'The troubles of our proud and angry dust/ are from eternity and shall not fail.' Toryism is hard work. Just after William Hague became Leader of the Party I congratulated him, promising to be a fair weather critic and a foul weather friend. There was only one problem. Over the next four years, there was barely four days of fair weather. Thus it has continued. The Tories' sunlit uplands are as far away as ever - to the extent that there has even been speculation that the most successful electoral machine in all history is now finished. Refuting that assessment will require hard pounding.
In taking a political stance, Labour has one advantage over the Tories. They have a teleology: socialism. To them, all history is pointed in that direction. All events can be interpreted according to whether or not they promote that goal. This gives Labour supporters the confidence to claim the high moral ground. Given the actual evidence of history, that ought to be impossible. Socialism has been an abject and repeated failure; Its close kin, Marxism and Communism, tragic and mass-murdering failures. Yet these homicidal illusions have been perpetrated by highly intelligent persons. Lord what fools these mortals be.
Unless they believe in the Kingdom of Heaven, Tories have no teleology. In this fallen world, they are condemned to a Promethean struggle, to ensure that chaos does not prevail. In the endless horse race of history, Tories must put all their energies into ensuring that good keeps its nose ahead of evil, which was a mightily challenging task during much of the Twentieth Century. To switch metaphors, Tories are like mountaineers, who struggle their way towards a distant rocky peak, only to discover that when they think that they might be at the top, another summit will come into view, and so it will go on, world without end. Whatever one's religious beliefs, 'original sin' is still the best two-word summary of the human condition.
As an alternative to Labour's facile pseudo-teleology, Tories are obliged to undertake another endless task: hard thinking. They can resort to a fair-sized library of Tory philosophy. Burke is the obvious exemplar, because he was a political philosopher who drew heavily on history. He got the American revolution right and also the French Revolution, and only in part because he had a general theory of revolutions. He knew how to read events correctly, which led him to castigate those who were swept away by theories, A Tory can draw wisdom from liberal Hegelianism and also of course from Oakeshott, though it would help if those great men had condescended to write easier prose.
When it comes to a fusion of philosophy and history, Hobbes is hard to beat. It could be argued that he was an accidental man, 'The time is out of joint/O cursed spite, that ever I was ever born to set it right.' Hobbes himself was born in an epoch of strife, when humanity seemed to be threatened by barbarism. He would have agreed with Oakeshott that civilisation was only a collective dream, and that without a well-made bed of order, such dreams could easily turn into nightmares. So: devise a system of government - a Leviathan - which condemns men to live in an ordered society. Forget the higher ideals of liberalism and rights. Simply enable men to live in safety.
Hobbes himself was a gentle and humorous soul. He would not have enjoyed the harsher necessities of life under Leviathan, but for the fact that they were necessary. But we are entitled to suspect that as the Leviathan regime settled down and men grew accustomed to order, Hobbes mimself would hope that it gradually became a gentler expression of order and civilisation.
Philosophy: history: there is plenty of material for Tories to mull over, starting with their very name. 'Conservative': those crisp little syllables sound like an old-fashioned bank manager, peering sceptically over his half-moon spectacles. 'Tory:' originally a nickname for Seventeenth Century Irish bandits, it sounds like a Cavalier waving his sabre aloft, cheering on the charge in the first rank of Rupert's Cavalry. Realism and the counting-house, romanticism on the battlefield: a happy political life surely needs a cocktail of both, with the party leadership of the day mixing the punch-bowl.
Tory history is long and was not always successful. At the end of the Seventeenth Century, the Whigs won, and so they should have. The Tories of the day were incapable of guaranteeing dynastic, religious or political stability. A great compromise emerged: the Crown in Parliament. But that was ultimately a compromise on Whig terms. Yet the Tory party was reborn, and its eventual success owed much to its ability to absorb the sensible elements of Whiggery. After 1832, and their opposition to the Great Reform Bill might have seemed to ensure that Tories were condemned to become a marginalised Carlist rump. They were rescued by the statesmanship of Peel and later by Disraeli. Twenty years after he seemed to have wrecked his party, he paid some compensation, ensuring that it would always be aligned with the interests and instincts of the rising middle classes. It would also become the British national party. Aspiration and moderate expressions of patriotism. For decades, that seemed a sound basis for continuing Tory success.
Now, we are on a new battle ground, and the past can only provide a limited guide to the difficulties of the immediate future. The greatest of these is easy to summarise. In recent years, an angry mood has been spreading among the British public: a sense that nothing works. There is an analogy with the late Habsburg Empire. When it came to ceremonial, the centre of Vienna would look magnificent. A few miles away, everything seemed to be falling apart. For Austria in 1914, compare the UK today.
Yet there is no excuse for this. On the public's behalf, the Government is spending almost £1.5 trillion a year: £50,000 per capita for every household in the land. That should surely buy a few warships, decent schools and hospitals, police forces et al. There is no excuse for failure. Tories ought to begin by acknowledging it, and then working out how to solve it: a crucial need for hard thinking. The taxpayer is entitled to value for money.
The same is true of higher growth, a vital need. There are three ways of tackling that problem as rapidly as possible. The first is cuts in taxation. No nation ever taxed itself to a higher growth rate. The second is welfare. Partly as a legacy of Covid, around one million youngsters aged between 16 and 24 are Neets: not in education, employment or training. This is a crippling waste of money and of people. It must be prevented.
Apropos crippling, growth also needs competitive energy prices. Ours are penalising the economy. In Eyzie Cecil's words, the United Kingdom is drifting into a form of managed economic decline, disguised as moral purpose. As with welfare, so with net zero - and illegal immigration. The last Tory government left unsolved problems. There is only one way forward: apologise and press on, through convictions to solutions.
The current Tory front bench has plenty of serious people who should be able to deploy moral and intellectual weight, under an increasingly impressive Leader. At various levels, the party is also full of intellectual energy. This web site will try to make a contribution to all that. It will not be a solely party political agenda. Foreign affairs have never been so disordered in peacetime. So geopolitics will be a major preoccupation. We will also address religion, science and culture, so we cannot be accused of lacking ambition. Nor shall we shirk from controversy. The struggle continues.