Exactly what is a Tory?

This question, often in the back of my mind, has been pushed to the forefront by the obituaries of the Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who died two days ago at the venerable age of 96.

He emerges from the obituaries as an entertaining but lightweight writer, which, for a change, tallies with my own view of his work. And all obits agree that Sir Peregrine was a quintessential, true-blue Tory.

That, however, raises the question in the title, and it isn’t easy to answer. The same question, by the way, is posed implicitly by another entertaining and lightweight writer, Sasha Swire, the author of Diary of an MP’s Wife.

She argues that neither David Cameron nor George Osborne, nor indeed anyone else other than the Swires, is really a Tory. She identifies many such impostors within Tory ranks, but without bothering to define what it is that makes a Tory. Supposedly that goes without saying.

It doesn’t. For Lady Swire’s definition of a Tory must be very different from mine. Hers, for example, doesn’t clash with supporting homomarriage, which both she and her husband did, whereas mine does.

Then again, Sir Peregrine also tended to define his politics apophatically, from the negative. “I was never a Thatcherite,” he kept saying, with ample justification. After all, as far back as in 1958 he called on all Tories to “pledge allegiance to the welfare state”, which isn’t a pledge Margaret Thatcher would have countenanced.

Sir Peregrine once brilliantly described Thatcherism as “bourgeois triumphalism”, the implication being that Thatcher was a Tory in name only. True, she was a Whiggish radical par excellence, and Worsthorne was right to identify the essential class element in Toryism.

Alas, however, that class has been relegated to the status of a Ye Olde England period piece. For all practical, political purposes it’s dead, and so is the political movement it spun. Not only Thatcher but all Tory politicians are these days Tories in name only.

When the modern Tory party was instituted in the 19^th century, it was, not to cut too fine a point, the party of aristocracy and landed gentry. The Tories believed in a social order based on traditional hierarchy, although not without flexibility.

Their attitude to the lower classes was paternalistic, akin to that of a father who feels that even his unsuccessful child deserves love. Since the lower classes were mostly employed in agriculture and nascent industry, Tory paternalism extended to those fields, taking the shape of what today we call protectionism.

In other words, Toryism was the flesh of the flesh and the blood of the blood of the aristocratic order. Hence, when Disraeli was coming up through the party ranks as its most brilliant mind, the only objection to making him the leader was that he wasn’t a “gentleman”, meaning not the owner of a baronial estate.

Since Disraeli’s claims could no longer be denied, the “gentlemen” in the party found a simple solution: they gave Disraeli a sizeable estate in Buckinghamshire, making him the Earl of Beaconsfield. Only then was he deemed qualified to lead his party.

All that is lovely, but it’s conspicuously lacking in contemporary relevance. If the essence of traditional Tory loyalties was adequately described as God, King and Country, the first two legs of that tripod have been knocked out by “bourgeois triumphalism”. That surely predated Margaret Thatcher, although she raised it to a new level.

The social, cultural and political soil in which Toryism used to grow so luxuriantly was sown with coarse salt to render it barren. Toryism qua Toryism predictably died, but the name hung on, an emptied shell to be filled with new content.

Such content is on offer, but it’s hardly uniform and not at all Tory, in the true meaning of the word. In order to function as a viable political force, erstwhile Tories had to become something else.

The menu of available options is extensive, designed to satisfy every taste. Tories can nowadays be neo-conservatives, non-conservatives, American-style conservatives, socialists, liberals, blood-and-soil nationalists, libertarians, Thatcherite Whigs. The only thing they can no longer be is Tories.

That’s why the same charge as the one Lady Swire levelled against Dave and George, and Sir Peregrine against a much wider group, can be legitimately levelled against just about any prominent Tory politician.

They can be all sorts of things, admirable or otherwise, but they can’t be Tories. Oxygen has been sucked out of the air they used to breathe.

That doesn’t mean real Tories are extinct. They aren’t, and I know quite a few. However, they all realise they are anachronisms, who can no longer exert serious influence on their country’s culture, mores – and certainly her politics. Being a Tory at all these days means being a reactionary, which sounds like a swear word to a modern ear.

Whitehall and Downing Street are off limits for Tories, for ever, as it now seems. Hence people who regard themselves as real Tories and still play a role in political life may effortlessly “pledge allegiance to the welfare state”, like Sir Peregrine, or campaign for homomarriage, like poor Sir Hugo Swire.

Toryism has become a church so broad that no faith is anywhere discernible. And even old-style Tory eccentrics, like Sir Peregrine, are fading away.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, RIP.