Politics
Daniel Pitt: Conservative statecraft and party renewal are old ideas but there’s a lot we can learn from them
Dr Daniel Pitt is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
Conservative statecraft is an old idea, the time for which has come again.
Taking a long view of our present discontents can help us understand them. Reflecting on historical events and great figures of our past can provide us with a map of sorts to move forward.
Deep reading and reflection were foundational to the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury’s political action. To be a bit more philosophical here, diving into our history can provide that metaphorical bridge between the generations. Indeed, building and restoring such a bridge is at the heart of conservative statecraft. This excavation of the past can build trust and form a type of social membership, and of course, the repudiation of it can and does create distrust and social alienation, which is why the woke left attacks our history.
The past is not a dead weight to be liberated from.
The Conservative Party’s history is a long and adventurous story that is punctuated by great success and, yes, failure. Or to quote a former Conservative Leader and Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, history “is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations.” This can be said about our party too. Conservative statecraft must draw from the party’s failures and successes. The late Joan Hall, a former Conservative MP for Keighley, said, “I can cope with failure and come back fighting.”
Indeed, Hall was a fighter and was nicknamed ‘the Yorkshire Valkyrie’; her sheer force of personality ensured that she came back fighting, but this can also be said of her party. The secret to the party’s success, I suggest, is its ability to come back fighting after failure. This is sometimes articulated as the party’s willingness to change and adapt to the times.
The party benefits greatly from the body of thought that shares its name. As the great Edmund Burke noted, in order to conserve, there needs to be some change. The dilemma for conservative intellectuals, as well as statesmen, is to discern the permanent from the transitory or the vital from the trivial. To assist in this dilemma, as Sir Winston Churchill suggested, we should ‘study history’ because ‘in history lie all the secrets of statecraft’. In my view, a conservative statesman is a person who has discernment on such matters and understands when the party needs to go through renewal and revitalisation. Now is such a time.
The core fundamental of conservative statecraft is about renewing the party whilst in Opposition to win elections and to be ready for government. Spending the party’s political capital on defending one’s record in Government, whether it is positive, negative or a mixed bag, is not the best way to spend it. Stephen Sherbourne, now Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, in a letter to Maraget Thatcher, hit the nail on the head: “there is no gratitude in politics”.
People want to know what the party will do in the future. Conservative statecraft is about surveying the past to enable current and future prosperity.
A conservative statecraft of revival should focus on five key things:
- Replenishing the party’s ideational stance;
- Reorganising the party machinery;
- Updating policy;
- Rethinking presentation and party branding;
- Updating personnel and recruiting new candidates
Kemi Badenoch is well on her way to achieving these five key areas of renewal, but there is still work to do. T.S. Eliot believed that we as a party “must have a political philosophy”. Badenoch, in her podcast phase, quoted conservative thinkers such as the American economist Thomas Sowell and the late Sir Roger Scruton, which revealed that she is more than willing to express ‘authentic’ conservatism and to replenish the party’s ideational stance. She does need to go that bit further and deeper in expressing this. There are useful examples of renewal to draw on from Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto, Benjamin Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech, and David Cameron’s Big Society concept.
For inspiration for the reorganisation of the party machinery, one can look at successful reforms by Disraeli and John Eldon Gorst in the Victorian era to ensure the party was competitive in urban areas, Neville Chamberlain’s and Stanley Baldwin’s setting up of the Conservative Research Department in the interwar years, and the Earl of Woolton’s elimination of payments by parliamentary candidates in the post-World War II years, which widened and deepened the pool of talent available to the party.
We can learn lessons for updating party policy from Churchill, Ted Heath and Thatcher’s time as Opposition leaders. The stratagem here is to demonstrate to the public (and to the media) that the party has sound policies that answer current issues, but the policies cannot be too detailed, as they could be held hostage to events. Kemi and her team are doing an excellent job here, and they are also overcoming the dilemma that the Government might pinch the policies by actively saying the Government should pinch them.
We can learn about how to rethink presenting the party from the past, too. There are many examples of logo change, such as Cameron’s tree, change of the style and content of advertising, such as Saatchi & Saatchi during the Thatcher years, and image building such as Seldon Man during Heath’s leadership, even if your opponent assists you in creating that image.
Conservative statecraft and party renewal are old ideas that are now back in fashion, and there is much to learn from them