
shared junior ministers Enoch Powell’s and Nigel Birch’s monetarist zeal) Green argues
that it was during this period that a picture of inflation as a social and cultural menace
was first thrust upon the administration by its middle class support base.
244

The Party Grassroots
Crisis on its own may convince challengers to formulate alternatives to the
existing state system in line with their own principles from their party’s ideological
seedbed, and anti-consensus feeling at the elite level may be self-reinforcing across
parties. But volatility, apathy and expressed discontent among the grassroots and
electorate can illustrate to the politician first, the depth of crisis, and second, the planks of
the existing settlement that are weakest.
Perhaps due to the Conservative Party’s large, deferential, and, in many cases,
loosely involved membership, ideological naïveté among the grassroots was more
prevalent than in the Labour Party. Debate recorded in constituency association minute
books suggests that arguments between activists at the lowest tiers were, at times, hard to
differentiate in their lack of sophistication from the attitudes of the general electorate.
Though valued for the presence they provided the party in local communities, and, to a

244
Green, Ideologies, 156-8.
173

lesser degree, for the financial contributions periodically solicited, a grassroots of this
type presented for the leadership in some respects the worst of both worlds: a substantial
group of somewhat ideologically aware supporters whose class antagonisms and
attachment to simplified clusters of core principles from the seedbed were moderated
neither by an interest in political feasibility, nor an appreciation of ideological
consistency. This did not prevent the grassroots, however, from offering ideological
entrepreneurs a window onto shifts in public opinion and, more broadly, the health of the
elite consensus by the reckoning of voters. Indeed, the closeness of the Tory grassroots to
the general politics of support may actually have been a benefit in this respect.
Powell’s attitude towards the grassroots had always been ambivalent. On the one
hand, he believed the voluntary party should restrict itself to its traditional functions of
fundraising, canvassing, and getting Conservative voters to the polls, while refraining
from criticizing elected Members and seeking to influence policy. But on the other, he
discovered an ability in the 1950s and early 1960s to address the grassroots in such a way
and on such a level that he could rouse emotions and hold Conferences in his hand, just
as his knowledge of procedures and the culture of Parliament allowed him to ‘play upon
the house of Commons like an instrument’.
245
Reflecting on Powell’s career in 1992, an
Observer editorial opined,
What usually distinguished him as a politician was less the intellectual force of his arguments than
the emotional intensity with which they were expressed and the extravagant theatricality of his
appearance and manner, the staring eyes and the unnaturally pale visage.
246

245
Powell, E., Interview, broadcast on Channel Four Television, July 1987, available at Wolverhampton
City Archives, VT-46.
246
‘Prophet in the Wilderness’ in The Observer (June 12, 1992).
174

Contact with the grassroots was educative for Powell not in that it gave him ideas that
could be used in his operationalization of a programme from core principles, but because
it indicated to him the level of discontent in the country, as well as hinted at the salience
of different issues and policy areas which, as Zaller and others have shown, fluctuates
unpredictably with conjunctural events. It also taught him how to orate to mass audiences
from an establishment position, and alerted him to the somewhat disconcerting potential
of populism. The development of Powellism from 1950 through to 1974 must be viewed
in the context of this learning curve.
The theme of the marginal middle classes, squeezed hopelessly between
organized capital and the unions, found resonance among ordinary members of the party
in the 1960s. Yet far from being a bastion of anti-consensus ideas across a range of policy
areas, during the 1950s the grassroots accepted, for the most part, the major tenets of the
post-war consensus that by 1947-8 dominated the thinking of the leadership. Green’s
determination to revise our understanding of British Conservatism’s ideological nature
leads him at times to overstate the magnitude and depth of anti-consensus sentiment at
the various levels of the party during the first two decades of the post-war period. His
limited examination of the actual views expressed by grassroots members allows him to
extrapolate conveniently from choice phrases—such as Macmillan’s ‘we used to sit [at
Conference] listening to these extraordinary speeches urging us to birch or hang them all
and other such strange things..[while] quietly nodding our heads’—the notion that the
party’s grassroots were completely out of line with the parliamentary party and
175

leadership.
247
He depicts a grassroots baying for the blood first of Churchill, then of
Eden, and after that of Macmillan, as each consecutively failed to roll back the Socialist
reforms that had transformed the state system between 1945 and 1951. ‘Through the
1950s’, claims Green, ‘ the Conservative grass roots voiced almost constant hostility to
nationalization, State intervention, the welfare state, high personal taxation, trade unions
and inflation’.
248

The reality is more complex. If, by the time Thatcher ascended to the leadership
of the party in 1975, the grassroots were restive on all of the above issues, this was not
the case in the 1950s. The cycle of inflation, tax rises, direct and corporatist economic
intervention, and loosening of the money supply had, by the 1970s, become a regular
feature of the politics of power under both parties, and its swings and societal effects
were becoming ever more pronounced. Furthermore, after Heath’s perceived 1972 U-
Turn and abandonment of the free market platform on which he had led the Tories to
victory in 1970, those among the grassroots and higher echelons who had once accepted a
gradualist approach to moulding a Conservative political economy came now to regard it
as tantamount to acquiescence in ‘ratchet-effect Socialism’.
249
The grassroots members of
the late 1940s and 1950s were much more inclined to give their leaders the benefit of the
doubt.

247
Green, Ideologies, 212.
248
Green, Thatcher, 36.
249
Thatcher, M., Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, Jan. 11, 1996, Press Releases, Thatcher Archive. Argues
Thatcher: ‘It was this fundamental weakness at the heart of Conservatism which ensured that even
Conservative politicians regarded themselves as destined merely to manage a steady shift to some kind of
Socialist state. This was what — under Keith’s tuition — we came to call the “ratchet effect”’
176

On industrial relations, members commended the ‘statesmanlike approach’ of
union leaders , believing, in stark contrast to the open hostility evinced during the
Thatcher years, that cooperation between a Conservative government and organized
labour enjoying various privileges and immunities was not only possible, but also
desirable.
250
Linking the issue of trade union representation with the Middle Way’s self-
consciously ‘one nation’ project, and, of course, the Conservatives’ claim to being a
national party, wedded in their core principles to those of the nation at large, Mr. L.
Summer expressed on behalf of Maldon Division Conservative Association at the 1954
Annual Conference ‘grave concern’ at the relegation of trade union matters to lower
down the agenda than at previous conferences. He thus moved that future conferences
should restore the original order of proceedings, ‘thus making [the Conservatives’]
position as the only party representative of all classes of the community abundantly
clear’.
In the fifteen years following Sir Walter Smithers’ attack on Middle Way
industrial policy as ‘pink Socialism’ at the 1947 Conference, the Conservative grassroots
accepted the dual responsibilities of management and labour, conceded the ‘necessity for
wholehearted co-operation between Trade Unions, Management and the Government’,
and, by a overwhelming majority, ‘urge[d] the Government to introduce legislation based
upon the principles of the Industrial Charter’.
251
As British membership of the Common
Market demanded the streamlining of industry, so a ‘far-sighted approach to

250
Annual Conference Report, Conservative Party Archive, [NUA/2/1/61] microform slide14.22.
251
Annual Conference Report, CPA, [NUA/2/1/55 and NUA/2/1/71] microform slides 2.94 and 27.42.
177

Conservative industrial policy [which] could build a bridge across the chasm which is
now allowed to divide the two sides of industry’ was needed more than ever, claimed one
Conference representative in 1960.
Furthermore, far from expressing ‘hostility to nationalization [and] State
intervention’ with any consistency, the party’s grassroots during the 1950s aped the
positions of the leadership. Conference resolved to condemn the Attlee government’s
nationalization of iron and steel, and applauded the Conservatives’ denationalization of
that industry, along with road haulage. But calls from the floor to press further with the
programme of selling state assets were uncommon, and went largely ignored by the
platform and other representatives. The key to ‘saving Britain from the ultimate fate of
becoming a Socialist state’ along Eastern European lines was ensuring no further
industries were added to government rolls and making sure that those already under
public ownership, which accounted for around forty percent of output, were run
efficiently.
252

The problem, it seems, was not so much that the Socialists were investing public
money in industry, but that they were investing in the wrong sectors, and Conservative
grassroots speakers were not bashful in making suggestions as to where money needed to
be spent. Richard Law MP, son of Andrew Bonar Law and free market recalcitrant,
excoriated Conference for its persistent enthusiasm to ‘pass some or other resolution
which recommends pouring another twenty or thirty millions of public money down the

252
Annual Conference Report, CPA, [NUA/2/1/61] microform slide 6.11.
178

sink’.
253
The grassroots, like their leaders, Law believed, were afraid of the electoral
ramifications of reducing expenditure. But, he argued,
If the electorate has a choice between two Parties, one of which says that the earth is flat, that you
can get on your bicycle and free-wheel for ever and ever, and another Party which says, “the earth
is flattish, but not quite flat. You may have to touch the pedals sometimes, but not very often”, I
think the electorate will go for the Party that goes the whole hog.
254

Law’s broadside attests to the fact opponents of consensus politics—what Thatcherites
would later term ‘me too-ism’—did exist, and at times were vocal, outside of the
leadership’s inner circle during the 1950s. But it also demonstrates the extent to which
such opponents had come to believe that ‘Pressure for public expenditure always comes
from the rank and file, from backbench Members of Parliament [and] from bodies such as
this Conference’.
Law was not only referring to the grassroots’ penchant for government
intervention in, and expenditure on, industry. He also felt that the free market principles
of the interwar years were being betrayed by Conservatives who saw opportunities to
have their own sectional interests serviced by a beneficent state. The expansion of the
higher education sector and state funding of grants for those attending universities were
highly popular with the Conservative grassroots, as were raises in state pensions and
benefits paid to the war disabled, and the modernization, or ‘humanization’, of the Health
Service and expansion of care for the elderly. In a speech delivered to the party faithful,
Powell boasted that expenditure on health had risen in real terms year upon year under
the Conservatives, and outlined his plans for the further rationalization of services and

253
Annual Conference Report, CPA, [NUA/2/1/64] microform slide 11.31.
254
Ibid., 11.23.
179

communication between local authorities and clinical staff so as to better meet the needs
of patients, and the integration of myriad other welfare functions into the package of
services provided at the modern hospital.
255
Rather than seeking to repeal Labour’s
reforms of the public services, the Tory grassroots, on the whole, believed the structure to
be sound, but that a Conservative government would be better able to find and effect
economies, to encourage voluntary action as a complement to the work of top down
organizations, and to deliver services tailored to individual needs.
The only set of issues on which the grassroots seemed to be collectively and
regularly out of step with the leadership related to crime and punishment. The leadership
knew discussion of such issues at Conference had the potential to embarrass the party or
bring unwanted attention to its internal divisions, and thus tried to, first, keep them off the
Conference agenda and, second, make sure the motions proposed were innocuous and
unlikely to stir up dissent if it was deemed necessary for a vote to take place after they
were debated. In 1961, for example, Bow Group member, social liberal and future
Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, petitioned to have the reference to
capital punishment—which, much to the chagrin of Tory activists, had been abolished by
the Conservative government as the sentence for most murders—struck from a proposed
resolution, which itself was the least extreme of thirty motions handed to the Chairman at
Conference that year.
256

255
Annual Conference Report, CPA, [NUA/2/1/70] microform slide 26.11.
256
Annual Conference Handbook, CPA, NUA2/4/34.
180

But such behind the scenes management amounted only to damage limitation. In a
succession of speeches to a ‘massive audience’ at the 1958 Conference, representatives
indicted ‘the smooth, smug and sloppy sentimentalists who contribute very largely to the
wave of crime we are experiencing at the present time’ that had led to a society
‘dominated by young toughs who violate our girls and frighten or savagely attack the
older people’ and in which ‘our wives and mothers are [too] frightened to open the
door’
257
. Spirited defences of birching and flogging for ‘brutes’, ‘thugs’ and ‘louts’
constituted highly visible displays of the kind of reactionary knockabout prevalent in the
constituency associations, yet for all the embarrassment they caused for men such as R.A.
Butler and Iain Macleod, many outside of the party, especially working class Labour
voters, regarded them as commonsensical.
Unlike economic issues, which required a modicum of technical knowledge to
understand and a great deal more expertise in order to formulate policies from core
principles, crime and punishment was an area where the lines between right and wrong
could be clearly demarcated and which relied, despite the leadership’s attempts to justify
rehabilitative measures by citing psychological research, on gut feelings. On the former,
the deferential mode of party membership held up, but on the latter, grassroots members
felt qualified to challenge their leaders. Butler’s attempts to convince the floor that
reforms had not created ‘semi-holiday camps’ in place of maximum security prisons, as
one representative had claimed, and that ‘the sanctions at the disposal of the Courts are
adequate at the present time’, elicited cries of “No!” from incensed representatives, who

257
Annual Conference Report, CPA, [NUA/2/1/66] microform slide 22.76.
181

did not feel it impudent to raise such a spectacle, as they no doubt would have if the
Home Secretary had been offering an explanation of, for example, police pay policies.
258

The fact dissent was so rare in the party has meant historians such as Green, who
seek to draw out ideological differences, focus on these sensationalist episodes, but, in
reality, their effects were largely self-limiting. Unlike dissent on services, which could
easily have spilled over into intolerance of planning in the economy in general, ‘issues of
conscience’ were regarded by Conference representatives as ‘non-Party Political’.
259
In
allowing for unwhipped divisions in the Commons on these issues, the party leadership
was skilful in preventing the passions they generated from overflowing into the realm of
‘serious’ politics.
As Berrington showed in his study of Conservative rebellions and revolts in the
Commons during the late 1950s, those casting ‘right wing’ votes on one issue or set of
issues were not necessarily those doing the same on other votes.
260
For example, several
Suez rebels were to be found in the division lobbies with liberal colleagues voting for the
abolition of hanging, while many of those ‘social liberals’ would also be the most
vociferous critics of Macmillan’s turn to dirigisme. As such, a ‘right tendency’, far less a
cohesive faction, which could have provoked the grassroots into calling for the radical
dismantling of the post-war settlement and converted such calls into a basis for

258
Ibid., 25.
259
Annual Conference Minutes, CPA, [NUA/2/1/65] microform slide 21.22.
260
Berrington, J., ‘Rebellions and Revolts in the Conservative Party’ in The Political Quarterly (32.4:
1961), 476-91.
182

challenging the Middle Way leadership for control of the party institution, did not emerge
in Parliament during this period.
Recognizing the bidirectional relationship between stability in the state and
electoral systems on the one hand, and consensualist and moderate policies on the other,
one representative at the 1952 Annual Conference argued that ‘with the country so evenly
politically divided at the present time, any other policy would inevitably result in utter
and complete disintegration’.
261
Unlike Labour’s ideologues, who had split their party
‘from the bottom up’, thus leaving it unelectable, ‘those who call for a more full-blooded
Conservative policy must fully appreciate the position and show forbearance’.
By the early 1960s, however, with economic problems becoming too widespread
to ignore and an haemorrhaging of Conservative support at local and by-elections,
impatience mounted among the grassroots. Motions delivered to the platform at
conferences during the Conservatives’ final administrations under Macmillan and
Douglas-Home were more likely to be contentious, more likely to require a vote, and,
although the procedure was still rare, more likely to be amended after debate.
Unanimously approved resolutions—in the 1950s de rigueur—were becoming less
common, and debate was becoming less temperate.
Discontent among the grassroots reflected crisis in the conjuncture, but the form
that discontent took, and its significance for intra-party politics, depended on the ideas
that were fed to the grassroots by opponents of consensus politics on the right, and on the
ability of the radicals to harness pressures from below to advance their cause. Several

261
Annual Conference Minutes, CPA, [NUA/2/1/65] microform slide 22.59.
183

ideas echoed by the grassroots would have made Powell balk. One representative, for
example, commended the establishment of the National Incomes Commission, stating
that its successful operation could ‘avoid us being priced out of an ever-increasingly
competitive world market...do justice to the real victims of inflation [the middle class and
pensioners]...and give employers and employees a sense of certainty to enable them to
plan for the future’, while another implied inflation could be curbed by large tax cuts.
Many schemes proposed by the grassroots could appear out of touch with reality,
or require social and cultural engineering on a scale few in the respective leaderships of
either party would have deemed possible or desirable. Mr. J. Sayer of Wellingborough,
for example, explained to Conference that ‘fair shares of bricks and mortar, a laundry line
apiece’ could be the antidote to Socialism. On its own, this coincided with the Tory
vision of a ‘property owning democracy’ that would persist, from its conception under
Eden, through the Thatcher years and down to the present day. But the proposal that
government force local authorities to ‘hand over their houses’ and encourage the
‘laggards’ and ‘human sheep’ who ‘lap up Socialist lies’ that their future lay not in social
housing rented from local councils, but with the thirty percent of people who owned or
were buying houses, exuded the kind of authoritarian overtones that marred discussions
of crime and punishment.
262

Yet the fact such issues as inflation—perceived even by some consensualists as
the Achilles heel of the post-war political economy—had literally taken centre stage at
conferences must have given heart to right-wingers. While generous provision of services

262
Annual Conference Minutes, [NUA/2/1/60] microform slide 19.104.
184

was still popular, ‘the simple truth that one cannot spend more than one earns’ became
the new dictum of grassroots members who bemoaned the ‘Rake’s Progress’ of higher
wages without commensurate rises in rates of productivity.
263
This was not the only item
which elicited some of the themes of Powellism. Food and housing subsidies came under
attack for the inefficiency they allegedly perpetuated and their lack of targeting, and the
government was encouraged to rein in the expenditure of local authorities, which were
still able to set property rates.
Perhaps most encouragingly for Powell, a new realism seemed to be taking hold
among the grassroots on imperial affairs, mirroring to an extent Powell’s abandonment of
old myths and construction of a new, territorially limited, nationalism. During a debate at
the 1948 Annual Conference, Anthony Nutting MP, who would, eight years later, resign
his Foreign Office post in protest at Eden’s Suez policy, gave a solid defence of Britain’s
imperial history, and complained that ‘there is no will in the Socialist Party to develop the
British Empire’.
264
Others called for the welding together of the empire as ‘one economic
whole’ under a ‘permanent body responsible for the development of a common
economic , defence and social policy’, with a division of labour between the home
farmer, who concentrated on milk , fresh meat and vegetables, and the colonial farmer,
who provided tea, sugar, wool and grain.
265
During the mid-1950s, the Commonwealth
was seen more instrumentally as an important element of Britain’s international trade

263
Annual Conference Minutes, [NUA/2/1/71] microform slide 27.43.
264
Annual Conference Minutes, [NUA/2/1/56] microform slide 4.15.
265
Ibid., 4.14.
185

strategy, but grandiose expressions of ‘faith in the British Commonwealth of Nations as
the greatest unit in the world for peace and stability’ were still to be heard on occasion.
266

By the early 1960s, however, even the most enthusiastic imperialists could only
recommend staying in Africa for long enough to fulfil ‘the moral obligation to preserve
basic law and order’ and the encouragement of Commonwealth trade through voluntary
planning agreements.
267
‘Of course, one recognises completely how the diversity of the
Commonwealth precludes any strong, formalised links’, conceded one representative,
who challenged the government ‘to be honest about it’ if they had completely abandoned
the idea of economic partnership with Commonwealth nations. The chairman of the
Conservative Commonwealth Council, who spoke directly after, welcomed ‘this new
child of Malaysia into the world’, and looked forward to the transition from ‘Old Empire
to New Commonwealth in South-East Asia’.
268

The Seventies
The anti-consensual shift in grassroots opinions was complete by the mid-1960s.
It has been claimed that Conference representatives held to a default right-wing position
through the 1970s, but it would be more accurate to describe them as class warriors rather
than ideologues. While they became more willing to advocate for cuts in spending and
streamlining and selectivity in service provision, more inclined to government
withdrawal from the negotiating apparatuses of industrial relations, and less likely to vote

266
Annual Conference Minutes, [NUA/2/1/65] microform slide. 17.116
267
Annual Conference Minutes, [NUA/2/1/69] microform slide 25.17-18.
268
Ibid., 19.
186

unanimously in favour of woolly, collectivist-sounding resolutions, the grassroots at
Conference unashamedly called on the Heath government to pander to middle class
interests. Speeches were made and motions were submitted arguing for the end of means
testing in the issuance of university grants, help for nascent and ailing small businesses,
and a mass programme of road building (as opposed to investment in railways, which
were the preferred, and, in some cases, the only, mode of transport for working class
people).
269

Thatcher paid greater lip service to the feelings of the grassroots than had Powell,
referring to them collectively (thus eschewing differences of opinion within the lower
echelons that still existed into the 1980s) as ‘my kind of party’, and stating that
‘politicians must work at every problem from the grassroots’.
270
Nevertheless, most
members remained politically apathetic and organizationally idle throughout the
Thatcherite challenge, with many constituency associations declining to submit motions
to Conference, presumably due either to lack of concern or the anticipation that the
leadership would continue to prohibit meaningful debate if attempts were made to ignite
it. Thatcher’s identification with the grassroots, it seems, was part of the more general
construction of an outsider image, rather than a genuine attempt to bring party members
into the policy debate, or to leverage their support in the intra-party power struggle.
Indeed, several Conservatives complained about the marginalization and neglect of the
voluntary party throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the loss of over half of the party’s

269
Wilson, M., ‘Grassroots Conservatism: Motions to the Party Conference’ in British Right, 74.
270
Ibid., 85-92.
187

membership during this period suggests that it was either unable to attract new members
to offset the attrition of its elderly base, or that disgruntled members left its ranks.
271

The economic uncertainties of the 1960s continued into the seventies and seemed
intractable as policies billed as innovative by the Wilson and then Heath governments
were unable to stabilize prices or, as time went on, to induce growth in the economy even
in the context of high inflation. By any measure—lost elections, repeal or abandonment
of election promises, failure to achieve desired policy outcomes—the Heath government
appeared a failure to those on the right, at best lacking conviction and being the
handmaiden of stagflation, and at worst, traitorous.
272

While historians have tried to rehabilitate Heath’s reputation and have questioned
the extent to which free market ideas figured in the 1970 manifesto and at the now
infamous gathering at Selsdon Park where it was drafted, the myth of betrayal was useful
for the Thatcherites.
273
The fact Powell’s challenge from the right occurred at a time
when Heath’s technocratic approach had not been tested in government, thus meaning
Heath could credibly placate those pushing for a more liberal economic platform (who
might otherwise have turned to Powell) with anti-consensualist rhetoric while in

271
Whiteley, P., et. al., True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership (Claredon; 1994), 24.
Grassroots fragmentation and loss of membership is likely to occur as a result of one tendency displacing
another at the parliamentary level. There are, unfortunately, two difficulties one encounters in measuring
this change. First, following the disappointing recruitment drives of the 1950s, Conservative Central Office
ceased to collect records of membership, while local Conservative associations often over- or under-
estimated figures depending on the financial implications. The detailed archival research of Whitely et. al.
is useful in demonstrating a fall in membership during the Thatcherite ascendency, but it also shows that
this was part of an ongoing trend which started in the late-1950s.
272
Kavanagh, D., Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus (Oxford, 1987) 46.
273
Campbell, J., Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer’s Daughter (Vintage; 2002), 189-94.
188

opposition, may have acted as a disadvantage for the challenger. That Heath’s core
principles were those of his Middle Way predecessors and, in government, could only be
operationalized in a similar way, was evident by the mid-1970s. His third election defeat
in October 1974 added to the failings of the Middle Way programme to fulfil its most
central purpose—the maintenance of stable growth and employment—the collapse of the
personal legitimacy of its most visible representative.
If the Conservative Party became more openly divided under Heath’s leadership
after 1970, conjunctural crisis produced similar murmurings in the Labour Party.
274

Right-wingers still dominated the Parliamentary Labour Party in the early 1970s, but the
left had come to control key posts in the constituency parties and the unions, which could
no longer be relied upon to provide support for the establishment with their bloc votes at
Conference. Left-wingers at the grassroots level, angry that they were shut out of
decision-making on policy despite doing most of the organizing and campaigning,
formed the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in 1973, which pushed for the
mandatory reselection of candidates by CLPs in the hope right-wingers could either be
ousted or forced to conform to the wishes of the direct membership, which tended to be
further to the left than union-affiliated members.
275

274
Fry, G.K., The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution: An Interpretation of British Politics 1975-1990
(Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), 16-19.
275
Koelble, T.A., ‘Party Structures and Democracy: Michels, McKenzie, and Duverger Revisited via the
Examples of the West German Green Party and the British Social Democratic Party’ in Comparative
Political Studies (22.2: 1989), 205.

189

Had militancy remained confined to the constituencies and certain unions, the
right’s strategy of proposing in opposition a package of concessions to the unions, which,
once in office, was largely accomplished through the Social Contract legislation, might
have helped quell dissent. However, by 1974, the movement had made such ground that
leaders of the party organization, many of whom were on the soft left, such as NEC
Chairman Ron Hayward, appeared unable, or unwilling, to police the party and expel
revolutionary factions that were officially proscribed. For high ranking right-wingers
such a Reginald Prentice—who would defect in 1977 to the Tories, knowing he would
otherwise have been deselected by his CLP—the left posed not only an existential threat
to the Labour Party and movement, but also to democracy. For Prentice, the nature of the
left had changed in the 1960s. The Christian pacifists and Oxford intellectuals had been
replaced by a generation of Spartists for whom debate was a distraction from disciplined
organization and who sought the complete overthrow of the old political-economic order,
albeit largely within the bounds of legality. Meanwhile the death of Anthony Crosland in
1977, just months after the IMF bailout, generated such malaise among moderates that
many simply gave up, becoming reconciled to a left takeover.
Whatever the true intentions of the left, the authority of the Labour leadership
during the second Wilson and Callaghan administrations was harmed as a result of this
internal division, the economic crisis wore on and the Thatcherites felt increasingly
confident to call for strong medicine for a sick polity.
As important, but overlooked in the literature, is the effect this polarization had on
Middle Way backbenchers who might otherwise have been opposed to Thatcherism, but
190

who accepted it, sometimes enthusiastically, as the lesser evil or the only viable political
option in the wake of the Heath government’s collapse. Patrick Cormack MP, who
would, in the 2000s, attempt to draw political capital from his record of rebellion during
the Thatcherite ascendency and who was categorized by Philip Norton as a Heathman
and solid ‘wet’, penned in 1978 an alarmist screed dedicated to Thatcher. In it, he
worried aloud that while nobody ‘is suggesting that Mr Callaghan has any more personal
wish to hand over to totalitarianism than had Clement Attlee, [what] is in question is
whether he has the strength to resist the power of the Left’.
276
The prospect of electoral
defeat and another parliament with Callaghan as prime minister, possibly with an
increased majority, convinced Tory moderates such as Cormack to throw in their lot with
Thatcher in 1975 and to support the leadership through to the election in 1979. Had they
known the implications of Thatcherism as a realigning project, particularly regarding the
unions and its hostility to Europe, many might have acted differently, but, in the context
of 1970s intra- and inter-party politics, the number to do so would probably have been
smaller than those disavowing Thatcherism after the fact.
Super-Whig and the Paternalists: Identifying the Enemy
When political theorists talk about legitimacy crises, they are most often referring
to some collapse of faith in the institutions of the state and the right of government to
exercise a given set of powers.
277
The legitimacy crisis confronting Middle Way
Conservative originated in the wider conjunctural crisis of the early 1960s, but it was

276
Cormack, P., Right Turn: Eight Men Who Changed Their Minds (Cooper; 1978), x-xi.
277
Heywood, A., Political Theory: An Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan; 1999), 258-9.
191

neither national nor even party institutions that were threatened. Rather, the collapse of
faith in the ideas of the Middle Way destabilized the hold on power enjoyed by
individuals most closely associated with its ideological programme.
Extended periods of government chip away at the legitimacy of both ideas and
personalities. Failure of policies to live up to expectations and the harmful effects of their
unintended consequences engender a sense of weariness and a lack of enthusiasm
towards new solutions associated with an ideology. To use the Popperian analogy, an
entrenched ideological paradigm ceases to be constructive. Thirteen years of government
generated among even the most committed Middle Way Conservatives of a younger
generation, such as Heath, Macleod, Reggie Maudling and Anthony Barber, the sense
that business as usual was no longer tenable.
278

Crises have a more immediate effect, but their consequences are broadly similar
to those of the passing of time and occupation of office. Suez brought down Eden’s
premiership and destroyed any pretence of Britain’s ability to play a great power role in
the post-war world, but its fallout was limited ideologically. The Conservatives’ blip in
electoral popularity proved to be temporary, owing to the public’s lack of attention to
foreign policy during times of peace; Macmillan stood in the wings, ready to assume
office as seamlessly as possible; short, flexible and low-key leadership consultations
resulted in his ‘emergence’ over Butler; and, most important, the government had almost
four years before an election needed to be called, in which time they could rebuild

278
Batson, L., Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling (This History Press; 2004), 185.
192

confidence in what remained the same Middle Way measures and the same Middle Way
men.
The Profumo Affair six years later was quite different. The War Secretary’s
dalliances might alone have generated enough prurient interest to force his resignation
and to damage the credibility of his colleagues in government, but charges of criminality,
Cold War intrigue and the breaking of class taboos combined to bring the government,
already mired in the country’s economic woes and with a prime minister struggling on
despite health problems, to verge of collapse.
279
While Macmillan and the inner circle
suffered during the crisis, it provided, if anything, a boost for Powell’s reputation. As the
‘sea green incorruptible’ of the administration, whose own life experiences were as far
removed as possible from the antics at the Cliveden Estate, Powell’s opinion was sought
after by the media. His eventual statement that the prime minister had acted in good faith,
which had been betrayed by his friend Jack Profumo, helped to diffuse calls for
Macmillan to resign, but also cast his own exalted personal morality against that of his
social superiors and paternalistic enemies within the Conservative Party.
280

The challengers’ job of identifying a dominant political faction or high-ranking
individuals with an operational ideology losing credibility was as easy for Powell in 1963
as it would be for Thatcher. Both Heath and Powell were members of the ‘class of
1950’—the large intake of new Conservative MPs elected at that year’s general election,
who differed markedly in terms of background and political approach from their older

279
Profumo, D., Bringing Down the House (2007), Chapter 4.
280
Roth, A., Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, (MacDonald & Co.; 1970), 345-8.
193

colleagues—and from the outset their views and temperaments seemed to clash.
281
Yet
Powell’s initial disdain was for the grandees of the Middle Way tendency, not least for
Macmillan himself, who Powell branded ‘Super-Whig’: a play on Fleet Street’s
somewhat adulatory nickname ‘Super-Mac’—which was coined by Evening Standard
cartoonist Vicky at the height of Macmillan’s popularity—and an allusion to what Powell
saw as the prime minister’s fickle convictions.
282

The post-war Middle Way challenge was led by intellectuals such as Butler at the
Research Department, whose publications bore his name and gave uncompromising
insights into the ideological leanings of the future Chancellor and Home Secretary, and
Quintin Hogg, who, in his 1945 and 1947 books The Left was Never Right and The Case
for Conservatism, put forward Conservative arguments for pragmatic collectivism and
also aped the style of rigorous argument normally associated with the literary and
academic left in Britain .
283
But the first and most explicit of the post-war Middle Way
Conservatives to champion ‘a new synthesis of Capitalist and Socialist theory’ as a
means of preserving ‘our heritage of political, intellectual and cultural freedom while, at
the same time, opening up the way to higher standards of social welfare and economic

281
Though their backgrounds were not as dissimilar, on the whole, from those of the interwar generation as
they were those of the ‘class of 1959’. See Green, E.H.H., ‘Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective’ in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (6: 1999), 17-18.
282
Shepherd, R., Enoch Powell: A Biography (Pimlico; 1997), 297.
283
Fair, J.D., ‘British Conservatism in the Twentieth Century: An Emerging Ideological Tradition’ in
Albion (19.4: Winter 1987), 554-5.
194

security’, was Harold Macmillan.
284
Writing during the depths of the slump as Member
of Parliament for the industrial constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, where unemployment
stood at almost thirty percent, Macmillan argued in The Middle Way: A Study of the
Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society (1938) for
‘a wide extension of social enterprise and control’. This, he believed, could alleviate
poverty, achieve the ‘highest possible degree of permanent employment’, and prevent
speculation and the ‘uneconomic waste and redundancy’ that were inevitable
consequences of a system of ‘unrestrained competition’. The alternatives were ‘political
discipline and dictatorship’ on the one hand, or social disruption and squalor on the other.
Macmillan was clear to situate his interpretation of a pragmatic Conservatism
within the Disraelian tradition, citing examples such as the successive Victorian Factory
Acts to demonstrate the inexorable trend towards enlightened government intervention in
the economy and emphasizing the ‘duty’ society as a collective entity owed to less
fortunate subjects. But his belief, as he openly expressed it, that Middle Way
Conservatism was a product of its time, developed to meet the challenges of the ‘changed
conditions of today’, was operationally necessary and intellectually honest. The core aim
of pragmatic Conservatism is social stability, which is achieved through mass deference
granted in exchange for paternalistic distribution. It thus encompasses three values—
stability, deference and paternalism—which are inherently situational and dependent on a
society’s broader moral and material framework. Macmillan was, in effect, stating in The

284
Macmillan, H.M., The Middle Way: A Study of the Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free
and Democratic Society, reproduced in Political Ideologies, M. Festenstein and M. Kenny (Eds.) (Oxford;
2005), 197-8.
195

Middle Way that corporations in capitalist economies had grown so large that the only
way to rationalize production and ensure stability was for the government to manage the
economy centrally, integrate institutionally the operations of private firms and the state,
and provide for social needs through economies of scale that charities and mutual
societies were unable to harness.
285
It would take a decade, and the intercession of the
Second World War, before the state system outlined in The Middle Way assumed the
status of orthodoxy within the Conservative Party, but, once it had done, there was little
doubt over its provenance. It is for this reason Powell and Thatcher came to loathe Super-
Whig, the paternalists, and, as their protégés and ideological progenies, Heath and the
Heathmen, on such a personal level.
The way in which the image of aristocratic, ‘grouse moor’ Edwardians Macmillan
and Douglas-Home was ridiculed by satirists and cast in the public mind against that of
the sprightly Wilson, then in his late forties, proved to be a handicap for the Tories in a
new television age where image mattered and deference to the establishment was waning.
Lord Hailsham’s tongue-in-cheek comment, made on a government-organized visit to
deprived areas of the North East, that whole streets in Durham needed be pulled down
seemed emblematic of the detachment of leading Tory figures from the feelings of
ordinary people and from the realities of everyday life. The caricatures were, of course,
misleading. Wilson’s pipe, pints of ale, tales of hardship growing up in Yorkshire,
regional accent and HP Sauce were carefully utilized props in much the same way cigars
and cognac had been for Churchill, while Macmillan’s mind and ruthless political

285
Ibid., 198-9.
196

instincts remained in the 1960s as sharp as they had been in the twenties.
286
But the
themes of modernity and progress were pressed heavily and successfully by Labour, and
aside from a few quips drawing attention to the reverse class prejudice inherent in much
of the Labour campaign, Douglas-Home proved incapable of rebutting charges that the
Tories, and hence the Middle Way, were ‘out of step with modern Britain’.
287

*
The core economic planks of the post-war settlement were unlikely to survive
unchanged in the context of Britain’s relative economic decline, and, given the rising
costs of providing benefits and services, neither could its social elements unless the
economic trend was reversed. But development strategies built around the mixed
economy were stymied by a parliamentary framework that severely restricted the
politically possible. Even in 1951, when the financial requirements of rearmament forced
the Labour government to introduce nominal prescription charges for dental treatment
and spectacles, many, especially on the Bevanite left, believed that the welfare state, if
not the post-war consensus they regarded as synonymous with it, was slowly being
hollowed out.
288
By the early 1960s, governments were presented with a choice: either
shed the responsibilities taken on by the wartime and post-war governments and shift
attention back to those functions compatible with a liberal constitution, or radically

286
‘Heath versus Wilson: The Dual’, broadcast on BBC Four Television, June 2011.
287
Thorpe, D.R., Alec Douglas-Home (Sinclair-Stevenson; 1996), 344.
288
Foot, M., Aneurin Bevan: A Biography: Volume 2: 1945-1960 (Faber and Faber; [1973] 2009), 300-1.
197

reform the state system (rather than simply government’s aims) so as to allow for the
formal representation of corporate interests, as was the case in Europe.
Labour’s right-wing worried that a lurch to the left, even in opposition, would
alienate voters who, despite Britain’s declining economic position in relative terms, had,
according to Macmillan’s oft-cited 1957 boast, ‘never had it so good’. Hopes on the left
that they could wrench the party’s policy away from consensualism by gaining control of
its National Executive Committee and the executives of Constituency Labour Parties
(who selected delegates to attend Conference) were dashed when leader Hugh Gaitskell
simply ignored Conference’s supposedly binding decision in 1960 that the party should
adopt a position of support for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Dissent was thus
quietened for much of the 1960s.
289

The Conservatives’ long spell in government and three successive election
victories convinced Middle Way consensualists that their electoral perspective was
adequate and that the claim made to the wider electorate that they were better stewards of
the mixed economy than Labour had been vindicated. Voices on the right seemed more to
bemoan the materialism of Macmillan’s ‘state of prosperity’ and its softening effect on
the character of the people than to present free-market alternatives to it. Mesmerized by
the economic successes achieved on the continent, the Conservatives, under Edward
Heath, embarked on a restatement of Middle Way principles and the re-operationalization
of those principles into a package of modernization that mirrored Labour’s turn to soft
corporatism.

289
Pugh, M., Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party (Random House; 2011), 302-4.
198

The radical alternatives to this new instalment of consensus politics were, of
course, variants of full-fledged Socialism or neoliberalism, and there had, since 1945,
been figures in both parties who wanted to move past the settlement in one or the other
direction. Yet the culture of compromise, conformity and national solidarity forged
during the war and carried into the 1950s militated against the articulation of such
alternatives by establishment figures, who might have lent them respectability.
290
Powell
was a consistent supporter of the public funding and administration of healthcare, but his
full-frontal attack on the universal principle in the provision of housing was received
coolly by many in both parties, as was the argument he put forward in a 1954 pamphlet,
co-authored with Iain Macleod, that in order for the benefits system to remain
comprehensive and compassionate, selectivity must be introduced and funds targeted to
the most needy.
291
However, the introduction of statutory controls of prices and incomes
by the Labour government in 1966—itself a consequence of the seeming failures of the
growth and industrial relations strategies of previous Labour and Conservative
governments—presented Powell with an opportunity to oppose publicly a widely
unpopular policy associated with consensualists in both parties: to attack, as it were, the
soft underbelly of the Keynesian state system.
The post-war consensus had not yet died; far from it. It would have to be killed
during the Thatcherite ascendency. But the battle over the Conservatives’ acquiescence in
it was about to begin in earnest.

290
Addison, Turning, Chapter 124-6.
291
Powell, J.E. and Macleod, I., The Social Services: Needs and Means (Conservative Political Centre;
1954) passim.
199

Chapter 4.

Enoch Powell, Powellism, and the First Challenge
As our model predicts, at the point of conjunctural crisis—shown above as the
discrediting of significant elements of consensus politics under the weight of social and
economic pressure—an ideological challenge is articulated in one of the parties. In this
case, Powellism challenged the hegemony of Middle Way Conservatism, which, through
its electoral perspective, had successfully reconciled the Tory Party with the existing
settlement from 1947-8 onwards. This chapter explores the reasons for Powell’s failure to
secure the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1965, and for his subsequent lack of
success in promoting an operational ideology grounded in the core principle of
parliamentary sovereignty.
Owing to the complex interrelationships between the four factors which
determine, according to our model, the likelihood of success for ideological entrepreneurs
in the challenge phase of a transition, the thematic structure of this chapter incorporates
each variable to a lesser or greater extent into its various sections. For example, the
discussion of changes to the rules of leadership selection pertains mostly to the
institutional setting of the party, but the strength Powell’s Middle Way opposition
had to capitalize on these changes, as well as the question of whether they were suited to
Powell’s low-key campaign and the particular precepts of his ideology, are raised in the
discussion.
200

After a biographical sketch of Enoch Powell’s life and career, the development of
new leadership selection rules following the disastrous 1963 contest is discussed, along
with their possible implications for the candidates who would compete under them in
1965. Next, it is argued that Powellism as an operational ideology comprising stridently
market liberal policies was not only Conservative in that it comported with traditions
from the party’s past that had been dormant since the interwar years, but was also
consistent with deeper principles drawn from the Conservative ideological seedbed.
However, the manner in which Powell presented his case, and his unwillingness to form
alliances or utilize oppositional groups within the party to his advantage, contributed to
Powellism’s failure in its early stages. Here, a comparison with the tactics of the
Thatcherites during the early stages of their challenge is illustrative. A discussion of
Heath’s new regime in opposition and Powell’s subordinate place within it concludes the
chapter.
Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell was born on June 16, 1912, in Stechford, Birmingham, the
son of schoolteachers Albert and Ellen Powell. Both sides of Powell’s family were of
recent Welsh extraction, his paternal great-grandfather having migrated to the Black
Country during its rapid industrial expansion. Powell’s father was liberal by temperament
and probably also in his politics, though Chamberlainite radical Liberalism held little
appeal for him. Powell’s mother, who would dote on her only child and with whom he
201

formed an exceptionally close bond up until her death in May, 1953, was a committed
Tory.
292

With encouragement from his mother to read classics, Powell won prestigious
scholarships to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and later to Trinity College,
Cambridge, whence he would launch an academic career culminating in his appointment
at the age of twenty-five to a professorship of ancient Greek at Sydney University in
1937. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Powell enlisted as an Australian at the
rank of private, hoping to be posted to the front. Instead, he served out the war in
intelligence positions, first in North Africa, and, from 1943, as an officer at South East
Asia Command, then based in Delhi.
Powell returned home in 1945, believing it his duty to do all he could to retain the
empire for which he believed the war had been fought. Concurring with Burke that ‘the
keys to India’ could be found in the despatch box of the House of Commons, Powell set
his sights on a political career, calling Conservative Central Office in 1946 and joining
future sparring partner Iain Macleod at the Research Department. As his biographer
Robert Shepherd points out, a call to Transport House rather than CCO would have made
more sense for a politically ambitious young man in the immediate post-war years, but
there were no questions for Powell where his political loyalties lay. He was to recall,
when speaking at the Cambridge Union in 1990:
I was born a Tory. Define: a Tory is a person who regards authority as immanent in institutions. I
had always been, as far back as I could remember in my existence, a respecter of institutions, a
respecter of monarchy, a respecter of the deposit of history, a respecter of everything in which
authority was capable of being embodied, and that must surely be what the Conservative Party

292
Shepherd, R., Enoch Powell: A Biography (Pimlico; 1997), 43.
202

was about, the Conservative Party as the party of the maintenance of acknowledged prescriptive
authority.
293

Following his by-election defeat at Normanton (a safe Labour seat) in 1947,
Powell successfully contested the marginal new constituency of Wolverhampton South
West at the election of 1950, and was elected to Parliament as a member of a Tory
Opposition priming itself for government, which it eventually attained in 1951, as
Labour’s majority of five made governing untenable.
Powell proved an able orator in the House, but, as a new MP expected to do his
utmost to curry favour with the whips, his lone rebellion against the Royal Titles Bill of
1953 baffled colleagues. His joining with the rebels over the proposed withdrawal of
British troops from the Suez Canal Zone cemented in the minds of many his image as an
imperialist hardliner, but this was upended spectacularly as, during the Suez Crisis itself,
he continued quietly at his work as recently appointed junior Minister for Housing, only
to declare the following year that the concept of a British Commonwealth was not only a
sham, but positively dangerous.
In 1957, Powell was offered the position of Financial Secretary to the Treasury,
which he accepted immediately, having coveted an economic portfolio since entering
Parliament. However, he was to resign dramatically, along with Chancellor Peter
Thorneycroft and second in command at the Treasury, Nigel Birch, over the seemingly
trifling issue of an additional £50m of government expenditure for the 1959 budget
compared with that of 1958. Powell and Birch argued, while Thorneycroft sympathized
with their concerns, that without economic growth, the additional expenditure would

293
Powell, E., ‘Theory and Practice’ in Politics and Philosophy, G.M.K. Hunt (Ed.) (Cambridge; 1990), 2.
203

result in the government being forced to print money, which, in turn, would drive up
prices and diminish savings. Their arguments anticipated not only the economics of
monetarism, which would be integral to the early Thatcherite project, but also the social
arguments that would accompany calls for the prioritization of inflation over services and
employment during the same period.
294
Faced with the choice between rigid fiscal
discipline and the reflation of the economy in time for the 1959 general election,
Macmillan, ever the tactician, chose the latter.
Powell returned to the backbenches where he made, in July, 1959, what was
thought by many on both sides of the House to be one of the most moving speeches of his
generation on the Hola Camp killings.
295
Invited back into government as Minister of
Health in 1960, Powell set himself to the task of micromanaging the most complex
bureaucracy in the country and lobbying the Treasury on behalf of the largest direct
spending department in Whitehall. His successes were notable on such issues as the
fluorination of water, reform of the treatment of mental illness, and raising awareness of
the dangers of smoking, but he again courted controversy with his handling of the
thalidomide case and the seeming relish with which he implemented Chancellor Selwyn
Lloyd’s ‘pay pause’ for public sector workers such as nurses in his own department.
296

When Macmillan stepped down in 1963, the ill-feeling surrounding Sir Alec
Douglas-Home’s ‘emergence’ as his successor convinced Powell he could not accept a

294
Green, E.H.H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford; 2002), 168-71.
295
Roth, A., Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, (MacDonald & Co.; 1970), 185.
296
Ibid., 254-5.
204

post in the latter’s Cabinet and at the same time retain his honour. In 1965, following the
general election defeat of the previous year, Powell stood against Edward Heath and
Reginald Maudling for the leadership of the Conservative Party, only to receive fifteen
votes to Heath’s 150 and Maudling’s 133.
Heath appointed Powell as his Shadow Defence Secretary, bringing him into the
inner sanctum once more of Conservative frontbench politics. Powell’s forays into off-
portfolio subjects—most worryingly at the time, the government’s prices and incomes
policy, which he ridiculed as nonsense, and Wilson’s support for American policy in
Indochina—irritated Heath.
297
But it was not until after his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’
speech on April 20, 1968, that Heath felt it correct and/or politic to sack Powell from the
Shadow Cabinet.
Heath’s reaction to what became Powell’s career-defining moment was swift and
decisive. At the behest of senior Tory colleagues who threatened to resign if Powell was
not sacked, Powell was cast into what his opponents hoped would be the political
wilderness. But as he was to tell an interviewer in 1973, ‘wildernesses are good places,
I’ve noticed, for voices. They tend to get a reverberation which is often lost in the more
crowded places’. Powell embarrassed Heath further at Eastbourne later in 1968, when he
called for ‘a programme of large-scale voluntary but organized, financed and subsidized
repatriation and re-emigration’, stating that he was merely reiterating official
Conservative policy.
298
Joining forces with those on Labour’s hard left who believed the

297
Heffer, S., Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (Orion, London; 1998), 458.
298
Powell, E., ‘Speech at Eastbourne, November 16, 1968’ in Freedom and Reality, J. Wood (Ed.)
(Arlington House; 1969), 53.
205

proposals did not go far enough, he helped scupper a moderate bill for Lords reform in
1969.
As Philip Norton shows in his cataloguing of Commons divisions, the 1970-4
parliament saw the most dissent among Conservative backbenchers since the war, with
most MPs rebelling against the government on a whipped vote at least once.
299
Powell led
the way, moving against his party, or abstaining, on a majority of divisions.

His most contentious act for Conservatives, and one which would see his exit
from Parliament and from the party, came in 1974. Powell declared that he was unable to
stand on the Conservative platform at the election that year, given Heath’s U-turn on a
prices and incomes policy. Certain things were central to the party manifesto and could
not be overlooked or discarded. With public trust in the administration rightly
diminished, he stated he would not seek to defend his Wolverhampton seat. Yet just days
before the election in February, Powell returned to urge his supporters around the country
to vote Labour, since it was the only party promising in its manifesto to offer the
electorate a referendum on continued British membership of the European Economic
Community. Labour defeated the Heath government, and Powell claimed to have exacted
revenge on his rival—an atonement for the fact, as he believed it to be, that his
Birmingham speech had gifted Heath his surprise victory in 1970.
300
His approval rating

299
Norton, P., Conservative Dissidents: Dissent Within the Parliamentary Conservative Party, 1970-74
(Temple-Smith; 1978), 11-15.
300
Heffer, Roman, 662.
206

among Conservative voters dropped in one poll to 32%; it had been twice as high just
months earlier.
301

Powell was returned as an Ulster Unionist for South Down at the second 1974
election. His belief that Ulster was like any other part of the United Kingdom and should,
therefore, be governed directly from Westminster, remained a bone of contention
between himself and his new party colleagues, who favoured a return of government to
Stormont and, hence, Protestant supremacy. He did, nonetheless, remain in Parliament
until 1987 (when the redrawing of constituency boundaries created a Nationalist majority
in South Down), acting as a rock of support and, in equal measure, a thorn in the side, of
the Thatcher government.
Having spent the last years of his life campaigning for British withdrawal from
what became the European Union and writing, as a textual critic, a revisionist rendering
of the Gospel of Matthew, Powell died, aged 85, on February 8, 1998.
The Leadership
At 10am on October 8, 1963, Harold Macmillan convened a meeting of the
Cabinet at 10 Downing Street. Macmillan told his ministers that he would be in
Blackpool that Saturday evening to deliver the customary leader’s speech to assembled
constituency association representatives at the annual Conservative Conference. In fact,
the prime minister was severely ill, under sedation, and was scheduled to be taken to
hospital that night for a prostate operation. Powell and his colleagues arrived in
Blackpool to news that Macmillan would not be speaking after all, which set the hall

301
Schoen, D.E., Enoch Powell and the Powellites (Palgrave Macmillan; 1978), 277.
207

alive with rumours and speculation about his future, which had been the subject of chatter
for months.
Macmillan’s heir apparent, R.A. Butler, who had been appointed the first
Conservative ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ in history earlier that year, assumed the role of
acting leader, moving into the hotel suite reserved for the prime minister. However,
weeks before, Macmillan had assembled his closest aides, including the journalist
Randolph Churchill, at a dinner at Chequers to discuss who would succeed him as leader
of the party and, hence, prime minister. The Churchill and Macmillan families held
personal animus towards Butler because of his earlier support for Appeasement, and it
was decided that Lord Hailsham (later Quintin Hogg) should enter any future leadership
selection process as a ‘stop Butler’ candidate.
Butler and his supporters regrouped following the initial shock of Macmillan’s
announced absence, and he was chosen narrowly by the Cabinet to deliver the leader’s
speech on Saturday. A high-minded parliamentarian, Butler could not move the party
representatives in the way Hailsham’s emotional appeals could. As it turned out, however
well Butler had performed, his speech would be overshadowed by the announcement,
read by the President of the National Union, the Earl of Home, that Macmillan was
stepping down as Tory leader and that, owing to the fact the Conservative Party had ‘no
set process’ through which leaders were selected, the ‘customary processes of
consultation’ would be carried on.
302
That evening, Hailsham disclaimed his peerage and

302
Ramsden, D., The Winds of Change: From Macmillan to Heath, 1957-75 (Longman; 1996), 345.
208

declared his intention to put his name forward as a candidate for the leadership, much to
the elation of the grassroots.
Powell’s relationship with Butler had been cool since he left the Research
Department, with Butler having come to regard Powell as an eccentric and a ‘natural
resigner’.
303
Yet Powell had various reasons for supporting Butler in his quest to become
leader. First, Butler was a ‘serious’ candidate. His fastidious nature undergirded his skill
as a parliamentarian and legislator, and as an intellectual he was genuinely interested in
the ideas men such as Powell and Macleod could bring to a Conservative government.
Powell also believed Butler’s claim was bolstered by his seniority in government and the
loyalty so many of his colleagues owed to him.
Third, Hailsham’s renunciation of his peerage would have incensed Powell.
Hailsham was not the first to have done so: twenty minutes after the passage of the 1963
Peerage Act, which Powell had passionately opposed, Viscount Stansgate, later Tony
Benn, disclaimed his baronetcy. But as a great respecter of the prescriptive principle,
Hailsham’s, and also Home’s, actions in this regard—although necessary in order for
them to sit in the House of Commons—would no doubt have struck Powell as abdication
of the most solemn duty.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Powell was a modernizer and a meritocrat,
despite holding very different views from other such men. It must be emphasized that
ideology was almost absent from the 1963 leadership selection. The struggle was fought
between impeccably Middle Way Conservatives over personal resentments, leadership

303
Roth, Powell, 214.
209

style, and, of course, ambition. Powell saw in Hailsham and Home the stale past of the
Tory Party and, with the election of either one, a missed opportunity to reconnect with
voters.
304
The leadership served as the public face of the party, and the power to appoint
members of the government had been used gratuitously by Macmillan to surround
himself not only with the usual Etonian establishment figures, but also with many of his
own relatives. The meritocrats’ frustration with ‘the magic circle’ and its sense of
entitlement was captured most notably in Macleod’s caustic 1965 Spectator review of
Randolph Churchill’s book recounting, from the perspective of Macmillan’s people, the
events surrounding the 1963 leadership debacle.
305

Macmillan had made Butler’s men fight in front of the party faithful—an arena in
which they were most uncomfortable. Powell rued what he saw as the selection of the
leader being taken out of the rightful hands of MPs and ceded to the emotional grassroots.
But he also admired Macmillan for the cold and calculated manner in which he had
outmanoeuvred the party’s brightest young men.
306
It taught him a lesson he was to
attempt to put into practice as his own challenge ran aground.
In reality, Hailsham was probably never a contender in Macmillan’s eyes, having
made too many enemies in his long career. Instead, the Earl of Home, later Sir Alec
Douglas-Home, was forwarded as a ‘compromise’ candidate, and five orthodox party
men were given the task of consulting with the Cabinet, backbenchers, peers and the

304
Ibid., 223.
305
Thorpe, D.R., ‘Magic Circle (act. 1963)’ in the Oxford DRB (2011), available at
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/97/97004.html, last accessed Feb 8, 2012).
306
Roth, Powell, 241.
210

party in the country. Home, they reported to Macmillan, had a majority of support among
all four groups. Powell called an emergency meeting at his house at 33, South Eaton
Place, on the night of October 17. Those present implored Butler not to serve under
Home, hoping this would prevent his forming a viable government. Powell and Macleod
telephoned Home to tell him they could not serve in any government led by him, with
Powell stating that if he were to do so he would ‘have to turn the mirrors round’.
307

Much to their disappointment, Butler magnanimously accepted Home’s offer of the job
of Foreign Secretary next morning, and Douglas-Home kissed hands hours later.
D.R. Thorpe’s recent biography of Macmillan casts doubt on Macleod’s
insinuation that the selection process in 1963 was hijacked by the inner circle of the
Conservative establishment. According to Thorpe, Home enjoyed widespread support
among the Cabinet, constituencies, peers and MPs.
308
Macmillan’s premiership had
rounded off nicely the re-emergence of the aristocracy to the forefront of Conservative
politics following the interlude of the 1920s and 1930s, and noblesse oblige was once
again the creed of the governing class. Peregrine Worsthorne suggests,
had not Iain Macleod, out of selfish pique, written his deceitfully misleading ‘magic circle’ article
in The Spectator suggesting the opposite, and Enoch Powell, out of perversity, been equally
regardless of the truth, the Tories under Sir Alec Douglas Home, as he had by then become, could
well have gone on to win the next general election.
309

Given that the Tories under Douglas-Home lost the general election in 1964, while
Macleod did not pen his article until 1965, to blame the latter for the defeat seems, if not

307
Heffer, Roman, 329.
308
Thorpe, D.R., Supermac (Pimlico; 2010), 559-71.
309
Worsthorne, P., ‘Cleared on all Counts’ in The Spectator (October, 2010).
211

in bad faith, then at least to rest on Worshthorne’s faulty recollection. Nevertheless, the
controversy surrounding the 1963 consultations led to a growing sense within the party
that formal rules governing the selection of the leader should be set out. It should also be
noted that, as undemocratic as they may seem to present day readers, the consultations of
1963 were the most inclusive and thorough in Conservative history. Just six years earlier,
when Macmillan ‘emerged’, only Cabinet ministers had been canvassed, along with two
members of the 1922 committee and one official in the professional party.
310

One complaint about the process was that it was left to those canvassing the
views of the party to use their discretion in asking questions about potential leadership
candidates. It appears that in 1963, Chief Whip Martin Redmayne interpreted a reply
from a member that he or she would not be averse to a Home premiership as an
affirmative vote for the Earl, and different questions, probably leading, were asked to
different people.
311
Redmayne also suggested more weight had been afforded the views
of MPs, and that any consultative process could not involve the simple counting of votes
from across the party. Journalists became aware of other quirks in the process, but the
theme of the discussion was clear: when selection is conducted behind closed doors, the
lack of transparency inevitably leads to inconsistencies, rumours, accusations, and
counter-accusations. With a competitive field of candidates, boundaries had to be laid out
between the included and the excluded, and procedures had to be followed in order to
ensure the legitimacy of the process and, in turn, of the leader winning through.

310
McSweeney, D., ‘Changing the Rules Changed the Game: Selecting Conservative Party Leaders’
in Party Politics (5.4: 1999), 471-83.
311
Roth, Powell, 235.
212

Following the 1964 general election defeat, Douglas-Home insisted there be
rules in place for the selection of Conservative leaders before he resigned from the post.
The new rules restricted voting for the leadership to Conservative MPs. Any Member
could be nominated, and, to secure a victory on the first ballot, he or she would have to
win an absolute majority of all Conservative MPs, plus fifteen percent of the MPs
actually casting votes. If no candidate could attain these votes, a second ballot would be
opened up to other eligible candidates and, from then, the candidate with the lowest
number of votes would be eliminated from the contest, and further rounds would be held
until one candidate won a majority of all Members.
312

These rules stayed in place, with minor alterations, from the leadership election
of 1965 through to the reforms of the late 1990s. Kevin McSweeney has examined their
impact over that period on the selection of leaders, and below is presented a table
summarizing his findings and comparing the elective to the pre-1965 consultative
process:

Table 4.1: Effects of institutional change on leadership selection outcomes.

312
Denham, A., ‘From Grey Suits to Grass Roots: Choosing Conservative Leaders’ in British Politics (4.2:
2009), 227.
Consultative System (c.1922-63) Elective System (1965-97)
Accountability of
candidates to party.
Low. Higher.
Selectorate. Cabinet, Conservative MPs,
Conservative peers, and
Constituency associations. In
reality, ‘magic circle’.
Conservative MPs.
Candidate experience as
bar for entry.
One of great offices of state; over
twenty years of parliamentary
experience.
Ministerial experience.
Younger candidates more
common.
Primary selection criteria. Personality; connections; ad hoc
issue stances.
Ideology; faction.
213

It should first be noted that the prestige and power of the leadership was not
reined in as a result of the 1963 episode. Instead, it was assumed that, if the leader was to
possess such sway over intra-party affairs, he or she should be accountable to MPs. This
accountability was to be enhanced further as the rules were reviewed and changed again
in 1974-5 by a committee chaired by Douglas-Home (in what was termed by some
‘Alec’s revenge’ over Heath) to allow for MPs to initiate a challenge to a sitting leader
who chooses not to resign voluntarily. In keeping with the idea of delineating authority,
the amorphous party that was consulted at various levels and to various extents under the
previous arrangements was narrowed down to current Conservative MPs, with each
Member casting a ballot of equal weight to those of their colleagues.
Under the consultative system, only those sounded out by the previous
leadership would be considered in the running for the office of leader. To arrive in the
position where his name would be considered by the establishment as an heir apparent, a
Member would likely have held one or more of the great offices of state—Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary—and have been in Parliament for a
considerable period of time, in most cases over two decades. The fact Butler met these
roundly understood criteria is yet another factor that added to his and his associates’
frustration that Hailsham and Home seemed to emerge with comparatively little
substance to their bids. The new system, however, has seen a succession of younger, less
experienced candidates both run for, and obtain, the party’s highest office. Of all the Tory
leaders elected under the 1965-97 rules, only John Major had previously held a major
post in government. Furthermore, the publicity generated by running under the new rules
214

can help an ambitious candidate with no realistic chance of winning the leadership at a
particular time prime the ground for a future attempt, or use the process to secure a post
in any future administration. Partly owing to the opening up of the leadership selection
process, and partly reflecting developments in British society, the social backgrounds of
those elected in the 1965-97 period were relatively humble. All were professionals of
independent means, and none had attended public school.
313
The contrast with those who
came before could not be more striking.
For McSweeney, the most important consequence of the new rules was the
ideological factionalization of choice and support in elections:
Concentrating responsibility for selection in MPs elevated the importance of parliamentarians’
needs and priorities in making decisions. Thus policy, parliamentary performance (at least in
opposition) and ideological tendencies grew in salience in the selectorate’s discrimination
between candidates.
314

Before analyzing this claim, it is important to point to the limited number of cases. From
1945 through to 1997, there were seven leaders of the Conservative Party. Churchill was
thrust into his position by the coalition government in the fog of war. Eden, Macmillan
and Douglas-Home ‘emerged’ under the consultative process. Heath, Thatcher, Major
and Hague were selected under variants of the process of election by Conservative MPs.
We must, therefore, be cautious in drawing conclusions about the effects of these
changes, especially with so many variables at play that are quite unrelated to the reform

313
See Henessey, P., The British Prime Minister: The Job and its Holders Since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan:
2001) for comparative biographical overviews of Heath, Thatcher and Major, alongside Labour prime
ministers and earlier Tory leaders.
314
McSweeney, 475.
215

of the leadership selection rules—such as free university education and political
polarization in the country at large.
This is especially true regarding the assertion McSweeney makes about growth
in the salience of ideology. At first glance, McSweeney seems merely to be claiming that
the selection procedure became more ideologically oriented. Here, one might ask whether
he is not stating the obvious. After all, under the consultative process, accountability to
the majority of Conservative MPs was negligible. As bit players in the selection drama,
their views on a candidate’s ‘parliamentary performance’ mattered little, even in the
event they knew who the candidates were and the canvassers afforded their opinions
greater weight than, say, those of the party grassroots. For ideology or, indeed,
parliamentary effectiveness to play a determining role in the selection process, it is
required that the ballot be openly contested. Yet there is no reason that ideological
divisions should play a role in contested ballots, far less that the new rules must produce
or exacerbate divisions, which is the next logical step in McSweeney’s argument. In other
words, existing factions or tendencies are needed for ideological conflict, but rules
facilitating such conflict in a public arena are not required for the existence of factions
and competition between them.
If the salience of faction increased in leadership elections, as McSweeney
suggests it did, this reflected the growing importance of ideology in the party per se, as
he seemingly concedes towards the end of his article:
Ideological tendencies did not define support for candidates under the consultative process. In that
period the party was not demarcated by ideological divisions. In parliament, Conservative MPs
were not aligned in coherent factions.
315

315
Ibid., 479.
216

By contrast, under the new rules and in the more ideological climate whose appearance
roughly coincided with (but was by no means produced by) them, a right-wing candidate
ran in every leadership election.
The problem, then, of dichotomizing alongside one another the ideological and
the non-ideological, the factional and the unified, the new leadership selection rules and
the old consultative process is not only that it implies a simple relationship between them,
which, in fact, would have been complex if not tangential: it also dehistoricizes large
tracts of the post-war period. Perusing Figure 4.1, we might be led to the erroneous
conclusion that the new rules ushered in an intra-party political environment conducive to
a challenge such as Powell’s, much in the same way they allowed Thatcher, as a
candidate of the right, to challenge Heath a decade later. As a scion of the lower middle
classes and grammar school, with very little (and chequered) ministerial experience, and
holding firm to a distinct set of principles, Powell might have been expected to do very
well under such a scheme.
In reality, the formalization of rules and creation of institutions does not ensure
their operation in the way their progenitors intended or even envisaged. While the
institutional variable is vital to our model of the intra-party politics of challenge phase, its
effects cannot be stated or studied in isolation. To understand how rules and changes to
the party-as-institution may act as impediments or catalysts to challenges, we must
examine the way they are ‘coupled’ with other variables, such as the tactics employed by
challengers and the attraction of their operational ideologies to fellow parliamentarians.
217

By 1975, the precedent of candidates for the leadership launching informal
campaigns within the party and canvassing other MPs for votes on the first ballot had
been set, and candidates could learn from previous episodes the tactics that worked and
those that did not.
316
In 1965, on the other hand, the rules were untested, and candidates
were left to develop tactics they thought might be effective from scratch. Many of the
differences between the candidates’ respective approaches to the new institutional setting
of 1965 can be put down to personality. Although favourite to win at the outset,
Maudling had a reputation as somewhat incompetent, laidback, and feckless, and his half-
hearted attempts at persuasion paled in comparison to the well-organized and overt
canvassing of the Heathmen, led by Peter Walker.
317
Powell was a shy man who spent
more time in the House of Commons Library than in the tea rooms where the kind of
networking Heath engaged in so enthusiastically was done, and he was considered by
colleagues to be a ‘loner’ and ‘unable to get on with other people’.
318
Such character
traits probably played a large part in his decision not to pursue in the manner of Heath
and Maudling the leadership in 1965, but, rather, to present to the party an alternative set
of policies to those of the Middle Way Conservatives, and to let the chips fall where they
would.
*

316
Zeigler, P., Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography (HarperPress; 2011), 453.
317
Cambell, J., Edward Heath: A Biography (Jonathan Cape; 1993), 234.
318
Zeigler, Heath, 269. Batson, L., Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling (The History Press; 2004), 185.
218

Given the alternatives of Powellism and post-war consensus politics, albeit
wrapped in modernizing rhetoric, Tory MPs chose in 1965 the latter. But to comprehend
fully the reasons why Powell’s initial challenge stalled in 1965, and why it failed to
regain momentum in the three years leading up to his Birmingham speech, we must look
beyond the politics of the leadership selection process and Powell’s less than garrulous
nature to Powellism as an operational ideology and the other circumstances that attended
its propagation.
Principles and Policies
John Wood, based at the economically liberal think tank the Institute of Economic
Affairs, published in 1965, with Powell’s assistance and approval, a compilation of
Powell’s remarks, speeches and articles, which, according to Wood, ‘restate[d] in
contemporary terms and language the case for the free society’.
319
Despite the apparent
consensus in British politics, Wood claimed that Powell ‘has brought [an alternative] into
the open and, more effectively than anyone else in politics at this moment, has explained
what the choice is’.
320
Reviewing the collection as editor of the Spectator, Iain Macleod
criticized the idea of ‘Powellism’ as a comprehensive corpus of thought, especially when
Powell’s views on non-economic issues were taken into account—though he had
suggested earlier that year that ‘Powellism’ could refer to an ‘attitude of mind’.
321
In fact,

319
Wood, J., ‘Prologue’ in A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell, J. Wood (Ed.) (B.T.
Batsford; 1965), iv.
320
Ibid., vii.
321
Heffer, Roman, 541.
219

Wood also derided those who ‘like to stick simple labels onto what are complex things,
still [talking] about ‘laisser-faire’, or ‘right-wing’, or even ‘Powellism’’.
322

The confusion arises out of Macleod’s and Wood’s different understandings of
Powellism. Wood believed Powell was articulating timeless principles, and to label the
measures after the man would imply they were original or ‘modish’, thus denigrating
their pedigree, whereas, for Macleod, Wood’s suggestion of consistency was as good as
designating an eponym. Wood was no doubt correct in cautioning his readers as he did.
Powell was, in Green’s words, ‘articulating, rather than leading, an important body of
Conservative opinion’.
323
But Macleod’s assertion that ‘Powellism’—if we are to use that
term to denote Powell’s alternative operational ideology—was inconsistent deserves
further examination.
To state that Powellism, listed simply as a collection of positions or policy stances
on real world events, is inconsistent, or that some of its components are incompatible
with one another, implies we have some understanding of the principles which underlie
those components. In the absence of core concepts, values or principles—which are
operationalized in the process of forming an electoral ideology—as a frame of reference,
it makes little sense to talk about one policy being out of kilter with another. Yet even the
most recognizable, effective and politically successful electoral ideologies are often
picked apart for ‘flaws’ or ‘contradictions’ by commentators and students of politics.

322
Wood, Nation, xiii.
323
Green, E.H.H, ‘Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
(6; 1999), 22.
220

Ken Philips attempts this for Powellism by splitting Powell’s views into three
categories—services, economy, and nationalism—and suggesting that his nationalism
contradicts somewhat his economic liberalism.
324
But Philips does not distinguish
between policies and the values from which they are derived, flattens all onto the same
analytical plane, and thus obscures the process of operationalization and any real
contradictions between principles and policies which may exist. A similar line of
argument was attempted by Paul Foot in his caustic polemic on the Rise of Enoch Powell
(1968), though he does make efforts to show that racism and disdain for the working
class were at the root of Powellism as an electoral (and, for Foot, mystifying) ideology.
325

When electoral ideologies pertain to numerous aspects of the real world and are
used by politicians to reconcile multiple conflicting interests, it seems fair to assume that
contradictions can always be found through utilizing one ideational frame of reference or
another. The more interesting question is: Knowing the components of an electoral
ideology, from what core principles could each and all of its operationalized elements be
derived?
Wood’s concentration on economics prevents him from reaching deep enough to
grasp that what animated Powell and formed the basis of his holistic alternative to the
post-war consensus was not the amorphous concept of ‘freedom’, or, as others would
posit, nationalism or prejudice in and of themselves, but, instead, the principle of

324
Philips, K., ‘Powellism’ in The British Right, R. King and N. Nugent (Eds.) (Saxon House; 1977),
Chapter 5.
325
Foot, P., The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin; 1968), 146, 170-3.
221

parliamentary sovereignty. Before examining what parliamentary sovereignty meant in
the context of Powellism, let us outline the political alternative Powell offered.
A Conservative Alternative
There has been a tendency among both Powell’s detractors and admirers to cast
him as a right-winger or a firebrand whose views were well outside the bounds of
acceptable politics both during the 1960s and 1970s, and in today’s climate. This view is
erroneous. While Powell can fairly be described as a ‘maverick’ who offered an
alternative set of policies to those at the helm of both parties during the post-war period,
his views—even on immigration—were shared and echoed by several of his
contemporaries and those of later generations, including Thatcher, whose admiration for
Powell was expressed openly, though never reciprocated.
326
Neither did Powellism run
totally against the grain of post-war politics. As Peter Madgwick points out, Powell did
not apply radical policy prescriptions such as selectivity to all services and benefits, and
there remained something of the consensus in his political economy, particularly during
the mid-1960s, when economics were his primary focus.
327
As the seedbed theory of
ideology predicts, ideological entrepreneurs developing and expounding programmes
from the platforms of establishment parties cannot, even if their programmes involve
genuinely radical alterations to the state system, assume or require the total dismantling
of the existing politics of power as a precondition for implementation. Even a most
despised consensus will contain elements of a societal ideology to which the party is

326
Campbell, J., The Grocer’s Daughter (Vinatge; 2004), 354.
327
Madgwick, P., ‘A Biographical Approach to the General Election of 1997’ in Parliamentary Affairs
(50.3: 1997), 476-487.
222

wedded, and have itself been built on structures so fundamental that any party competing
for power within broadly recognized constitutional parameters will subscribe to them as a
matter of course. Powell was under no illusion as to the extent collectivism had been
embraced as a tenet of the national identity during the war, or the administrative depth of
the Labour legislation passed during the immediate post-war period. He was, therefore,
acutely aware of the outer bounds of the politically viable in his own time, and what
remained beyond them.
Neither was Powellism an alien creed to British Conservatism. Liberals in name
or in belief had flocked to the party since the late-nineteenth century, when the rise of
social liberalism and support for Irish Home Rule within the Liberal Party led to an
exodus of traditional liberals from its ranks, and the rapid organization of the labour
movement outside it convinced landed and industrial interests that a unified defence of all
types of property was needed.
328
Those such as R.J Bennett, who regard Conservatism as
inherently paternalistic, hostile to rationalism and, of necessity, committed to a middle
road between Socialism and Liberalism, fall into the trap, as outlined above, of equating
Conservatism as a set of operational ideologies with conservative philosophy.
329
In doing
so, they also overlook the fact that many Conservative politicians have articulated
economically liberal policies with reference to principles such as scepticism, duty and
hierarchy which found, and still find, no place in the ideological seedbed of the Liberal

328
Paul Adelman’s Rise of the Labour Party: 1880-1945 (Longman; 1996) and The Decline of the Liberal
Party (Longman; 1996) complementarily offer a concise but comprehensive account of the debates
surrounding the political transformations of the early twentieth century.
329
Bennett, R.J., ‘Conservatism as a Right Wing Ideology?’ in The British Right, 28-9.
223

Party.
330
Finally, they dehistoricize Conservative operational ideology. While it is true
that Conservatives recoiled from the precepts of Liberalism’s more radical nineteenth
century exponents, they did not look forward to a state system akin to the post-war
welfare state, but rather backwards to a state just as limited in its social functions as that
of the mid-Victorian era, but which served, instead of urban centres, landed interests
through its mercantilist foreign economic policies. Even the most paternalistic of the
Victorian High Tories did not conceive of the state in domestic developmental terms, and
certainly not as the country’s preeminent engine of economic growth.
Powell put forward his liberal political economy in categorical terms. Regulation
of the economy—which was, he claimed, by definition, self-limited, negative and
universal in its application to all sectors of industry and civil society—was a proper
concern of government, though it was the duty of those in government to show restraint.
An example of regulation would be legislation for, and enforcement of, an eight hour day
or paid holidays in the private sector. Intervention in the economy, on the other hand,
involved meddling with the workings of the supply and demand mechanism, which
would, left undisturbed, result in the most efficient allocation of manpower and
resources. Regional development policies targeting specific industries, the protection of
supposedly sluggish and overmanned British firms and sectors from foreign competition,
and the setting by government of artificial caps on wages or prices, irrespective of money

330
Russell, A. and Fieldhouse, E., Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate: The
Electoral Politics of the Liberal Democrats (Manchester University Press; 2004), 3-15. See chapter 2 of
Hall, D., A2 Government And Politics: Ideologies And Ideologies In Action (Philip Allan; 2011), for an
historical overview of British Liberalism as an ideology.
224

supply or economic growth, were the most troubling examples of intervention for
Powell.
331

Since even the poorest subject, as a consumer of goods, casts votes every day in
the democracy of the marketplace, freedom and the rule of law depended on the freest
operation of the economy as possible. When Powell stunned a group of journalists in
1967 by declaring, ‘Often, when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how
much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism’, he was only
restating for effect the idea he had expressed much more prosaically throughout his
career, which was that the free market was not only effective in bringing about material
progress, but also natural and as close to perfection as man could hope to attain.
332

Alongside the economic sphere, Powell believed, lay the field of politics, where
goods and services that were considered too important to be left to market provision, or
were unsuited to market disciplines since they could not be measured on a monetary
scale, were supplied by the state. Thus, Powell did not oppose in principle the mixed
economy. However, he believed the two spheres should remain distinct, for to mix public
and private into the same representational institutions amounted to corporatism, negated
parliamentary sovereignty, and would inevitably lead to fascism as demands for further
extra-parliamentary control of legislative functions would snowball.
333
For Powell, it was
the unencumbered operation of market forces in a large private sector that generated the

331
Utley, T.E., Enoch Powell: The Man and His Thought (London; 1968), 65.
332
Ibid., 43.
333
Philips, ‘Powellism’, 94.
225

taxable wealth which could then be spent on those services the people had democratically
determined should be provided by the state, such as health care and national assistance
for those not covered by government insurance schemes.
334

But he identified two main dangers in the government provision of public services
and performance of welfare functions: first, universal provision could help perpetuate the
myth that a service or particular standard of living was a natural right, rather than a
privilege underwritten by the nation’s economic successes, the collective conscience, and
understandings of the ‘civilized society’ at a given juncture. ‘This translation of a want or
need into a right is one of the most widespread and dangerous of modern heresies’,
claimed Powell, worrying that violence would break out if there came a time when the
state was unable to fulfil the philanthropic responsibilities it had taken on.
335

Meanwhile, the most pernicious social effect of the universal distribution of equal
payments was the government’s inability to target funds to the neediest. The solution,
believed Powell, was to introduce selection criteria into the administration of social
services where the benefit was individualized and could be compensated in the economic
sphere (i.e. rent subsidies), while retaining universal provision of services in kind, such as
health and education. ‘The more easily a service approaches to a public and a general
benefit and recedes from a personal one’, argued Powell, ‘the more natural is its
provision without charge or test of means’.
336

334
Utley, Powell, 77.
335
Quoted in Philips, ‘Powellism’, 92.
336
Quoted, Ibid., 89.
226

Decisions about the means test should be made on a benefit-by-benefit, service-
by-service basis, depending on the circumstances of the day. Powell and Iain Macleod—
the latter widely regarded as the type of paternalistic Tory who longed for a compact
between Crown and poor as a bulwark against the individualism of the middle
classes
337
—jointly recommended in their 1955 pamphlet, The Social Services: Needs and
Means, that inflation had driven enough pensioners onto the national assistance rolls,
simply as a means of supplementing their national insurance funded state pensions up to
subsistence levels, that change was needed. Either the universal benefit should be
delivered in line with inflation, or it should be paid on a needs basis to ensure those with
inadequate savings were guaranteed security in old age. Powell and Macleod favoured
the latter approach. The subsequent development of a pensions scheme based on
graduated national insurance contributions, which offered universal payouts that roughly
reflected lifetime earnings, was repulsive to Powell. The government’s job was not to
coerce the frivolous into saving for retirement, but rather to ensure a minimum standard
of living and safety-net through which even the most irresponsible could not fall.
338

Second, Powell feared that interest groups would grow around services and,
anticipating the arguments of academic public choice theorists who would influence the
Thatcherites, that the bureaucracies providing them would develop interests of their
own.
339
Variety and market forces within the state sector could go some way to

337
Batson, Reggie, 110.
338
Utley, Powell, 154.
339
Hepple, L.W., ‘Destroying Local Leviathans and Designing Landscapes of Liberty? Public Choice
Theory and the Poll Tax’ in Transactions: Journal of British Geographical Society (14:4, 1989), 363.
227

preventing inertia, levelling and homogenization in the provision of services, though this
could only be guaranteed by allowing non-state organizations to provide services in the
same sectors as the government. In this regard, Powell set himself against the post-war
trend towards ‘comprehensivisation’ in education and economies of scale and
centralization in health. He also attempted to expose what he thought was the ‘positively
dangerous’ theory of consensualists that increased spending on services would act as a
stimulus for growth beyond the indirect effects of those organizations’ output. He stated
further that this myth had led in the case of education to diminishing standards and
disruption in the universities, as the sector had been rapidly and unnecessarily expanded
as part of Wilson’s technological revolution.
340

Powellism, then, was not a thoroughgoing denunciation of the post-war welfare
state, but it did critique the ways in which both parties had operationalized the ideas
behind Beveridge in later legislation and policies. It met our model’s prerequisite for
transition by offering a liberal, yet authentically Conservative, alternative to the
consensus that had grown up around these policies, proposing fiscal restraint, a smaller
public sector, the abandonment of corporatist arrangements, and greater selectivity in the
provision of services.

340
Powell. J.E., Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, R. Collings (ed.)
(Bellew; 1991), 623.
228

Ideational Grounding and Operationalization
To Powell’s three great nationalist ‘crusades’—immigration, the Common Market
and Ulster—can be added a list of policy stances on economics and his anti-imperialist
positions in foreign affairs. Yet Powell was convinced that,
if government decisions are to be more than a series of unconnected expedients and party policies,
more than an anthology of electoral bribes, those decisions have to be taken, and those policies
framed, with some reference to some general notions of what government ought, and ought not, to
do.
341

Meanwhile, ‘there must be a great, simple, central theme, branching into all fields and
subjects of debate, but in itself easily grasped, which runs through the words and actions
of a successful opposition’.
342
In this context, it appears Powell is using the word
‘opposition’ as a collective noun referring to the official parliamentary Opposition, but he
would regard the need for a ‘great, simple, central theme’ as equally applicable to
individual opponents of the establishments of both parties, such as himself.
Several of Powell’s later biographers have treated the florid speech he delivered
to the Royal Society of St. George on April 23, 1961, as a rare window into the core of
his thinking.
343
They are correct to have done so. However, their fixation on Powell’s
romantic nationalism, though understandable from their vantage point looking back over
his post-1968 career, prevents them from identifying the core value which undergirded
not only the positions that constituted his politics of nationalism, or the ‘new racialism’,

341
Quoted in Wood, Nation, 23.
342
Quoted Ibid., 24.
343
Cosgrave, P., The Lives of Enoch Powell (Bodley Head; 1991), chapter 24. Heffer, Roman, chapter 32.
Shepherd, Powell, 224-7.
229

as critics called it, but also his liberal political economy. That principle is parliamentary
sovereignty.
Powell’s speech ponders what, shorn of its empire and ‘returned home again from
years of distant wandering’, England really means. His answer, delivered through voices
of the pre-Elizabethans, asserts the centrality and indispensability of the Crown-in-
Parliament to the nation’s continuity, the rule of law, the organicism of its society and the
means by which subjects are represented in the body politic.
Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship
would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly
England’s: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited
supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of
England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover
their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this
unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.

For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon
unique in history, the product of a specific set of circumstances like those which in biology are
supposed to start by chance a new line of evolution. Institutions which elsewhere are recent and
artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned.
344

Parliament offered to England ‘the picture of its own nature, its past and future, its place
among other nations in the world, which it carries in its imagination’.
Anything which threatened the integrity of Parliament had, then, to be resisted,
and for Powell, many such threats were extant during the post-war period. Indeed, Powell
operationalized the principle of parliamentary sovereignty not as a positive political
programme, but as a series of interconnected rearguard actions against such programmes
which negated parliamentary supremacy and, thus, were likely to bring about instability,
tyranny or violence.

344
Quoted in Heffer, Roman, 387-92.
230

Powell’s pessimism cannot be overstated. His prediction of the ‘River Tiber
foaming with blood’ was part rhetorical flourish, part genuine expression of his fear that
immigration involving hundreds of thousands of newcomers would lead to the formation
of communal interests incapable of being represented in Parliament. Conflict between
communities could not easily be assuaged and aggregated in the laws sent out from
Parliament, which, Powell stressed, must apply equally in all of England’s regions and to
all its subjects. In other words, the rule of law was under threat.
345

Powell believed the nation, represented in Parliament and embodied in the person
of the monarch, whose executive prerogatives were installed in Parliament under the
ancient doctrine, was politically indivisible, both laterally and vertically. Britain was a
unitary political nation or nothing; hence the title of Powell’s 1979 dissection, from a
constitutional standpoint, of Britain’s entry into the Common Market under the accession
treaty negotiated by Heath, which ceded some economic decision-making to Brussels—A
Nation or No Nation. Nationalism was an all or nothing affair, for it preceded the
individual and was necessary for the exercise of his freedom and integral to his
conception of self.
346
In ‘destroy[ing] the self-government of the United Kingdom’,
347

Heath had sold the freedom of the people themselves.

345
Brooke, P., ‘India, Post-Imperialism and the Origins of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech’ in
The Historical Journal (50.3: 2007), 672. Here, Brooke explores the concern of communal violence in
Powell’s thinking from his time in India, arguing his stance on immigration originated long before, and was
only tangentially related to, the redefinition of Commonwealth citizenship in the 1940s and 1950s.
346
Berkeley, H., Odyssey of Enoch: A Political Memoir (Hamish Hamilton; 1977), 178.
347
Quoted in Heffer, Roman, 751.
231

If supranational forces were tearing at Parliament’s sovereignty from above, what
Powell called the ‘petty nationalism’ of the Celtic fringe was doing the same from
below.
348
Powell, of course, was supportive of attempts to incubate the nascent revival of
Welsh culture, but political devolution was tantamount to the ‘destruction of the United
Kingdom’.
349
To a group of Tory activists assembled in Prestatyn in September, 1969,
Powell delivered a speech which can be seen as theoretically prefiguring his move to
Ulster five years later, in which he stated, ‘Half-way house solutions such as Welsh or
Scottish assemblies within the context of a United Kingdom Parliament are out.
Nationalism, if it is real, cannot be bought off with anything less than the real article’.
350

Threats to parliamentary sovereignty were not only of the nationalist variety.
Despite the Wagnerian tenor of his many speeches, Powell’s nationalism was not one of
blood and soil spiritualism, but rather born of Blackstonian legal fiction. Overlooking the
fact that, just as is true for a system of separated powers and checks and balances,
government along Westminster lines exists as a component of a state system and can, in
the medium term, be gamed to serve entrenched interests, Powell paints an idealized
picture of Parliament as a politically neutral institution. When bargains are struck
between government and interested organizations through extra-parliamentary bodies and
given the effective force of law, proper constitutional channels are circumvented. It is for

348
Powell, E., Speech to West Bromwich Conservative Association, April 10, 1969; ‘Press Cuttings’,
Papers of Enoch Powell, 14/2/3.
349
Quoted in Heffer, Roman, 910.
350
Powell, E., Speech at Prestatyn, Sept. 28, 1969; ‘Press Cuttings’, Papers of Enoch Powell, 14/2/3
232

this reason Powell believed the elevation of the unions to the status of fifth estate was a
not insignificant step along the road to fascism.
Figure 4.1 illustrates Powell’s operationalization of the core principle of
parliamentary sovereignty through the intermediate construction, discussed above, of a
stark divide between the political and the economic, and into a collection of free market
policies. Berkeley and Utley ridicule Powell’s model of an economic sphere in which
commodities can be measured in monetary terms and intervention into which should be
prohibited, and a political sphere of services whose values are unquantifiable.
351
They
correctly point out the obvious facts that even light-touch regulation impacts on sectors
unevenly, and cannot, in practice, be easily differentiated from intervention. And, of
course, the perennial conundrum of ‘guns or butter’ shows that even the provision of
essential services by governments involves tradeoffs, and that, therefore, Powell’s model
collapses in reality into a fairly uniform political economy.
But for Powell, the pure economic and the pure political were useful fallacies. By
drawing the distinction between the two at the semi-abstract level, he could set the
relative sizes of the spheres so that when operationalized fully as policies, the
responsibilities entrusted to government would be fewer than under the arrangements of
the post-war settlement. In effect, the intermediate construction is a rhetorical device used
to confer legitimacy on arguments over political economy as delivered to audiences at the
high political level, for whom theoretical underpinnings, even if flimsy, are likely to add
weight to a real world political programme. It was no accident that Powell outlined this

351
Berkeley, Odyssey, 106-11. Utley, Powell, 76-8.
233

scheme in a speech at the Cambridge Union during his first challenge, rather than at
Wolverhampton Civic Hall during his second.
The principle of the Crown-in-Parliament is arguably the most venerable
constituent of the Conservative ideological seedbed. It was in coming to terms with the
Hanoverian succession and its constitutional implications that the Tories emerged as a
recognizably modern party and the dominant force in British politics.
352
But while Powell
was operationalizing august Tory principles, neither he nor Conservatives commanded a
monopoly on how they could be interpreted for a modern setting. The process of
operationalization involves, first, the reality in which the principle is operationalized, and
second, the politician’s interpretation of that reality. From the same core principle of
parliamentary sovereignty, Socialists and Middle Way Conservatives could also arrive at
an intermediate construction of two spheres—one economic, the other political—and
their application of that model to their value-laden understanding of reality would result
in very different political programmes to those of Powell.
The complexity of the process of operationalizing core principles is evident not
only from different interpretations by different politicians of the same principle in
accordance with their respective values or views of the conjuncture, but also in the total
transformation of Powell’s political programme in a short space of time, despite the fact
parliamentary sovereignty remained throughout the most important principle for him.
Figure 4.2 illustrates the deduction of antonymic positions on foreign affairs from the
same core principle of parliamentary sovereignty.

352
Williams, B., The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760, Revised by C.H. Stuart (Oxford; 1961), chapter xiii.

CORE PRINCIPLE INTERMEDIATE CONSTRUCTION OPERATIONALIZATION POLICY

Small state.

Parliamentary sovereignty. Politics-Economics
divide.

Large state;
Economies
of scale.
Fig. 4.1: Operationalization of different political economic stances from same core principle and intermediate construction.

Retreat from empire;
Little England; Restrict
immigration.

Parliamentary sovereignty. Crown-in-Parliament advised by
ministers on behalf of subjects
offering identical and total allegiance.
Open, multinational,
multiracial
Commonwealth; Civis
Britannicus Sum.
Fig. 4.2: Operationalization of antonymous policies in foreign affairs from same core principle and intermediate construction.
234
235

From that principle, the intermediate construction of the uniform incorporation of
subjects into the polity through the advice tendered by their representatives to the Crown
is derived.
353
As with the economic-political divide, this construction is a model. It was,
at best, a highly formulistic representation of British politics, and had, even by the
interwar years, only superficial validity regarding the relationship between the self-
governing dominions and the mother country. To have viewed the Indian population as
constituents of a great imperial body politic and legally identical as subjects with the
inhabitants of Surrey was ludicrous, and Labour’s Nationality Act of 1948, which sought
to distinguish between the statuses of British subject and citizen of a Commonwealth
realm, was a significant step in the dismantling of this myth.
But the emotional attachment Powell felt towards the myth of imperial
subjecthood channelled through the Westminster Parliament was strong enough to
survive over a decade of retreat from empire and attendant legal developments, until, in
1956, the myth as operationalized became so preposterous that it could not be perpetuated
in good faith. In his rapid conversion to anti-imperialism, Powell did not abandon the
intermediate construction of coequal representation in Parliament under the Crown. On
the contrary, the same model was recycled in order to argue for a Britain confined to its
island home. An intercontinental parliament that afforded equal representation and
commanded complete allegiance was no more possible in 1956, claimed Powell, than it

353
See Moodie, G.C., ‘The Crown and Parliament’ in Parliamentary Affairs (10.3: 1956), 256-264, for
other possible interpretations of the concept than that offered by Powell.
236

had been when Burke ridiculed the idea as a solution to the dilemma of the American
colonies.
354

Why Powell’s understanding of reality and, thus, his operationalization of the
principle of parliamentary sovereignty, should have altered so drastically in the area of
imperial policy and citizenship at the time it did is an interesting question, but one best
left to journalistic speculation. What should have become clear, however, from the above
exploration of Powell’s operationalization of principles into a programme, is the
complexity of the process and the number of conceptual definitions and logical steps
involved.
Sensitivity and Salesmanship
In terms of introducing Private Members’ Bills on issues of conscience and points
raised in committee, the Conservative ‘right wing’ became angrier, more restive and
emboldened enough to speak out openly against the party’s leadership in the 1960s,
particularly after successive election defeats.
355
Though it did not become any more
cohesive as a group in its opposition to consensus politics, this need not have presented
too great an obstacle to ideological challengers aiming to utilize its disgruntlement.
Indeed, Thatcher’s election as, in part, an anti-Heath candidate in 1975 had been
strengthened by the amorphousness of discontent on the backbenches. There are four
reasons why Powell’s articulation of his operational ideology failed to mobilize support
in the way the Thatcherites were able to do.

354
Collings, Reflections, 459.
355
Berrington, J., ‘Rebellions and Revolts in the Conservative Party’ in The Political Quarterly (32.4:
1961), 486.
237

First, Powellism as operationalized contained such a panoply of policies and
stances as to seem inconsistent to those who were unable to grasp—or, as was more often
the case, were uninterested in examining—its core principle of parliamentary
sovereignty. Powell’s search for an underlying theme for his programme was necessary
to satisfy his own desire for ideational purity, and may have impressed others of a similar
bent. Yet consistency with a single principle need not be a prerequisite for the
operationalization of ideologies and political action on their behalf. Far less did Powell’s
parliamentary colleagues deem it a quality that their own speeches and statements had to
exhibit. As Figure 4.3 shows, Thatcherism comprised many of the same policy positions
as Powellism, but was operationalized from two core principles which, while perhaps
laying the Thatcherites open to charges of naiveté or duplicity,
356
were easily understood
and communicated to a receptive audience within Parliament and later to the public.
Here, Powell failed to pay adequate attention to, or misjudged, the stratification of
the party-as-institution and its ‘coupling’ with the politics of ideology. As an experienced
member of the Tory frontbench and an intellectual, the level at which Powell initially
pitched his arguments was unsuitable, even during the challenge phase, for his principal
audience. This consisted mostly of unexceptional constituency MPs, whose ideological
sophistication was more akin to that of the grassroots—sharing their desire for policies
easily identifiable as Conservative, visibly derived from clusters of core principles from

356
Marquand, D., ‘The paradoxes of Thatcherism’ in Thatcherism, R. Skidelsky (Ed.) (Blackwell; 1988),
55.

CORE PRINCIPLES
(THATCHERISM) Chauvinism/ Xenophobia Individualism

OPERATIONALIZATION

POLICY AREAS Europe Immigration Foreign Policy Social Services Industrial Relations Denationalization

OPERATIONALIZATION

CORE PRINCIPLE
(POWELLISM) Parliamentary Sovereignty

Fig. 4.3: Derivation of similar programmes from incompatible or unrelated core principles.
238
239

the party’s seedbed, and sold forcefully and unequivocally—than to his own. The type of
simplification and modification Powell proved so devastatingly capable of at Conference
and during his second challenge might, it seems, have paid dividends if attempted at an
earlier point in time among colleagues whose interest in, and awareness of, operational
ideologies he no doubt overestimated.
Second, in propounding equally forcefully across a gamut of issues, Powell
ensured there was always at least some element of disagreement between himself and
potential allies. As such, Powell attracted no more than three or four disciples who could
fall in line with his gospel in its entirety, rather than the kind of loose but politically
weighty collection of voices that fell behind the Thatcherite challenge. Party grandees
could overlook inconvenient aspects of Thatcherite ideology to support a programme
which they thought the lesser evil, and which they could place above specific policy
gripes or personality clashes.
357

Third, in the few instances where there was widespread agreement in the party
with the Powellite position, and, thus, where an opportunity could have opened for
further inroads to be made, Powell qualified such agreement out of existence, or attached
an overwhelmingly popular policy to a more controversial scheme. Powell’s position that
Ulster should remain part of the United Kingdom, but that it should therefore be
governed from Westminster, or that inflation was a social menace and needed to be

357
According to John Biffen, writing in the Political Quarterly of April, 1972, ‘The Powellite group, in so
far as it identifiably exists, is not yet a tightly knit force or arrangement of political subjects and to that end
Mr. Heath has no need for the present to worry about his right flank’.
240

tackled, but that the behaviour of the unions (and, therefore, efforts to cut hard deals with
them) was irrelevant to the problem, were cases in point.
Finally, irrespective of the principles and operationalization of Powellism itself,
Powell’s logical absolutism and need to enunciate publically the step-by-step derivation
of his ideas struck many as un-Conservative or ‘too clever by half’ for a party
traditionally happy to confer legitimacy on habit and unexamined practice.
358
Thatcher,
while consulting privately with intellectuals and, perhaps more so than Powell, relying on
academic justifications for a tight monetary policy, was able to convey unabashedly the
precepts of Thatcherism as self-evident truths.
Thatcher, like Powell, was a social as well as an ideological outsider, coming
from a provincial, lower middle class, grammar school and Oxbridge scholarship
background. But, unlike Powell, who believed ideology to be an adequate, and the only
relevant, criterion of distinction between himself and the Middle Way establishment,
Thatcher quite consciously portrayed herself as a social enemy of the same elite. The
rendering of Margaret Roberts, precocious daughter of Grantham alderman and local
grocer Alfred Roberts, became integral to the Thatcher myth.
359
As Lady Thatcher came
to write in her memoirs,
Of course, in the eyes of the ‘wet’ Tory establishment I was not only a woman, but ‘that woman’,
someone not just of a different sex, but of a different class, a person with an alarming conviction
that the values and virtues of middle England should be brought to bear on the problems which
the establishment consensus had created. I offended on many counts.
360

358
Green, Ideologies, 224.
359
Clarke, P., ‘The Rise and Fall of Thatcherism’, in Historical Research (72.179: 1999), 303.
360
Quoted in King, A., ‘The Outsider as Political Leader: The Case of Margaret Thatcher’ in the British
Journal of Political Science (32.3: Jul. 2002), 441.
241

Thatcher draws here the linkage between her own background, lower middle class values,
and a political programme that departed from the post-war settlement and state largesse
as means of discharging paternalistic responsibility.
The reality, however, was less neat. Thatcher’s preference for the company and
advice of businessmen who ‘had to buy [their] own furniture’ and Jews was noted and
caused some unease in a party where distrust of self-made men and casual anti-Semitism
were quite prevalent.
361
Yet Macmillan’s quip that there were ‘more Estonians than
Etonians’ in Thatcher’s government was untrue. When David Baker et. al. analyzed the
backgrounds of the men Thatcher brought into government, they found the trend towards
meritocracy in politics came to a halt under her leadership, with more Etonians, more
Oxbridge educated Members, and fewer businessmen occupying government positions at
every level, or being selected for safe seats, than at any time since Macmillan’s and
Home’s nepotistic governments.
362
That no social transformation of the Tory Party took
place under Thatcher leads Baker et. al. to conclude
that policy shifts derive from changes above all in political economy and other aspects of national
decline. Ideological disputes related to such change cannot be usefully mapped onto social
origins.
363

361
Defries, H., Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews 1900-1950 (Psychology Press; 2002), 174-82.
Ramsden, D., Winds, 141-2. Macmillan, according to Hailsham’s notes, is reported to have said of Joseph
that he was the ‘only dull Jew’ he knew of.
362
Baker, D., et. al., ‘The Conservative Party Elite 1964-1994: The End of Social Convergence’ in the
British Journal of Political Science (29.4: 1994), 287-8.
363
Ibid., 279.

242

Our model of change accepts, of course, that ideological transitions are the result of
political-economic challenges to a given state system and emerge out of crises in that
system. Ultimate success is therefore to be judged by changes to the state system ushered
in by challengers. But in downplaying the relevance of social distinction, since this is not
an end goal of the challengers, the authors overlook the importance of social markers as a
tool of ideological conflict, which can be used tactically by ideological entrepreneurs as
an alternative to outright assault on the ideas themselves of the old regime.
During the initial stages of the Thatcherite transition, the magnitude of the
ideological distance between Thatcher and her Middle Way opponents was downplayed
in public, partly as a conscious effort by all in the party to maintain the facade of unity in
the run up to the 1979 election, and partly as a continuation of the gradualist gambit the
Thatcherites had been playing to from the outset.
364
Changing the social origins of
ministers was never a goal for Thatcherites, but using social distinction as a usefully less
toxic substitute for ideological distinction allowed the Thatcherites to define themselves
against a given order during the phase of intra-party struggle that had to be won before
changes to society could be made. In attacking Middle Way ideology and its advocates
directly, Powell was regarded from the beginning as a real danger, rather than an

364
See Sanford Ungar, writing in the American journal Foreign Policy (Summer 1979), 186-7, for an
outsider’s view of Thatcherism’s potential in the period following the election of 1979. Writes Ungar:
‘Thatcherism...may mean that British taxes become less confiscatory in the short run, that union leaders
elected for life have less arbitrary power, and that the country’s bloated civil service comes back to more
reasonable proportions. But to portray her regime with rightward arrows superimposed on the Union Jack,
and to talk of Britain making a dramatic about-face, is to exaggerate and misrepresent what has
happened...once elected, she surrounded herself, by and large, with moderate consensus politicians’.
243

ambitious upstart who could easily be swept aside, as Heath believed of Thatcher on the
eve of his defeat.
365

Oppositional Institutions
Looking back over his thirty-seven year parliamentary career, Powell compared
his time at Westminster to that in the army: ‘I enjoyed its institutionality, the framework
in which men understand conventions, the same rules; it’s the kind of environment in
which I’ve always flourished’.
366
Powell refused to take an office at Westminster,
believing Members should not be separated from the House and chamber, and his
knowledge of the institution’s arcane rules made him a formidable tactician as well as
floor orator. Both skills were instrumental in garnering what for him was a momentous
victory—the defeat of Labour’s 1968-9 proposals to reform the House of Lords. For Lord
Norton, Powell was ‘one of the greatest parliamentarians of his generation’, but he was
less able as a politician.
367
Parliamentary finesse, of course, is of little consequence in
isolation, and effective political action in the service of operational ideologies must come
through the party in Parliament.
It was, paradoxically, the same qualities which made Powell well-suited to the
former role which, in part, prevented him from mounting a successful oppositional
campaign within the party in the same way Thatcher proved was possible just a few years

365
Young, H., One of Us: Life of Margaret Thatcher (Macmillan; 1988), 301.Heath is often quoted as
replying tersely to Thatcher’s telling him she would challenge his leadership with, ‘You’ll lose; Good day
to you’.
366
Powell, E., Interview, broadcast on Channel Four, July 1987, available at Wolverhampton City
Archives, VT-46.
367
Lord Norton of Louth, 1911 Centenary Lecture on Enoch Powell at Palace of Westminster broadcast on
BBC Parliament, June 20, 2011.
244

later. Members of the Conservative Party, angry at Powell’s call upon his supporters in
the country to vote Labour in 1974, branded him a ‘Judas’, but the reality was quite
different. Powell was, in fact, unimpeachably loyal to the Conservative Party as an
institution up until 1974, and it was the knowledge that, had he retained his seat at the
election that year as a Tory, he would be forced, out of principle, to rebel with the
persistence he had done during the previous parliament that helped to convince him it
was not possible to stand again in Wolverhampton on Heath’s manifesto. Even after his
dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet, Powell replied to numerous letters from regular
Conservative voters who indicated that they were unsure whether or not to vote for
‘mediocrities Ted and Reggie’ in the general election of 1970, urging his correspondents
to ‘follow my example [and] vote Tory, because there is no hope otherwise’.
368

Powell’s unwillingness to confront directly the leadership of the party or to
foment open rebellion, far less create what he sneeringly referred to as a ‘party within a
party’, was displayed in his conduct from the outset of his parliamentary career.
369
It
appears Powell had numerous misgivings about the commitments of the party’s
manifestos in the 1950s, which he believed could be ‘damaging to the party and our
supporters’, but chose the setting of the 1922 Committee to air privately these concerns,
rather than rebelling hastily against the government or showing open defiance in speeches
outside of Parliament.
370

368
Letter of Response (Feb 13, 1970), Correspondence—General, Papers of Enoch Powell, 2/1/5.See
envelope 1 for similar.
369
Letter of Response (Feb 17, 1970), Correspondence—General, PEP, 2/1/5.
370
Minutes of 1922 Committee, 1950-9, Conservative Party Archives, 1922/1/6, 34.
245

Powell did become one of the founding members of the One Nation Group in
1950. One Nation, although a self-selected group, was dissimilar in its form and
operation to a nascent British ‘think tank’ such as the Institute for Economy Affairs or,
indeed, the in-house Centre for Policy Studies that would propel the early advances of
Thatcherism within the party. The One Nation Tories were a group of ambitious
backbenchers who met semi-regularly to dine and discuss policy seriously, occasionally
publishing pamphlets that were expressly the work of the authors, but which had been
reviewed by other members.
371
When members were invited into government, they
declined to attend meetings of the group.
The fact so many members were, in fact, called to the frontbenches ensured a
swift turnover in group membership, but it also raised questions about One Nation as a
faction, especially since the group let it be known at the time of selections in the
parliamentary party its preferred slate of candidates.
372
To the extent the group acted as a
springboard for meritocrats such as Heath and Powell without connections in the party to
facilitate otherwise their advancement, the group ‘can be regarded as representative of a
new Zeitgeist, a response to the wider demands of the age much more than a decisive
determining force in its own right’.
373
There is, however, little evidence that One Nation
was an ideological splinter group—or what were, in the Conservative Party,
euphemistically termed ‘ginger groups’ to downplay any impression of division.

371
David Seawright The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics (Continuum; 2010), 34.
372
Ibid., 41.
373
Walsh, R.A., ‘The One Nation Group: A Tory Approach to Backbench Politics and Organization, 1950-
55’ in Parliamentary Affairs (11.2: 1998), 336.
246

Much of the misunderstanding regarding the use of the term ‘One Nation’ can be
traced to its origins and later appropriations. ‘One Nation’ was a direct reference to
Disraeli’s 1845 novel, Sybil, in which he wrote of England as ‘Two nations between
whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's
habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of
different planets: the rich and the poor’. His modest record aside, Disreali’s Crystal
Palace speech of 1872, in which he defined the modern Conservative Party by the three
great objects of monarchy, empire and the improvement of the people, cemented his
legacy as a popular Tory and reformer.
374
Successive left-wing and centrist groupings in
the twentieth century Conservative Party, the most notable of which has been the Tory
Reform Group, would claim the ‘One Nation’ mantle, in the process implying that those
of differing viewpoints were sectionally motivated.
375
But there is nothing to suggest the
group Powell joined the year he was first elected to Parliament harboured any such
ideological ambitions or an agenda. Its two primary architects, Angus Maude and Edward
Boyle, came from different wings of the party, and, up until the present day, the group’s
members have been defined as much by their interest in ideas in politics per se as by the
content of particular ideas.
376

The Bow Group, also formed in 1950, offered university graduates under the age
of thirty-five a similar chance to debate policy in an informal setting and to participate in

374
Blake, R., Disraeli (London; [1967]1992), 299-302.
375
Seawright, One Nation, 134.
376
Ibid., 23.
247

researching and publishing articles in the group’s magazine, Crossbow. With five
hundred to a thousand members, it was extra-parliamentary, though several of its more
talented members were already by the 1960s entering high-level politics.
377
Its young
leaders sought to counter the dominance of the left in the realm of ideas in policy,
becoming for the Tories what the Fabian Society had been for Socialism in Britain.
Contemporary observer, Richard Rose, commented that the group’s disposition not only
reflected the youth of its members, but also its ideological leanings.
378
These were,
simply stated, liberal economically and anti-colonialist, supporting the withdrawal from
Africa set out in Macmillan’s 1960 Winds of Change speech in Cape Town. It might
seem, then, that Powell’s views, by the late 1950s, would have coincided with those of
the Bow Group, and that it may have provided a vehicle for the re-entry of liberal market
thinking into the Conservative mainstream.
Powell, however, chose to remain at a distance from the Bow Group. Part of the
reason for this seems to have been that, with its highly dedicated administration,
ideological awareness and capacity for data processing, the Bow Group resembled too
much Powell’s party within a party, or a modern pressure group. On occasion, the
group’s publications and policy positions challenged the authority of Central Office’s
official intelligence and propaganda organs, the CRD and the Conservative Political
Centre, the former of which had been instrumental in launching Powell’s own career in

377
Barr, J., The Bow Group: A History (Politico; 2001), 244.
378
Rose, R., ‘The Bow Group's Role in British Politics’ in the Western Political Quarterly (14.4: Dec.
1961), 872.
248

the party.
379
The other factor preventing closer links was ideology. Powell’s anti-
imperialism was, like much else in his ideology, uncompromising, based as it was on an
isolationist nationalism born of quite different reasoning to that informing the imperial
drawdown supported by Bow Groupers, who largely subscribed to the liberal
internationalism of the zeitgeist.
380

The same factors were at work in preventing Powell from forging closer ties with
a group which, particularly after 1965, might have helped him challenge the party’s
consensualist leadership. The Monday Club was founded in 1963 to rival the influence of
the Bow Group, particularly in foreign affairs. The Club’s first chairman, Paul Bristol,
invited other members of the party who, like the Bow Group, were in their mid-twenties,
but with only a minority having a university education, to speaker meetings and
discussions.
381
The primary purpose of the Club was to shore up support for the fledgling
Central African Federation and, on its disintegration, rebel Rhodesia, and to oppose
attempts by both Labour and Conservative governments to scale back commitments
overseas. Many of the empire diehards the group attracted were reluctant to see
restrictions placed on immigration from Commonwealth realms, but over the course of a
few years from 1965 to 1968, the organizational and ideological character of the group
changed profoundly.
382
The Club was purposely transformed from a close-knit and

379
Critchley, J., ‘The Intellectuals’ in the Political Quarterly (32.3: July1961).
380
Barr, Bow Group, 169.
381
Seyd, P., ‘Factionalism within the Conservative Party: The Monday Club’ in Government and
Opposition, (7.4: 1972), 468.
382
Ibid., 474-6.
249

metropolitan circle to a mass membership grassroots movement with a presence in every
constituency association, where hostility to immigration was preponderant. By 1970, the
Club had preferred candidates running for posts in the majority of associations, had called
for the repatriation of immigrants, and had gone from being derided by the leadership as a
nuisance to being feared as a potential threat.
383

Powell delivered speeches on numerous occasions to meetings of the Monday
Club, despite ambivalence towards the Club’s disruptive influence on intra-party politics,
but there is little to suggest he attached great significance for his own advancement to
such meetings, which only became frequent after his departure from the Conservative
Party.
384
The Club came, in the late 1960s, to endorse a collection of policies which, if
meaningfully operationalized from a single set of values at all, seem to have stemmed
from a reactionary nostalgia quite irrelevant to Powell’s core value of parliamentary
sovereignty. While coherence in operationalization may not have mattered to members of
the Club, who were, for the most part, typical of grassroots Tories in their levels of
ideological cognizance, the absence of shared principles would have perturbed Powell.
The group’s membership accordingly remained factious in terms of class and ideology—
a fact which became clearer when the Conservative leadership eventually expelled the
Club in 2001, at which point it was effectively dismembered as members formed and
joined a spectrum of ‘ultra-right’ groups.
385
Indeed, Powell’s limited association with a

383
Ibid., 476.
384
Heffer. Roman, 798.
385
Interview with author, Aug. 19, 2011.
250

group whose only uniting factor was opposition to immigration reinforced, if it at all
made any difference to his standing, his status as a single-issue figure in the 1970s.
Political scientist Anthony King wrote of Thatcher that it was outcomes that were
important to her, not institutions:
She showed no interest whatsoever in the institutional legacy that she would bequeath to her
successors and the country at large. The monarchy, so far as she was concerned, could look after
itself. Parliament and the cabinet were largely sidelined...Rather, she established her own parallel
government within the traditional system. She ran, in effect, an outsiders’ government inside the
existing government.
386

Thatcher also allowed every level of the Conservative Party organization to crumble,
most notably the Research Department. This was, no doubt, partly a by-product of
Thatcher’s disregard for institutions in general, which could only place constraints on the
crusading leader she envisaged herself as. But it also reflected the conscious decision by
Thatcherites to let those institutions within the party most associated with the old order,
such as the CRD, wither once ascendency was consolidated, and at the same time to
reinforce the oppositional institutions that had been crucial in displacing that order during
the challenge phase of the transition.
The Institute of Economic Affairs was founded in 1955 as a ‘charitable research
and educational trust’, and endeavoured to convince the public of what it believed to be
the technical and moral superiority of the market and small government.
387
Drawing on
empirical social science, particularly the Chicago and Austrian Schools of economics, the
group was expressly non-partisan, and valued the freedom its independence afforded to
pursue academically an economic and ethical liberalism to its logical conclusions, not

386
King, ‘Outsider’, 442.
387
Denham, A., Think Tanks of the New Right (Dartmouth; 1996), 25.
251

burdened by the priorities of real-world politics. In fact, the IEA’s charity status
precluded closer contact with politicians generally, and economists working at the
institute, such as Arthur Seldon, despaired at the Tories’ interventionist turn and actively
campaigned against the party. What was needed by the Thatcherites was an organization
willing to espouse an applied version of the IEA’s ideology while, if possible,
maintaining close ties with the party.
Thatcher’s closest political ally, the barrister and intellectual, Keith Joseph,
claimed only to have been converted to Conservatism, by which he meant free market
ideas, in April, 1974.
388
Joseph worked with the IEA to compile a ‘bibliography of
freedom’—a reading list of liberal political economy he recommended to Conservative
students and party workers in the hope he might counter the consensualist hegemony he
had once been a spokesman for.
389
Hailsham, Maudling and Iain Gilmour dismissed him
respectively as ‘dotty’, ‘nutty as a fruitcake’, and as possessing a ‘Rolls-Royce brain
without a chauffeur’, but with Labour able to secure an overall Commons majority at the
election that autumn, Joseph’s ambitions grew.
390
After a leadership campaign cut short
by ill-chosen remarks at Birmingham about inter-generational poverty and family
planning, Joseph concentrated on setting up the Centre for Policy Studies as an

388
Denham, A. and Garnett, M., Keith Joseph (Acumen; 2002), 124.
389
Denham, Think Tanks, 67.
390
Bogdanor, V., ‘Mad Monk’s New Creed’ in the Times Higher Education Supplement (May 24, 2002),
available at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=169340§ioncode=5, last
accessed Feb. 10, 2012.
252

alternative voice on the right, and fell squarely behind Thatcher in her bid to oust Heath
the following year.
391

The CPS sought to change the climate of opinion in favour of a market economy
geared towards wealth creation, in which state activity did not distort the market in such a
way as to stymie increases in productivity. It was hoped public opinion could be brought
around to tolerating the inevitable inequalities that would accompany economic
liberalization if it were made clear that the growth which alone could fund public services
such as health and education could only be achieved by dismantling some of the welfare
structures put in place after the war and by reforming the industrial relations
framework.
392

But the significance of the CPS was not only, or even principally, its approach to
macroeconomic questions, which was quite similar to, though necessarily more pragmatic
than, that of the IEA; the CPS’s social agenda was just as radical, as well as being
indispensible to the propagation of the ahistorical narrative integral to the Thatcherite
project. The foundational statements of the CPS held that the values of self-reliance that
once cemented society had been undermined by the bloated welfare state, and that the job
of a Conservative government was ‘to recreate the conditions which will again permit the
forward march of embourgoisement which went so far in Victorian times’.
393
The erosion
of middle class values had not only sapped the moral fibre of ordinary people, since

391
Denham and Garnett, Joseph, 176.
392
Behrens, R., ‘Diehards and Ditchers in Contemporary Conservative Politics’ in the Political
Quarterly (50.3: July 1979), 290.
393
Kaye, H.J., ‘The Use and Abuse of the Past: The New Right and the Crisis of History’ in the Socialist
Register (23: 1987), 342.
253

economic responsibility was next to godliness; it had also contributed to the decline of
Britain’s economic and political standing in the world.
Of course, such arguments were hardly derived in a vacuum, and they owed much
to the renaissance of liberal thought termed the ‘New Right’—pioneered in its various
guises in the United States by sociologists such as Charles Murray, Daniel Bell and
Nathan Glazer, as well as the intellectuals who assembled around magazines such as the
Public Interest and Commentary.

It is not surprising in this context that Gertrude
Himmelfarb, the American historian of Victorian Britain, scholar-activist, self-appointed
champion of bourgeois values as democratic values and wife of neoconservative social
theorist, Irving Kristol, should have been one of the Centre’s patrons, and thus have lent
the authority commanded as a result of her scholarship to its radical public policy. The
coincidence of Himmelfarb’s and Thatcher’s views was remarkable, with choice sitting at
the centre of both women’s social philosophies. The state, claimed Thatcher, had taken
choice out of the hands of the individual to the point where ‘his moral faculties—his
capacity for choice—atrophy, and he becomes a moral cripple’.
394
The one choice the
post-war settlement did offer, between ‘earning his living and depending on the bounty of
the State’, was no choice at all for the upstanding citizen.
That Heath allowed Joseph to set up the CPS is surprising, and not entirely
explicable. Joseph’s claim that the Centre’s purpose was the comparative study of
continental social market economies may have downplayed the advocacy role that was

394
See Himmelfarb, G., ‘A De-Moralized Society: The British/American Experience’ in The
Neoconservative Reader, I. Stelzer (Ed.) (Grove;1994), 426-7.
254

envisaged. Or perhaps Heath’s position was so tenuous after the setbacks of his
premiership that, by 1974, he felt unable to resist the proposals. A possible factor could
have been an assumption on Heath’s part that by keeping the CPS and potentially
dangerous colleagues who had supported it close to his government, loyalty could be
coerced, or at least outright mutiny corralled. But any such an assumption was to be
proved incorrect. The battle between the CPS and CRD was bitter and highly ideological,
the latter being staffed, according to the CPS’s Director of Studies, Alfred Sherman, by
‘opportunists’ whose ideas were ‘fundamentally at variance with our own’.
395

The CPS continued to work as a ‘consumer of research’, to publish pamphlets,
and to offer advice to Conservative ministers throughout the Thatcherite transition. Links
with the party and government became closer after the 1979 election, when Lord Thomas
of Swynnerton was appointed Director. Sherman, whom he replaced, bemoaned a loss of
independence and the ability to criticize the government. In reality, though, this had
always been limited.
396
The true purpose of the CPS was not to offer groundbreaking new
studies or to act as a check on government, but to provide intellectual cover for ideas that,
in the post-war era, were seen as unrespectable, and to demonstrate outwardly that the
CRD, which the Thatcherites believed was hopelessly enmeshed in consensus thinking,
did not possess a monopoly on ideas in the party. Coupled with the power incumbent on

395
Denham, Think Tanks, 68.
396
‘Margaret Thatcher & the Centre for Policy Studies, 1974-79’, Thatcher Archives.

255

the leadership and Thatcher’s approach to existing institutions, it played key
organizational and presentational roles in the Thatcherite transition.
Defiance Continued
The concept of the ‘Shadow Cabinet’ was relatively new to Tory parliamentary
politics and, like the new rules for leadership selection, its precise operation was still in
the process of being figured out at the start of Powell’s challenge. Churchill had brought
the organization of the Conservative frontbench largely in line with that of the post-war
Labour Party, but whether this framework would be retained and Labour ministers
‘shadowed’ by the men they had been ‘shadowing’ weeks before was uncertain when the
Tories were voted out of office after thirteen years in government in 1964.
Heath regarded himself as a modernizer, and, on winning the leadership in 1965,
sought to emulate the frontbench style Labour had refined during their long period in
opposition. One major element of Shadow Cabinet organization was the clear
demarcation of shadow ministerial briefs. Heath allocated the role of Shadow Defence
Secretary to Powell for two reasons: first, it was thought that Powell’s intellectually
rigorous arguments for scaling back foreign commitments East of Suez might sweeten the
pill of the final stages of imperial withdrawal, to which consensualists in both parties
were by then wholly committed, but which the grassroots and much of the public found
too bitter to swallow; and second, as a portfolio, Defence was considered fairly self-
contained, which would, hoped Heath and his allies, prevent Powell from embarrassing
his leader by putting forward his own distinct perspective on economic and fiscal affairs.
256

Heath also believed that the doctrine of ‘Cabinet collective responsibility’
should have its analogue in the operation of the Shadow Cabinet. Decisions reached by
the shadow cabinet in committee should be adhered to by all members of the body, who
should also espouse the same agreed-upon policies in their public statements. This, he
believed, would ensure a professional image and perceived unity of purpose among those
who hoped to convince the electorate that they were able to take over the reins of
government. If such an arrangement could be achieved, it would surely be less dangerous
to have well-known, influential mavericks such as Powell inside the inner circle and
constrained, rather than outside it and free to pronounce as they pleased.
397

Perhaps due to lack of precedent and personal experience, but more likely out of
a desire to try the patience of his leader, Powell continued to present his alternative
electoral ideology right up until the Birmingham speech. As Shadow Defence Secretary,
Powell argued in front of grassroots members at the 1965 Annual Conference that
Britain’s presence East of Suez might impede, rather than help bring about, the natural
and desirable equilibrium in the balance of power between Russia and China. Although
well-received by his unassuming audience, the insinuation that Britain should divorce its
foreign policy from that of its Western allies embarrassed Heath. During the election
campaign a year later, Powell made the sensational claim that Wilson had plans to send
troops to Vietnam, adding that under the Labour government, Britain had ‘behaved
perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably as an American satellite’.
398
While the

397
Zeigler, Heath, 233.
398
Quoted in Heffer, Roman, 545.
257

reliability of his assertion seemed, at the time, dubious, it served the dual-purpose of
drawing attention to Powell and his alternative politics and of undermining the credibility
and popularity of both party leaders, who held to the same pro-American position.
*
Had Powell continued to speak out of turn on defence, or to make occasional
forays into economics, Heath may have chosen to tolerate him begrudgingly, despite
Powell’s lack of judgment, the new and stricter institutional setting of the Tory
Opposition, and the mutual disdain already deeply entrenched between the two men. This
is because, even if Powell’s challenge was still alive after his failure to win the leadership
in 1965, it had, by 1968, all but run aground as a result of the various factors discussed in
this chapter, not least of which was Heath’s strength vis-à-vis potential challengers as a
result his victory at the leadership election. Powell, nonetheless, was still fervently
committed to an operational ideology which offended numerous different colleagues in
numerous different ways in the parliamentary party, many of whom also found his
demeanour and approach unpalatable. It is in this context that we see Powell turn to a
new audience—the electorate—and a particular issue—immigration—which he believed
could be directed inwards to the party, forcing aside through sheer strength of external
support the obstacles that had derailed his more conventional challenge. It is to this
populist phase of Powellism that we now turn.
258

Chapter 5.

The Populist Challenge: 1968-74
Enoch Powell’s bid to win the Conservative Party leadership was defeated in
1965, and his subsequent attempts to inculcate a free market operational ideology
grounded in the principle of indissoluble parliamentary sovereignty had also floundered
in the years leading up to 1968. Powell’s populist turn, inaugurated spectacularly with his
so-called Rivers of Blood speech, sought to mobilize forces and opinion outside of
traditional parliamentary channels in order to advance his ideological challenge to Middle
Way Conservatism. But Powellite populism was not extra-parliamentary in the way Sir
Oswald Mosley’s mobilizations had been in the 1930s, or anti-party, as George Wallace’s
temporary break from the Democrats had been as he launched his revanchist assault on
the American liberal orthodoxy in the same year Powell spoke at Birmingham.
399

The commitment to the Conservative Party that had driven Powell’s actions and
attitudes towards institutions during the intra-party challenge, the strength of British
political parties, and the stability of the party system meant that Powell’s second
challenge, while utilizing resources outside of the Conservative Party, ultimately
focussed on enhancing the purchase of Powellite ideas within it. In this context, his
departure in 1974 to the small, regionally concentrated Ulster Unionist Party, which itself
was ideologically integrated into the Conservative fold, should be seen less as an act of

399
Thurlow, R.C., Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to the National Front (I.B.
Tauris; 1998), 63.
259

defiance and continuation of the fight by other means than as an overdue embrace of the
political wilderness.
This chapter traces Powell’s second challenge, the centrality of party to it, and the
applicability of our model to a challenge atypical in British politics in that it attempted to
mobilize support outside the party to force events within it. After an outline of the
Birmingham speech as rhetoric and cultural event, the aftermath of the speech and
Edward Heath’s politically effective reaction to it are discussed. The next section
explores how Powell came to choose immigration as an issue that could launch his
populist challenge and a platform on which support for his broader ideology could be
built, paying particular attention to his development of an argument and style that could
instil fear while remaining conceptually slippery enough to be dissociated, when it had to
be, from the explicit racism of fringe groups outside the party.
Analysis of the public reception of Powell’s challenge and the reasons for his
failure constitutes the bulk of this chapter. Two somewhat contradictory interpretations of
Powell’s message put forward by historian Amy Whipple are critiqued: the first of
these—that Powell offered a new form of post-imperial little Englandism—is
anachronistic, it is argued; the second—that Powell presented electors with a ‘blank
screen’ onto which they could project an image of ‘the politician they wanted’, is borne
out neither by the primary material nor what would prove to be the limited scope of his
appeal. Indeed, a savvier politician might have discarded potentially unpopular views
during the early stages of the challenge, as did Thatcher on the Health Service, or,
perhaps even more effectively, chosen as the basis of any populist challenge an issue of
260

conscience that was unlikely to offend the leadership if a contrary position was taken.
This last consideration is particularly pertinent when the leadership of the party, as was
the case in the late 1960s, is unified, credible, and secure vis-à-vis the parliamentary
party, and where a less ideologically aware group, for whom concurrence and consistency
with the party’s seedbed is unimportant, as with the broader British electorate to which
Powell presented his second challenge, is the ideological entrepreneur’s primary
audience.
A receptive public could have offered a challenger such as Powell a great deal of
freedom regarding the content of his populist message, and thus the chance to whip up
support while avoiding a direct conflict with the leadership, at least until a following had
been attracted (at which point the old order would have had greater difficulty putting the
genie back in its bottle). Nevertheless, Powell, as a conviction politician, chose the
controversial topic of immigration as the basis of his second challenge, and it was on this
issue only that his supporters following the Birmingham speech were united. The social
and geographical diversity of Powell’s supporters could be assumed to indicate a theme
transcending the politics of race, but examination of the congratulatory letters Powell
received show that this was not, in fact, the case. It is Powell’s opponents, however, as
educated and ideologically engaged critics, who provide the greatest insights into his
motives and the reasons for his failure.
In the years following Powell’s dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet, he was
unable to build on the nebulous sentiment surrounding the immigration issue. Far from
successfully offering to the public the ‘blank screen’ of Whipple’s second hypothesis, or
261

utilizing, as had many of his American contemporaries and, to a lesser extent, Thatcher
during the 1979 general election campaign, the racial alarm and coded signals that proved
such powerful electoral tools, Powell’s tactics at this stage ensured that the outpouring of
positive feeling towards him was confined to the single topic of immigration. As we shall
see, his inability, or reluctance, to assemble or engage with organizations outside the
party, as the Thatcherites did, along with Heath’s sidelining of grassroots malcontents
and sympathizers early in his second challenge, meant populist Powellism was always
institutionally weak. At the same time, conviction and detachment from the views of
people whose support he needed were ‘coupled’ to render his crusade on Europe as near
to irrelevant, despite continued economic crisis, widespread Euroscepticism, and natural
policy linkages between immigration and European integration.
Rivers of Blood
On Saturday April 20, 1968, Powell delivered to a group of activists at a meeting
of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham what would
become known as his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The speech dealt ostensibly with the
Labour government’s Race Relations Bill, which sought to strengthen statutorily anti-
discrimination measures that thereunto had relied on voluntary codes of practice, and
which was due its second reading in the House of Commons the following Wednesday.
The Conservatives had pledged to table a reasoned amendment on the grounds that, while
born of the highest sentiments, its enforcement would infringe on the liberties of the
262

subject (the Crown would be exempt from scrutiny in the courts) and would not be
commensurate with the limited effects it might have on intercommunity relations.
400

Yet the subject matter of the speech extended well beyond the immediate issues
of the Race Relations Bill, discrimination, and freedom of expression. Powell started off
by recalling a conversation he had had a few weeks prior to the speech with a constituent,
‘a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized
industries’, who told Powell that ‘this country will not be worth living in for his
children’, and that if he had the money, he would emigrate.
401
Powell sympathetically
quoted this ‘decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman’, repeating the incendiary line, ‘In this
country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the
white man’.
He next turned his attention to the number of immigrants entering Britain, and to
those already settled, since, he believed, ‘numbers are of the essence’. By the turn of the
century, working to current trends, he estimated that immigrants and immigrant-
descended persons in Britain could number almost seven million, changing the character
of such towns as Wolverhampton ‘beyond recognition’. He went on:
We must be mad, literally mad, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents
who are, for the most part, the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended
population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

While Commonwealth immigration (excepting students and medical staff, who ‘are not,
and never have been, immigrants’) needed to be reduced to ‘negligible

400
Fiddick, J. And Hicks, J., ‘The Race Relations Amendment Bill [HL] Bill 60 of 1999-2000’, House of
Commons Research Paper 00/27 (Mar. 8, 2000), 7.
401
Powell, E., Speech Delivered at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, Apr. 20, 1968, reprinted in Berkeley
H., Odyssey of Enoch: A Political Memoir (Hamish Hamilton; 1977), 205-14.
263

proportions...without delay’, this would not, in and of itself, mitigate the ‘character of the
national danger’. It was thus imperative that a policy of assisted, though voluntary,
repatriation be ‘pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative
justifies’.
Powell proceeded to read in full a letter he had received from a woman in
Northumberland about an elderly war widow living in Wolverhampton, whose
‘respectable street’ had become ‘a place of noise and confusion’ as ‘one house after
another [was] taken over’ by immigrants. The woman, according to Powell’s
correspondent, had refused to sell her home to an immigrant landlord or to let rooms to
immigrant families and, as a result, had been refused a rate reduction and was living on
less than £2 per week. The letter concluded with the following:
She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her
letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning
piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist’, they chant.

Powell went on to suggest, in his own voice, that while integration was technically
possible, the numbers involved, the motives of the overwhelming majority of immigrants,
and the sinister intention of ‘vested interests...with a view to the exercise of actual
domination , first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population’ made
this unattainable. Bringing his argument full circle, Powell suggested that the Race
Relations Bill was ‘the very pabulum [such elements] need to flourish’, as it
demonstrated clearly their ability to ‘agitate against’, ‘overawe’ and ‘dominate’ their
fellow citizens ‘with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have
provided’.
264

He then uttered the speech’s most notorious, and what would become its
eponymous, line: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem
to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”’. No doubt anticipating the furore to
follow and implicitly drawing the parallel between his own speaking out and Heath’s
silence when presented with the same reality, Powell restated earlier lines in the speech,
protesting that ‘to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal’.
The cultural enormity of Powell’s speech was most pithily captured by Douglas
Schoen:
One of the country’s leading political figures, a man of Cabinet rank and experience with a
powerful aura of cerebral severity, had made all his own the cause of the pubs and clubs, the
bingo-halls and the football terraces. The bitter anecdotes of a thousand Coronation Streets had
poured forth from an apparent stalwart of the Establishment and were set amidst the classical
allusions so long the hall-mark of the authoritative in British politics.
402

Nationally, Powell’s approval ratings climbed overnight. Prior to the speech, no more
than 3% of respondents—some polls even restricted the sampling frame to Tory voters—
ever suggested to pollsters that Powell would be their first choice either as Conservative
leader or for Prime Minister.
403
When asked the same question in the days immediately
following the speech, 37% of a representative sample of all voters told Gallup they would
like Powell to be Prime Minister.
At the same time, support for the Race Relations Bill fell from 51% to 30%,
indicating the immediate and pronounced association in the public mind between Powell

402
Quoted in Wootten, W., ‘Rhetoric and Violence in Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of
Enoch Powell’ in The Cambridge Quarterly (19.1: 2000), 3.
403
Schoen, D., Enoch Powell and the Powellites (Palgrave Macmillan; 1978), 6-17.
265

and the issues of race and immigration.
404
The shift in attitudes was temporary and,
according to political analyst Donley Studlar, ‘the basic pattern of divisions on questions
of race relations and immigration soon reasserted itself’. Nevertheless, Studlar noted that
‘although Powell has done nothing to change the long-run pattern of public opinion, his
speeches have provided an opportunity for public opinion to do something for him’.
405

Aftermath
Little unease was visible in the hall as Powell delivered his speech, but footage
reached London in time for it to feature in the prime slot on the television news bulletins
that evening. Next morning, as the Powells set out on their weekly walk from their
constituency home on Merridale Road to St. Peter’s Church in Wolverhampton, they
were greeted by a huge pack of press photographers. Arriving in London that evening,
Powell received a telephone call from Heath informing him he was sacked from the
Shadow Cabinet. It was the last time the two men spoke.
Heath acted decisively, issuing the statement at 10 p.m. that ‘I have told Mr
Powell that I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist
in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions’.
406
Powell, however, had opened the
floodgates to a groundswell of sentiment which greatly disturbed the Conservative
leadership and political class in general, but which it was seemingly powerless to quell.
One thousand dockers, predominantly Labour voters, marched on Parliament to protest

404
Ibid., 48.
405
D.T., Studlar, ‘British Public Opinion, Colour Issues, and Enoch Powell: a Longitudinal Analysis’, in
the British Journal of Political Science (4.3: 1974), 379-80.
406
Aitkin, I., ‘Mr. Heath dismisses Mr. Powell for 'racialist' speech’ in The Guardian (April 22, 1968).
266

Powell’s sacking, and workers from local breweries and metal works staged a similar,
though smaller, protest in Wolverhampton, presenting a petition in support of Powell at
the town hall.
407
Later in the week, one thousand men at Norton Villiers engine
manufacturers in the town left work early, and Fergus Montgomery, MP for neighbouring
Brierley Hill, stated ‘What he is saying is what millions of people in the country have
been saying privately’.
408

Powell turned down offers of journalistic work on economic and religious affairs
during the latter half of 1968 in order to continue expressing his views on immigration to
audiences around the country, now unencumbered by membership of the Shadow
Cabinet.
409
He aroused passions wherever he spoke, particularly at universities, but such
was Powell’s determination to promote himself and his views that he entered into
quarrels with university academics who attempted to cancel his scheduled campus
appearances after hearing of assassination threats, accusing them of stifling academic
freedom.
410
Powell was relatively subdued at Conference later that year, but he reignited
the issue with a speech to the London Rotary Club at Eastbourne on November 16, 1968,
calling for the establishment of a Ministry of Repatriation, and prophesying that by the
turn of the century, there would be ‘several Washingtons in England’.

407
‘Petitions for Powell’ in the Express and Star (April 24, 1968).
408
‘Views Split on Powell Speech’ in the Express and Star, (April 27, 1968).
409
Powell, E., Letter, Re: Offers of Journalism (14 October, 1968), Papers of Enoch Powell, 1/2/1, 3.
410
Powell, E., Series of Letters and Cuttings (September 17-23, 1968), PEP, 1/2/4, envelope 1.
267

At Labour’s Annual Conference that October, Harold Wilson declared that
‘Powellism has infected like a virus the Tory party at all levels’.
411
This was, perhaps, a
case of wishful thinking on Wilson’s part, was far from the reality of what was
transpiring at the time in the Conservative Party, and was even less reliable as a
prediction of what would occur between then and 1974.
Heath’s swift dismissal of Powell allowed the latter and his supporters to claim
victimization, but the alternative would have been to permit an emboldened and popular
Powell to continue from within the Shadow Cabinet to undermine the cohesiveness of
that tenuously constituted body and to challenge his leader’s authority.
412
Attempts to
control or limit the effects of his pronouncements, short of outright dismissal, could have
been portrayed by Powell as suppression of free speech by an establishment too
electorally weak and politically indecisive to respond to those who flouted the rules laid
down expressly by Heath when he became leader. Moreover, the Shadow Defence post
would have provided a modicum of authority and insider status from which other tenets
of Powellism as an operational ideology could be attached to the clearly visible position
he had taken on immigration. Contemporaries agreed that Heath was more respected than
loved by his party and the voters, and that this was intentional, but in the wake of
Powell’s speech, it was the un-Machiavellian trio of Anthony Barber, Quintin Hogg and

411
Powell, E., A Nation or No Nation (Elliot Right Way; 1979), 24.
412
Heath privately acknowledged, according the minutes of meetings with the Executive of the 1922
Committee, that there were still differences within the shadow cabinet in 1968 on immigration and taxation
policy after Powell’s departure in April.
268

Edward Boyle who persuaded Heath that it was better to risk derision once than to be
considered changeable, cowardly and irresolute in the longer term.
After sacking Powell, Heath sent these trusted lieutenants to Area level meetings
of the voluntary party, perhaps as a means of impressing upon leaders of opinion in the
constituency associations the unacceptability of Powell’s message and the need to bring
grassroots members around to the consensualist position. A week after Powell delivered
his Birmingham speech he addressed a meeting of the Conservative Western Area
Council on the balance of payments and exchange controls while declining to accept
questions at that time on immigration.
413
Hogg and Barber, seeming to understand
Powell’s tactic of introducing other issues into a charged milieu, kept the focus of
grassroots Tories squarely on race and alternative arguments from that of Powell, with
speeches on immigration and, in Hogg’s case, the cancellation of the England cricket
team’s tour of South Africa.
414

Astute tactics also ‘coupled’ here with the wider institutional setting of
Westminster during the middle years of Wilson’s first government, which in itself may
have insulated against challenges as Powell came to launch his populist campaign. Heath
benefited from what he described privately as a ‘lethargic’ Parliament, with the smoking
rooms virtually empty and 1968 being the ‘worst year ever’ for political activity among
backbenchers. In the first months of 1968, attendance at meetings of the 1922 Committee,
where Conservative backbenchers discussed among themselves issues of concern, had

413
Western Area Council Minutes, 1957-72, Conservative Party Archives, 1/14/4, 76.
414
Wessex Area Council Minutes, 1947-69, CPA 1/16/2, 187.
269

fallen to around eighty on several occasions: less than half of those eligible to attend. The
meeting of April 26 demonstrated significant support on the backbenches for Powell, as
MPs expressed anger at the seeming double standard applied to left-wing Shadow
Education Secretary Boyle, who had abstained against a three-line whip on the Race
Relations Bill, and Powell, who had been dismissed despite, in word if not in spirit,
simply echoing Conservative policy. This gathering was attended by 160 Members, but
the number soon tailed off again as the initial furore subsided. Controversy could only
ensure attention for a short period or at occasional intervals, and Powell would have to
foster a popular ideology outside of the party without an institutional base inside it.
Development of the Second Challenge
Interviewed in 1987, Powell stated:
That this was going to change my life, and in some sense the course of British politics, wasn’t in
my mind. If some celestial finger had tapped me on the shoulder while I was drafting the speech of
20
th
April and said “these will be the consequences”, I [would have replied], “if there’s anything I
can alter or put differently, then I will”.
415

His purpose, he claimed, was to state his views while causing minimal trouble for himself
and the leadership, and he recalled how he had spoken to Chief Whip William Whitelaw
after the speech to ascertain whether there was any way he could ‘make things better with
Ted’. This account at best obfuscates, and at worst deliberately misleads.
Commentators have differed in their interpretations of Powell’s anti-immigration
stance, which had developed in fits and starts over a four or five year period leading up to
1968, and comported intellectually, and, at times rhetorically, with his changing

415
Powell, E., Interview., broadcast on Channel Four, July 1987, available at Wolverhampton City
Archives, VT-46.
270

understanding of British nationality and subjecthood in a postcolonial world. But from
those accepting the benign interpretation that Powell’s imperialism was a romantic
figment which collapsed in the wake of a genuine reconnection with reality, through to
Paul Foot, who believed that Powell, as a servant of capital, cynically shuffled the
‘ideological cards in the game of British supremacy’ when it became evident that large
numbers of Britain’s colonial subjects might leave their plantations, move to the mother
country, and collect on their hitherto notional rights to housing, health and education,
there is agreement that the personal ambition to lead the Conservatives was the major
driving force behind his presentation of the anti-immigration case.
416

Powell’s aim was still to become leader of the Tory Party, but he understood that
in winning the contest in 1965 and deftly positioning allies, Heath had secured the
leadership at least up until the election following that of 1966. Even if Heath was
defeated in 1970 or 1971, there were no formal procedures in place for the 1922
Committee to issue a vote of no confidence and thus spark a leadership election. By
allowing Powell to undermine his leader’s popularity while bolstering his own, a publicly
conducted crusade against one tenet of consensus politics might have convinced
backbenchers of Powell’s leadership qualities and political instincts, while at the same
time potentially advancing Powellism as a realigning project.
Finding an Issue in Immigration
The issue of immigration was particularly suitable as a political punch bag, and in
attacking it, Powell hoped to gain a foothold from which he could assault the more

416
Foot, P., The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin; 1968), 187.
271

integral elements of the post-war consensus. Powell’s frontal assault on the consensus
had failed in 1965 to gain him the votes needed to secure the Tory leadership, and even
his attack on wages policy had been successfully rebuffed by consensualists in both
parties. Yet the consensus flank on immigration was not only weak to begin with, but
also poorly defended. There were several reasons for this. Such was the concentration
after the war on economic recovery that little attention was paid to immigration beyond
its offering a solution to labour shortages and a fillip to growth.
417
Cultural conflict,
discrimination, and competition over services were regarded by consensualists (if they
were thought about at all) as teething problems which would resolve in time.
Thus, as the gap between public opinion and government policy on immigration
grew during the 1960s, moderates were unprepared to defend their position with the kinds
of robust electoral perspectives they had developed for central concerns such as the
mixed economy and services. The Wilson government’s three-pronged strategy was to
pay lip service to the arguments of moderate opponents of immigration, to enact
incremental restrictions on entry that would satisfy calls from its working class base,
while occasionally denouncing Tory hard restrictionists as hypocrites and purveyors of
prejudice.
418
The Conservatives were sensitive to charges of hypocrisy, given their recent
history of support for inclusive Commonwealth citizenship, free movement of people,
and retention of British nationality for the Asian minority when negotiating Kenyan

417
Spencer, I., British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain (Routledge;
1997), 39-42.
418
Dean, D., ‘The Race Relations Policy of the First Wilson Government’ in Twentieth Century British
History (11.3: 2000), 259-260.
272

independence, and were therefore happy to comply with Labour wishes that immigration
should, as far as possible, be kept outside of mainstream politics.
419
At a meeting between
Heath and the Executive of the 1922 Committee on July 4, 1968, the leader bemoaned the
disorganization of the Conservatives’ immigration policy, believing this had, in turn,
prevented agreement on the best possible way of integrating immigrants into their new
communities.
420
The Race Relations Bill that Powell attacked was, in effect, the weakest
link in a loosely consensualist chain of policies that had been reluctantly, and then half-
heartedly, drawn up by moderates.
With neither party eager to detail the economic arguments in favour of
immigration, the issue became ‘emotional as well as political’—one of base feelings
ready to be manipulated—and as politicians prevaricated, public opinion hardened.
Powell would have been aware of this shift as a result of activity in the grassroots
Conservative Party, which was, by the 1960s, according to one senior backbencher, ‘far
to the right of the parliamentary party and on present form [likely to] give a lot of
trouble’.
421
Many Tory MPs, while sympathizing with the predicament of the leadership,
believed that opinion in the constituency associations had turned so sharply against
immigration that the most that could be offered was abstention in controversial Commons
divisions.

419
Shepherd, R., Iain Macleod: A Biography (Hutchinson; 1994), 341. Spencer, Immigration Policy, 47.
420
Meetings of Leader with Executive of 1922 Committee, Minutes June 1968- Sept. 1969, CPA, 1922/2/3,
Item 1, page 3.
421
Ibid., Item 1, page 2. Godman Irvine warns Edward Heath of trouble ahead.
273

In 1957, Conservative Area agents, charged with the job of representing the
professional party hierarchy in liaising with the voluntary party and advising the
associations on organization and procedure, noted to Central Office that resentment
against immigrants was growing across the country and could no longer be ignored.
422
At
the following year’s Annual Conference, the first motion on immigration was debated.
The motion was measured, calling for the speedier deportation of foreign-born criminals
and stating that, due to social problems arising ‘as a result of unrestricted immigration
from Commonwealth and Colonial countries, the immigration laws of this country should
be revised irrespective of race, colour or creed on the basis of reciprocity [regarding the
numbers of British emigrants in Commonwealth countries]’.
423
Cllr. Derek Clarke of
Hayes and Harlington sponsored a more toughly-worded motion in 1961, calling on the
government to ‘take action quickly’ on the matter of ‘uncontrolled numbers of
immigrants flowing into the United Kingdom’, which received almost unanimous support
from Conference representatives.
424

But the most visible sign that immigration could play a powerful determining role
in political campaigns came in 1964, a few miles from Wolverhampton in working class
Smethwick. Gordon Walker, sitting Member for the supposedly solid Labour seat and
Harold Wilson’s choice for the job of Foreign Secretary in the event of a Labour victory,
was defeated by Conservative Peter Griffiths, who ran his campaign principally on the

422
Crowson, N.J., ‘Conservatives and Immigration’ in Mass Conservatism: The Conservatives and the
Public since the 1880, S. Ball and I. Holliday (Eds.) (Frank Cass; 2002), 104-6.
423
Annual Conference Minutes, CPA, [NUA/2/1/65] microform slide 18.87.
424
Annual Conference Minutes, CPA, [NUA/2/1/69] microform slide 25.78.
274

issue of immigration. The contest was bitter, with Griffiths not declining to draw
advantage from openly racist slogans posted around the town by his supporters.
425

When entering Parliament after the election, Griffiths was assured of
‘parliamentary leper’ status, but the message to be taken from Smethwick was clear: there
were votes to be had and attention to be gained from ‘evoking and echoing mass fears’.
The election of 1964 had seen a national 3.4% swing to Labour, but across the ethnically
diverse Black Country, vehemently anti-immigration Conservatives marginally increased
their share of the vote, and in Smethwick, Griffiths achieved an almost eight percent
swing: by far and away the largest Tory gain in the country.
426
By contrast, Powell,
whose 1964 election address and public statements on immigration had been moderate,
suffered a net loss of 6.5% of his 1959 poll. The entry of a Liberal candidate into the
contest accounted for much of this, but the fact the Conservatives in South West
Wolverhampton lost proportionally more votes to the new entrant than Labour, and that
Powell was unable to compensate by wooing working class Labour voters to his corner in
the way Griffiths had, suggested a change in message was needed.
Finding a Pitch at Walsall
In a speech delivered on February 9, 1968, at Walsall—a neighbouring industrial
town to Wolverhampton with a similarly high immigrant population—Powell essentially

425
Arnot, C., ‘Malcolm X in the Black Country’, in The Independent (Mar. 3, 1993).
426
Frasure, R.C., ‘Constituency Racial Composition and the Attitudes of British M. P.s’ in Comparative
Politics (3.2: 1971), 454-65. Robert Frasure analyzed the attitudes of MPs based on their voting histories
and public statements over the 1969-70 period. He found Labour Members in diverse areas were more
inclined to racial liberalism than those in white constituencies, while Conservatives in areas of high
immigration, who were, on the whole, more likely to be anti-immigration, were polarized among
themselves. West Midlands Tory MPs, however, were significantly further to the right on immigration than
those representing similarly constituted conurbations elsewhere.
275

tested the waters, gauging the reaction of the public and press to the themes he would
bring to the fore and the style he would use at Birmingham two months later. The
speeches were remarkably similar both in their content and structure. Powell began by
warning of the epochal danger posed by mass immigration, justifying his speaking out so
candidly against it on the grounds of duty, before discussing the numbers of dependents
then entering, or who were eligible to enter in the future if the current nationality laws
were left unaltered. ‘Of six hundred parliamentary constituencies’, claimed Powell,
‘perhaps less than sixty are affected in any way like ourselves’, inviting his audience to
share in the anger felt by ‘we in Wolverhampton’ by suggesting ‘you and I might as well
be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances’.
427
Powell’s
diction, usually high-flown and tending to add to the verbosity of his oratory rather than
establish a connection with his audience, was, like at Birmingham, toned down, with
phrases such as ‘stark staring bonkers’ used to refer to the government’s admission of the
Kenya Asian refugees who had retained British passports after independence. Moreover,
as in his Birmingham speech, Powell added to his roll of facts and figures personal
observations, such as of the ‘communal agitation’ whipped up in Wolverhampton by Sikh
bus drivers asked to remove their turbans, and second-hand anecdotes, such as the
‘constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school’.
Powell’s speech was surprisingly underreported in the national press, but while
generating little unease among backbenchers, it still ensured several handfuls of letters,

427
Powell, E., Speech at Walsall, February 9, 1968, available at http://www.enochpowell.net/fr-80.html,
last accessed Dec. 1, 2011.
276

largely congratulatory, reached him.
428
These letters reinforced in Powell’s mind the
salience of the issue of immigration among large sections of the population, and, thus, the
potential political capital that could be accrued from exploiting it, but they also
highlighted the themes of greatest concern for voters. Urban deprivation, competition for
jobs, school places and council housing, and the ‘snobbery and cowardice’ of ‘left-wing
Tories like Mr. Heath’ all featured as grievances in the letters Powell received, and he
was to give voice to them all in his much longer Birmingham speech.
429

Yet it was violence, never alluded to explicitly at Walsall, that was to offer Powell
the defining hook of his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and the Walsall correspondence
contained many variants on that theme. One correspondent from Lancashire complained
that immigrants were ‘out breeding English people’, comparing the ‘invasion [by an]
increasingly well organised enemy’ to the demographic strategy of ‘alien domination’
employed by the Afrikaners.
430
‘As the problem becomes more obvious’, he feared, ‘so
will in time the white people have to protect themselves and this may well mean
bloodshed between the races and the overthrow by violence of any Government seeking
to protect the minorities’.
431
To one letter writer, who admonished Powell for stirring up
prejudice and ridiculed the idea of ‘national suicide’ already present in his rhetoric,

428
Minutes of 1922 Committee, 1961-70, CPA, 1922/2/6, 231.
429
Letter (Feb 14, 1968), Correspondence—Walsall, PEP, 2/1/11.
430
Letter (Feb 21, 1968), Correspondence—Walsall, PEP, 2/1/5, 1.
431
Ibid., 2.
277

Powell offered a rare written rebuttal, suggesting the author ‘should be ashamed [of
herself] for forming a judgment in ignorance of the material facts’.
432

Sketching a Dystopia
Of our model’s four factors predicting the success of intra-party transitions,
Powell came closest in his populist challenge to fulfilling that of attractive rhetoric—
though, as we shall see, additional work needed to convert attraction into permanent and
effective mobilization behind a full-fledged electoral ideology was not undertaken.
Powell’s speech at Birmingham, and the many later speeches he made on immigration,
met all of the requirements for effective right-wing political rhetoric laid out by Patrick
Wright. Powell articulated a romantic version of the past against the blemished present,
pulling together the sense of crisis which existed at the time, especially on the issue of
immigration among working class communities, into a dystopian vision of the future.
Several commentators have suggested Powell’s nightmare scenario of communalism in
Britain resembled the situation in post-partition India, where up to a million people had
been slaughtered in episodes of mass violence.
433
This interpretation, while seeming to fit
biographically with Powell’s stationing during the war and the fact the examples of
communalism he cited in Britain involved Indian and Pakistani religious and cultural
groups, actually carries little weight. Powell had returned home two years before
partition, and his preoccupation with re-establishing British rule on the sub-continent,
which ended abruptly in 1947, involved the retention of the multi-ethnic Indian Army,

432
Letter (Feb 12, 1968), Correspondence—Walsall, PEP, 2/1/8.
433
Shepherd, R., ‘The Real Tributaries of Enoch’s ‘Rivers of Blood’’, in The Spectator, (Feb. 27, 2008).
278

which, he believed, was possible even at the height of the violence. Instead, the majority
of Powell’s speeches on immigration referred expressly to events in the United States,
which he had visited for the first time before his speech at Walsall. This is an important
point to note as we come to review Powell’s arguments about race, culture and conflict.
Powell’s ‘new racialism’ was so insidious, according to his opponents, because it
disguised itself behind the respectable veneer of culture. But when Powell said that ‘the
tragic and intractable phenomenon’ of communal violence ‘was interwoven with the
history and existence of the [United] States itself’, he was stating essentially that where
there were longstanding racial minorities, violence between groups, irrespective of
cultural similarities (which, of course, compared to post-war India, were high), was
inevitable. Thatcher was later to court controversy by saying ‘people feel rather swamped
[by immigrants]’, and was rebuked for flirting with Powellism.
434
In reality, Thatcher’s
calls for restriction were political and cultural, based on the belief that people’s
resentments lay in competition over resources and a healthy patriotism that should be
indulged (and taken advantage of) by politicians. At the root of Powell’s public
pessimism, by contrast, was a sub-Hobbesian view of human nature and the institutions
needed to contain it, which could leave his audience in no doubt that the country had
invited upon itself nothing less than its physical destruction.
Powell’s careful qualification to his Birmingham speech that integration between
races was possible, so long as the numbers of culturally distinct newcomers were not so

434
Thatcher, M., ‘World in Action’ television interview, broadcast on Granada Television, Jan. 27, 1978.
‘Row Erupts over Blunkett's 'Swamped' Comment’, in The Guardian (Apr. 23, 2002).
279

large as to allow communities to form within the once culturally homogenous national
community, was useful in allowing him to dissociate himself from the overt racism of the
various fascist or quasi-fascist organizations gaining traction in working class
communities during the 1960s. It was, no doubt, with this caveat in mind that Powell
replied to a reporter’s question asking why he ‘seem[ed] to harp on the subject of race’,
with the disingenuous ‘I never mentioned race. Race isn’t relevant. Indeed, as I think I’ve
been reported as saying, I don’t know what race is. If there were four or five million
Germans in this country, would they be of a different race? I don’t know, but I certainly
never talk of it’.
435

The first of Powell’s claims is patently false. Most of his speeches on the
immigration issue referred to immigrants either as ‘coloured’, or emphasized their new
Commonwealth origins, which essentially identified them as such. As for the relevance of
race, the supposedly cultural problems posed by mass immigration were, as Powell stated
them, indelibly bound up with, if not the direct product of, the different physical
appearance of the newcomers from that of, for example, the much larger group of Irish
immigrants in Britain.
Reception
In the weeks after his Birmingham speech, Powell received well over one
hundred thousand letters from the public, predominantly in support of his views as
expressed in the speech. These letters provide valuable insight into the direct relationship

435
Powell, E., 1970 Election Campaign Interview in Wolverhampton with ITN, broadcast on ITV, June 7,
1970.
280

between Powell and his newfound supporters, which was the defining feature of his
second challenge. Most commentators have focused on the words of Powell’s speech in
order to flesh out their understanding of popular Powellism, rather than situating the
speech, as has been done above, in the context of a more comprehensive ideology, and
few have explored this link between Powell and the public using primary archival sources
such as correspondence. The only academic study of these letters has been conducted by
Amy Whipple, and was published in the Journal of British Studies in 2009. Whipple
randomly sampled two thousand letters and explored the themes of race, nation and class
in the context of national decline. In order to understand the reception of the speech, she
offers two seemingly contradictory interpretations of Powellism and its intended aims,
which are examined and critiqued below.
Little Englandism and National Redemption
Powell, Whipple argues, presented England as an antidote to the end of empire
and as a substitute for Britain. However, many people did not understand this, believing
Powell to be a champion of a revitalized Britain. Writes Whipple:
Moreover, Powell became more in their eyes than a mere opponent to race relations and relaxed
immigration policies. He was a new leader who promised to remedy national follies and ills—to
give voice to “ordinary people” and make Great Britain great once again... For some supporters,
the arrival of Commonwealth immigrants sparked an appreciation for all the peoples of the United
Kingdom as the real Britons.
436

Two related points must be made here.
First, nowhere in his Birmingham speech does Powell seek to draw the distinction
between England and Britain, or between either of those national entities and the

436
Whipple, A., ‘Revisiting the “Rivers of Blood Controversy”: Letters to Enoch Powell’ in the Journal of
British Studies (48.3: July 2009), 720, 725.
281

Commonwealth. Powell expressed reverence for England’s intertwined institutions, laws,
and culture, and two years earlier had dismissed the Commonwealth as a dangerous
unreality and a ‘sham’.
437
Mass immigration was, of course, bound up with the construct
of Commonwealth subjecthood and, as Powell saw it, the asymmetrical and illogical
forms of citizenship this conferred on different peoples. But to understand Powell’s
complex arguments about England, Britain and the Commonwealth, one would need to
have read and studied much more than his Birmingham speech. The majority of people
who heard the speech with little prior knowledge of Powell’s thought were not mistaken;
there was nothing in the speech on this topic to be mistaken about.
Second, Whipple might be accused of over-analyzing Powell’s use of the term
‘England’. Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the causes and dynamics of
devolution and normative arguments for and against the process, and as nationalists in
Scotland and Wales reclaimed and restated ancient identities, the term ‘England’ has,
largely as a reaction to events on the Celtic fringe, taken on new meanings and additional
significance.
438
The problem here is that Powell’s understanding of ‘England’ was, along
with that of most of his contemporaries, certainly less reflective and arguably more
benign.

437
Powell. J.E., Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, R. Collings (ed.)
(Bellew; 1991), 134-6. His anti-imperialism would extend as far as denying the British Empire existed in
any real sense before Joseph Chamberlain sought to use it as an ideological stimulus to trade between the
white dominions and Britain.
438
Bond, R., ‘The Importance of Being English: National Identity and Nationalism in Post-
Devolution England’ in Nations and Nationalism (16.3: June, 2010), 62.
282

British national identity during the twentieth century was at its strongest during
the Second World War and the post-war years, and the terms ‘England’ and ‘Britain’
were used interchangeably, without political intent, throughout the United Kingdom.
Powell, who spoke fluent Welsh, published books in that language and lobbied
extensively for the creation of the post of Welsh Secretary at Cabinet level, referred to
himself regularly as an Englishman, much as Burke had done despite his Irish birth and
Catholic ancestry. In speaking of his ‘fellow Englishman’ in the Birmingham speech, and
stating the terminologically inconsistent point that areas of ‘Great Britain’ were
‘undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of
English history’, Powell demonstrated perfect fidelity to the language he had used
throughout his career. When, in 1987, Powell stated that ‘my whole political life has been
telling the English who they are’, he was no more offering a vision of an alternative
nation state or project than he was when, writing home to his parents on the eve of war,
he referred to the ‘Prime Minister of England’ as a ‘smarmy traitor’.
439

Whether Powell began to articulate a peculiarly English form of nationalism
along with other populist themes later in his career is a debate suitable for academic
common rooms, but such considerations, for simple reasons of temporality, could not
have played on the minds of his audience in April, 1968.

439
Powell, E., Interview, broadcast on Channel Four, July 1987, available at Wolverhampton City
Archives, VT-46. Heffer, S., Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, (Orion, London; 1998), 122.
283

A ‘Blank Screen’
Whipple expands on the bland assertion that Powell’s supporters saw in him a
leader who could ‘make Great Britain great once again’, but the conceptual linkage she
offers between Powellism at the levels of high and low politics is hardly any more
substantial. She writes:
Indeed, perhaps the most striking element of the popular reception of the “Rivers of Blood” speech
is the extent to which supporters envisioned Powell as the politician they wanted, not the politician
that he was. Many seemed unaware of his broader political career and thinking, particularly with
regard to his postimperial transformation into a “Little Englander”, as well as his support for the
liberal social legislation of the late 1960s...In the end, Powell became something of a blank screen
on which individual supporters could project the image of the leader they wanted, the man they
believed that Britain needed.
440

Having already dealt with the nature, to the extent that it is relevant, of Powell’s ‘little
Englandism’, let us discuss other aspects of the vertical relationship between Powell and
the public.
By the ‘liberal social legislation’ Powell’s followers purportedly overlooked,
Whipple no doubt has in mind Powell’s votes in favour of decriminalizing homosexuality
and abolishing capital punishment. Powell’s support for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967,
which put him firmly in the minority of Tory MPs, failed to elicit any negative reaction
among either his supporters or detractors. Of the sampled (see below) Birmingham
speech correspondents, none referred to it in their letter even in passing or as a peripheral
issue to immigration, and only one highly abusive letter from a retired prison officer,
which accused Powell himself of being a homosexual, mentioned the issue at all.
441
It is
possible that Britain’s relative lack of cultural conflict over the ‘permissive society’ and,

440
Whipple, ‘Revisiting’, 720.
441
Letter (Apr. 17, 1975), Correspondence—Miscellaneous 1969-87, PEP, 46/1/7, folder 1.
284

thus, the low electoral salience of such issues, explains the scarcity of references to this
topic, though Whipple is probably correct in speculating that most people were unaware
of his liberal stance.
442

The same cannot be said for his abolitionist position on capital punishment. Law
and order was a major concern among voters, and substantial majorities of the British
public, and especially members of the Conservative Party, felt differently to Powell on
the issue over the course of his career. What is more, Powell appeared on television
programmes and in print explaining his consistent abolitionist vote when the issue came
up for debate in Parliament at ten-year intervals, thus generating publicity and, it seems
from the volume of letters he received from supporters on the matter, considerable
awareness among them of his choice in the division lobbies.
Most of the letters were penned by right-wingers expressing bemusement at the
fact Powell’s views accorded so neatly with their own apart from on this glaring issue,
though a significant minority expressed support for a stance that seemed out of kilter with
his own public image. Powell replied to these letters politely, though somewhat
contradictorily when we look at the responses side by side. Powell explained to those
who appealed to Old Testament notions of justice his own interpretation of relevant
biblical verses along with his belief that retribution was not a legitimate end of a state
administered legal system and, in any case, that such ethics were contextual had been

442
The literature on cultural conflict in Britain has tended to emphasize generation rather than religion,
religiosity, and elitism, as has been the case in Europe and the United States. See Australian author Hal
Colebatch’s Blair's Britain: British Culture Wars and New Labour (Claridge; 1999) for an account of
cultural conflict along these lines in Britain, which the author dates to the mid-1990s and the emergence of
New Labour as a culturally assertive and radical force with roots in wider metropolitan society.
285

superseded by New Testament values.
443
He also, one senses slightly mockingly,
reminded a supporter concerned about an increase in muggings, robbery and other violent
crime that many generations had elapsed since such offences carried a capital penalty. To
a woman who expressed ‘horror and disgust’ at the thought that hanging could be
reintroduced, Powell assured her that his opinions accorded with hers.
444
Nonetheless, a
few days earlier he had told a correspondent who favoured reintroduction that several of
their views coincided, and that he might be interested in reading his article on the topic in
the Daily Telegraph, published on the day of the parliamentary debate in 1973.
445

Powell’s Telegraph article exhibits remarkable logical acrobatics even by his own
standards. Powell starts by explaining that, since he believes it is the state’s primary duty
to ensure, using lethal force if necessary, the security of its subjects, it is impossible for
him to oppose the death penalty on moral grounds. However, the punishment is so
gruesome that the bar of efficacy must be set high indeed if it is to be used internally for
normal crimes (IRA terrorism, he believed, constituted an act of war against the state, and
so different rules applied). Citing a series of statistics, he argued that as a deterrent to
murder, the death penalty was ineffective, and it was thus the politician’s task to explain
to his electors the calculation he had made, and to challenge such woolly inanities as, ‘if

443
Powell, E., Letter (November. 3, 1975), Correspondence—Miscellaneous 1969-87, PEP, 46/1/7, folder
1.
444
Powell, E., Letter (Mar. 29, 1973), Correspondence—Miscellaneous 1969-87, PEP, 46/1/7, folder 1.
Powell told his constituent that the supposed uptick in murder was a direct result of juries’ willingness to
convict after the capital penalty was abolished for normal murder in 1957.
445
Powell, E., Letter (Mar. 19, 1973), Correspondence—Miscellaneous 1969-87, PEP, 46/1/7, folder 1.
286

it saves one life...’, and so forth.
446
At the end of the article, Powell adds a qualification
to his previous argument, namely that, despite his own misgivings and social scientific
evidence, if support for hanging among his electors were to reach ‘such a level as to be
deafening’, he might be convinced that it was his duty to them to vote for reintroduction.
This qualification is important for two reasons. First, viewed in the context of the
contorted elucidation of his rationale for voting against the death penalty, it considerably
undermines claims often made by those seeking to demonstrate the ignorance of his
supporters that Powell was a social liberal, at least in the sense that that term is
commonly understood when applied to those such as Roy Jenkins and Shirley
Williams.
447

Second, and more importantly, it gives us an insight into Powell’s view of the
politician as a representative and, thus, the limits to his populism. Powell’s suggestion
that he might change his vote, should the people speak with a loud enough voice, might at
first seem to prove correct Foot’s interpretation of Powellism as populist opportunism.
Yet opinion polls that Powell would have been aware of at the time are telling. Public
support for capital punishment between abolition and Powell’s last vote against
reintroduction in 1983 hovered at around seventy percent, predictably peaking after
particularly grisly murders, but never falling below sixty percent.
448
How loud, it might
be asked, did the people need to raise their voices?

446
Powell, E., ‘On Hanging’ in The Daily Telegraph (Mar. 17, 1973).
447
‘Liberalism’ in Party Ideology in Britain, L. Tivey and A. Wright (Eds.) (Routledge; 1992), 141-57.
448
Ipsos-MORI, ‘Support for the Death Penalty: Fieldwork 1977-2008’, (Jan. 22, 2008).
287

The answer, it seems, depended on the issue. It is interesting that these figures
match almost to the digit popular approval of Powell’s views on immigration,
notwithstanding the immediate spikes in support following his speeches at Birmingham
and Eastbourne. Powell presented himself as a tribune of the people on immigration, but
as a high minded representative whose duty it was to stand above their passions and to
mould their feelings on the issue of capital punishment, because, to put it succinctly, he
agreed with the resounding emotions of the masses on the former and disagreed with
them on the latter. Commentators delighted in pointing out Powell’s flaws as a logician,
and his contradictory positions on the above issues are another example of his use of
pseudo-logic to mask the deeply-held convictions which actually informed his political
decision-making.
Holding fast to convictions—whether born of romanticism, internal logical
consistency, or a mixture of the two—regardless of their popularity, is never the highest
gift for those seeking to mobilize swathes of the electorate behind an already contentious
electoral ideology. Thatcher, whose natural instinct held that ‘it was disgraceful that
people who could purchase private health insurance relied on the state’, recognized that it
was impolitic in the first two stages of the Thatcherite transition to do anything but
promise to invest in, and improve, the Health Service. Even during the Thatcherite
ascendency, with other reforms to the state system having succeeded or at least having
entered a stage of realistic implementation, retrenchment and reform of health financing
288

was largely abandoned, and thus resulted in the ‘explicit re-endorsement of the tax-based
system’.
449

Powell’s message was well-crafted to attract parliamentary colleagues to his
corner, and one can reasonably assume that at least some of the sympathy expressed in
the 1922 Committee meeting after his Birmingham speech stemmed from his linking the
immigration issue to the Conservative ideological seedbed. Nevertheless, unbridled
conviction politics were even more dangerous when ‘coupled’ with the institutional
setting of Heath’s regimented Shadow Cabinet. A man of more flexible principles and a
finer sense of the acceptable and unacceptable might have realized that an emotive
crusade on an issue of conscience such as capital punishment could have generated the
kind of anti-establishment fervour and personal following that the Birmingham speech
brought about, without the risk of breaching protocol and gifting his political enemies the
chance to act decisively against him. The fact consistency with the party’s seedbed was
not essential, and that, therefore, much leeway was granted by his primary audience, the
electorate, for ideological entrepreneurship, makes it even more striking, though, given
his previous record, less than surprising, that Powell chose the riskier course with
immigration, rather than safely exploiting other fears.
This is not to say that, because Powell did not launch such a campaign, his views
on social issues were unknown or unimportant. It is impossible to ascertain the proportion
of people who knew about his seemingly anomalous stance on social issues, but of those

449
Lowe, R., ‘Financing health care in Britain since 1939’, research paper for History and Policy (2008),
available at http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-08.html, last accessed Dec 28, 2011.

289

who wrote to him on these topics, none were under any illusion that he was a reactionary
in the mould of Gerald Nabarro, despite the fact plenty would have preferred if he was.
Many admonished him over his position, attempted to convert him to their way of
thinking, but reaffirmed their support for his actions on immigration. Furthermore, since
he stated his case in clear language in a variety of nationwide forums, it is not unfair to
assume that those who were unaware of his position on homosexuality and particularly
that on capital punishment were little interested in Powellism as a comprehensive
ideology, and simply saw in Powell an articulate, establishment figure, unique in the fact
he was willing to mouth their prejudices. Whereas for the first group of people Powellism
was not a ‘blank screen’ onto which they could project their own image of national
redemption, but, if it was considered an ideology at all, a well fleshed out and sometimes
puzzling collection of attitudes and convictions, for the second group it became literally
overnight a synonym for ‘no more immigration’.
The Birmingham speech was about a single issue, mass immigration, and little
else. Powell made no pledge to the effect he would ‘make Great Britain great once
again’, to take Whipple’s platitude, precisely because he understood this was impossible
at the time, owing to his position as a political and ideological outsider in Heath’s
Shadow Cabinet. There was little positive in Powell’s speech at all. This was intentional,
for the first aim of the populist challenge was to attack immigration as a tenet of
consensus politics, with the second being to draw attention to his wider anti-consensualist
programme. An examination of the reaction to the speech among ‘Powellites’ in the
290

general public, which now follows, shows he succeeded in the first, but failed completely
in the second.
Powell’s Correspondents
For the purpose of this study, a random sample of two thousand letters—the same
number viewed by Whipple—was taken from the boxes of letters of support Powell
received after the Birmingham speech. Powell deposited the letters at the Staffordshire
Records Office on the condition that those accessing them were approved by his literary
trustees, and that quotations from the material were published anonymously to honour the
confidentiality of his correspondents. Different levels of political knowledge and
involvement are evident in these letters,
450
and we can also see the diversity of those who
felt compelled to write to Powell to congratulate him on his Birmingham speech.

Powell often stressed that immigration was not a phenomenon that affected all
areas of Britain equally or directly. His prophecy of violence and communalism was
predicated on patterns of migration that created large concentrations of immigrants,
particularly in provincial towns such as Walsall and Wolverhampton and the boroughs of
large cities. Many of his correspondents disagreed. One pensioner from Tonbridge, Kent,
who considered it his ‘duty to England to send this letter’, tried to disabuse Powell:

450
There are various levels of popular ‘Powellism’ identified in Schoen’s work. The three types of
‘Powellite’ in the electorate are: those who agree with Powell on immigration; those who show support for
Powell as Prime Minister to opinion pollsters; and the 200,000 people who wrote letters of support or voted
for Powell as the BBC’s Man of the Year in 1972.This discussion engages with the theories of reception
Schoen puts forward about Powellism. Schoen’s ‘Powellites’ were those expressing support for Powell’s
positions or his political ambitions to pollsters, mainly from Gallup, along with a limited and scarcely
referred to set of interviewees who explained their positive feelings towards him. As such, the two sets of
data are not readily comparable—it takes more effort and, one might surmise, a greater level of
commitment or outrage to write to Powell at Westminster (or, in many cases, either to his home in
Belgravia or constituency residence in Wolverhampton), than it does to indicate support anonymously for
him in a survey.
291

‘When you said that in areas away from immigrant towns, feelings may not be so strong,
you are in error. I can assure you, as one who moves around talking to many people, that
your views are shared by most in the South’.
451
Based on the provenance of those letters
sampled, as illustrated in the chart below, the correspondent was correct.

Fig. 5.1: Origins of letters of support sent to Powell on Birmingham speech.
Letters from the two Wolverhampton constituencies (both those in support and
the much smaller number opposing Powell’s views) were archived separately from those
sent from elsewhere.
452
A random sample of the Wolverhampton letters was taken and

451
Letter (Apr. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/4.
452
Polls reveal that as time went on, support across England varied only slightly. In Scotland, where
support for Powell in 1968 stood nine percent below the national average, it declined further into the
second challenge. Only in the West Midlands did the proportion of voters expressing approval of his
message remain above the national average throughout the period. See Schoen, Powellites, 214-19.
West Midlands
(including
Wolverhampton),
428
London, 340
South East
(excluding
London), 267
East Midlands,
132
North West, 263
North East, 143
Commonwealth
and Rhodesia, 33
South West, 270
Wales, Scotland,
Ulster, 104
Abroad (non-
Commonwealth),
7
292

added proportionally to a larger sample from other towns and regions to make up the
two-thousand letters examined. Predictably, Powell attracted his highest level of support
in the West Midlands conurbation—an urban area of high immigration within whose
boundaries lay his own constituency. But the differences were not as marked as Powell
himself implied they would be, and, when controlling for a region’s population, his
support in the overwhelmingly white regions of the industrial North East and rural South-
West was as strong, if not stronger, than that found in London. Michael Heseltine’s later
assertion that ‘my constituency was in Devon, and if he’d stood to be leader of the
Conservative Party or, indeed, Prime Minister there, he would have won in a landslide’
accords well with one correspondent’s claim that Powell was ‘voicing the opinion of my
fellow Westcountrymen’, and indeed seems plausible, given the above figures.
453

It is doubly ironic, though perhaps unsurprising, that the most inflammatory
letters were sent from residents and citizens of the old Commonwealth, and from
republican Rhodesia, which had unilaterally declared its independence from Britain under
the white supremacist government of Ian Smith in 1965. A ‘faithful follower’ and
‘English patriot’ in Durban wrote to Powell ‘You are the BRITISH peoples [sic] choice,
we are waiting for you to lead us. LEAD ON ENOCH’, and asserted that Powell, like
Smith, was of the ‘officer quality’ needed to save Britain from ‘squalor’, ‘paganism’,
‘criminality’ and illiteracy.
454
A fellow South African speculated that Parliament would

453
Letter (Apr. 21, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/33.
454
Letter (Apr. 24, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/18.
293

have to legislate for some type of segregation.
455
The first irony, which Powell’s
opponents took satisfaction in pointing out, is, of course, that these correspondents were
themselves immigrants to far-flung continents. The second, which none of those living in
the old dominions demonstrated awareness of, was that Powell’s all-or-nothing
nationalism, derived from the core principle of parliamentary sovereignty, led him to
ridicule the idea of a Commonwealth bound by mere symbols, along with the concept of
dual citizenship, and he would thus have regarded them as foreigners.
The gender composition of the sampled letter writers coincided with the findings
of pollsters that Powell’s supporters were mainly men, with 60% of his correspondents
being male and a substantial majority of the women being married. These results should,
nonetheless, be interpreted with caution. While they may seem to confirm that, as a
group, Powell’s most ardent supporters were unrepresentative of the disproportionately
female Conservative electorate, we should remember that those speaking at conferences
or attending Tory policy discussion groups—perhaps more comparable on an activism
scale to writing a letter—were even more disproportionately male than Tory voters were
female.
456

It is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty the class, or even
educational, composition of a group of correspondents such as that sampled. A few letter
writers raised the concerns of small businesspeople, and a similar number referred to their
manual occupations. Yet there were few signs of the staunch individualists to whom T.E.

455
Letter (Apr. 24, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/41.
456
‘The Analysis of Voting Behaviour in Great Britain’, Ipsos-MORI and British Election Study data,
available at http://www.earlhamsociologypages.co.uk/vbint.htm, last accessed Dec 29, 2011.
294

Utley believed Powellism as an electoral ideology might appeal.
457
Nor is it obvious from
examining letters from the 1969-74 period that Powell’s correspondents became more
working class and, hence, more Labour-leaning, as his supporters in the electorate
supposedly did over the same period.
458
Comparisons with American contemporaries
such as Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Joseph McCarthy,
459
the junior
senator from Wisconsin, occasionally appeared in the letters, and Schoen raised the
possibility that status anxiety could have mobilized support for Powell in the way it
seemed to have done for those men, before concluding that, since inter- and intra-
generational class mobility was so low in Britain, its effects would have been minimal.
460

The letters studied here offer little reason to doubt this.
Examination of a smaller random sample of 150 letters sent by those writing to
Powell to oppose his views did highlight differences between opponents and supporters.
Powell’s opponents were predominantly from England’s softer South East and held self-
consciously leftist political leanings. Many joint statements were sent to Powell by
student unions and bodies such as Oxford University Humanist Group, and university
academics and graduate students from several countries supplied a stream of well-written

457
Utley, T.E., Enoch Powell: The Man and His Thinking (London; 1968), 124.
458
Schoen, Powellites, 176-80.
459
Near contemporary. Powellism as McCarthyism may be an anachronism. Powell’s populism became
more concerned with elite complicity in forces stacked against the people and even the security of the state
during the 1980s. He was particularly anxious about the American role in Ulster, which he believed was a
destabilizing one aimed at securing a united Ireland that would, in return for its reunification, sign up as a
full-fledged member of NATO. He insinuated that the CIA was responsible for the Mountbatten
assassination, and linked this to foreign affairs. ‘I don’t think one can estimate the importance of the
American input into the actions of the government. Particularly in last eight years, when the Prime Minister
[Margaret Thatcher] has been so prone to American interpretation and American vocabulary’.
460
Schoen, Powellites, 343-4.
295

letters, adding credence to Schoen’s finding that ‘anti-Powellites’ in the electorate tended
to be better-educated. Ministers from the non-conformist churches were also prominent
among Powell’s opponents, and encouraged their congregations to pass resolutions and
sign petitions. Powell’s supporters were not drawn from any particular denomination,
though even before his joining the Ulster Unionists, Catholics were decidedly cool
towards him.
461

Far from cutting a radically different profile from that of the population as a
whole, Powell’s supporters who wrote letters after his speech at Birmingham and
throughout the early 1970s were demographically quite representative of the British
electorate. Schoen examined the idea that ‘Powellites’ may have been less integrated
through institutions into their local communities and social classes, thus engendering a
detachment from the traditional channels of political representation that had acted in the
past as levees preventing the rise of extremism or mass movements in Britain, but found
no significant differences among poll respondents. There is nothing to suggest that such
bonds had been weakened among Powell’s correspondents. Few were dismissive of the
institutions of state and parliamentary government, or even the party system (aside from
the men occupying key posts at the time), and many were members of unions, chambers
of commerce, and community groups.
It is also worth noting that, despite the relatively small number of letters he
received from the Celtic fringe and Whipple’s belief that a new, specifically English,
consciousness was being stoked by Powell, the terms ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ were used

461
Ibid., 221. Petitions (Apr, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham Against, PEP,1/2/7, folder 1.
296

interchangeably by his audience, just as they were in the Birmingham speech itself.
‘Please keep the Crusade against mass immigration going’, begged a middle-aged woman
from Wiltshire. ‘You are Britain’s last hope. You will be the greatest Englishman since
Churchill. God bless you’.
462

Arguments, Understandings and the Preponderance of Immigration
Figure 5.2 illustrates topics and themes brought up by Powell’s correspondents in
the sampled letters. Many letters mentioned more than one of the themes included below,
hence why the sum of the percentage totals for all categories is greater than one hundred.

Fig. 5.2: Topics that animated Powell’s correspondents.

462
Letter (Apr. 24, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/9.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
297

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of letters state clearly the author’s
dissatisfaction with an aspect of the government’s immigration or race relations policies,
and most offer some form of solution to ‘the immigration situation’, ‘the colour
question’, or, as many simply put it, ‘the problem’. These ranged from encouraging
greater integration and capping entry for immigrants without family members already
settled which, by 1969, was broadly in line with the policies of both parties, to stopping
all immigration permanently and forcibly repatriating West Indians and Asians to their
native countries, along with their British-born children. Labour’s Race Relations Bill was
mentioned in only around five percent of letters, confirming that, even if Powell had been
primarily interested in voicing concerns over this particular piece of legislation, the
implications of his speech were widely seen to be much larger than the reason given for
its delivery. Those who did mention the bill picked up, however, on Powell’s
straightforward argument that attempts to legislate away discrimination would only result
in more frequent and institutionalized discrimination against whites, demonstrating that
Powell had, in fact, conveyed his message in such terms that it could induce anger and
heighten fear among his audience. ‘This Race relations bill’, wrote one correspondent in
Rhyl, ‘is APARTHEID IN REVERSE, it gives the black man rights which are denied to
the white man in his own country’.
463
The very few letters which did not mention
immigration praised Powell for his courage in striking a blow for freedom of speech, or
were simply postcards offering ‘congratulations on your speech of last weekend’.
464

463
Letter (Apr. 21, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/2.
464
Letter (Apr. 25, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/9.
298

Disillusionment?
The fact so many of Powell’s letters came from areas of very low immigration
might lead us to suspect, along with Whipple and Schoen, that the driving force behind
the authors’ feelings and actions extended further than the issue of immigration. Few
correspondents even in the West Midlands and London recounted the kinds of personal
experiences with immigrant communities that Powell leaned so heavily on in his
Birmingham speech. Immigration was viewed by most correspondents as bad for the
country as a whole and its people in general, but virtually none gave examples of how
their own lives, or even those of friends or relatives, had been affected.
Whipple believed the deeper issue at stake was disillusionment with the political
system and its dominant class, stating ‘From their perspective, Powell was not speaking
for all ‘whites’ so much as for those to whom no one bothered to listen’.
465
Adopting a
similar tack, and deciding that Powellism was not a form of mass politics along the lines
of mid-century mass mobilizations in Europe, or a product of status anxiety, Schoen
concluded that support for Powell was a somewhat reflexive response to the feeling of
lacking political efficacy.
Significantly for our model, Schoen links this disillusionment back to crisis in the
post-war consensus, suggesting that the narrow spectrum of interests represented by the
main parties, the lack of meaningful choice between them, and the government’s seeming
inability to promote economic growth within the settlement’s parameters created a
generalized fatalism in the electorate. He then marshals secondary evidence for

465
Whipple, ‘Revisiting’, 729.
299

disillusionment—such as the increase in third party voting during the 1960s, the number
of times the sitting government was humiliated at by-elections, the overall fall in electoral
turnout, and opinion polls showing that, among the public, politicians commanded less
respect than dustmen—suggesting that the most disillusioned were likely to express
agreement with Powell’s views on immigration.
466
That the level of support among the
public for Powell coincided over time with the numbers reported as saying they would
vote for third parties seemed, for Schoen, to confirm this. Powell was stepping into a
political void, and Heath’s swift action relieving him of his responsibilities confirmed his
antiestablishment credentials in the eyes of the disenchanted looking for a champion.
There are several strands to Schoen’s and Whipple’s disenchantment or
disillusionment, none of which were evident among the letter writers. ‘Alienation from
the political process’, as it is labelled in the chart above, was defined broadly in the
analysis of the 2000 letters to encompass any kind of disenchantment with parties,
people, or the state system.
There were occasional expressions of anger at ‘the powers that be’, who, whether
for reasons of ideology, class, region or temperament, were ‘out of touch with the lowly
people’, as one factory worker in Glasgow put it.
467
Slightly more common were ad
hominem attacks, particularly against Heath, with knowing allusions made to his bachelor
status, along with accusations that Heath himself would not choose to ‘live in the

466
Schoen, Powellites, 310-32.
467
Letter (Apr. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/14.
300

unsanitary conditions of the immigrants’.
468
Members of the elite outside of politics were
occasionally derided, with one correspondent in Bradford asking, ‘why should the
archbishop [Michael Ramsey, who had opposed restrictions on the entry of Kenya Asians
in 1967] have so much influence? He should extend his Christian teaching by taking a
house up here in Lamb Lane or Leeds Road’.
469

Attacks on the political system itself were few and far between, though one
correspondent equated the Westminster system’s elective dictatorships with rule by
‘vicious minorities’—a concept which Powell was to develop in his more general
speeches—and called for a more direct form of democracy with Powell at the helm,
believing ‘it would surely silence forever the shrill voices of the left-wing minorities and
crank fanatics, the protestors and progressives—they would be utterly overwhelmed and
routed by the massive vote of the electorate’.
470
Such schemes, of course, directly
contravened Powell’s core principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and, while not typical
of the letters Powell received in support of his speech, the suggestion demonstrated how
out of touch with political and institutional reality some of his supporters were. As our
seedbed theory predicts, this is likely to be the case at the electoral level of politics, and,
as such, the perfect fidelity to the seedbed’s core principles on which Powell insisted
even during his second challenge could present only limitations while garnering little
goodwill in and of itself.

468
Letter (Apr. 28, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/25.
469
Letter (Apr. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/2.
470
Letter (Apr. 30, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/4.
301

Of the handful of correspondents calling for change to the system, most were
content to see the emergence of a ‘people’s own party’, led by Powell and funded through
shilling contributions from ordinary people. Powell, however, saw his place up until 1974
as a member of the Conservative Party, and members who wrote to congratulate him on
his speech seemed to be suggesting he should circumvent the traditional processes and
institutions of the party and disavow its official platform, which, in Powell’s mind, would
have negated the very concept of the party in representative politics. As one Tory
suggested to him:
The trouble as I see it, is that we belong to the local Conservative Association and are constantly
being told that we must agree with the national policy. Not for the first time I am not with Mr
Heath. I cannot see how things are to be changed, but I feel that could you find some way of
contacting the constituency associations, you would have a great amount of backing in them.
471

The consensus among grassroots Tories appeared to be: ‘Heath has to go or we will lose
the next election’. But there was a lack of understanding with regards to how Powell
could, as one eighty year old ‘true Conservative’ from Sussex put it, fulfil his ‘duty to
[his] country to come out as leader of the Conservative party’.
472

Interests
Powell may have trodden a fine line between cultural and racial opposition to
immigration, but any theoretical differentiation he unconvincingly made between the two
was all but lost on his supporters in the electorate. Many drew the explicit linkage
between race and culture, with one correspondent casting ‘British culture, civilisation and
Way of Life’, which encouraged ‘white people [to] try to limit their families’, against oft-

471
Letter (Apr. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/2.
472
Letter (Apr. 22, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/17.
302

repeated, though unsubstantiated, myths of immigrants being allowed by the state to take
child wives while practising polygamy.
473

Few mentioned cultural communalism as a likely cause of violence in and of
itself, but Powell had, in his claim that the wives of his constituents ‘were unable obtain
hospital beds in childbirth’ and so forth, successfully tapped into a deep sense among the
working classes in particular that, in the words of one Oldham assembly line worker, the
politicians were ‘giving away our country’. ‘I am not colour prejudiced’, wrote the man,
but it annoys me to see immigrants in this country receiving all social benefits, National Health
benefits etc., especially when it is hard working members of society who are being ‘taxed to the
hilt’ to finance it...I feel certain that when the Tory Party returns to it’s [sic] correct place, with
you and other honest members leading it, many of the burdens imposed by this so called
‘Government’ will be rectified.
474

The idea that schools, housing and the Health Service were being ‘taken over’ and denied
to ‘those who have a right to it’ was widespread, and it was such worldly concerns that
the bulk of anti-immigrant feeling was rooted in. This would have discomfited Powell for
two reasons: first, the equation of services with rights; and second, the limited scope it
offered for the transferral of such issue-specific resentments to a broader political project.
Very few issues other than immigration were mentioned in the Birmingham
letters, casting further into doubt the notion that Powell’s supporters were frustrated with
‘liberalism gone berserk’ generally. Some correspondents wondered ‘whether England
will be a safe country for our children and grandchildren’ and were ‘almost in despair for

473
Letter (Apr. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/15.
474
Letter (Apr. 21, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/42.
303

the ordinary English people’, but whether the issue was crime or poverty, it was always
secondary to, and a consequence of, in their minds, ‘immigration and its effects’.
475

Opponents
The issues of race and immigration also crowded out all other concerns for
Powell’s opponents. Many juxtaposed his support for the repatriation of non-natives in
Britain with the blind eye he turned to the crimes the regime in Salisbury committed
against African natives, citing this as proof of his hypocrisy and racism.
476
Several
correspondents implored him to moderate his rhetoric in the wake of attacks on
immigrants in Wolverhampton, and sought for him to repudiate what amounted to
collective punishment, lest his prophecy of communal violence become self-fulfilling.
Yet others believed, partly due to the newfound popularity he had found among ‘the
thugs, the ignorant, the prejudiced, the paranoid, the yobbos, and the drop-outs’, and
partly due to Powell’s sharing in their ‘quiet intolerance’, that he would carry on along
the same path, remaining ‘one of the most hated men in England today’.
477

Very few of those writing to Powell to oppose his views were themselves
immigrants. One of Powell’s most infamous remarks was, however, refuted by black and
Asian correspondents who drew on personal experiences. Powell had said in November,
1968:
The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he
becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still. Unless he
be one of the small minority – for number, I repeat again and again, is of the essence – he will by

475
Letter (Apr. 24, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham, PEP,1/1/4.
476
Letter (Nov. 23, 1968), Correspondence—Eastbourne Against, PEP,1/6/3.
477
Letter (Apr. 28, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham Against, PEP,1/2/7.
304

the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality
without acquiring a new one.

One West Indian woman questioned whether Powell believed the same about the English
‘kith and kin’ who had settled in Australia and New Zealand, while a mixed race Anglo-
Indian man, who self-defined as a ‘coloured Englishman’, stated, ‘we consider ourselves,
and know we are, more English than most white people in this country, this country now
being a mixture of nationalities, from all over the globe’.
478
It is not an understatement to
say that this vision of, and for, Britain was diametrically opposed to that which Powell
offered, but this demonstrates only how central the race and immigration issues were to
Powellism as it was understood in the public mind, rather than the fact of opposition to
Powell on a plethora of issues.
One topic that was often debated by Powell’s opponents, but which was absent
from the letters he received in support of his views, was the motives he had for airing
them, particularly with regards to his own political ambition. One correspondent
suggested Powell’s call for repatriation was a cheap bluff, designed to draw attention and
praise his way, when, in fact, he knew very well that ‘the Treasury [did not] have the
money and Britain [did not] have the skills to send them all back, [as it] would be left
without a Health and Transport Service’. Another critic levelled the charge of
demagoguery against Powell, stating:
The British public is credulous, Mr. Powell, and you play upon their credulity and sad prejudices
to produce feasibly shocking results....We have not yet arrived at government by referendum in
this country: you have dramatically demonstrated what has often been felt, that such a system
would be narrow-minded and repressive in its effects.
479

478
Letter (Apr. 30, 1968), Correspondence—Birmingham Against, PEP,1/2/7.
479
Letter (Nov. 24, 1968), Correspondence—Eastbourne Against, PEP,1/6/3, 4.
305

By ‘presenting false information to an already bigoted public’, Powell was not only
serving his own political ends, but also the interests of capital by ensuring that ‘sections
of the community which [Powell] would like to see firmly kept in their productive
positions’ were distracted from economic realities.
Much the same argument is made by Paul Foot, and, since Powell was unable to
ascend to the leadership of his party and, in turn, to transform Powellism as electoral
ideology into Powellism as state system, it is unclear whether he intended to push
nationalism as the mystifying tenet of an electoral perspective designed to pacify the
liberal economy’s workforce, or whether he would have attempted to sell capitalism as
democracy at face value. Irrespective of this, it is clear that Powell’s opponents and
supporters were equally animated by his position on immigration and, for the most part,
paid little attention to other aspects of his electoral ideology. From the same speeches and
on the same issue, one group was able to paint Powell as a tribune of the people, and
another to cast him as an opportunist, a demagogue, and a cynical mouthpiece for the
privileged few.
*
Even those committed enough to write to Powell differed from one another
markedly in terms of class, partisanship and personal ideology (extending here the term
‘ideology’ to encompass collections of beliefs held by individuals, across swathes of
whom enormous disparities in knowledge, awareness and interest existed). In his analysis
of popular support for Powell and its causes, Schoen defines Powellism as a type of
political extremism—the implication being that those expressing any kind of support for
306

Powell can be treated sociologically as an homogenous herd of extremists, flailing
incomprehensibly at demons of their populist imagining.
480
This conclusion is erroneous.
Some ‘Powellites’ in the electorate were, as one would expect, extremists by the
dictionary definition (‘an advocate of extreme doctrines or practices’), since his
correspondents were, if we examine their own opinions as expressed in the letters they
sent to Powell, a fairly representative cross-section of the British population on ideational
and social measures.
481
The only thing, however, that they shared in common with one
another was a fervent opposition to immigration, and, in probably a majority of cases,
some degree of racial prejudice. Even the solution to the ‘immigration problem’ was not
agreed upon by his supporters.
Most of Powell’s supporters, detractors, and the few who were indifferent to his
populist challenge were able to place him on an issue spectrum as supporting an
immediate halt to Commonwealth immigration, along with the voluntary, assisted
repatriation of recent immigrants and their dependents.
482
That Powellism became
synonymous with racial alarmism owed more to the already controversial and
sensationalist nature of the issue when he raised it and the undercurrents of support for
tough policies than it did to his neglect of other issues or failure to attempt to construct
around immigration a popular electoral ideology. Powell was neither quiet nor coy about
his wider programme, including his ‘support for the liberal social legislation of the late

480
Schoen, Powellites, 254.
481
Dictionary.com. Based on the Random House Dictionary (Random House; 2012).
482
Schoen, Powellites, 278.
307

1960s’. But even if Powell had provided a ‘blank screen’ onto which people could
project the ‘politician they wanted’, few would have attempted to do so, since Powellism
meant simply ‘no more immigration’, and for the overwhelming majority of his
supporters through to 1974, this was all they cared for it to mean.
Powellism as Mass Politics
Though Powell attracted controversy and, with it, sporadic outpourings of support
and symbolic gestures such as factory walkouts, Powellism never became a mass
movement. A small group of supporters, numbering around six hundred and calling
themselves the Powellight Association, published from 1968 through to either 1974 or
1975 a newsletter titled Powellight, which largely focussed on immigration and
nationalist/ Unionist politics. Recognizing that Powell’s second challenge had
floundered, and without the subscriptions needed to continue publishing Powellight, Bee
Carthew, the Association’s Chair, joined the overtly racist National Front in the 1970s,
but soon returned to the Conservative right-wing fringe with groups such as the Monday
Club, of which she had been an executive member.
483

To talk about a Powellite faction within the electorate was, then, even more
fantastical than talking about one in the Conservative Party. This was not the case with
Thatcher, who, even before becoming leader of the party, cultivated links with potentially
sympathetic organizations in civil society. As the Tories’ frontbench spokesperson on the
environment, Thatcher was responsible for formulating the 1974 manifesto policies of
mortgage reduction, assistance towards housing deposits, and the centralized capping of

483
Barberis, P., et. al., Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations (Pinter; 2005), 192.
308

property rates raised by local authorities.
484
All of these proved popular with a middle
class base that identified with Thatcher (and would be afforded attention in return), and
which was, as a decade earlier, frustrated not only with the advances of organized labour,
big business, bank profits and property speculation on the back of inflation, but also with
the soft corporatism of the Conservative Opposition and Heath’s betrayal on prices and
incomes.
Several groups had formed in the late 1960s and 1970s to press for middle class
sectional interests against the consensualist grain, and while all were officially
autonomous from the Conservative Party and most of them more uncompromising in
their stances than the leadership under Heath, of the two parties it was clear where their
natural allegiance lay.
485
Heath, too, had attempted to engage groups in civil society, but,
despite accepting in principle some form of locally raised tax to replace rating, the
tactical and ideological extremism of groups such as the National Union of Ratepayers’
Associations and the potential electoral threat single issue groups posed convinced Heath
to work through traditional channels. For example, Central Office’s Department of
Community Affairs in the early 1970s sought to reinvigorate Conservative Trade
Unionists as a means of ensuring Conservative-leaning, or at least moderate,
representation in the increasingly unionized middle ranking professions.
486

484
King, A. and Nugent, N., Respectable Rebels: Middle Class Campaigns in Britain in the 1970s (Hodder
and Stoughton; 1979), 162.
485
Ibid., 156.
486
Ibid., 167.
309

The Thatcherites, by contrast, took a direct approach to fostering relations with
groups unafraid to demand ideological purity. The National Association for Freedom,
which campaigned for the drastic curtailment of union privileges, and the Middle Class
Association, a right-wing pressure group with considerable membership overlap with
local Conservative constituency associations, were courted by Thatcherites from
relatively early on in their challenge, but two election defeats in 1974 and Thatcher’s
victory the following year brought the relationship into the open.
487
Keith Joseph, for
example, stirred up controversy with his hyperbolic criticism of Labour moderates who
had joined the picket line during the 1976-8 Grunwick dispute, which had polarized
public opinion and become a rallying point not only for trade unionists, but also liberal
opponents such as the NAFF, who called for the total abolition of the closed shop and set
out to break the strike.
488
In siding with the radicals, Joseph purposely snubbed ‘wets’ in
Thatcher’s Shadow Cabinet who called for moderation, such as Shadow Employment
Secretary Jim Prior, directing tensions in civil society into the fray of battle for control of
the party.
Echoes at the Grassroots
Attitudes expressed at Conference mirrored those of Powell’s correspondents and
drew on what was considered by many grassroots Tories to be the public mood. The way
immigration figured in the constituency associations also attested to the way the issue
quickly developed its own momentum as Powell pressed his case. But rather than a

487
Ibid., 15-16, 175.
488
Pattinson, T., ‘Jayaben Desai: Obituary’ in the Independent (Feb. 21, 2011).
310

corollary to other issues and the potential base around which an ideology of the right
could be constructed, immigration came to be, for many grassroots members, the idée
fixe to be brought up in any situation.
In South West Wolverhampton, the constituency association’s yearbook in 1967
did not contain a single reference to the problem Powell claimed gripped the town,
despite the fact the Tory-controlled council’s housing policies—which would have dealt
head on with questions of community integration and access to benefits—were touted as
a success, and thus could have provided a useful pretext for launching into a discussion of
immigration.
489
In the 1969-70 book, however, W.G Morrison, the Chairman of the
Conservative group on Wolverhampton Town Council, assured local party members that
‘despite the problems created by immigration, our educational programme continues to
make headway’, and entreated all voters to make the best of what was not under their
control.
490
‘Wolverhampton County Borough is a prosperous Town’, he wrote. ‘This is
one of the reasons for our current immigration problems’. In the discussion forums set up
by the Conservative Political Centre in 1970 as a means of surveying grassroots opinion
more regularly, immigration often topped the list of issues that most concerned party
members.
491

489
Yearbook of Wolverhampton South West Conservative Association (1967), Wolverhampton City
Archives, LS 1042/15.
490
Morrison, W.G., Yearbook of Wolverhampton South West Conservative Association (1968-9),
Wolverhampton City Archives, LS 1042/16, 7.
491
Minutes of the Executive Committee of Wolverhampton South West Conservative Association, 1950-
76, Wolverhampton City Archives, LS 1042/3, bound reports, book 1.
311

The Conservative grassroots not only reflected, and amplified, shifts in public
opinion; as the primary campaigning organ of the party, they affected how electioneering
was conducted on the ground. By the early 1970s, Conservative Central Office had
realized that immigrant voters, who had, up until that point, been conceded by default to
Labour, would play an increasingly important role at future elections in constituencies the
Conservatives needed to compete for.
492
Some constituency associations appeared
lukewarm to the idea of proactively canvassing immigrant voters and increasing non-
white representation in the associations themselves, and when officials at Central Office
proposed that in certain areas campaign material could be printed in various Indian
languages, the reaction among the grassroots helped convince them that such a move
would likely alienate more electors than it would attract.
In the two years prior to Powell’s Birmingham speech, a ‘demographic analysis’
and targeted membership drive called Project ’67 was devised by the leadership with the
hope of diversifying the party grassroots, in particular bringing underrepresented groups,
including ethnic minorities, who might, excepting their sectional status, be inclined to
vote Conservative, into the formal party.
493
There is evidence of a lack of enthusiasm in
the minutes of meetings in the constituencies for such ‘interference’ from the centre, with
some associations simply refusing to participate in the campaign, unlike with the drives
to increase membership of local branches of the inoffensive Young Conservatives.
494
The

492
Crowson, ‘Conservatives and Immigration’, 108.
493
Ibid., 106.
494
‘Advertisement for the Young Conservatives’ in Yearbook (1967), Wolverhampton City Archives, LS
1042/15, 25.
312

fact hostility increased in the wake of Powell’s speech, and that Heath seems to have
wound up Project ’67 quietly and prematurely, might suggest a Powellite intra-party
victory at the grassroots. But if the demise of Project ’67, to which the leadership from
the outset appeared only half-hearted in its commitment, was accelerated by Powell’s
intercession, Heath was at least able to convert this small inconvenience into advantage
by creating the impression among higher level grassroots members that elements
detrimental to the party’s future electoral success, such as the already developing right
tendencies in the student associations, had also either to be tamed or sidelined.
495

Europe
During the early 1970s, Powell continued to speak to the Defence brief from
which he had been sacked, advocating for an independent foreign policy based on
Britain’s sole interest as a medium sized Western European power of maintaining
stability on the continent, in contrast to the consensualists’ more internationalist
orientation, as well as for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The issue that came to take
precedence over all others, however, was British accession to the European Economic
Community, to which consensualists in both parties were committed (the Conservatives
enthusiastically, Labour’s right wing less openly so, due to the hostility of many in the
party towards what they saw as an unaccountable capitalist leviathan) and which Powell
bitterly opposed.

495
Meetings of Leader with Executive of 1922 Committee, Minutes Jun 1968- Sept 1969, CPA, 1922/2/3,
Item 1, page 4.
313

Powell had supported British entry in the early 1960s, and later claimed this was
because he was unaware of the political scope of the arrangements. For a committed
nationalist and economic and constitutional thinker as astute as Powell, the plausibility of
this account might at least be called into question. In the same manner as Powell came to
take an uncompromising stance on monetary supply as the root of inflation only after
already having resigned from Macmillan’s government, it could be said that his
willingness to launch full frontal attacks on the establishment was more the product of his
intra-party challenge’s failure than fearless conviction.
Nevertheless, even in 1969, with his extra-party challenge firmly underway,
Powell did not cut the figure of the arch-Eurosceptic he would become. When one
correspondent requested that year that he address a meeting of the fast-growing Anti-
Common Market League, he declined the offer, stating that he could not associate
himself with groups unaffiliated with the Conservative Party, despite having addressed
many other such groups throughout his career.
496
The true reason, it seems, is that Powell
had not fully made up his mind on the matter in 1969, far less decided this would be the
crusade to supersede immigration. ‘There are so many different possible circumstances
and conditions of entry into the Common Market’, he replied to one Eurosceptic
correspondent, ‘that I do not believe the question—like most other large national
questions—can be reduced to yes or no’.
497
Pragmatic issues such as the economic
integration of the wealthy regions of northern Europe with poor and underdeveloped

496
Powell, E., Letter to correspondent (Sep. 14, 1969), Common Market; 1967-75, PEP, 14/6/2.
497
Powell, E., Letter to correspondent (Oct. 7, 1969), Common Market; 1967-75, PEP, 14/6/2.
314

Mediterranean ones, the impact of accession on Anglo-French relations, and the current
trends in productivity of countries already in the Market all needed to be considered
carefully, and Powell, although tending towards scepticism, believed in keeping the
country’s, and his own, options open on Europe. He thus continued to focus on his
campaign against immigration through to the 1970 election.
When the decision had been made in Powell’s mind that the question of EEC
membership was one of sovereignty, all other considerations became insignificant.
Powell based his case against British entry under terms both parties’ moderates found
acceptable solely on the political theoretical point of the transfer of legislative authority
from Westminster to Brussels. Such concerns became more prominent in the debate as
the EEC’s central bodies were strengthened with the formation of the European Union,
but during the 1970s, both opponents and supporters of British membership spoke largely
in terms of the benefits that would be accrued by British industry and consumers. The
tactical interests of the country at the time were attached to the higher strategic purpose
of securing peace in Europe, which Conservatives such as Heath, who had served in the
European theatre during the war, believed with almost Cobdenite passion could be
accomplished through trade. Powell had argued that true and beneficial free trade,
meaning open competition between all nations of the world with floating exchange rates,
did not require, and, indeed, would be stifled by, the arrangements of the Common
Market, and that, in any case, Russian ambitions inoculated Western Europe against
internal war. Yet he made these practical arguments very rarely during the 1970s, his
emphasis being fixed squarely on sovereignty.
315

Public opinion in Britain, although not as hostile to European integration as it was
to become, was, during the period of British accession, considerably and consistently
more Eurosceptic than in any other Western European country.
498
A poll conducted for
The Times and ITN by the Opinion Research Centre in November, 1973, found British
respondents believing that, of all members of the Common Market, Britain had the most
to lose and least to gain from membership, and the French, followed closely by the
Germans, had the most to gain while having to jettison fewer of their interests.
499

Furthermore, working class and Labour voters—many of whom had, through the 1970s,
come to form the base of Powell’s support in the electorate—were more Eurosceptic than
the Conservative middle classes, providing what might have seemed like an opportunity
for Powell to extend his appeal beyond the issue of immigration in isolation. The fact free
movement of workers was one of the primary goals of European integration could have
allowed Powell to draw a natural linkage between the two issues.
500

Yet Powell did not make the connection for people, and many of the letters he
received after major speeches on the Market urged him to return to the subject of
immigration, where, it was claimed, ‘things are worse than ever’.
501
Generalized
xenophobia could also have provided the link between Europe and immigration. One

498
YouGov/The Sun, Fieldwork, Dec 11-12, 2011, available at
http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/70sguf5mbt/YG-Archives-Pol-Sun-EurozoneVeto-
131211.pdf, last accessed Dec. 30, 2011.
499
‘Poll Shows No Enthusiasm Among Public for Europe After 10 Months’ Membership of EEC’ in The
Times (Nov. 16, 1973),
500
Title III, Chapter 1, Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, signed at Rome, Mar. 25,
1957.
501
Letter (Feb. 26, 1972), Common Market; 1967-75, PEP, 14/6/2.
316

correspondent branded ‘Heath and his collaborators’ as ‘Anti-British/ Pro-French’, and
intent on ‘taking this country into a bunch of foreigners to be mixed up with their
intrigues and greed’.
502
But this stood in marked contrast to a speech Powell delivered in
French at Lyon in 1972, in which he claimed the mantle of the ‘true European’, as
opposed to the philistines who would, out of ignorance, destroy the great stores of
European civilization whose existence depended on the preservation of separate political
nations in Europe.
503

Surveys showed far fewer people to be aware of Powell’s stance on the Common
Market than were aware of the growing discontent on Labour’s backbenches.
504
The
sovereignty issue failed to rouse anger, was misunderstood, or was simply not seen as
relevant by those for whom Powell’s opposition to British membership nevertheless put
him on the right side of fence. Those features or corollaries of membership which were
most visible in everyday life, such as the listing of metric measurements in supermarkets
and the decimalization of the currency, were opposed by Powell’s correspondents not
because they negated traditions and lawmaking authority or were imposed from outside,
but because they would supposedly mean ‘being sold less and paying more for it’.
505

Leaving the Conservative Party
A major aspect of Conservative Central Office’s pact with the voluntary party,
which ensured that the latter’s decision-making bodies—from Central Council and its

502
Letter (Apr. 2, 1970), Common Market; 1967-75, PEP, 14/6/2.
503
Powell, Reflections, 344-7.
504
A4 Booklet (Mar. 1972), Data—Common Market 1972-4, PEP, 14/12/3, 3.
505
Letter (Mar. 1, 1971), Common Market; 1967-75, PEP, 14/6/2, 2.
317

Executive Committee down to the Areas and constituencies—were politically quiescent,
was its delegation of exclusive responsibility for candidate selection to the constituency
associations. Readoption by selection committees was almost obligatory and, as a long-
sitting Member and immensely popular figure among South West Wolverhampton’s
grassroots, Powell’s seat was secure and easily defendable, so long as he desired to
defend it. Furthermore, in keeping with the party’s secular Anglican internal ordering, the
Conservative whip had not been withdrawn (the equivalent of excommunication) from an
MP in living memory, the expectation being that disgraced or disgruntled Members
should dignifiedly resign the whip, causing as little fuss as possible for their party.
506

That Powell should, in these circumstances, quit his Staffordshire constituency and, with
it, the two institutions—the Conservative Party and Parliament—whose values, he often
claimed, were as good as innate to him, therefore shocked many people.
Powell stated his reason for leaving as Heath’s turn to statutorily enforced prices
and incomes controls in 1972, which he now believed were not only economically
harmful, but also a mortal threat to democracy and, of course, his core value of
parliamentary sovereignty. Since they constituted an indispensible and defining
component of any future Tory government’s programme which he could not defend to his
electors, Powell believed it would be deceitful for him to contest the election as a
Conservative.
507
Powell had emphasized throughout his career that ‘a man must be
candid with his electors’, and had resigned on finer points of principle before. But as with

506
Jackson, R.J., Rebels and Whips: Dissension, Discipline and Cohesion in British Political Parties since
1945 (St. Martin’s; 1968), 248.
507
Berkeley, Odyssey, 147-9.
318

his conversion from committed imperialist to nation state realist over a few short months
in 1956, or with the instant evaporation of his youthful infatuation with Germanic culture
on hearing of the Röhm massacre on July 2, 1934, it may be the case that dejection and
anger mounted to a point where he could no longer reconcile, either emotionally or
logically, the schemes or identities that he had operationalized from core principles in the
past with reality as he now saw it.
508

A more pedestrian explanation would simply be that Powell had, by 1974,
accepted that while his ‘voice in the wilderness’ might reverberate, he was, as Humphry
Berkeley labelled him, ‘yesterday’s man’. Though his speeches on immigration could
always be guaranteed media coverage and his popularity had peaked again during the
Uganda Asians crisis in 1972, the Conservatives’ election victory in 1970 had silenced
any disquiet about Heath’s competence as party leader, which, ‘coupled’ with the fact no
mechanism was in place to spark a leadership contest in any case, essentially locked
Powell out of the high political game. If the initial torrent of support for Powell during
the first eighteen months of his second challenge discomfited the party leadership, the
upticks in his approval ratings became more sporadic as he was unable to build support
around his wider alternative. This reinforced in the minds of ambitious young Tories his
status as political untouchable.
*
In his 1977 biography of Joseph Chamberlain, Powell wrote, drawing the none-
too-subtle parallel between Chamberlain’s and his own career, ‘All political lives, unless

508
Ibid., 166.
319

they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature
of politics and of human affairs’.
509
But failure in politics is relative, and by the standards
of the Thatcherites and, indeed, the Middle Way ideological entrepreneurs of the previous
generation, the impact Enoch Powell had on the ideology of the Conservative Party and,
in turn, the British state system, was slight.
Powellism was not a form of proto-Thatcherism, but, in offering an alternative to
the state system of the post-war consensus, Powell, like Thatcher, should have been able
to capitalize on the crisis of confidence in the political economy of the consensus and the
collapse of faith in its associated electoral perspectives. Breakdown was already well
under way by the early 1960s, and, indeed, may have convinced Powell that the time had
come to launch his challenge. To understand Powell’s failure, we must look inside the
Conservative Party, where his efforts were initially, and necessarily, directed.
Powell entered Parliament a decade earlier than the Thatcherite pioneers, perhaps
holding more generationally in common with post-war meritocrats such as Heath than
with the ‘class of 1959’, but this does not satisfactorily account for his failure. While
Thatcher may have spent the fifties outside of parliamentary politics, she was intimately
involved in Conservative organizational work, remained on the party’s candidates list for
much of the period and, as her most astute biographers have shown, was conscious of her
own liberal positions vis-à-vis those of the post-war paternalists. Moreover, Powell, as
junior minister and conspicuous social and ideological outsider, remained on the

509
Powell, E., Joseph Chamberlain (Thames and Hudson; 1977), 151.
320

periphery of Macmillan’s governments, and certainly outside of their inner core, as his
part in helping to diffuse the Profumo scandal demonstrated.
On the other hand, Powell’s ‘prickly’, ‘defiantly plebeian’, ‘stern’ and
‘unclubbable’ personality was unsuited to the ethos of the midcentury Conservative Party
and, irrespective of his message, this may have repelled backbenchers and powerbrokers
in Parliament who would have felt more at ease in the company of Middle Way men who
had mastered the art of conviviality. Yet neither Heath nor Thatcher fitted the traditional
Conservative mould, either in background or behaviour, and their manners offended
many upper middle class colleagues.
Powell’s abrasiveness, however, extended to the way the content of his message
was sold. Iain Gilmour said of Powell that he was ‘the closest the Conservative Party had
ever come to an ideologue’, while others went further, suggesting Powell was not a
Conservative at all, but in fact a disciple of Manchesterism.
510
This dissertation has
shown that Powellism as an operational ideology drew on some of the deepest traditions
from the Conservative ideological seedbed, but Powell’s logical absolutism, at least in his
rhetoric, and his privileging of conviction over pragmatism, ambition, and political sense,
did not sit well with secular Anglicanism as a mode of ideological competition. Of
course, Thatcher was seen as fanatical and un-Conservative by the same men who
accused Powell of this offence, but her excesses in this regard came largely after she had
consolidated power in the party at their expense. In the challenge phase, Thatcher, to

510
Bennett, R.J., ‘The Conservative Tradition of Thought: A Right Wing Phenomenon?’ in The British
Right, R. King and N. Nugent (Eds.) (Saxon House; 1977), 35. Fair, J.D. and Hutcheson, J.A., ‘British
Conservatism in the Twentieth Century: An Emerging Ideological Tradition’ in Albion (19.4: Winter 1987),
568.
321

paraphrase Iain Macleod, travelled often on Powell’s train, but always got off several
stops before the end of the line. As Lord Norton put it, ‘One can imagine Margaret
Thatcher agreeing with [Powell], but recognizing that, even for her, what he said would
be a step too far. She could recognize a brick wall when she saw one’.
511

The new rules for leadership selection devised to avoid a repetition of the
embarrassing and disruptive 1963 contest did not suit Powell’s strengths and weaknesses
as a politician, and his loss to Heath in 1965 dealt a major blow to his challenge. As a
‘party man’ who believed in the hierarchical and established institution of the
Conservative Party, Powell would not attempt to construct a party within a party as a
vehicle for his challenge, as Thatcher had effectively done in hers and Joseph’s nurturing
of the Centre for Policy Studies. Nor, even if the will had been there, could he
realistically have, as many of his supporters later urged him, set up his own national party
to circumvent the obstacles that stood in the way of his attaining the Tory leadership,
since the British party system was institutionally so stable.
Powell turned to immigration in 1968 as a volatile issue on which his own views
accorded with those of much of the public, and which he could use to build an attack on
consensus politics from outside of the party while directing the populist fallout inwards in
an attempt to raise his own status in the party to that of a capable and popular leader-in-
waiting. But the same insensitivity to the nature of public opinion and unwillingness to
engage in building extra-party institutions prevented him from transferring the

511
Lord Norton of Louth, 1911 Centenary Lecture on Enoch Powell delivered at the Palace of Westminster,
broadcast on BBC Parliament, June 20, 2011.
322

groundswell of feeling he had unleashed among swathes of voters into a movement or
widely recognized and understood electoral ideology. Heath’s powers as a recently
elected leader—and, in 1970, an election victor—to set party policy, to dismiss at will
those who threatened his position, and to suppress dissent at the lower levels of the party
were also vital at each stage of Powell’s second challenge.
If all political lives end in failure, perhaps the same can be said of operational
ideologies, which are, after all, the creation and saleable products of ambitious
individuals in politics. This dissertation has shown that it is impossible to trace how
operational ideologies fail, or to understand why they do so, without taking into
consideration the party system and the ethos and institutional setting of the party as the
primary site of ideological transition.
323

Chapter 6.

Model or Approach?
This chapter contends that the theoretical concepts developed and applied to the
case of the post-war Conservative Party in the preceding chapters may possess
explanatory value for the analysis of intra-party ideological transitions in other partisan,
historical and even national settings. After reviewing three transitions, working from the
familiar arena of the near-contemporary Labour Party through to the neoconservative
transformation of the U.S. Republican Party, we conclude with a question: Should the
prerequisites, variables and processes suggested to have cross-case relevance in this
dissertation be regarded as a comprehensive model of ideological transition, to be applied
ambitiously as a template across time and geography, or, more modestly, as an approach
to an overlooked phenomenon—as an analytic corrective and complement to a broader
body of scholarship?
While the Labour Party competes for political power in the same parliamentary
system, its leadership selection process—which involves an electoral college in which
affiliated unions, the party membership, and the parliamentary party each, as a bloc, hold
a third of voting power—is very different from both the pre-1999 and post-reform Tory
Party selection procedures. Despite this major institutional difference, which is only the
most conspicuous of many, along with myriad other historical and cultural particularities,
a review of the Labour reaction to Thatcherism in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrates that
324

our model of successful transitions can be applied neatly to other parties in late twentieth
century Britain.
Our second example attests to the usefulness of the model to non-contemporary
transitions. Joseph Chamberlain’s 1903-6 tariff reform campaign involved more than the
simple advocacy of protectionism and imperial preference: it challenged the free market
domestic and foreign political-economic consensus to which Conservatives had
subscribed for over half a century. The prerequisites of conjunctural crisis and an
alternative electoral ideology were both present for the Chamberlainite challenge. Also,
compared to those of Powell, Chamberlain’s tactics were apt and his rhetoric attractive,
which, as our model predicts, provided a boon for the challengers’ chances of success.
Notwithstanding these advantages, flux in the party system, in contrast to the stability of
the post-war years, altered the balance or ‘coupling’ of our model’s internal factors, and
especially the relative importance of the party’s institutional configuration. Party
fragmentation, coalition formation, and the new dominance of the labour-capital cleavage
that arose as a result of extensions to the franchise in the late Victorian period made elite
level politics more conducive to ideological challenges in general.
The neoconservative transition took place not only in a party with its own unique
organization and ideological seedbed, but also in a national setting encompassing a
starkly different political culture and governmental system. The process by which
operational ideologies and realigning projects are converted into implementable policy
programmes may alter the order in which political action can be undertaken, and
therefore the strategy pursued by challengers. For example, the comparative weakness of
325

American parties may provide opportunities for challengers to pursue change to the state
system having attained only minimal, or partial, control of their respective parties, so
long as they can capture niche areas of policymaking. Nevertheless, ideological
ascendency in the Republican Party remained high on the list of neoconservative
priorities, and was central to their long-term strategy. Concepts such as the ‘ideological
seedbed’ and ‘party-as-institution’ are helpful when analyzing the intra-party politics of
this case, and the importance of our model’s four factors in determining the success of
transitions in their early stages is notable.
Thatcherism and the Labour Response
The Conservatives’ victory at the 1979 general election was disappointing, though
not unexpected, for a Labour government that had veered sharply towards fiscal
conservatism during its final two years in office under the leadership of Jim Callaghan,
and with Denis Healey dealing as Chancellor of the Exchequer with the new realities
imposed by the humiliating 1976 IMF bailout. The scope of Thatcherism had yet to be
realized by many in the party and, it was assumed, political realities would soon tame the
new government, thwarting any radical ambitions it might harbour and bringing it back
into line with the prevailing consensus. It was longstanding internal ideological divisions
that appeared most troubling for Labour during these early years of the Thatcherite
transition, and it was to intra-party politics that both the party leadership and its left-wing
detractors devoted most of their efforts.
The right-wing leadership was still intact by the time of the 1979 election, and the
Parliamentary Labour Party was, on the whole, politically supportive and ideologically
326

sympathetic.
512
However, as noted above, the conjunctural crisis of the 1970s had
strengthened the hand of the left, which opposed the post-war settlement and derided the
electoral perspective developed by the party’s right-wing as ‘Labourism’—craven
complacency and commitment to the electoral fortunes of the party above the class
struggle out of which the Labour movement was born, and which it existed to advance.
513

Tony Benn, the former Secretary of Industry, who, at the Department of Energy under
Callaghan and much to the consternation of his colleagues, had moved to adopt a hard
left position, proposed an economic agenda popular in the Constituency Labour Parties
that challenged many of the party’s official positions.
514
Benn proposed radically
extending, under the remit of an Industrial Powers Act and the National Enterprise Board
established in 1975 by Wilson, the process of nationalization already underway, along
with a thoroughgoing micro-investment programme and centralized planning project, the
implementation of import controls, and withdrawal from the Common Market. Although
reservation existed even among Bennites, the Alternative Economic Strategy, as it came
to be known, became the backbone of the left-wing programme moving into the 1980s.
515

The strength of the left reached its symbolic apex at the January 1981 Labour
Party Conference at Wembley. Organized left-wing delegates defied the party leadership,
successfully introducing new rules for the selection of parliamentary candidates and the

512
Beckett, A., When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (Faber and Faber; 2009), 508-9
513
Fry, G.K., The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), 14.
514
Ibid., 17.
515
Callaghan, J., ‘Rise and Fall of the Alternative Economic Strategy: From Internationalisation of Capital
to “Globalisation”’ in Contemporary British History (14.3: 2000), 224.
327

party leader, increasing the electoral college votes of the trades unions, and decreasing
that of the overwhelmingly moderate PLP. Disillusioned high-profile right-wingers,
dubbed the ‘gang of four’, sensationally quit the party to found the centrist Social
Democratic Party, but the biggest impact of the change to the rules was its demonstration
to right-wingers that a shift in the balance of power in the party had taken place, and that
the left was now in a position to exact ‘revenge’ for the Callaghan years.
516
Months
earlier, the PLP had elected the veteran Socialist intellectual Michael Foot as leader,
largely as a concession to the left, hoping this might bring about some unity in time for
the next election. Instead, increasingly public disagreement within the shadow cabinet
continued, conclusively undermining, in concert with factors discussed above, the party’s
chances of defeating the buoyant Conservatives in 1983.
In the aftermath of the 1983 landslide defeat—Labour’s most disappointing result
in living memory—Bennites consoled themselves with the fact, as Benn himself put it,
that ‘never have so many people voted for Socialism’.
517
In hindsight, the manifesto
Foot’s Labour Party proposed to the electorate was to prove the closest the left would
come in the post-war era to dictating party policy, and, it has been argued, was the last
hurrah for British Socialism.
518

The nemesis of left, and midwife and active forebear of New Labour, came in the
unlikely person of working class Welshman Neil Kinnock, the Shadow Education

516
Labour: The Wilderness Years, BBC Television documentary (1995).
517
Quoted by Stuart Hall at Cultural Studies Now roundtable discussion, University of East London, Feb.
2007.
518
‘Wilderness Years’.
328

Secretary under both Callaghan and Foot. Kinnock had previously associated himself
with the non-Bennite ‘soft left’ of the party, particularly on foreign policy.
519
Enemies
would later claim these early positions as examples of Kinnock’s intellectual shallowness
and ideological vacuity, while backers would cite them as cute politics and a necessity for
advancement in the party of the early eighties.
520
Whatever the case, Kinnock was elected
leader under the new rules in October 1983, and, from the outset of his long tenure as
Leader of the Opposition, sought to transcend the divide between Labourism and the left
that had sapped the party’s credibility so disastrously.
One of the most provocative early steps taken by Kinnock was to tackle frontally
the Militant Tendency, which had for years been accused of Trotskyist entryism, but had
also been allowed to fester and grow as a threat, in large part due to right-wing weakness
and irresolution. In a combative speech at the party’s Conference in 1985, Kinnock
admonished Militant-controlled Liverpool Council as follows: ‘You start with a far-
fetched series of resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and
you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real
needs’.
521
The aggressive reaction of Militant leaders in the hall provided the pretext for
the suspension of Liverpool District Labour Party. Militant’s machinations over a number
of years, particularly the campaign waged against Benn and parliamentarianism, had also

519
Morgan, K.O., Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock (Oxford; 2011), 333-5.
520
Ibid., 342.
521
Kinnock, N., Speech to Labour Party Conference at Bournemouth, October 2, 1985.
329

alienated those on the non-Trotskyist left who may have been expected to express some
sympathy.
522

Kinnock had, by 1986, nailed his colours unmistakably to the modernizers’ mast,
but this new breed of Labour politician was not the only force pushing for change. As our
model predicts, changes to the state system arising from successful ideological transitions
in one party, as they are translated into policy and implemented as realigning projects, are
sure to have effects inside opposition establishment parties, who must reconcile their
alternative electoral ideologies with the altered political-economic terrain in order for
them to remain viable. The conjunctural crisis that had permitted the rise of Thatcherism
in the Conservative Party induced its abortive radical analogue in the Labour Party; but
the discipline of the polls and the headway made by Thatcherism pulled the party, over
the course of just four years, to a very different point.
The shift, it must be emphasized, was not simply a return at breakneck speed to
the Labourite centrism of the post-war years. Kinnock’s most conspicuous reforms were
direct responses to the Thatcherite project of the ‘free economy [and the] strong state’.
Labour, traditionally the more sceptical of the parties even at the elite level towards the
Common Market, became, under Kinnock, fully committed to the ‘European project’.
523

This is unsurprising, given that the EEC’s supranational bodies were flexing their
political muscle with a proposed ‘Social Chapter’ that would, to quote Thatcher, ‘re-
impose at a European level’ the ‘frontiers of the state’ her government had ‘successfully

522
Powell, D., Tony Benn: A Political Life (Continuum; 2002), 82, 90.
523
Jessop et. al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Blackwell; 1987), 215.
330

rolled back’ in Britain.
524
The economic and social rights which appeared to many built
into the post-war consensus could no longer be guaranteed in the emerging Thatcherite
state system, and European integration provided for Labour a practical antidote to a
malady they seemed, domestically, unable to alleviate.
525

With Kinnock, nonetheless, the transformation of the Labour Party could only
develop to a certain point. Kinnock’s often buffoonish personality, which was lampooned
mercilessly in the right-wing press, his several tactical blunders in the run-ups to the
general elections of 1987 and 1992, and, of course, the extraordinarily successful
campaigns the Conservatives ran under Thatcher and her chosen successor, John Major,
combined to negate Kinnock’s standing.
526
After Labour’s surprise defeat in 1992, it was
clear to all, including Kinnock himself, that he could not continue in his post, and he duly
resigned a few days after the election on April 13.
More importantly, the modernizing leadership did not offer a positive alternative
to either Labourism or the left factions it succeeded in marginalizing or eliminating. This
is one of the prerequisites for challenges to occur, according to our model. Kinnock
fought with limited success against a dominant and increasingly radical Thatcherism, but
his fight consisted largely of piecemeal reaction to the Conservative offensive. Historians
and political theorists are in some agreement that Kinnock’s failure to develop an
innovative and cogent programme aided the electoral and political progress of

524
Thatcher, M., Speech delivered to College of Europe at Bruges Belfry, Sep. 20, 1988.
525
Westlake, M. and St. John, I., Kinnock (Little, Brown; 2001), 189.
526
Ibid., 16-9, 234.
331

Thatcherism.
527
It is also for this reason that, while Kinnock’s tenure can justifiably be
regarded, in its weakening of rival factions, as an essential intra-party precursor to New
Labour (and thus as central to any understanding of the ease with which the Blairite
transition did occur), the beginning of ‘the project’ of New Labour should be dated after
his departure.
Under Kinnock’s successor, the Scottish barrister and former Shadow Chancellor
John Smith, steps were taken to reduce the power of the union bloc vote at Conference,
but a new generation of modernizers led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown became
frustrated at the leadership’s cautious approach to changing the party’s reputation for
fiscal irresponsibility.
528
Smith’s untimely death in 1994 opened a window of opportunity
which Blair seized, having reached an informal accord with Brown which held that the
latter would step aside to support Blair in a bid for the leadership.
Our model’s four variables worked in favour of the New Labour challenge, but
we must also acknowledge the prerequisites for transition which were met. The ideology
of New Labour was operationalized from core principles fully during Smith’s period as
leader. For the challengers, the party’s commitment to nationalization was an unattractive
relic from a collectivist era and an economic system centred on heavy industry, which, as
arch-revisionist Anthony Crosland had argued as far back the 1950s, was in any case
unnecessary and a distraction from the proper ends of modern Socialism, which were

527
Jessop et. al., Thatcherism, Chapter 6.
528
Driver, S. and Martell, L., New Labour (Cambridge; 2006), 88.
332

tackling ‘large inequalities and the collective discontents’.
529
New Labour’s brand of
revisionism sought to work within the grain of relatively unfettered markets—particularly
in the financial sector—which, after a decade of ‘high Thatcherism’, were accepted by
the challengers as a political-economic fait accompli.
530
Through an extended and
reinforced taxes and benefits system within this free market consensus, it was hoped
services could be provided, regional development achieved, and certain economic and
social behaviours incentivized.
531
Critics would later decry New Labour’s ‘social
engineering’ and its cynical creation of a clientelistic constituency of public sector
workers outside of London loyal to the party.

New Labour’s alterative electoral ideology gave credence to the dictum repeated
throughout the West that, during the 1980s, the right had won the economic arguments
and the left had won the culture. Its harshest critics at the elite level within the party,
who, on the whole, were themselves cultural liberals, tended to be more critical of New
Labour’s abandonment of Socialism than its cultural policies. But the affront of the
Blairites’ unequivocal advocacy of multiculturalism, relaxed immigration policies, and
women’s and gay rights to traditional sectors of working class Labour support should
also be recognized as a significant break with the party’s past. Indeed, the effects and

529
Crosland, A., ‘The Future of Socialism’ in Political Ideologies, M. Festenstein and M. Kenny (Eds.),
(Oxford; 2005), 246-9. Driver and Martell, New Labour, 23.
530
Driver and Martell, New Labour, 25.
531
Jessop, B., ‘From Thatcherism to New Labour: Neoliberalism, Workfarism, and Labour Market
Regulation’ published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, available at
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc131rj.pdf, last accessed May 23, 2012. Norman, J., The Big
Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics (University of Buckingham Press; 2010), 44.
333

potential effects of Britain’s culture skirmishes, though, for several reasons,
comparatively mild in the European context, are still being felt and pondered today.
The prerequisite of conjunctural crisis was also met in the wake of the 1992
election. Recrimination abounded within the party as the post-mortem of the defeat
began, and the question, ‘can Labour ever win again?’ was commonly asked by elites and
supporters alike.
532
Yet, according to the opinion polls and social surveys, satisfaction
with the Tory government and the direction of the country were at consistently low
levels.
533
High profile cases of violence, such as the racially-motivated killing of black
teenager Stephen Lawrence and the horrific murder of toddler James Bulger by
schoolboys, reinforced the sense of lawlessness and social breakdown in the cities. The
principal upshot of the recent wave of privatization had not been, as Thatcherites had
claimed when selling the project, the rise of a ‘share owning democracy’, but the
spiralling of executive compensation to levels a large majority deemed unacceptable and
socially deleterious.
534
The Tories’ reputation for economic competence suffered its fatal
blow with the devaluation of sterling that forced Britain’s withdrawal from the European
Exchange Rate Mechanism on November 3, 1992. The party quickly sank in poll ratings,
and lost to the Liberal Democrats the safe seat of Newbury at the spectacular May by-
election the following year, where Labour failed to capitalize.

532
Turner, A., Things Can Only Get Bitter: The Lost Generation of 1992(Aurum; 2012), 1-3.
533
Marwick, A, British Society Since 1945 (Oxford; 2003), 412.
534
Ibid., 411-15.
334

Finally, though New Labour proposed what it claimed were radical formulas for a
post-Conservative era, the party, as our model holds, subscribed to the rules of the
electoral game and democratic process. Policies with constitutional implications, such as
the devolution which New Labour wholeheartedly embraced, reform of the House of
Lords, the delegation of monetary policy to an independent Bank of England, along with
such reforms as the introduction of a statutory minimum wage, were to be pursued
through established parliamentary channels. Indeed, many of these policies were seen as
long overdue and necessary for the functioning of the market economy which the Labour
government was to inherit in 1997, and to which its programme was reconciled.
535

After Blair’s and the modernizers’ capturing the party leadership in 1994, New
Labour hegemony was easily consolidated. The tactical mistakes of the past convinced
the new leadership of the need for a permanent professional public relations machine
integrated into the party’s new campaign headquarters at Milbank Tower. Closely
connected on personal and ideological levels with the new regime and, having worked
under Kinnock in the 1980s, ruthless in their attitudes towards dissent, New Labour’s
spin doctors, tacticians and press workers produced propaganda as sophisticated as that
turned out by Saatchi and Saatchi, which, as noted above, neither the old Labourites nor
the left could replicate. Blair’s now notoriously close working relationship and personal
friendship with Rupert Murdoch also ensured approval of his modernized party from the

535
Norton, P. at. al., The Blair Effect, A. Seldon (Ed.) (Little, Brown; 2001), 8, 47-53, 141-47, 156, 187.
335

most influential quarters of the right-wing press.
536
No Labour leader had been able to
guarantee this before, or has been since.
At the elite level, the seamlessness of New Labour’s consolidation owed most to
the weakness of opposition or potential opposition within the PLP to ‘the project’. The
election routs of the ‘wilderness years’ had resulted in many left-wingers losing their
parliamentary seats. Moreover, what did remain of a left in Parliament was chastened by
the prospect of the Conservatives winning yet another term, which would have extended
their time in government to an unprecedented two decades. More than a few left-wingers
had welcomed the Tory victory in 1979, believing the Thatcherites, notwithstanding their
belligerence, to lack substance and ability, and that in sending Labourism into disarray,
they had opened the door to the inevitable—resurgent Socialism.
537
In 1997, there were
no such illusions as to the nature and drive of the new Conservatism, or surrounding the
left’s prospects for rolling back its gains and supplanting it with their own Socialist
alternative.
Institutional reforms which limited the power of the CLPs were supported by
affiliated unions that had become generally sympathetic to the modernizers’ project out
of desperation. Ironically, the adeptness with which the new regime capitalized on the
same feeling among the grassroots made the reforms unnecessary. Bumper poll ratings—
which, of course, were as much the product of strong post-recession growth and public
disdain for Major’s government, which, by 1995, was mired in myriad political and sex

536
Ibid., 514.
537
Fry, Revolution, 17.
336

scandals that the generic term ‘sleaze’ seemed to capture aptly, as they were of interest in
Labour’s new programme—were cited as evidence of the reformers’ competence vis-à-
vis the shambles of the early 1980s. This stick, coupled with the carrot of some genuinely
innovative policies that were operationalized at Conference from such core principles
from the party’s seedbed as equitability, reformism, democracy, aspiration among
working people in solidarity, and, though not to the extent the grassroots would have
liked, redistribution, brought many traditional supporters onboard.
538

Here, the new regime realized that, as in the Conservative Party, at the grassroots
level, ideological politics had little to do with the nuances of operation or even the
policies derived. Rather, they were grounded in caricatures of identities such as ‘left-
wing’ and ‘moderate/ social democratic’ and the tribalism surrounding them. The
phenomenon of ex-miners turning into staunch Blairites is recounted with dismay by
Labour supporters who, as our model would predict, left the party following the
leadership election won by Blair, whom they variously described at the time as an
‘infant’, a ‘Tory in disguise’, and a ‘menace’.
539
But, despite New Labour having little
programmatically in common with right-wing Labourism, it should not surprise the
analyst of party challenges that the hatred working class instrumentalists and the new

538
Sheldon, A. and Snowdon, P., Blair Unbound (Simon & Schuster; 2008), 387, 389.
539
Author’s personal interview with ex-Labour member, Feb. 3, 2012. This was counteracted by a small net
gain from membership drives at the height of dissatisfaction with the Major government. New members
were committed to the party and to bringing about a new government, but resembled more in their
relationship with the party the Tory grassroots previously discussed. See Scarrow, S., Parties and their
Members (Oxford; 1996), 15.
337

moderates shared towards ‘Trots and Tories’ was enough to bind the former to Blair’s
regime as the battle at the grassroots level became bitterer.
New Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory marked quite neatly the beginning
of its ascendency period. Having already consolidated supremacy within the parry, the
institutional focus of the new regime could, once in government, be set squarely on the
state system and society at large. A Commons majority of 179 and the mandate that could
fairly be claimed after such resounding success at the polls allowed, during the early
ascendency phase, for the realigning project to be directed outwards. As our model has it,
intra-party ideological politics were not completely neglected. The spectre of the
‘wilderness years’, cast against Blair’s stellar election record at the helm of the party, was
periodically raised in order to instil discipline in a PLP consisting of 419 Members, and
was to prove remarkably effective throughout the New Labour era, even after the Prime
Minister’s personal approval ratings plummeted following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
540

The fact so many young Members entered Parliament on the back of the 1997 victory and
thus cut their legislative teeth in the early years of New Labour’s ascendency also secured
loyalty to the leadership that endured through the next decade.
*
As we have seen, the ideological seedbeds of parties not only provide ideas and
symbols to be used by ideological entrepreneurs and their opponents; they also determine
the mode of intra-party conflict. Whether modern Labour Party ideology, or the thinking
of significant numbers of its high ranking members, are, at root, akin to the secular

540
Fairclough, N., New Labour, New Language? (Psychology Press; 2000), 52-3, 87, 142.
338

Anglicanism of the Conservative Party is a more difficult question to answer. Certainly
the parties’ rhetorical styles have converged, as have their policies in significant ways.
The revision of Clause IV of the party’s constitution indicated for many the abandonment
of class struggle as a hallmark of Labour identity and a shift to a more conciliatory
approach to politics. Likewise, Blair’s 1999 remark ‘we’re all middle-class now’ seemed
to suggest that New Labour had accepted the notion that the core principles of the party’s
ideological seedbed need not be bound up with sectional interests. Perhaps, as Tony Benn
believed was the case, under Blair the party became a place where ‘the ordinary people,
the Socialists, were not welcome any more’.
541

The most persuasive reason to believe the Labour Party, committed once to
abstract positive rights and values, has come to share the Conservative faith in institutions
is precisely that these values have to a significant extent become solidified in the nation’s
institutions since 1945. As institutions such as the National Health Service became
accepted and then respected by overwhelming majorities of all classes, claims that social
democratic values constitute an integral part of the national essence, and that values
regarded as transcendent by Labour members need not be ‘anti-system’, could be made
more convincingly. This is an interesting line of enquiry, and it is conceivable that some
of the limited, non-fratricidal processes of ideological conflict within the Conservative
Party examined in this dissertation will have their analogues in the very recent history of
the Labour Party.

541
Benn, T., Interview with BBC Television for ‘Wilderness Years’.
339

The Chamberlain Comparison
In the public mind, Enoch Powell will likely always be associated with the West
Midlands, and, in particular, his adopted town of Wolverhampton.
542
Unlike most other
upwardly mobile Tories, Powell never modified his regional accent in order to ‘fit in’
with his new circle. Perhaps he did, as Andrew Roth believes, possess such self-
assuredness that social markers failed to impact upon him, but there is more than enough
evidence to suggest Powell revelled in his image as a sheltered and incorruptible
provincial, and that he recognized such deportment was as much an asset as a
disadvantage. In a 1948 letter to the Chairman of Wolverhampton Conservative
Association, introducing Powell as a prospective candidate to contest at the next general
election one of the town’s two parliamentary seats, a Conservative Central Office worker
wrote, ‘Brigadier Powell’s father’s family have been Black Country for at least four
generations, and he understands the mentality of the people well’.
543

Of the hundreds of letters of support Powell received from residents of his own
constituency and Wolverhampton North East, one, from a young working class woman
and first time voter, stands out in illustrating Powell’s success in mobilizing for his own
ends the civic pride that existed in the post-war provinces. By the time Wedgwood Benn
compared in 1970 ‘the flag hoisted at Wolverhampton’ to ‘the one that fluttered over
Dachau and Belsen’, the town had, primarily due to its association with Powellism,

542
Anderson, B., ‘Enoch Powell made the Rivers of Blood speech out of ambition, not conviction’ in The
Independent (Nov. 5, 2007).
543
Letter (Nov. 2, 1948), Miscellaneous—Personal, Papers of Enoch Powell, 74/3/1.
340

attracted the appellation of the ‘Racist Capital of Britain’.
544
But the young elector,
although offended by Benn’s comment, was unmoved. ‘You see, Mr Powell, I love
Wolverhampton right down to its dirty canals and its smoke belching steelworks. You are
the best thing this town has ever known’.
545

Paul Foot disputes this view, suggesting Powell’s local connection was fickle, and
that his relationship with his constituency was as instrumental and remote as that of any
other Member.
546
Nevertheless, that Powell was voicing the ‘views and fears of the
people of Wolverhampton’ has become one of the historical myths accepted and
perpetuated, it appears, not only by biographers and political historians, but also by the
people of the town themselves. ‘Your integrity of purpose is a well-known factor in your
electorate,’ one of Powell’s neighbours wrote to him after his Eastbourne speech, with
another assuring him that ‘the people of Wolverhampton are behind you’.
547
Comparisons
with ‘fellow Midlands demagogue’ Joseph Chamberlain became commonplace during
Powell’s second challenge, and in penning a biography of Chamberlain in 1976—which
was at least sympathetic towards its subject’s political style—it could be assumed Powell
was not averse to them being made.
Chamberlain, like Powell in the period of his second challenge, had cultivated
populist support on an emotive and regionally divisive issue, tariff reform, and had
challenged the Unionist leadership of the early century, headed by prime minister Arthur

544
Barnsby, G., Letter to the Chief Executive Wolverhampton City Council (2001).
545
Letter (Dec. 4, 1970), Correspondence—Immigration, June, 1969-1970, PEP, 3/1/4, folder 3.
546
Foot, P., The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin;1968), 135.
547
Letter (Nov. 26, 1968), Correspondence—Eastbourne, PEP, 1/6/2.
341

Balfour, which tried to steer a middle way between import duties and imperial preference
on the one hand, and, on the other, long-established free trade policies. Chamberlain won
several partial victories and, it has been argued, laid the groundwork for the trade policy
of the interwar years.
548
But in doing so, he divided the Unionists in the same way he had
the Liberal Party two decades earlier, and destroyed in the process their credibility while
opening the door for a Liberal landslide in the general election of 1906 and the
dominance of that party in the early years of the century and through the Great War.
Chamberlain ultimately failed to oust Balfour as leader and returned to his Birmingham
stronghold in 1906, his national standing greatly enhanced by his popular and populist
campaign for protection of British industry, but with his health in decline following a
severe stroke. Nonetheless, his challenge had achieved greater success than both those of
Powell—the similarities between them being not only superficial, but also misleading in
analytic terms.
As our model predicts, Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign grew as a response
to conjunctural crisis which, in this case, had weakened the Unionist establishment and
its electoral perspective that sought to generate support among an expanded electorate for
free trade on the oft-repeated grounds that it reduced the cost of basic goods for urban
workers.
549
As Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain had overseen a period of rapid imperial
acquisition and consolidation, and the concept of empire enjoyed almost unanimous

548
Green, E.H.H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford; 2002), 87.
549
Marsh, P.T., Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (Yale; 1994), 630-2.
342

approval among Britain’s political class and widespread support across society.
550
Yet at
its zenith, the British Empire and the free trade consensus on which it had traditionally
rested faced profound economic and geopolitical challenges, most notably from late
entrants to the imperial game. Both Germany and the United States possessed natural and
demographic advantages over Britain, and, in the context of the political stability
achieved in the 1870s and with education systems geared towards the impartation of
technical knowledge, productivity and industrial growth in those countries far outstripped
that in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century. Calls for measures to protect
struggling British industries from competition that benefited from trade barriers set in
place by foreign governments became ever louder.
Chamberlain’s experience negotiating the Venezuela boundary dispute of 1895,
which resulted in Lord Salisbury’s government’s humiliating, though tacit, acceptance of
the Monroe Doctrine invoked by U.S. President Grover Cleveland, had also demonstrated
that with America’s economic might came the desire for political clout on the world
stage.
551
Likewise, German diplomatic intervention on behalf of the Boers during the
South African conflict signalled that country’s emergence as a newly confident power
and potential adversary. That an alliance would have to be forged with either the United
States or Germany was apparent to many British observers of international politics, and
Chamberlain, who instinctively preferred a continental accord, set about trying to
hammer out a settlement with the Kaiser’s foreign ministers from 1898 through to

550
Paxman, J., Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (Penguin; 2011), 189, 250.
551
Judd, D., Radical Joe: A Life of Joseph Chamberlain (Hamilton; 1977), 165.
343

1901.
552
Successive failed attempts to negotiate an agreement at the highest levels
reinforced, for Chamberlain, the sense that Britain would be vulnerable in the event of
war breaking out, which seemed increasingly probable.
The realigning project of tariff reform offered an alternative and a solution to the
flaws and contradictions of the free trade consensus both domestically and
internationally. Indeed, the two were linked. Though Chamberlain dined regularly with
economists and extolled the benefits and supposed inevitability of government protection
of agriculture and manufacturing in an autarchic economy, the economic arguments for
tariff reform were merely foundations on which a full political-economic programme was
built.
The money raised on imported goods, so Chamberlain believed, could be spent on
enlarging the nascent welfare functions of the state such as pensions, unemployment
insurance, and healthcare, as he envisaged a role for central government akin to that of
his Radical administrations as Mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s.
553
Sensitive to charges
that protection would raise prices of stock items, he went to lengths to show that under
the regime proposed, the same amount of produce could be purchased with a worker’s
wage packet as under the existing free trade arrangements.
554
While many industrialists,
particularly in the Midlands, who had, in the past, welcomed unrestricted global trade,
supported tariff reform, Chamberlain also succeeded in attracting significant portions of

552
Crosby, T.L., Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist (I.B. Tauris; 2011), 141-4.
553
Ibid., 122.
554
Ibid., 123.
344

the landed gentry, who stood to benefit from high import duties on foodstuffs, and whose
suspicions of Manchesterism and contempt for the commercial classes had survived from
the years leading up to the repeal of the Corn Laws.
555

Furthermore, a policy of imperial preference for imports could ensure a colonial
division of labour and economies of scale, supplying for the domestic consumer an array
of goods at low prices while at the same time drawing the mother country into closer
union with her self-governing settler dominions, and perhaps even bringing into being an
imperial parliament. This, it was hoped, would provide an adequate bulwark against the
assertive economic policies of competitor nations. It was Chamberlain’s design to convert
the British Empire from an ad hoc collection of ‘accidental’ acquisitions—an
administrative ‘confidence trick’ played by handfuls of civil servants on native
populations—into a substantial body able resist the territorial ambitions of others seeking
a ‘place in the sun’.
556

As with any cross-class or multi-constituency movement, there were ideological
and theoretical inconsistencies and conflicts of interest. Producers of small technical
manufactures stood to gain from duties imposed on foreign imports, but industrialists in
the North West, whose concentration remained on textiles, depended on an unhindered
supply chain and feared the retaliatory closing of markets to their finished goods. Similar
divisions existed among sectors of the urban working class. Though Chamberlain
recognized the desire of the white dominions to develop their own industrial sectors and

555
Cannadine, D., The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Vintage; 1999), 19-20.
556
Powell, E., Joseph Chamberlain (Thames and Hudson; 1977), 101.
345

thus built such development into his project, colonial producers and politicians feared
that a form of ‘Empire free trade’ was the logical conclusion of his plans, and that with it
came the risk of their permanent consignment to the economic periphery.
557
Finally,
grand schemes for improving the condition of the masses relied on the continued flow of
imports on which duties could be imposed, thus defeating what throughout was deemed
to be tariff reform’s primary purpose—reducing dependence on non-Empire goods and
rejuvenating industries at home.
558

Such contradictions need not, as we saw in the case of the Thatcherite transition,
hinder the effectiveness of the challengers’ campaign or its chances of success, so long as
ideological work is done to downplay the inconsistencies. Chamberlain was noted as one
of the most charismatic orators of his generation, and particularly for his sense of theatre
and innate sympathy for, and appreciation of, the democratic multitude.
559
Where Powell
had trained himself to perform in front of audiences he distrusted, Chamberlain was
naturally at ease at large public gatherings. Beatrice Potter (later Webb) was mesmerized
by Chamberlain’s performances and verve, though perturbed by the content of his
rhetoric, describing in the following way a speech delivered to his core constituency at
Birmingham Town Hall:
As he rose slowly, and stood silently before his people, his whole face and form seemed
transformed. The crowd became wild with enthusiasm...Perfectly still stood the people’s Tribune,
till the people, exhausted and expectant, gradually subsided into fitful and murmuring cries. At the
first sound of his voice they became as one man. Into the tones of his voice he threw the warmth
of feeling which was lacking in his words; and every thought, every feeling, the slightest

557
Judd, Joe, 198.
558
Green, Ideologies, 64.
559
Crosby, Chamberlain, 48.
346

intonation of irony or contempt was reflected on the face of the crowd. It might have been a
woman listening to the words of her lover! Perfect response, and unquestioning receptivity.
560

Chamberlain accepted that ideological sophistication was limited among the masses, and
conveyed his message accordingly, emphasizing the core principles of paternalism and
extreme patriotism. His claim to the mantle of nationalist leader was enhanced by his
consistent and principled opposition to Home Rule and enthusiastic prosecution of the
second Boer War where others had expressed doubts.
He also understood the importance of the ideological seedbed to debate at the
high political level. Many Conservatives still held reservations about Chamberlain’s
personal integrity, his religion, and his radical social positions, despite a proven
commitment to the Unionist alliance in parliament and opposition to Socialism and the
political wing of the labour movement in the years following his split from the official
Liberal Party. Yet the most forceful defenders of free trade were also relative outsiders,
several being adherents of the Whig tendency of Liberal Unionism.
561
Following the
Duke of Devonshire’s resignation from both the government and the Liberal Unionist
Association in protest at what he and free trade-supporting Cabinet members regarded as
Chamberlain’s duplicity, the latter was able to assume command of the faction and to
capitalize on many Conservative parliamentarians’ traditional misgivings about free trade
and its attendant cosmopolitanism, which they thought alien to their party’s creed.
Coupled with the institutional strength of the grassroots during this period, which,
because of Chamberlain’s simple conveyance of Conservative core principles, supported

560
Beatrice Potter quoted in Judd, Joe, 167.
561
Crosby, Chamberlain, 156.
347

his campaign through the recently formed National Union of Conservative and Unionist
Associations, Chamberlain was able to generate widespread support at all levels for tariff
reform.
562

The institutional configuration of the Unionist alliance in Parliament and of the
party and political systems made it easier for Chamberlain to convert the support he had
built among the people of Birmingham into leverage for the ideological challenge he was
waging at the high political level.
Chamberlain was not, of course, a Conservative, but a Liberal Unionist. By the
time of his tariff reform campaign, the Conservatives, as part of the Unionist bloc, had
accepted and promoted social reform which twenty years earlier they had derided as
anarchistic, and the ideological and institutional separation between the parties had all but
disappeared.
563
Liberal Unionists of a reformist inclination, such as Chamberlain, and
those of Whiggish temperament such as Lord Hartington, Lord Lansdowne, and George
Goschen, all found the Conservative seedbed operationally congenial to their respective
electoral ideologies.
564
Nevertheless, flux in the party system—which mirrored
punctuated franchise reform and the elevation of the labour-capital cleavage to a position
of political salience over the issues of religion, foreign policy, and landed verses
commercial interests—meant discipline in parliamentary groupings was laxer than in the
parties of 1960s, and the expectation of revolt much higher.

562
Judd, Joe, 187-9.
563
Ferris, W., ‘The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886-1912’ in Parliamentary History (30.2:
June 2011), 142-4.
564
Marsh, Entrepreneur, 284.
348

Powell moved into his Wolverhampton constituency as a relative outsider.
Wolverhampton and his native Birmingham were only fifteen miles from one another,
but to regard them as constituent areas of an amorphous West Midlands conurbation risks
anachronism.
565
Without mentioning the different histories and economies of the shire
towns and boroughs of what, only with the reorganization of local government in 1972,
became known as the West Midlands Metropolitan County, the respective political
systems and dynamics of the towns were quite distinct. Powell had had no previous
involvement in Wolverhampton’s local politics, and, as such, possessed neither an
institutional base from which to launch his national career, nor the kind of reserve of pre-
generated goodwill that Chamberlain was able to draw from. Even with such experience,
the stability of the party system and prevalence of rigid class-stratified voting would
likely have prevented him from building a broad-based coalition around local issues.
Instead, Powell’s success relied on, first and foremost, the Conservatives’
performance at the national level and its national campaigns, issue positions and election
platforms. The fact Powell had to campaign solely on national issues while Chamberlain
was able to dissociate himself publically from the dominant Unionist factions meant the
former’s image would always be more divisive, since there existed, as noted above, a
large minority of the electorate hostile by default to the Conservatives. ‘Powell,
Wolverhampton disowns you’, exclaimed one group of constituents, who gathered in
February, 1961, in Wolverhampton to protest increases in prescription fees.
566
The

565
Palmer, R., The Folklore of the Black Country (Logaston; 2007), 1-3.
566
‘Powell, Wolverhampton Disowns You’ in The Express and Star (circa Feb. 1961), Press Cuttings:
Politics folder Enoch Powell, Wolverhampton City Archives, LS/L07CUT/461, folder 1.
349

decision to raise fees was a collective one taken by the government, but as Minister of
Health and, arguably more importantly, a high-ranking member of a well-disciplined
governing party, he was liable to experience the brunt of the inevitable disapproval from
Labour loyalists, even (perhaps especially) in his own constituency.
Even if Powell did accrue a modicum of local political capital through
involvement with Wolverhampton’s Conservative associations and its town hall politics,
regional cultural consciousness in England—which had never been as strong as in Europe
or in the United States—was much weaker than it had been at the turn of the century.
567
If
geography existed as a political cleavage in England (and, indeed, the post-war United
Kingdom), it was bound up with numerous related factors, most notably, and predictably,
social class. One of Powell’s northern correspondents seemed to understand Powell’s
second challenge in this context, stating, ‘we know that the divisions in England are
social, not regional...the social rift is between these urban areas and their surrounding
dormitory boroughs which are full of do-gooder goodie-goodies who love everybody
except their own people’.
568

At the constituency level, Chamberlain’s Unionist electoral machine was much
more developed and effective in mobilizing support than the active membership of South
West Wolverhampton Conservative Association during both of Powell’s challenges,
securing for Chamberlain a political base that extended well beyond Birmingham and

567
Marr, A., The Making of Modern Britain (Macmillan; 2009), 11.Ward, R., City-State and Nation:
Birmingham’s Political History 1830-1940 (Phillimore & Co.; 2005), 2-3.
568
Letter (Nov. 25, 1968), Correspondence—Eastbourne, PEP, 1/6/4.
350

into the Black Country.
569
There were several reasons for this: First, change in the
configuration of the party system involved processes and contests in the sphere of local
government, where elected representatives enjoyed greater autonomy and were
responsible for functions that, by the end of the Second World War, had been brought
under the aegis of Whitehall departments. Birmingham, under Chamberlain’s
‘Unauthorised Programme’, became a laboratory of social experimentation and partisan
realignment, and well-calibrated local parties and machines were needed to bolster
political support for developments in the town.
570

Though Chamberlain and the Birmingham Liberal Unionists had lost control of
the National Liberal Federation and the Liberal Unionist Council by the end of the
century, the National Radical Union and its successor, the National Liberal Union, which
were founded as rivals to Whig-dominated Unionist groups, provided a precedent and
experience, if not an organization and personnel, that proved invaluable as Chamberlain
set up his Tariff Reform League. Chamberlain’s connections with businesses were strong
enough to ensure that the League was well-funded and the press sympathetic. He was
thus able to generate support for protectionism at the local level and to challenge free
trade opinion in the Unionist constituency associations.
Second, the greater importance of canvassing in the late Victorian period—since
newly enfranchised voters, before automatic electoral enrolment, needed to be registered,
and, before the advent of the wireless and television as modes of communication, could

569
Crosby, Chamberlain, 43.
570
Ibid., 53-4.
351

only be educated, propagandized and mobilized through face to face contact—also
encouraged an emphasis on building strong party organizations in the constituencies.
Finally, urban constituencies such as Birmingham, prior to the Redistribution of
Seats Act of 1885, were still underrepresented relative to the ancient rural constituencies,
and often had multiple members elected by one large group voters, each of whom was
limited to fewer votes than there were Members to be elected. The parliamentary
constituency of Birmingham sent three Members to Parliament, and each elector in the
constituency cast two ballots. Multiple-Member, highly urbanized, and compact
constituencies such as Birmingham allowed the parties to effectively communicate a
single message to a large number of electors at the same time, who would be encouraged
to vote for slates of candidates. The limited vote rule could have weakened
Chamberlain’s hold on the town, but instead provided another incentive for the Liberals
to strengthen their organization. As Charles Seymour explains,
The Liberals of Birmingham realized that if they were to retain the third seat, their vote must be
divided economically between the three candidates. To prevent waste of votes, an organization
must be built up which could control absolutely the choice of the elector; and each elector must
vote invariably as he was told. The success of the Birmingham organization, which soon became
known as the Caucus was unbroken and no Conservative candidate was returned.
571

Even after Birmingham was split into seven equally populated single-member
constituencies in 1885, the Conservatives retained their organization covering the whole
of what became, in 1889, the City of Birmingham, much to the consternation of
Conservative Central Office, which remained wary of wealthy, centralized local party
organizations. The Birmingham Conservative and Unionist machine was still a force in

571
Seymour, C., Electoral Reform in England and Wales (Yale; 1915), 342-3.
352

local and national politics by the turn of the century, and, combined with Chamberlain’s
standing in the city, was viewed with suspicion as a potentially unruly quasi-fiefdom in
London.
*
Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign was wildly popular and, because of the four
factors identified in our model, in particular the institutional setting of the early century,
he was able to direct public opinion inwards and, as such, to advance his electoral
ideology within the party. Following his stroke, Chamberlain charged his eldest son,
Austen, with speaking on his behalf in intra-party negotiations. He had previously been
able to extract from Balfour the following statement by way of reconciliatory letters sent
on Valentine’s Day, 1906, just weeks after the Liberal rout:
I hold that Fiscal reform is, and must remain the first constructive work of the Unionist party; that
the objects of such reform are to secure more equal terms of competition for British trade and
closer commercial ties with the Colonies; that while it is unnecessary at the present time to
prescribe the exact methods by which these objects are to be attained, and inexpedient to permit
differences of opinion as to these methods to divide the party, I hold that...the establishment of a
moderate general tariff on manufactures should be adopted if shown to be necessary for the
attainment of the ends in view or for the purposes of revenue.
572
(Emphasis added)

Chamberlain’s dreams of an imperial federation, positively protected from economic and
geopolitical competition, were, like the plans and projects of other ideological
entrepreneurs, to be dashed by the outbreak of the Great War and the cataclysmic
domestic and international consequences which were foreseen by few in government.
Yet, under his sons Austen and Neville—both of whom would lead an interwar
Conservative Party whose Members had come to political consciousness during the years

572
‘The Valentines Letters’ in English Historical Documents 1874-1914, G. M. Young (Routledge; 1995),
113-14.
353

of Chamberlain’s challenge—it can fairly be stated that his views shifted the debate of
the later period in the direction of protectionism, albeit with the narrower aim of securing
strategic industries at home.
The New Right and the Republican Party in the United States
While the Tory challenges presented in this dissertation may be analogous in
some respects to most situations of intra-party ideological transition, it might be expected
that cultural ties and the tradition of Anglo-American conservatism would make them
particularly useful comparisons for analyzing challenges within the Republican Party.
573

The problem with this is not so much the fact that, as thinkers from Louis Hartz through
to Samuel Huntington have pointed out, American conservatism is essentially liberal in
character, or, in any case, does not have the Burkean roots of the Tory Party.
574
As
Rogers Smith deftly shows, illiberal and liberal traditions exist side by side throughout
American history and straddle the commonly acknowledged periodization—illiberal and
liberal politics being, for Smith, ideal types, or means of categorizing operationalized
ideology.
575

The analogy of secular Anglicanism is certainly not apt, but the populist turn of
the GOP in the 1970s may have engendered a very similar style of selling its message to
that developed by the Tories, conscious of being the ‘party of the nation’. Moreover,
there were striking similarities between the political cultures of the Republican and

573
Kirk, R., The Conservative Mind (Regency; [1955] 2002), Chapter 1.
574
Hartz, L., The Liberal Tradition in America (Mariner [1955] 1991), 4-5. Huntington S.P., ‘Conservatism
as an Ideology’ in the American Political Science Review (51.2: 1957), 454.
575
Smith, R., ‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America’, in the
American Political Science Review (87.3; 1993), 549-51.
354

Conservative Parties and their respective differences from the Democrats and Labour
during the 1970s and 1980s. As Jo Freedman points out:
There are two fundamental differences between the [Republican and Democratic] parties in which
all others are rooted. The first one is structural: In the Democratic Party power flows upward and
in the Republican Party power flows downward. The second is attitudinal: Republicans perceive
themselves as insiders even when they are out of power and Democrats perceive themselves as
outsiders even when they are in power.
576

Although insider status, according to Freeman’s work, led to a political and social
ostracization of Ford moderates following Ronald Reagan’s 1980 primary victory that
seems obdurate by the standards of a Conservative Party where conviviality is considered
a virtue, the social homogeneity of the parties’ broader memberships and its importance
in helping to demarcate the boundaries of an in-group and an out-group is a significant
area of commonality. Perhaps most importantly for our model of ideological challenge is
Freeman’s discussion of the role of ideological groups within the Republican Party,
which could equally apply to the Conservatives:
The purpose of ideological factions—at least those that are organized—is to generate new ideas
and test their appeal. Initially these new ideas are for internal consumption. Their concept of
success is not winning benefits, symbolic or otherwise, for their group, so much as being able to
provide overall direction to the Party. If successful in attracting adherents these ideas will be
adopted by the Party for external appeal.
577

The problem that seems to loom largest from a comparative perspective, and
which calls into question not only the usefulness of the Conservative case narratives, but
also the model in general, is the difference in electoral rules and institutions between the
countries.

576
Freeman, J., ‘The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties’, in Political Studies
Quarterly (101.3: 1986), 328.
577
Ibid., 331.
355

It need hardly be said that federalism and universal primary elections mean the
link between electorate, grassroots and the party in government will be very different,
regardless of ideology. One grasps most strikingly from Richard Fenno’s and David
Mayhew’s work the relative autonomy enjoyed by American lawmakers at every point in
their careers and at any stage in the political process, along with the inability of the
‘respectable’ party elite to keep its members in check with the kind of certainty attained
through disciplinary measures in Westminster systems.
578
Parties are also weakened in
the United States by the political decentralization and a directly elected presidency that
follow respectively from the vertical and horizontal separation of powers, by the
geographical diversity which gives added salience to regional and local issues, and, it has
been suggested, by a political culture that fosters scepticism towards the legislative
bodies where parties are most active, which are often seen as bastions of self-serving and
aloof careerists.
579
Thus, in a setting where parties are less important to the fortunes of
individual politicians, who, of course, undertake the ideological work needed to advance
a realigning project, we could ask whether parties are also less relevant as mediating
institutions through which the resulting transitions are developed and worked.
For similar reasons, we might also enquire as to whether the same strategic
parameters hold true for transitions as they unfold through the state system. Unlike in the
unitary Westminster system where the previously reviewed transitions or partial
transitions took place, ‘pluralist’ observers have, with some justification, argued that

578
Fenno, R. F., Home Style: US House Members in their Constituencies (Longman; [1979] 2001), passim.
579
Aldrich, J.H., Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (University
of Chicago Press; 1995), 4.
356

American interest groups pursue their agendas as if playing a multi-level game of chess.
Where avenues are blocked for the implementation of programmes through one branch,
opportunities to push certain policies or to circumvent obstacles often arise elsewhere.
580

As a result, the institutional focus of challengers may not trend away from the party and
towards the state system and society, as illustrated in Figure 1.4 and traced in relation to
the Thatcherite and Middle Way cases, but instead shift unevenly across time and a
gamut of issues and policy areas.
Finally, even if parties-as-institutions are the focus of challengers, as well as
being vital determiners of the chances they will meet with success during the early stages
of transitions, we must, if the claim to external validity is to be made on behalf of our
model, ascertain whether the same variables apply, and whether concepts such as
‘ideological seedbed’ are translatable. Do institutional differences make it easier for
challengers to derive operational ideologies and to promote them as alternatives to
existing strands of consensus politics, as was the case in Britain during the early years of
the twentieth century?
From Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964 through to the turn of the
century, a major shift occurred in the operational ideology of the GOP. Republicans’
ambivalence towards the post-war state system forged by the New Deal, which ranged
within the party’s ranks from enthusiastic acceptance to begrudging acquiescence, turned
into outright hostility and calls for the repeal of its major provisions. The new
conservative realigning project in the U.S. resembled Andrew Gamble’s characterization

580
Dahl, R.A., ‘Pluralism Revisited’ in Comparative Politics (10.2: Jan. 1978), 191-3.
357

of Thatcherism: Government would be forced to vacate swathes of activity and its role in
society would be reconfigured, facilitating the move to a low tax economy, though the
state would be strengthened in its law enforcement functions. As in Britain, right-wingers
made inroads into the welfare state, and their centrist Democratic successors in office felt
electorally obliged to compete and to work within the new parameters of the state system
and even to persevere with a similar agenda of reform and retrenchment.
581

Of course, the New Right in America was dealing with more modest levels of
initial government involvement, and so efforts from the outset could be concentrated on
the state’s social and even cultural functions. But this should not detract from the
challengers’ successes in redefining the language of policy and changing the terms of
debate. The British ‘scrounger’, living off ‘handouts’, found his analogue in the
American ‘welfare queen’ with her ‘entitlements’, on top of which was added a further
layer of racial cues which capitalized on, and reinforced, the changing regional
alignments of American politics. The federal regime also may have helped in this
process, as conservative governors and state legislatures were able to push further still
with programmes of retrenchment, while Democratic counterparts were unwilling, or
unable, to resist from below the liberalization of the economy’s most productive or
emerging sectors.
The case of America’s ‘right turn’ also highlights the comparative openness of the
country’s federal regime. Unlike in the unitary Westminster system, where only the
ideological outputs of a challenge, such as the various groups in society who receive

581
Berman, W.C., America’s Right turn: From Nixon to Clinton (Johns Hopkins; 1998), 165, 185.
358

ideology developed at the centre, are open, in the U.S., so too are ideological inputs, by
which we mean groups inside and outside of the party who contribute to the
operationalization of core principles from its seedbed and the advance of the realigning
project at various stages and levels of the state system. Perhaps in terms of the personnel
who staffed GOP campaigns or acquired legislative or administrative positions,
neoconservatives were not as visible as, for example, the previously maligned supply-
side economists who found receptive ears in the new brand Republican administrations.
But as an influential group of right-drifting intellectuals initially sympathetic to the
Democrats (though largely remaining outside of party politics), their story is illustrative
of the fact that in open party systems, the operationalization and strengthening of ideas
occurs at coalitional intersections in civil society, even though the focus ultimately
returns to party. Along these lines, it is particularly interesting how the first generation
neoconservatives’ ‘two cheers for capitalism’ gradually turned into three as they became
fully integrated into the new GOP regime in the 1980s, at a time when ideological
ferment in the party was high. It is also noteworthy the role the group played in linking
ideologically and politically the New Right’s economic and cultural strands.
The first problem that arises with any topic centred on a particular political group
is how one defines its membership. This is especially acute with neoconservatism, despite
the comparatively recent origins of the movement.
582
Neoconservatives do, however,

582
The controversy surrounding neoconservatives and the war in Iraq is no doubt a cause of this confusion;
the surest way of deriding one’s political opponent now seems to be to call him a ‘neocon’. That said, the
term was actually first employed pejoratively by Michael Harrington as a means of bringing opprobrium
upon those in the process of abandoning the left—‘Socialists for Nixon’, as Harrington derided them. It is
for these reasons that few have openly endorsed the neoconservative label. See Podhoretz, N.,
‘Neoconservatism: A Eulogy’ in Commentary, (Mar. 1996), 20-1.
359

share common traits. A fervent opposition to feminism, ‘alternative’ lifestyles and
affirmative action are examples of domestic attributes which seem to hold true for nearly
all neoconservative thinkers, just as a belief in the congruence of American ideals and
interests and a willingness to use force to advance both apply to most neoconservatives in
foreign policy.
Neoconservatism emerged, first and foremost, as a domestic movement, and there
is a rough narrative of its progression well established in the scholarly literature.
Neoconservatives were liberals or radicals, many with roots in the New York Intellectual
movement of the 1940s and 1950s, who became disillusioned with the liberal consensus
and what Schlesinger termed the ‘dead center’ of American politics by the end of the
sixties.
583
The New Deal, whose central tenets the neoconservatives continued to support
in principle, had been transformed into Great Society welfarism, which neoconservative
sociologists such as Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer believed was hopelessly inefficient,
failed to ‘target’ the neediest, and had unintended consequences that often exacerbated
the social problems its programmes were designed to alleviate.
584
The conjunctural crisis
out of which neoconservatism grew, which our model sets as a prerequisite for
ideological transition, had many facets. Depending on their academic or professional
backgrounds, different neoconservatives accorded these issues varying levels of attention
over time. The Vietnam War’s impact on American foreign policy, the oil shocks of 1973

583
Friedman, M., The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy
(Cambridge; 2005), 266-7. Dorman, J., Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in their Own Words
(Chicago; 2001), 151-7.
584
See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘The Professors and the Poor’, in Commentary (Aug. 1968), passim.
360

and 1979 and the inflation and unemployment (referred to together in the press as the
‘misery index’) they exacerbated, inner city violence and urban decay, energy insecurity,
and the alleged opening of a ‘missile gap’ between the American and Soviet nuclear
arsenals were all causes for worry, believed neoconservative authors.
585

The phenomenon which virtually all historians agree was central to the
neoconservatives’ move to the Republican Party in the 1970s was the rise of the New
Left and counterculture during the preceding decade.
586
By the early seventies,
neoconservatives had expressed their disgust at what they collectively termed ‘The
Movement’ and its alleged double standards, arrogance, and anti-Americanism.
587
The
problem with ‘radical chic’, for neoconservatives, was not only its philosophical nihilism,
but its practical consequences. Academics, intellectuals, and bureaucrats—referred to by
Irving Kristol as the ‘New Class’—could chatter endlessly in their common rooms about
the latest leftist fad while their undergraduates tore at the fabric of American life and
undermined authority inside, and the authority of, the very institutions which sustained
them.
588
Through the seventies, the neoconservatives opposed the new constituencies in
the Democratic Party who supposedly dragged it further from its New Deal,
universalistic, and anticommunist operational ideology. Community activists, peace

585
Adapted from MPhil thesis submitted by author at the University of Cambridge, May 2007.
586
Dorrien, G.J., The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Temple
University Press; 1993), 174-9.
587
Podhoretz, N., ‘Revolutionary Suicide’, Commentary (Sept. 1970), 23.
588
Bell, D., ‘Columbia and the New Left’, in I. Kristol and D. Bell (eds.), Confrontation: The Student
Rebellion and the Universities (Basic Books, New York: 1969), 67-107. Bunzel, J. H., ‘Black Studies at
San Francisco State’ in Confrontation, 32. Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, 102.
361

groups, gay rights organizations and feminists who in 1972 were drawn to George
McGovern’s presidential campaign were prime culprits, as was the ‘new liberalism’ of
which McGovern was a reluctant champion and which proved amenable to ‘identity
politics’.
589

The alternative the neoconservatives offered to the existing state system and the
electoral perspective of the new breed of Democratic (and many Republican) politicians
comprised three policy area stances operationalized from the core value of liberal
universalism: a statement of internationalism and assertive opposition to communism
abroad that favoured rollback over detente and accommodation; retrenchment of
government programmes and welfare functions at home to correct government overreach;
and opposition to cultural ‘balkanization’ as manifested in multiculturalism and the
relaxation of moral codes—of ‘defining deviancy down’ or ‘defining [other types of]
deviancy up’ so as to negate shared standards of acceptable conduct.
By 1980, most neoconservatives conceded the fight had been lost in the
Democratic Party, and those who had not already changed their allegiance in 1972
endorsed Reagan in the presidential election of that year. By the nineties, the
neoconservatives had become part of the conservative mainstream, and through rhetorical
skill and the influx of a second generation of neoconservative thinkers, had managed to
push kneejerk traditionalists such as Patrick J. Buchanan to the fringes of the GOP while

589
Miroff, B., The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic
Party (University of Kansas, Lawrence; 2007), 203-6. Gerson, M., The Neoconservative Vision: From the
Cold War to the Culture Wars (Madison Books; 1996), 214.
362

expediting the attrition of centrist Northeastern Republicans who had for years been
victims of long-term regional realignment.
590

The rise of neoconservatism to become what several commentators believed in
the first years of the new millennium to be the ascendant ideology in the Republican
Party suggests that the political party is still integral to the strategy of ideological
entrepreneurs in American politics.
591
Up until the events of 1967-8—the Six Day War,
riots on the East Coast, the Tet Offensive, and the Columbia University occupation and
siege—neoconservatives had been content to comment on public affairs from a distance,
but Norman Podhoretz (often referred to as the godfather of neoconservatism) believed
his ‘class’, by which he meant intellectuals, had to act:
To be an intellectual…was not good enough…one had to change the world. Nor was it even good
enough to be, as Shelly had said the poets were, the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
They had to be acknowledged, they had to exercise actual political power.
592

Podhoretz had never been a Trotskyist of the ‘Alcove 2’ set, but he shared with Kristol
the belief that the ‘New Class’ was waging a war of position, either consciously or not,
on behalf of radical cultural politics which extended beyond any one presidential
administration or candidacy. Though the Straussian influence on neoconservatism,
particularly as it applied to its first generation, is often overstated in the historiography
and theoretical work, the idea that through the Republican Party they could influence in

590
Buchanan, P.J., Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution
and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (Thomas Dunne, New York; 2004), x-xiii.
591
Lind, M., ‘How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War’, available at
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2003/04/09/neocons/index.html last accessed May 22, 2012.
592
Podhoretz, N., Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (Harper and Row; 1979), 34.
363

the long-term those wielding power appealed to these public intellectuals and academics
who had, up until that point, been marginal to real world politics.
593

The factors we saw working to enhance the prospects of challengers in Britain
were also present for the neoconservative challenge to rivals in the Republican Party.
First, neoconservatives employed resources and organs outside of the party to advance
their ideas among the New York and Washington intellectual and political elites. The
journal of the American Jewish Committee, Commentary, is often considered the
unofficial mouthpiece of the movement. Not only did it trace out in its pages the
evolution of neoconservative thought and the partisan switch of the 1970s; it also served
as an important platform for neoconservative policy advocacy.

Commentary magazine
was first published in 1945 as part of an attempt to fuse the highbrow culture of the New
York Intellectuals with middle-brow journalism in the mould of Harper’s and the New
Yorker. Published monthly, the magazine changed over the years, shedding much of its
literary and cultural content in favour of in-depth social and political discussion. This
change was largely the result of editorial policy, and the central role of the editor is very
important to understanding Commentary’s significance to public discourse. As Nathan
Abrams explains, complete editorial freedom allowed Commentary’s editor to bend the
politics of the magazine to his own liking, to commission articles which fell within the
bounds of what he considered politically acceptable, and to publish editorials reflecting

593
George, J., ‘Leo Strauss, Neoconservatism and US Foreign Policy: Esoteric Nihilism and the Bush
Doctrine’ in International Politics (45: 2005), 177-180. Norton, A., Leo Strauss and the Politics of
American Empire, (Yale; 2004).
364

his own beliefs.
594
As such, a quasi-fiefdom was created, and we should view the
magazine as an extension of the man at the helm.
In 1960, Podhoretz took over the editorial reigns with the mission of creating a
more general and political journal of thought. In this he succeeded, and his flirtation with
radicalism in the period through the late 1960s was reflected in Commentary’s pages.
Similarly, as he turned towards a new brand of conservatism through the seventies, his
magazine went with him, and the articles published chime with this ideology.
595
At the
heart of ‘The Movement’, thought Podhoretz, was the New York Review of Books, the
literary magazine founded by his ex-friend and, by 1970, bitter rival, Jason Epstein. It is
true that the Commentary-New York Review spat had plenty to do with personalities and
circulation figures, but at its root there was certainly a clash of ideas. This came to a head
when the New York Review published an article by Tom Hayden on the Newark Riots,
along with a front-page illustrated guide to making a Molotov cocktail. When challenged,
the editors of the New York Review claimed the design was a joke, but an angry
Podhoretz later commissioned Dennis H. Wrong’s scathing piece on its embrace of
‘radical chic’, and wrote an editorial concurring with Wrong’s conclusions.
596

Commentary’s impact on the political class was notably demonstrated when
Reagan, having been encouraged by his foreign policy aide, Richard V. Allen, to read an

594
Abrams, N., “A Significant Journal of Jewish Opinion” in The American Jewish Archives Journal (55.1:
2003), 56.
595
Podhoretz retired in 1995 and was replaced by his deputy Neal Kozodoy, who in turn was replaced by
Podhoretz’s son, John Podhoretz, in 2007. Kozodoy did not deviate from the neoconservative line and his
son is expected to carry on this tradition.
596
Wrong, D., ‘The Case of the “New York Review”’ in Commentary (Nov. 1970), 49-51.
365

article titled ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ that appeared in the magazine’s
November 1979 edition, offered its author, the soi-disant ‘AFL-CIO Democrat’ Jeane
Kirkpatrick, a job in any future administration on the basis of her views on the
distinctions between left- and right-wing non-democratic regimes. Commentary was not
the only influential forum of neoconservative opinion. If Commentary bridged the gap
between intellectuals and government, the journal Public Interest, which was founded in
1965 by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell and concentrated on sociological issues of interest
to a general readership, did the same for the relationship between neoconservatives inside
and outside the academy. These early public expositions of the movement’s thought
generated the attention and credibility needed to attract funding for the establishment of
pressure groups such as the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger,
and for neoconservatives to gain a foothold in older think tanks such as the American
Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. Both enhanced neoconservative influence
on members of Congress and among presidential candidates.
597
The Weekly Standard,
which was founded in 1995 by William Kristol and Fred Barnes with the financial
backing of Rupert Murdoch as an explicitly hawkish and partisan publication, is the most
recent example of neoconservatives being able to outspend on mass media rival right-
wing factions.
Neoconservatives were also aware of the importance of the Republican Party’s
seedbed for ideologically engaged partisans, and of the difference between ideological
appreciation at the high political level and that among grassroots conservatives. As our

597
Mann, J., Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking, 2004), 111-4.
366

model predicts, conflict between the old and new orders becomes bitterer as the former is
displaced, and arguments come to centre on which faction represents the ‘true’ ideology
of the party. As ex-leftists or liberals, the neoconservatives initially found the GOP less
than welcoming, and came into conflict almost immediately with the traditionalist faction
now referred to as ‘paleo-conservative’ in order to differentiate it from a Republican
mainstream dominated by neoconservatism. The hostility of ‘paleo-conservatives’
towards the Democratic transplants is evinced by Stephen J. Tonsor’s 1986 remark:
It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a
good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday
sermons, matters have been carried too far.
598

What their rivals failed to grasp, however, was that the neoconservatives too had an
understanding of the Republican seedbed and its operational relation not only to their
own programme, but also to the liberal underpinnings of the American Constitution and
the essentials of the country’s state system. The core principle of liberal universalism was
not only the true creed of the Republican Party, but also of the nation. As Podhoretz
wrote in his second autobiography, Breaking Ranks, in 1980:
…Midge Decter said she had come to recognize that she owed “her very existence” to the idea
historically associated with liberalism “that no person may be forcibly imprisoned within the class
or clan or even family to which he was born,”…Consequently, even though there were nowadays
many more things she wished to conserve than to improve upon…she could not yield [to the label
of conservative] without betraying her obligation to contend with those enemies of the liberalism
to which she owed her life who were now seeking to “abscond with its good name.” I felt very
much the same way, and I think [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan did too: as the child of an Irish slum in
New York he also owed his existence to the traditional liberal idea.
599

The Democratic Party had abandoned the American ethos, but FDR liberals could turn to
the GOP, so long as illiberal elements in that party were defeated. This approach proved

598
Mark Molesky, ‘A Profound and Lyrical Historian’ in The Intercollegiate Review (Spring 2006), 58.
599
Podhoretz, Breaking, 356.
367

to be extremely successful, perhaps because experience of the internecine conflicts of the
Marxist left stood the neoconservatives in good stead for ideological struggles in which
the ‘enemy’ was regarded not merely as mistaken, but possessed of ill-intent and
treacherous designs. By the end of the century, neoconservative authors were able to
dismiss their marginalized rivals who coalesced around The American Conservative
magazine as ‘un-conservative’ and ‘un-American’, and to sneer at the ‘antisemitism,
isolationism, and general quackery that define that particular fringe of the American
right’.
600

Neoconservatives were not above cooperating with groups whose ends and
motives they may have found troubling. Collaboration with the Christian Right, whose
rise seemed inexorable in the wake of the controversial Supreme Court privacy decisions
handed down in the 1960s and 1970s, provided a suitable avenue to connecting with
swathes of mobilized voters seeking clearly defined, yet easily conveyable, Conservative
messages. Podhoretz rationalized quite cynically the alliance he and other
neoconservatives had forged with evangelicals, using the analogy of Jewish dietary
laws.
601
In the same way food remained kosher if contaminated with just a small portion
of butter, Pat Robertson, the charismatic televangelist and leader of the Christian
Coalition, was an acceptable partner in the culture wars, since his allegedly anti-Semitic
remarks made up only a small percentage of his overall public output.

600
Goldfarb, M., ‘Un-American’ in The Weekly Standard (Mar. 2009), available at
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/03/unamerican.asp, last accessed May 22, 2012.
601
Podhoretz, N., ‘In the Matter of Pat Robertson’ in Commentary (August, 1995), 27-32.
368

This is not to suggest there was no programmatic overlap between
neoconservatism and the political movement of evangelicals. A decline in sexual morality
was a genuine concern of both groups, for example.
602
Podhoretz produced startling
logical contortions in forwarding his now infamous argument that the same feminized
culture and tolerance of homosexuality that had existed in interwar Oxford, where
students had resolved they would ‘not fight for King and country’, was bedevilling an
America locked in a crisis of confidence following defeat in Vietnam.
603
But he was
thereby able to link the issue areas of foreign policy and moral relativism through a
simple common prejudice, without engaging in discussions of political theory which
risked alienating a constituency inclined to anti-intellectualism.
604

Finally, opposition within the Republican Party had been weakened by the crises
of the 1970s in which moderates and pragmatists, including President Richard Nixon, had
adhered to the strategies of demand management approved of heartily by Keynesian
economists, but which failed ultimately to quell inflation. Much along the lines of
Edward Heath’s government in Britain, Republican administrations balked at the radical
ideas espoused by supply-siders and the party’s right wing—whose latest champion,
Ronald Reagan, was still perceived as late as 1978 as a dangerous extremist—and opted
for the continuation of the post-war economic approach.
605

602
Kristol, I., Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press; 1995), 17. Decter, M., ‘The
Boys on the Beach’ in Commentary (Sept. 1980), 35-48. Decter’s controversial article decried
homosexuality as a tragic perversity.
603
Podhoretz, N., ‘The Culture of Appeasement’ in Harper’s Magazine (Oct. 1977), 25-32.
604
Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, 334.
605
McGirr, L., Suburban Warriors (Princeton; 2001), 53.
369

What is more, according to Podhoretz, before the entry of intellectuals such as
himself into its ranks, ‘there was no interest in ideas within the Republican Party, not
even in ideas that served to confer legitimacy on the privilege of the business class which
it existed to serve’.
606
This characterization is not entirely accurate. Alongside the
‘irrational Lockianism’ which turned, according to Hartz, the ‘irritating figure of the
bourgeois gossip...into the frightening figure of A. Mitchell Palmer or a Senator
McCarthy’, there were traditionalists who traced their modern origins to the conservative
‘canons’ listed by Russell Kirk in his 1953 classic, The Conservative Mind

, and pockets of
serious libertarian thinkers and activists.
607
And while there is, of course, a distinction
between mid-century American conservative thought and the operational ideology of the
Republican Party of the same period, conservative thinkers were often active in GOP
circles and regarded the party as their natural—their only—political home.
Nonetheless, there was no equivalent to the kind of statements of Middle Way
operational ideology to which British Conservative parliamentarians could subscribe.
Both traditionalists and libertarians shared in a staunch anti-communism, but in this they
differed little from liberals or even radicals, including much of the New Left, and by the
end of the 1960s, ideologically aware conservative activists were more divided than
united by ideology.
608
According to political sociologist Rebecca Klatch, it was the rise
of the counterculture that struck the deathblow to the conservative coalition. While

606
Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 95.
607
Hartz, Tradition, 12. Kirk, R., The Conservative Mind, 72.
608
Students for a Democratic Society, ‘An official statement of Students for a Democratic Society’ in How
Democratic is America? Responses to the New Left Challenge, R. Goldwin (ed.) (Chicago, 1971), 6.
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almost all traditionalists were horrified by what one Young Americans for Freedom
member called a ‘generally unpleasant, unpleasant time’, many libertarians
‘wholeheartedly embrace[ed] the counterculture’, participating in drug use and the
relaxed sexual climate.
609
That this schism or breakdown coincided with the rise of the
New Right meant the challengers, including the neoconservatives, encountered a less
effective opposition than might otherwise have been the case.
*
Though many politicians in the Republican and Democratic Parties are, or have
been, referred to, more often than not pejoratively, as ‘neocons’, the small group of
intellectuals who changed Republican ideological politics in the 1980s were not
politicians themselves. Instead, they were able to change the terms of debate within the
GOP by influencing, through a network of organizations that straddled the divide
between policy, civil society, and academia, those wielding legislative and executive
power. In a country where large electoral swings are rare, where ‘safe’ districts
predominate, and where incumbency exerts its own effects in preserving the status-quo,
the appropriateness of using the composition of legislatures as a proxy for the power of
certain factions is even more dubious than attempting to measure the ideological leanings
of British backbenchers for the same purpose. What complicates matters further still is
that neoconservative policy specialists were, because of independent appointments made
in the executive branch, able to capture, or at least hold sway over, fairly discrete areas of

609
Klatch, R., A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley; 1999), 145
and 149.
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policy that were central to their realigning project, most notably reform of the welfare
system, crime, and foreign policy.
The challenge here for the analyst is applying the scheme of periodization. As we
saw from the Middle Way and Thatcherite transitions, demarcating various stages and
delineating their boundaries can be difficult, and will often be open to dispute arising
from different, though equally valid, interpretations of events and their significance.
Though the neoconservatives generally worked their transition out from the party and
through the state system over time, it is fair to say that the trends in institutional focus
depicted for the three stages in Figure 1.4 are, in the practice of American ideological
politics, more disjointed than when mapped onto British cases. This brings us to the
question: should the scheme put forward in this dissertation be considered a model or an
approach?
Conclusion
Realignments of the state system—which can encompass government policy, the
economic and welfare functions of the state, the relationship between state and civil
society, voter alignments, and the party system—do not simply reflect changes in the
social and economic structure. Such changes themselves come to bear on social relations
symbiotically, and, as we have seen, ideological entrepreneurs, through the electoral
ideologies they espouse, work to facilitate this process. While recent institutionalist
scholarship has, in exploring phenomena such as welfare state retrenchment, emphasized
the role of the state and its governmental components in mediating realignments in the
broader state system, a similar role for the party has been overlooked in the literature.
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This dissertation’s foremost contention has been that the politics of ideology within the
party-as-institution are crucial in determining the substance and the early prospects for
success of ideological challenges seeking to transform the state system.
Conjunctural crisis is a prerequisite for transitions in the state system to take
place. But, short of revolution, challenges within a political party must occur in order for
them to reach fulfilment. The question we must ask, moving forward in this field of
study, is not whether realigning social forces produce transitions in the state system. As
shown in our discussion of inevitability and the Thatcherite challenge, even if change in a
particular direction is prefigured by the logic of conjuncture, the process of ideological
conflict surrounding the shift, along with the content of the state system replacing the old
consensus, depends on the institutional and ideological configuration of the political party
whence the challenge is pursued and articulated. Rather, we should seek to better
understand the dynamic and temporal relationship between crisis and intra-party
challenges, and, given conjunctural flux, how easy it is for ideological entrepreneurs to
challenge the existing electoral perspectives of the their parties. In each of the cases
reviewed here, the intra-party challenge arose quite soon after disjuncture emerged in the
wider society and economy, and, as expected, alternative electoral ideologies were
advanced by challengers that addressed supposed contradictions or flaws in the respective
consensuses.
One of the most pertinent methodological tasks for students of the genesis of
transitions within parties is separating analytically manifestations of crisis from the
effects of challenges themselves. For the Powell case study, political-economic crisis was
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explored as a theme among the grassroots, for it was the environment of the Conference
floor that, on the one hand, mirrored unease in the wider population which Tory activists
were, in their ideological and political awareness, quite close to, and, on the other,
relayed discontent upwards to ideological entrepreneurs at the elite level. Yet,
notwithstanding historical clues as to the mechanism of challenge formation, there
remains the problem of measuring crisis depth. That is to say: At what point does crisis
become deep enough to bring about challenges in parties? Multilevel analysis such as that
presented here will hopefully convince the reader of the breadth and depth of
conjunctural crisis, but a yardstick against which crisis can be measured remains,
precisely because of its many facets, elusive. Certainly, the Marxian sociologists’
mechanistic account of the rise of Thatcherism, with its emphasis on ahistorical
contradictions as foreshadowing the breakdown of the post-war consensus, offers little in
the way of measurement. Meanwhile, both consensualist and anti-consensualist historians
offer dynamic approaches to the Thatcherism narrative, but measurement is focussed not
so much on crises’ effects at various levels of the state system, but on declining elite
acquiescence in a slate of consensus policy positions. The value of detailed historical
narratives linking conjunctural crisis and definable chinks in the existing state system
with the ideological politics of the party cannot, it seems, be discounted in work on this
topic.
This dissertation proposes a model of intra-party ideological transitions
periodized according to the institutional focus and strategic aims of challengers at various
stages, but it has concentrated primarily on the first of these stages: the challenge.
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Though intra-party politics can lead to the decline of an ideological regime within the
party at any point, this is more likely—and the cause of disintegration is easier to
attribute solely, or overwhelmingly, to events within the party—at this early stage, where
intra-party hegemony is the primary concern of both challengers and their opponents.
Built into our model is the assumption that, within the template of a three-stage sequence,
the institutional setting of the party, the politics of ideology, and unique conjunctural
factors determine the different lengths of common periods of transition. In this respect,
the historicist contention that history must be understood on its own terms is upheld. The
greater threat to the scheme presented here as a model, however, comes from the
subtleties and variations within these defined phases.
Once an alternative ideology has been articulated in response to crisis, it has been
shown that four ‘coupled’ variables work to determine the likelihood of the challengers
achieving success. These are: the configuration of party institutions; the manner in which
the challengers conduct their campaign; the attraction of the challengers’ ideology vis-à-
vis the electoral perspective of the old order; and the political strength of the old regime.
Table 6.1 summarizes the attributes of the challenge stages of transitions or partial
transitions reviewed in this dissertation, giving some indication that successful challenges
must incorporate all of the four factors listed above. Nevertheless, the interplay of ideas
and their institutional setting is not reducible to an algorithm comprising discrete
variables, and to understand the dynamics of particular cases, the ‘coupling’ of factors
must be brought out in narratives.

Tariff Reform GOP New Right New Labour Thatcherism Powellism
Crisis
(Precondition
for
emergence of
challenge)
Relative economic
and social decline;
Geopolitical
challenges; Crisis of
imperial confidence
following Second
Boar War.
Cold War uncertainty
post-Vietnam; Oil crisis;
Stagflation and inner city
violence; Collapse of
faith in liberal consensus
and promise of continued
‘progress’.
Success of Th