Abstract
Until quite recently it was customary for academic observers of the Conservative Party to introduce their books with a rueful acknowledgement that their favourite subject was not receiving the attention that it deserved. Whatever its political fortunes, the Labour Party always seemed to take the lion’s share of scholarly notice. Certainly during their period of opposition between 1974 and 1979 only a handful of academics thought the Conservatives worthy of serious study, compared to the steady stream of books and articles which charted Labour’s chequered career during the 1970s as a whole.1
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Notes
David Willetts, Modern Conservatism, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992, 21.
Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson, True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994.
Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley, Labour’s Grass Roots: The Politics of Party Membership, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992.
Among the books alone, see Ian Gilmour and Mark Garnett, Whatever Happened to the Tories?, London, Fourth Estate, 1998;
Peter Dorey (ed.), The Major Premiership: Politics and Policies under John Major, 1990–97, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999;
Mark Garnett and Philip Lynch (eds), The Conservatives in Crisis, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003;
Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005;
Andrew Denham and Keiron O’Hara, Democratising Conservative Leadership Selection: From Grey Suits to Grass Roots, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008;
Peter Snowdon, Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection, London, HarperPress, 2010;
and Tim Bale, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, London, Polity Press, 2010.
For a devastating survey of changing public attitudes during the Thatcher period, see Ivor Crewe, ‘Has the Electorate Become Thatcherite?’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 25–49.
Philip Norton, ‘The Lady’s Not for Turning, but What About the Rest? Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party 1979–89’, Parliamentary Affairs, 43.1, 1990, pp.41–58.
See, for example, John Gray, ‘Michael Howard Might Turn out to be the Leader Who Lays Thatcher’s Ghost’, New Statesman, 10 November 2003. Ideas for ‘decontaminating the Conservative brand’ had begun to appear under Duncan Smith; see especially Edward Vaizey, Nicholas Boles and Michael
Gove (eds), A Blue Tomorrow: New Visions for Modern Conservatives, London, Politicos, 2001
and Gary Streeter (ed.), There is Such a Thing as Society: Twelve Principles of Compassionate Conservatism, London, Politicos, 2002.
For the classic exposition of this view see Jim Bulpitt, ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft’, Political Studies, 34.1 (1985), pp.19–39.
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© 2011 Peter Dorey, Mark Garnett and Andrew Denham
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Dorey, P., Garnett, M., Denham, A. (2011). Introduction. In: From Crisis to Coalition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307742_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307742_1
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