Does the following sound familiar? "After a long period in office the Tories split badly over a single great question, and were routed at the polls. They had to reinvent themselves under a new leader; and it was some time before they regained office."
The Tories are a party of regular habits. Survey the record: helplessly divided by catholic emancipation in the 1820s they were unable to respond to agitation for constitutional reform, which came at last in 1832, over what could literally have been their dead bodies. A new Tory coalition, patched by Peel, returned to government in the 1840s, only to be shredded again by the Corn Laws debacle. In 1906 they were annihilated in a Liberal landslide over the free trade question. And in 1997...
There are especially resonant parallels between the Tory implosions of 1832 and 1997. The scale of the defeats is identical; in 1832 the Tories retained only 175 seats in the Commons, while Lord Grey's Whigs captured more than 400. And it was a single issue that split Wellington's Tories, one on which-just as with Britain's membership of the EU today-there was no going back by the time of the decisive election. (Present quarrels over the EU are really about mechanics, not principle; Little Englander nationalism is about as realistic an option now as No Popery was then.)
Yet again, the big Tory defeats of 1832 and 1997 each mark the start of constitutional revolutions. (The same is partially true of 1906, which prefaced the first serious diminution in the power of the Lords.) Most observers of the 1997 election had their eye off the ball; flummoxed by Calvinistic promises for the Treasury, they thought a Labour government would represent mere change of personnel. But Labour's constitutional agenda-devolution, abolition of peers' voting rights, a Freedom of Information Act, a Bill of Rights, and greater co-operation with Europe-is wonderfully welcome and overdue.
Consider the precedents. In 1832 Grey and his fellow Whigs, in what was ironically the most aristocratic government of their century, hoped that transferring the franchise from rotten boroughs to growing industrial cities would defuse agitation for reform. It did not; it made possible all the measures that followed. The vote was extended to adult male householders in the cities in 1867 and the countryside in 1884; to men aged 21 and women aged 30, in 1918; to women aged 21 in 1928; and in 1969 to everyone aged 18 and over. (Criminals and peers remain voteless.) With these developments came ever-increasing power for the Commons and changes elsewhere in the practice, status and interrelationships of the realm's estates.
But the reforms are manifestly incomplete. The gross anachronism of a hereditary upper house, the absence of written protections for the liberties of people who are still subjects and not citizens, the absence of sufficient checks on the power of the Commons, and the unrepresentative electoral system, still await remedy. For the first two, at least, remedy seems at hand.
JH Plumb wrote that a study of history helps us "to create out of the debris of the past a more extended, a more rational, a more detached sense of human destiny." To read of the fission, decay and disaster of the Tories in the years to 1832 is to see recent events transposed and sermonised, not least in what it teaches about the hubris spawned by long tenure of office, and the violence of passions over what at the time-but only at the time-seemed the great question. It teaches other lessons too; Lord Grey and his Whigs had languished long without office; they had, often hopelessly as it seemed, nourished reforming ambitions; but their chance came. They took it.
Much has been written about the watershed of 1832. It is always a shock to be reminded of the rick-burning, machine-smashing, rioting, executions and transportations that convulsed the years to 1832. Wellington carried loaded pistols and an umbrella with a sharpened ferrule, but the mob broke Apsley House's windows nevertheless. It was not the merits of reform that made the Duke pull his hat over his eyes and abstain in the final, crucial, vote; it was Grey's threat to create enough new peers to carry the Bill in the Lords. Dilution of blood struck the Duke as far worse than its spilling.
A good account of it all is given in EJ Evans's The Forging of the Modern State (Longman 1983). JAR Marriott's England Since Waterloo (Methuen 13th Ed 1944), which I read by torchlight under dormitory blankets, is now doubtless outdated, but is a classic of elegant (and gripping) narrative clarity. Good biographies make good history; Elizabeth Longford's famous Wellington (two volumes, Weidenfeld1969 and 1972) and Christopher Hibbert's highly accomplished Wellington: A Personal History (HarperCollins 1997) admit one to the very eye of the storm, as do Grey's commendable biographers EA Smith (OUP 1990) and J Derry (Blackwell 1992). At this delicate moment Tories must be hoping that whoever writes the sequel to Robert Blake's History of the Conservative Party (HarperCollins 1970) will have more to tell than how many of us bade the Thatcher-Major years a relieved goodbye.
