A PARTY AND A WAY OF LIFE
The Conservative party have always said that, on the whole, their policy meant that people had to fill up fewer forms than under the policies of other parties.
SIR ALAN HERBERT
The man for whom the law exists—the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.
HENRY THOREAU
Although they have little in common otherwise, the Great American Public and the radical wing of the British Labor Party share a strange mental image of the British Conservative. They see him as a red-faced stout old gentleman given to saying "Gad, sir," waving the Union Jack, and kicking passing Irishmen, Indians, and Egyptians. He is choleric about labor unions, and he stands for "no damned nonsense" from foreigners.
The picture was a false one even before World War II. No party could have existed for a century, holding power for considerable periods, without a basis of support in the British working class. Such support would not be granted to the caricature of a Conservative described above. Certainly the Conservative Party has now, and has had in the past, its full share of reactionaries opposed to change. The inquiring reporter will encounter more than a smattering of similar opposition to change among the leaders of Britain's great unions.
Britain's altered position in the world and the smashing Labor victory of 1945 combined to whittle away the authority of the reactionaries in the Conservative Party in the years between 1945 and 1951 when it was out of office. Since then other influences, including the rise within the party of young politicians whose education and experience have little in common with those of the recognized Tory leadership, has further altered the character of the party. It has come a long way since 1945.
A young Conservative minister recalls with horror the annual Conservative conference of that year. The chairwoman, a billowy dowager wielding a lorgnette, announced with simpering pride that she had a surprise for the conference. It was, she said, "a real Conservative trade-unionist." Had the Archbishop of Canterbury appeared on the platform and danced the can-can, the surprise could not have been greater. When a Negro student went to the platform a decade later to discuss colonial affairs, no one turned a hair.
In retrospect, the election of 1945 was one the Tories could not win. Almost everything was against them: the pre-war Tory government's appeasement of Germany, the military disasters of 1940, the distrust of Churchill in time of peace, his own exaggerated campaign attacks on Labor, the superb organization of the Labor Party machinery by Herbert Morrison. Ten years later the Conservatives faced an election they could not lose. Even when all other conditions are taken into account, this was a singular example of the adaptability and mobility of the Tories.