Volume 25, Number 1, September 2015
UK politics and Ideologies
Why is Conservatism such a
successful ideology?
Dr Peter Galliver
This article is relevant for both AS UK politics and A2 Ideologies.
There is an element of begging the question in a consideration of why Conservative ideology has been
so successful. For long periods in its history the Conservative Party has been anything but an electoral
success. The Tory Party of the eighteenth century, with its association with the Stuart line and taint of
Jacobitism, was something of a permanent opposition to the Whigs. In the nineteenth century, with the
transition from Toryism to Conservatism, the Conservatives did not win an election between 1841 and
1874. Conservative success has consisted in streaks of election wins. These periods are broadly
those associated with the premierships of Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, Harold Macmillan and
Margaret Thatcher.
Defining Conservatism
It has to be acknowledged that ‘political ideology’ is a term fraught with problems, having been called
‘the most elusive concept in the whole of social science’1. ‘A set of beliefs about a proper order of
society and how it can be achieved’,2 however, will do as a working definition.
The core of modern Conservative ideology derives principally from Edmund Burke. His response to
the French Revolution was to stress the organic nature of social and political development, to accept
the inevitability of change but to insist that this should be in accord with a people’s historically derived
culture and institutions. Similarly, in a twentieth-century reflection on the upheavals caused by
Marxism and National Socialism, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott stated that ‘To be
conservative…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.’3
This way of thinking about political change, an ideological commitment to pragmatism as it were, has
made the Conservative Party remarkably adaptable:

In 1834 Robert Peel accepted the expanded franchise, which the Tories had previously
opposed.

Benjamin Disraeli, in his Crystal Palace speech of 1872, added social reform for the benefit of
the working class to the objectives of the Conservative Party.
1
D. McLellan, Ideology, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 1.
R. S. Erikson and K. L.Tedin, American Public Opinion, Pearson, 2002, p. 64.
3
M. Oakeshott, ‘On Being Conservative’, in Rationalism in Politics, 1956.
2
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
The party accommodated itself to the welfare reforms enacted by Asquith’s Liberals before the
First World War and Attlee’s Labour ministry in the aftermath of the Second.
The perils of excessive ideology
History suggests that whenever the Conservative Party has allowed itself to be associated with
elements of a more radical ideology, or indulged in a bout of ideological conflict, it has suffered at the
polls. For example, commitment to economic protectionism, when the intellectual tide had turned in
favour of free trade, split Peel’s party in 1846. It proved toxic thereafter. Joseph Chamberlain’s revival
of the issue, with his call for imperial preference, contributed to the crushing Conservative defeat of
1906, and Stanley Baldwin lost office by failing to secure a mandate for tariffs in 1923.
The Conservative Party, therefore, has been consistently successful when it has been able to present
itself as the united alternative to a party driven by an ideology that does not go with the grain of British
history and which makes its adherents unfit for the practical business of running the economy. Hard
times have invariably made Conservative ideology more appealing. This has been characteristic of the
struggle between the Conservatives and Labour for government since 1918. The 1945 election apart,
whenever the Labour Party has gone into an election with a radical ideological message, especially in
a time of economic difficulty, the Conservatives have profited.
Successful ideologues
The Labour landslide of 1945 and the success of ‘Thatcherism’, however, are problematic for the
argument that the Conservative Party succeeds when it can profit from the electorate’s antipathy to
radical ideologies and suppress ideological disputes within its own ranks.
With regard to the triumph of Labour in 1945, a major war involving the entire nation does make a
difference. The sacrifices made by the people from 1939 to 1945, reflection on the conduct of foreign
policy by the National Government and social conditions in the pre-war period probably did create the
ground for the appeal of socialism in 1945. It did not, however, take long for a return to political
normality. The Conservatives were able to exploit weariness with austerity and the slow pace of
economic recovery. They were back in office by 1951.
At first sight, it appears that Margaret Thatcher had brought about a shift in Conservative ideology and
with electoral success. Thatcher reacted against traditional ‘one nation’ Conservatism, and its support
of the postwar consensus in social and economic policy, which she believed had caused economic
stagnation. She drew on the free-market-based ideologies of Friedman and Hayek to counter
socialism.
Notwithstanding the popularity of council house sales and privatisations, the electoral success of
Thatcher was in spite of rather than because of Thatcherism. Trailing massively in the opinion polls in
her first ministry, she was saved by the success of the Falklands War and went on to win re-election in
1983. Thereafter she was sustained by the mistakes of her opponents within and without Parliament
as they challenged her from the Left. The response of the Labour Party to its defeat in 1979 was to
retreat to the ideological comfort zone of its core socialist ideology, committing itself under Foot, then
Kinnock, to more state intervention in the economy and, in the era of the Cold War, disarmament. The
Conservatives were further helped when Labour split, those on the right of the party seceding to form
the Social Democrats in 1981.
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It was the uneasy ideological mix between Thatcher’s commitment to the ideas of Hayek and
Friedman and the more traditional Conservatism of those such as Heseltine that contributed
significantly to the end of nearly 20 years of Conservative electoral success. Those of Thatcher’s
colleagues unconvinced by the stringency of her commitment to free markets forced her out in 1990.
John Major was still able to win in 1992 because Labour under Kinnock still had not worked out how to
counter Conservatism. 1992, however, was only a reprieve. The attempt to join the exchange rate
mechanism, pushed for by pro-Europeans, culminating in the economic debacle of ‘Black Wednesday’
in 1992 when sterling was forced out of the system, cost the Conservatives their reputation for
economic competence, while the Eurosceptic opponents of the Maastricht Treaty presented the
electorate in 1997 with the image of a divided party.
New Labour: New Danger
The people who really had the answer to why Conservative ideology has been so electorally
successful were the politicians who created New Labour: John Smith, Gordon Brown, Peter
Mandelson and, above all, Tony Blair. While Kinnock may have dealt with the potential danger to
Labour by neutralising the ‘Militant Tendency’, it was the leaders of New Labour who grasped the
nettle of repealing Clause IV. Under Blair, Labour governments adapted to the landscape shaped by
earlier Conservative governments and held the centre ground. The Conservatives were left with a
damaged reputation for economic competence, divisions over Europe and, as one of the legacies of
Thatcherism, a reputation for being, in Theresa May’s phrase, ‘the nasty party’.
Conservative re-emergence
The real problems for Blair were posed less by opposition leaders William Hague and Ian Duncan
Smith than by his relationship with Gordon Brown and the extent to which his own party was unhappy
with the ideological compromises that had been made in the pursuit of electoral success. For many,
social reform rather than socialism was not good enough. The fallout from the economic crisis of 2008
cost Labour the 2010 election. The party’s reaction to this cost it the election of 2015. The selection of
Ed Miliband as leader and a shift to the Left may have enabled Kinnock to say ‘we’ve got our party
back’. It also allowed Blair to predict that the election would be one ‘in which a traditional left-wing
party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’.
Learn more
1. For those interested in the theory of political ideology as developed by psychologists, this
article is worth reading:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Political%20Ideology__Its%20structure,%20functions,%20and
%20elective%20a.pdf
2. There have been attempts to explain political differences from the perspective of evolutionary
biology:

Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B. and Alford, J.R. (2014) Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives
and the Biology of Political Differences, Routledge.

Tuschman, A. (2013) Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us,
Prometheus.
Philip Allan Publishers © 2015
www.hoddereducation.co.uk/politicsreview
The argument, broadly, is that political responses can run in families and have a biological
basis. Conservatism, the preference for the known in the face of threat, is something of the
default position for humanity. Liberalism is an evolutionary luxury afforded by threats becoming
less prevalent and deadly.
These books are reviewed by Chris Mooney in an article entitled ‘The origin of ideology’ in the
Washington Monthly, March/April/May 2014:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_may_2014/on_political_books/the_
origin_of_ideology049295.php?page=all
3. Further reading suggestions:

Derbyshire, Jonathan (2009) ‘The meaning of conservatism’, New Statesman, 8 October
2009: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/10/conservative-disraeli-burke

Coleman, Bruce (1988) Conservatism and the Conservative Party in Nineteenth-Century
Britain, Hodder Arnold.

Ramsden, John (1998) An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since
1830, HarperCollins.

Smith, Jeremy (1997) The Taming of Democracy: The Conservative Party, 1880–1924,
University of Wales Press.
Dr Peter Galliver is a history teacher at Portsmouth Grammar School.
This resource is part of POLITICS REVIEW, a magazine written for A-level students by subject experts.
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Philip Allan Publishers © 2015
www.hoddereducation.co.uk/politicsreview