Intelligence

Ideas are the decisive force

Opinion - William Rees-Mogg Times Online

William Rees-Mogg
MAURICE Cowling, who died last week, was one of the most brilliant Cambridge dons of his generation, but like other brilliant dons he was a swan with a gammy wing. Again and again in his career, particularly in his early attempts at journalism, he was appointed to an enviable post, only to lose it prematurely. The Times, under Sir William Haley, fired him as a foreign leader writer; so did Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express; he resigned from The Spectator.

Yet he had 25 golden years as a fellow of Peterhouse, from 1963 to 1988; his teaching in those years had a significant influence on the intellectual development of the Conservative Party.

He was a great teacher and influenced a whole generation of politically minded Cambridge historians, of whom the most influential, in his turn, was Michael Portillo, who was to become the Young Pretender of the Tory party. Even today the former Portillistas, who may be thought of as Cowling’s intellectual grandchildren, have become some of the ablest of the younger generation of Conservative MPs. If there are still any ideas in the modern Conservative party, they have some Cowling genes in them.

I had the good fortune to see him in action, teaching undergraduates. In the late 1970s he invited me to Peterhouse to speak to his group of college historians. I have no recollection of the subject matter, though I think the occasion occurred in that very interesting period when Margaret Thatcher was leading the Conservative Opposition. There was then a real ferment of ideas. Maurice was impressive, challenging, analytical, amusing, paradoxical, at home with his students. I remember thinking how lucky his Peterhouse students were; with his lightness of touch, he was expanding their political and historical consciousness.

Yet even then I thought that there was a central paradox in his teaching that could not be reconciled. His great gift was to bring political ideas to life, to explain them so that good second-class students of Peterhouse, let alone the high-flyers, could see them as vivid and significant. Yet his central doctrine was that political philosophies are mere rhetoric, designed to advance the politician or his party towards power. He was a brilliant exponent of political philosophies, but he did not believe that they were real.

After the meeting we chatted for half an hour in his rooms. He made some more than usually extreme statements. I replied that he must know that what he was saying was not true; he was saying it to provoke. He seemed to be pleased, as though that were a compliment. I imagine that his impish delight in extreme propositions rubbed off on some of his students.

Maurice would certainly have appreciated the irony that he died at the beginning of a Conservative leadership contest in which political philosophy is not playing a prominent part. The only Conservative political theorist to whom I have seen any reference is Benjamin Disraeli, a bogus and inconsistent political theorist even by Maurice’s standards. Disraeli has only got into the current debate because some potential candidates refer to themselves as “one nation” Conservatives; the reference is taken from his middle period novel, Sybil, where one of the characters says portentously: “I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations.” Note the capital letters.

Disraeli had difficulty with political philosophy. Writing in the 19th century, he looked around for respectable political ancestors. In the previous two centuries, the Tory party, from which the Conservative Party descends, were the party of the King and the Church of England — “Church and King” was its motto. The Tories existed to defend these interests, a task they performed with extraordinary incompetence. They lost the first civil war in the 1640s and the second in 1688.

They went out of office when Queen Anne died in 1714 and remained in opposition until George ll died in 1760. When they got back in to office, they lost America under the prime ministership of Lord North. In Disraeli’s time it was more obvious than it is now that the first 140 years of the Tory Party, from the 1640s to the 1780s, were an unmitigated disaster.

Lacking a convincing political ancestry, Disraeli fixed on Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who lived from 1678 to 1751; he was the friend of Pope and Swift, a gifted but unpleasant man who was consistently outwitted by the Whig Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. He wrote The Idea of a Patriot King, which was read to George lll by his foolish mother, the widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bolingbroke was a genuine intellectual, with the leisure of being out of office, but his Patriot King is not required reading in the modern Conservative Party. It is a fair bet that none of the leadership candidates, save David Willetts, has ever bothered to open it.

Thus Maurice Cowling may seem to be proved right by Disraeli’s example. He certainly thought that all political philosophy was a sham, either the musings of men without power, or the self-seeking rhetoric of politicians seeking power. But I believe that Maurice was mistaken. There is more to it than that. Ideas are the decisive force in all politics, whether they are bad ideas or good ones. The New Deal idea made Franklin Roosevelt. The half-baked racial Darwinism of Hitler took him to power, though it was intellectually contemptible.

There are even more ideas in the present Conservative leadership contest than may appear, but they desperately need better definition. “Modernisation” is the cry of one group, but what does modernisation mean in practice? Is there any candidate who would not claim to be a moderniser? How would a new Conservative Party balance the values of liberty and equality? Now that Ken Clarke has dropped the euro and the European constitution, how far would he still go in European integration? A fog of evasion hangs over this philosophical battlefield. It is a pity Maurice is no longer available to disperse it.

August 29, 2005 at 07:17 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home