"Has the most successful species in British political history finally become extinct?" What is the state of English political liberties; where is the trust in slow historical progression, the loyalty and reverence to constitutional forms? Where is the spirit of Dryden, Johnson, Swift and Pope? Like the Jacobites of an earlier era, Geoffery Wheatcroft illuminates how traditional British conservatives have been perennially displaced and marginalised in the UK of today and into the future:
The Conservative party dominated British politics for 120 years from Disraeli's victory in 1874, culminating in an unprecedented eighteen-year spell in government after 1979. And yet at the very end of the century the Tories imploded so disastrously as to suggest the party might be doomed to follow the Liberals into oblivion...Get your copy at Westminster Books and shed a tear for England.
The Strange Death of Tory England goes on to show how the gradual eclipse of military virtues and patrician ideals came to discredit Toryism, how the party tore itself apart over Europe and how it suffered from the malign influence of a quasi-intellectual New Right which held sway in the Tory press. Wheatcroft demonstrates brilliantly how two profound truths explain the Conservatives' decline: that the Right had won politically, but the Left had won culturally; and that it was possible to win the battle, but lose the argument.