From the Archives: Hypermodern Toryism
An extract from an essay on Disraeli, previously unpublished
This is a draft copy of an article that grew from an essay written late last year on Toryism, which was discussed at pitch but never properly completed.
Britain today finds itself in the profound position of feeling as though it is sinking beneath the waves, without rescue in sight. Institutions that once commanded trust now seem exhausted or adrift; the political consensus has fractured, and national identity - once so confidently worn - is now the subject of nervous uncertainty or outright rejection. The legacy of the last thirty years, above all the Blairite settlement, has left Britain with transactional politics: stripped of poetry, starved of purpose, and unable to inspire any of its subjects to fulfil their most basic obligations.
The cultural and constitutional rewiring that took place from 1997 onward was not merely administrative. It altered the tone, balance, and soul of British public life: the House of Lords was in effect demolished; the civil service and judiciary politicised; ancient offices made to feel obsolete; and a managerial class elevated over an ethos of service. Britain was not modernised - it was hollowed out by charming sociopaths drunk on the price of everything and the value of nothing.
In response to this, many instinctively cling to nostalgia; others urge radical change. But neither paralysis nor upheaval offers a sustainable future. In these times of flux, a mature conservative response must be neither fatalism nor fury, but stewardship. And for that, we could do far worse than consider the wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli.
Disraeli’s legacy offers a model of conservative thought that is pragmatic, romantic, and above all national. His Toryism was not a clinging to unearned privileges - it was a recognition that institutions must adapt if they are to survive. At a time when the ground beneath our feet seems unsure, Disraeli’s vision - of conserving the soul of a nation while reshaping its structures - speaks directly to our own.
Toryism - distinct from mere Conservatism, as the excellent John Oxley and others have noted - is less a doctrine than a sensibility. To borrow from Kenneth Clark, “I don’t know what it is, but I think I can recognise it when I see it.” In recent years, One Nationism has become a punchline in some circles of the Conservative Party - and not without cause - but properly understood, it represents a vital idea: that a national politic must respect the natural hierarchy of things, while also ensuring those hierarchies serve the nation as a whole. Toryism is the defence of monarchy and the champion of suffrage; the guarantor of liberty and the enforcer of responsibility. It believes in order, but not stasis.
Disraeli practised this principle with instinctive dexterity. He did not fear movement; he feared drift. “The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing,” he once declared - a statement that reveals his central truth: that conservatism must lead, not simply resist or react. Nor must it abdicate cultural life to the cult of spreadsheets and graphs. His imagination was aristocratic, but his politics were national. “I have come amongst you,” indeed.
The clearest proof of this came in 1867, when Disraeli steered the Second Reform Act through Parliament. To many Tories, it seemed like surrender to the mob. But Disraeli understood that to refuse reform is not to preserve order - it is to undermine it. His reformism did not concede to radicalism; it disarmed it, and bound new classes to the nation. A modern example would be the peerage: in refusing meaningful reforms for survival, it has become stuck like flies in amber - which has only hastened a view amongst the wider public that it is not fit for purpose. As we watch the Parliamentary contributions of the hereditary peerage die, it has died because we have failed to nurture its life sustainably.
More than thirty years earlier, in A Vindication of the English Constitution, a young Disraeli had already made the case for adaptation. He rejected the Whiggish idea of a purely rational constitution, and instead presented ours as an organic inheritance - something that could endure only if it evolved. “An institution which has accommodated itself to the circumstances and necessities of the times,” he wrote, “is one which must command respect.”
Modern Britain has almost entirely lost this sensibility. Parliament is mistrusted. The civil service is overtly partisan. The Union wobbles. The monarchy endures, but is less understood. And behind it all lies the Blairite re-engineering of our political architecture, which replaced deference with bureaucracy, and identity with individualism. In many ways, it has probably also shattered the very premise of coherent ideology as an effective electoral force, and it must be resisted.
This is not a moment for mild correction - it is a moment for restoration. Not of a golden past, but of the moral seriousness and cultural coherence that once underpinned national life. Just as the bleak misery 1970s was enough for the public to give Thatcher the blank cheque for radicalism in the 1980s, our present discontent calls for an ambitious national project: the re-founding of British public life on firmer ground. We must go back to Burke’s rejection of the French Revolution, and embark on constructing a Britain which is in contract with its dead and its unborn.
Disraeli's genius was to see that a nation is not just a mechanism of law or GDP, but a living thing - bound by shared memory, myth, and responsibility. His One Nation vision offers us a path back to coherence without resorting to either populism or managerialism. It is the middle path between nihilism and nostalgia.
To put it bluntly: Britain is not dying of economic mismanagement - it is dying of disorientation. The agenda must now move beyond GDP figures or marginal tax tweaks. It must ask: what sort of country is Britain, and what sort of future can it rightly call its own? Let us all pray a coherent answer comes soon.