Conservative Party Agents in Second World War Britain

The Second World War placed great pressures on the machineryand personnel of all political parties. Conservatives formedthe view that their own machine had been especially hard hitby the challenges of the war years, and that this was a majorreason for the party's 1945 general election defeat. A supposeddecline in the number of full-time, salaried constituency agentswas a key component of this narrative of decline. This articleinvestigates what happened to the Conservative agency in wartime,using an unusually wide range of sources, including those ofaround a hundred constituency associations. It shows that thenumber of agents did fall as a result of the war, but that associationsoften worked hard to keep their agents, or to mitigate the effectsof their departure. It also explains the failure of headquarters'wartime efforts to reform the agency and centralize the employmentof agents. Although the party's relative organizational declinedid have significant emotional and practical consequences forit in 1945, Conservatives tended, post hoc, to overstate theextent of their wartime organizational collapse, in part becauseit allowed them to avoid damaging recriminations about the realreasons for their defeat. Ultimately, though, the war's effects,while significant, were essentially transient. Constituencycontrol of agents remained, and a professional standard wasmaintained. The Conservatives emerged from the war with an agencythat was different in detail from, but recognizably similarin form to, that which had predated the war.     

Managers and Agents: Conservative Party Organisation in the 1850s*

During the 1850s in the wake of the calamitous Peelite split, Britain's Conservative Party struggled to rebuild its numbers in the house of commons. The structure of the party's electoral organisation is well known‐parliamentary leaders, election managers such as Sir William Jolliffe and Philip Rose, plus local constituency based agents. Jolliffe's and Rose's 1859 election notebooks help understand this, but they also reveal serious gaps in the Conservatives' information networks. This article delineates the electoral activities of Sir John Yarde Buller (first Baron Churston) and his ally Samuel Triscott, who supplemented the spasmodic flow of information from small boroughs in at least two counties. Mid‐level or second‐tier managers, to whom no attention has previously been given, assisted the Conservatives in their gradual electoral recovery. Their roles also suggest that the party's organization may have been more complex than previously believed.     

The Liberal Party and Patriotism in Early Twentieth Century Britain

Many historians have highlighted the role played by ‘languagesof patriotism’ in the political appeal of the BritishConservative Party in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The present article engages with this debate by pointing tothe fact that the Liberals, in the Edwardian period at least,could also articulate patriotic languages That this was thecase is demonstrated by an examination of Liberal attitudesto the Education Act of 1902, the tariff reform controversy,and the issue of the ‘land question’. The widelyheld view that the Conservatives enjoyed a complete monopolyon patriotism is called into doubt. Furthermore, this articlecontends that the Liberal Party's use of patriotic rhetoricprovides a new means of making sense of their policies in thisperiod. These policies, it is suggested, cannot simply be understoodas expressive of a ‘new Liberal’ system of thoughtincreasingly influenced by collectivist ideas ^*I would like to thank Jon Parry for his very many helpful commentsand suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The researchpresented here was assisted by the financial support of Christ'sCollege, Cambridge, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.     

The Conservative Party and Defeat: the Significance of Resale Price Maintenance for the General Election of 1964

The 1964 general election was one of the closest in modern Britishhistory and resulted in the narrowest of defeats for the ConservativeParty, who had been in office continuously for thirteen years.In terms of the popular vote, the difference between the victoriousLabour Party and the Tories was just 0.3 per cent and—witha swing of just 3.5 per cent—the Labour majority in theHouse of Commons was only four, the smallest since Lord JohnRussell's Whigs in 1847. There were, of course, many differentfactors involved in the defeat, including the longterm damagecaused to the Conservative Party by the 'Profumo affair' andother security scandals. Yet, the issue that caused the greatestpolitical problems for the Conservative government in the run-upto the election was not a public scandal or the general managementof the economy, but a seemingly innocuous macroeconomic issueknown as resale price maintenance (RPM). The Macmillan and Douglas-Homegovernment's attempts to abolish RPM—a practice wherebyproducers would dictate the price at which their goods couldbe sold by retailers, thereby ensuring that prices were 'fixed'across the board—led to the biggest backbench rebellionsince Neville Chamberlain was forced out of office in 1940.During the RPM affair, Conservative MPs openly plotted againsttheir own government and threatened it with embarrassing defeatin a series of highly charged parliamentary votes. At one stagethe Conservative government's majority in the House of Commonswas reduced to just one vote. Party whips and managers foundthemselves unable to contain the rebellion, and even the Cabinetfound it difficult to remain above the fray, with several seniorministers strongly opposing the measures. Originally introducedby Harold Macmillan as part of an overarching policy programme,RPM abolition was highly controversial during his administrationand continued to overshadow that of his successor, Alec Douglas-Home.The Conservative government's attempts to legislate againstRPM culminated in an attempt to force through the controversialmeasures in the run-up to the general election. The measuresinvolved and the resulting rancour, fed by an anti-governmentcampaign organized by retailers and a large section of the press,split the party and alienated many 'natural' Conservative votersm the country. This study seeks to explain the issue of RPMabolition and its origins within the context of the two successiveConservative administrations, and to assess the political rationalebehind the controversial decision to proceed with the ResalePrices Bill in Parliament. The intention is not to show thatRPM abolition in isolation was responsible for the ConservativeParty's defeat in 1964, but rather to demonstrate that the directand indirect effects of the whole issue were crucial to theelectoral fortunes of the Conservative Party in one of the closestgeneral elections in modern British history.     

No Hammock for the Idle: The Conservative Party, 'Youth' and the Welfare State in the 1960s

The postwar ‘baby boom’ focused unprecedented attentionon young people in Britain and made ‘youth’ a newand increasingly worrying category of both social and politicalidentity. Belief in the uniqueness of postwar youth was widelyshared among political parties but it caused particular anxietyfor the Conservatives who feared that young people in the 1960swere shaped by values that predisposed them to socialism, notconservatism. This article traces the Conservative party's interactionwith ‘youth’ through an examination of the policy-makingefforts of the Young Conservatives (YCs) organization. Afterthe 1959 election, the Conservative party was anxious to retainthe support of younger voters and saw the YCs as a vehicle topublicize its commitment to them. Departing from the YCs’long-standing emphasis on social activities, the party establisheda Policy Group Scheme to integrate younger members into policy-makingand encourage a ‘youth’ perspective on key policyareas such as the welfare state. However, in 1966, the PolicyGroup Scheme ended as it became clear that young people's loyaltyto the main party was not conditional upon participation inpolicy-making and the YCs’ model of postwar conservatismdiffered very little from that of older Conservatives. Thisanalysis of grassroots discussion of the welfare state thusestablishes the limits of a distinctive ‘youth’perspective on major issues in modern conservatism such as individualfreedom and the role of the state, and contributes to recentdiscussions of the role of age and demographic structure inpostwar Britain.     

The Lost Leader: Sir Stafford Northcote and the Leadership of the Conservative Party, 1876–85*

Sir Stafford Northcote has gone down in history as a man who fell short of the ultimate achievement of being prime minister largely because of personal weakness, and lack of political virility and drive. The picture painted by Northcote's political enemies – most notably the Fourth Party – has been accepted uncritically. Yet, political motives lay behind the actions of these supporters, and their harsh black and white portrait is not illustrative of the complexity of the situation in which Northcote found himself. Although individual characteristics undoubtedly played a part in his final political failure, underlying dynamics and structural transformations in politics and political life were more significant. It was more than simply the misfortune in succeeding the exceptionally charismatic Disraeli as leader. Northcote was faced with unparalleled disruption in parliament from Irish Nationalist MPs; the starkly polarised debate on the eastern question left him detached as a moderate. His temperament was better suited to constructive government rather than to opposition. However, following general election defeat in 1880, Northcote was denied this opportunity. Equally, his position in the lower House denied him the capacity to define a clear political critique of the Liberal government. Northcote's leadership of the party reflected the changing nature of British politics as radicals, tories, Irish Nationalists and Unionists increasingly contested the consensual style more appropriate to the political world of Palmerston and the 14th earl of Derby.