Abstract
No history of post-war Britain can be complete without a study of the country’s most enduringly successful political organisation — the Conservative Party. Yet despite the party’s record, it has been much less studied by historians and political analysts than its less successful rival, the Labour Party.1 Readers of this chapter should, therefore, appreciate that many areas of major interest to an understanding of the Conservative Party either have not been investigated, or remain under-researched.2 The chapter is divided into a number of thematic sections. It opens with a discussion of the party’s electoral record, the dominant fact about the Conservative Party post-war, and there follow shorter sections dealing with the phases of the party’s policies, ideologies and factions, organisation, social base and finance, concluding with an assessment of the party’s six leaders and seven governments from 1945.
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11. The Conservative Party since 1945
Anthony Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer (1981) pp. 54–5.
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘From Macmillan to Home, 1959–64’, in Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon (eds), Ruling Performance (Oxford, 1987) p. 156.
John Ramsden, ‘Conservatives since 1945’, Contemporary Record, 2 (spring 1988) 19.
Ben Pimlott, ‘Is the Postwar Consensus a Myth?’, Contemporary Record, 2 (summer 1989) 12–14.
Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Nationalisation and Privatisation’, Contemporary Record, 1 (winter 1988) 33.
For a useful introduction, see Rodney Lowe, ‘The Origins of the Welfare State in Britain’, Modern History Review (September 1989) 24–5.
Martin Holmes, ‘Thatcherism: Scope and Limits’, Contemporary Record, 1 (autumn 1987) 5.
John Curtice, ‘North and South: The Growing Divide’, Contemporary Record, I (winter 1988) 7–8.
For a useful survey, see Alan Ryan, ‘Party Ideologies since 1945’, Contemporary Record, 1 (winter 1988) 17–22.
Martin Durham, ‘The Right: the Conservative Party and Conservatism’, in Leonard Tivey and Anthony Wright (eds), Party Ideology in Britain (1989) pp. 53–4.
Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way (1938).
Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (Penguin edn, 1947) p. 32.
Ian Gilmour, Inside Right (1977) p. 121.
Ben Pimlott, ‘The Unimportance of “Thatcherism”’, Contemporary Record, 3 (autumn 1989) 15.
See Ivor Crewe, ‘The Policy Agenda’, Contemporary Record, 3 (February 1990) 2–6.
Robert T. McKenzie, British Political Parties (1955).
Kevin Swaddle, ‘Hi-Tech Elections’, Contemporary Record, 1 (spring 1988) 33.
Gillian Peele, ‘British Political Parties in the 1980s’, in Anthony Seldon (ed.), UK Political Parties since 1945 (1990) p. 148.
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘Party Finance. Funding of Political Parties since 1945’, Contemporary Record, 1 (winter 1988) 21.
Keith Ewing, The Funding of Political Parties in Britain (Cambridge, 1987) p. 177.
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© 1991 Anthony Seldon
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Seldon, A. (1991). The Conservative Party since 1945. In: Gourvish, T., O’Day, A. (eds) Britain Since 1945. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21603-1_11
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