The Roots of [British] Conservatism
2nd March 2023
We’ll miss it, now that it’s gone.
20 October 2022 is a date I shall not forget. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day when I was to lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest on “British Conservatism post-Boris Johnson”.
If I had stuck to my original title, my lecture — on the future of a Party which seems to have decided that it doesn’t want one — would have been almost as short as Liz Truss’s statement. Instead, I decided to take refuge in its past.
Invoking Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”, I declared that the current death spiral of the Party was the perfect opportunity to retrieve its history. And indeed that the crisis demands it, since the Party’s almost total loss of its historical tradition is the principal reason for its present plight.