CapX: History is the Conservative Party’s greatest asset

After fourteen years in government, in which five different prime ministers imposed their own vision of politics onto the Conservative Party, the Tories’ values have become unclear. As Kemi Badenoch, one of the frontrunners to lead the party in opposition, recently put it: ‘the past decade saw us twist and turn in the wind, unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country.’

Fixing this problem won’t be easy. Conservatism, more than any other political philosophy, is a tradition. There’s no foundational text or set of easy diagnoses and prescriptions that conservatives can hark back to or apply. 

Instead, Conservatives have something which has, throughout the party’s long existence, proved much better: history. Specifically, the trial and error of the many people who have wrestled with the question of how to govern these islands over the centuries. As Rab Butler once put it, the Tory philosophy isn’t ‘a set of premises… but a mature and human tradition which is neither fixed nor finished.’ The party’s perennial challenge is to refresh and apply that tradition.

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