The Conservative Party (UK)

The Conservative Party is the older of Britain’s two governing parties and, measured by time in office, the most successful electoral organisation in the democratic world. It governed for roughly two-thirds of the twentieth century. It has also survived by changing its mind: on the Corn Laws, on the franchise, on empire, on the mixed economy, on Europe. That adaptability is either the party’s genius or its emptiness, and the argument between those two readings has run inside the party since Robert Peel.

The party carries no founding doctrine and no manifesto of first principles. What it carries instead is a disposition, best described by Michael Oakeshott: a preference for the familiar over the unknown, the tried over the untried, the actual over the possible.⁵ Whether that disposition amounts to a politics, or merely to a talent for managing whatever the other side has already built, is the standing question about British conservatism.

Key Takeaways

• Descended from the eighteenth-century Tories; Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of December 1834 is conventionally treated as the founding statement of the modern party.
• The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 split the party and kept it out of sustained office for nearly three decades.
• Benjamin Disraeli built the mass party, passed the Second Reform Act in 1867, and supplied the One Nation language still used in its internal disputes.
• Margaret Thatcher, leader from 1975 and prime minister from 1979 to 1990, broke with the post-war settlement on state ownership, union law, and inflation.
• The general election of 4 July 2024 produced the party’s worst result on record, 121 seats; Kemi Badenoch was elected leader on 2 November 2024.

History And Context

The Tory party of the eighteenth century defended the Crown, the Church of England, and the landed interest against the Whig combination of great families and dissenting commerce. The modern organisation dates from the wreckage of the 1832 Reform Act. The Carlton Club was founded in London in 1832 as its headquarters, and in December 1834 Peel issued the Tamworth Manifesto, accepting the Reform Act as settled and offering the correction of proved abuses rather than resistance to all change. That formula, conceding the ground already lost and defending what remains, has been the party’s method since.

Peel then broke his own party. The repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846, carried with Whig votes against two-thirds of his own members, split the Conservatives; the Peelites drifted toward the Liberals and the rump held office only briefly until 1874.

Benjamin Disraeli rebuilt it. Leader of the Conservatives in the Commons from 1849, he carried the Second Reform Act in 1867, roughly doubling the electorate and enfranchising the urban working man before the Liberals could. The National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations was founded the same year and the Conservative Central Office in 1870. His novel Sybil of 1845, with its portrait of two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, gave the party the phrase One Nation, which it has used to describe an obligation of the propertied toward the poor.¹ The Primrose League of 1883 gave it a mass volunteer base including women three decades before they could vote.

The twentieth century was a sequence of accommodations. Stanley Baldwin absorbed the arrival of Labour, Winston Churchill led the wartime coalition from 1940, and the party accepted most of the Attlee settlement on returning to office in 1951. Margaret Thatcher ended that accommodation. Between 1979 and 1990 her governments privatised the state industries, restricted union immunities, sold council houses to their tenants, and made the control of inflation the object of policy.² John Major won in 1992, lost heavily in 1997, and the party spent thirteen years out of office. David Cameron returned it in 2010, called the European referendum of 23 June 2016, and resigned when he lost it. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak followed in eight years; the 2024 defeat was the deepest in the party’s history.

The Conservative Position

The party’s own account of itself rests on three claims. The first is that institutions embody more practical intelligence than any reformer’s plan. Burke’s argument from the 1790 Reflections, that the individual is foolish and the species wise, and that inherited prejudice carries reasons its holders cannot articulate, remains the intellectual charter.³

The second is the union of property and obligation. The One Nation strand holds that inequality is tolerable only where the advantaged accept duties to the rest, and that the alternative to voluntary obligation is confiscation. This is the tradition of Disraeli’s factory legislation, Baldwin’s caution, and the party’s acceptance of the National Health Service.

The third is the union of the kingdom and its sovereignty. The party has defined itself by the constitution: Crown in Parliament, the established Church, the unity of the four nations, and, since 2016, the recovery of legislative authority from Brussels. Roger Scruton grounded this attachment in something prior to argument, a settled love of a particular place and its inherited arrangements, which he held to be the precondition of political obligation rather than its conclusion.⁴

Differing Positions

The sharpest criticism comes from the party’s own right. On this account the party is not conservative but managerial: it has conserved nothing it was elected to conserve, having presided over record immigration, an expanding state, rising taxation, and a legal order it declines to reform. The rise of Reform UK is the electoral expression of that charge, and the 2024 result is its evidence.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat criticism is the mirror image: that the party’s flexibility is a mask for a constant, the defence of accumulated wealth, and that One Nation rhetoric has functioned as a way of conceding the minimum required to keep the rest.

A third criticism, made by some conservative thinkers, is that the party’s non-doctrinal character is a genuine handicap in an age of ideological politics. A disposition can lose an argument to a programme, because it has nothing to put on the table when the electorate wants a plan.

References

1. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (Henry Colburn, 1845).
2. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants (Allen Lane, 2015).
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790).
4. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Penguin, 1980).
5. Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative”, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962).