Acting out the past
Being a conservative means having regard for tradition, but it mustn't become performative anachronism
This last week has been an odd one, as we have looked back over the long reign of Her late Majesty and also begun, tentatively, to peer into the future of a new monarch and—we can almost forget at the moment—a new government. The past has crowded in, with its rituals and symbols (I wrote about this in my last essay), and it has been a particularly heady time for conservatives and traditionalists, among whom I would generally number myself.
This point was driven home with particular force in a tweet by the splendid John Oxley, a witty chronicler of politics and, I think he would admit, on the right of the ideological spectrum. He wrote, very perceptively, “This is a fertile time for "things I profess to believe as a bit" becoming "things I actually believe".” In that sentence he shone a very bright light on the conservative pose which a certain sort of young(ish) person enjoys adopting (I am not immune from this habit myself) and it caused me to think a great deal.
Those who know me will attest that I can appear in some ways old-fashioned. I don’t wear anything that might be described as modern clothing, I prefer suits and formal dress to casual attire, I wear a hat, I smoke cigars. I like formality in its place: I enjoy elaborate dinners and the rituals which go with them, I am a staunch and instinctive monarchist, and I am interested in the arcana of protocol and procedure.
I had a fairly traditional education. At prep school we had a religious element in assembly every morning, including the singing of hymns, and I read history at St Andrews, which has its own “trad” reputation, including wearing gowns and singing the Gaudeamus, an old student song which dates back at least to the 18th century, though some people argue for a much earlier origin. Our graduation ceremony was a full-dress affair, with maces and robed academics, and the act of graduating itself involved us being “capped” by the chancellor or vice-chancellor with a piece of cloth alleged (no doubt apocryphally) to include a fragment of John Knox’s breeches. You get the picture.
There is no doubt that I am a conservative in many ways. Enoch Powell said that a Tory was “one who believes that institutions are wiser than those who operate them,” and as a default I hold to that; I would certainly say that change must always bear the burden of proof and that it is not synonymous with progress. I have a particular loathing of the loaded use of the word “modernisation”, as it implies that it is inherently good and wise and beneficial, which I dispute.
At the risk of special pleading, however, I would argue that my views are more complicated than that. In matters of public ethics (if one can call them that), I am, I think, fairly liberal: I absolutely support equal marriage—at least in terms of the legal construct of marriage as a contract between two people—I think it was iniquitous that the age of consent for homosexual sex was ever higher than it was for heterosexual sex, I am hugely permissive on obscenity and sexual explicitness, and I loathe the kind of cramped, starchy mindset that Mary Whitehouse exemplified, with her dread of corrupting minds and polluting society. Censorship should be extremely light-touch and there must be a near-overwhelming presumption in favour of freedom of speech.
That being so, I am strongly in favour of manners—I think that shouting at Prince Andrew that he is a “nonce”, while it may well be true and he is something of a moral sewer if the circumstantial evidence is to be believed, as he accompanies his recently deceased mother’s cortège is simply rude. There is, I really do think, a time and a place.
I was a young fogey. I have no problem admitting that. I wore bow ties before I was a teenager, favoured cardigans and cords and tweed, the whole nine yards. And this is not a new phenomenon: Alan Watkins popularised the term in the Spectator in 1984 but it had been identified at least in the 1970s. It was boosted hugely by the television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in 1981, and as the decade went on it was embraced enthusiastically by people like A.N. Wilson, Simon Heffer and Charles Moore.
Like any craze of the young, it was carried to excess. Vintage clothes or a liking for old-fashioned forms of speech were only the beginning, and it became—and still is—popular to adopt with varying degrees of sincerity philosophical positions of extreme conservatism. That was what Oxley was tweeting about. Go to the right university society or religious organisation or members’ club and you will find people in their 20s and 30s who will claim earnestly that they think the Great Reform Act was a mistake, or that theocracy (often of a Catholic nature) is desirable, or that gender equality has been largely disadvantageous to society as a whole.
Some of it is ludicrous and one can treat it as obnoxious or simply let it wash over you: I twitch slightly at undergraduates who refer to listening to the “wireless”, or call a five-penny piece “a shilling”, or bemoan the loosening of our class structure or whatever. I’m sure I did things just as vomitous when I was young, and I hope I do them rarely now. But progress moves quickly: I’m only in my mid-40s yet when I recall the first transmission of our fourth television channel, or the playing of the national anthem at the end of programming on the BBC, or the casual and consciously innocent use of language which is now problematic, I do feel a little behind the times.
But Oxley identified the danger, of outward poses becoming genuine beliefs. On an individual level, it is a personal matter: if people want to hold opinions which are extremely retrogressive and anachronistic, that is a matter for them. If, however, you identify broadly as a conservative, you need to understand that the movement, let alone the Conservative Party itself, cannot risk becoming identified with this kind of fogeyism, let alone caricatured as it.
This does not mean that we must be silver-suited, Logan’s Run exponents of everything modern. The United Kingdom in particular is a country and a society which is shot through with tradition and history, and we are at our best, I think, when we can manage a co-existence of the old and the new. I could write several paragraphs on this but I don’t believe in unnecessary work, so I direct you again to a TEDx talk by a former Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Robert Rogers (now Lord Lisvane), entitled How the new can live with the old. Robert is a friend and a former boss, and was caricatured unfairly as an arch-traditionalist in the House of Commons, partly because of his appearance and deportment; but he was thoughtful and imaginative when it came to reforming Parliament, and I think he sets out the intellectual underpinnings of this extremely well.
People think instinctively of Jacob Rees-Mogg. I don’t know the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (for ’tis he) at all well, though I’ve always found him polite and pleasant in person, but his anachronistic personality is partly earnest—I don’t doubt the sincerity of his devout Catholicism—and partly a “bit”. His apparent unworldliness, his drawling intonation, his old-fashioned suits and his mild stiffness of personality are a confection, in the same way his father William’s lofty patrician manner was a creation.
(A word on tailoring: journalists often refer to Jacob’s “immaculately tailored” suits, but they really are not. Always double-breasted but not, as is commonly thought, pinstriped, they are baggy and shapeless, and hang awkwardly on his spindly frame in a way which announces that he cares nothing for style. His tailor is not known, but is either reluctantly following the client’s orders to the letter, or else has no eye for cutting cloth at all. I would want a refund.)
I say this with some hesitation but absolute belief: there is no electoral future in extreme social conservatism. The Cornerstone Group of Conservative MPs, founded in 2005, nods to free enterprise as one of its tenets but the others give the game away: tradition, nation, family and religious ethics. The first two are fine in their place, but when taken together as a philosophical outlook they catch the public eye in particular ways: a hostility towards non-nuclear families, an uncertainty about homosexual relationships and especially marriage, parsimony towards publicly funded welfare and tight controls on immigration.
I don’t suggest for a moment that this kind of conservatism is insincerely nurtured. And it can contain a wide spectrum of belief: I am instinctively a proponent of small government, I believe the private sector can be a much more effective deliverer of services than state bureaucracy, and I applaud measures which are supported and operated by communities rather than through the agency of government.
But politics, as Rab Butler observed, is the art of the possible. It is simply not credible to ignore the opinion of the electorate, and I have no doubt that the constituency of voters which holds these (at best) traditionalist and old-fashioned views is small and dwindling. Of course political parties can sometimes lead public opinion, but there is also a huge importance in reflecting modern society, creating and adapting to what John Major called “a nation at ease with itself”. (Like much of the unfortunate Major’s agenda, there was a lot of good in this phrase, but it would be knocked hopelessly off course by circumstance.)
One of government’s greatest duties is to provide a space in which individuals and groups can flourish in ways with which they are comfortable. We are a diverse, pluralistic society (though not as diverse as it can sometimes seem from the vantage point of London) and in the main I believe in a government which is, pace the 1960s, permissive. To capture it in a slightly frivolous way, I would love to live in a country in which tweed jackets are the most popular items in clothing shops, but I have no wish to live in one in which they are mandatory because they are “good for us”.
Maybe a certain type of youth will always crave fogeyism. It is not in itself a wicked or even damaging habit, and, unfashionable though it is, it has been the wellspring of some great art (I would note here that 2022 is the centenary of the births of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin). It is not for me, or for anyone, to regulate the habits and preferences of individuals.
However, the Conservative Party, and the conservative movement (whatever that means in Britain), must not stereotype itself into irrelevance at the fringes of opinion. If we strike poses and let them, unwittingly, become real, if we attach ourselves to a series of lost causes, the public will—rightly—conclude that we are fundamentally unserious about politics and about being able to influence the future of our nation and society. That would be a tragedy for conservatism, and a loss for our polity. Now, I must press my corduroy suit for tomorrow.