I met William Waldegrave in 1968 when I was a graduate student and he was an undergraduate. We were introduced by Peter Sinclair, a contemporary of mine, a very nice man who became a distinguished economist and who sadly died in 2020 as one of the first victims of the original, virulent, strain of Covid. Waldegrave was very obviously a young man who had been dealt a full hand of cards. He was well descended and well connected. He was handsome and very bright and had a full set of social skills (rare among the bright and handsome). For what it was worth, he already had a title: as the younger son of an earl he was “The Honourable”. There are those who bridle when faced with such a strong hand, but I am pleased to say I am not one of them. And as for “Hons.” I scrummaged with up to three of them depending on team selection.

The reason that Waldegrave was with Sinclair was that he was seeking some instruction in economics. He was studying “Greats” (classics and philosophy) and though Thucydides offers many insights into aspects of modern life monetary policy is not one of them. The point being that Waldegrave came with a label. Just as the young Mike Atherton was always said to be “FEC” (future England captain), Waldegrave was “FPM” – future prime minister. He made no bones about it and who could rival his position on the starting grid? In his autobiography he estimates the age at which he first thought he would be prime minister as seven. Incidentally, in reading it I discovered that, despite my being a graduate and him an undergraduate when we first met he is actually older than I am; this is partly because Greats is a 4-year course, but also because Lancaster Royal Grammar School was clearly better at letting you go at your own pace than was Eton.

The autobiography (A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir, Constable, 2015) is remarkably good. In all kinds of writing there are those who write as honestly and clearly as they can and those who seek to position themselves. It was a kind of standing joke in the academic study of politics where I spent my career that political autobiographies fall almost entirely into the latter category, but this is not so of Waldegrave. The book is laced with what Orwell called “the crystal spirit”. It is based around the paradox that its author held several cabinet posts between 1979 and 1997, became Provost of Eton and, as a life peer since shortly after he lost his Commons seat in 1997, has been some sort of legislator for most of his adult life, he still regards himself as essentially a failure. Not a failure by most people’s standards, obviously, but by those of FPM certainly. His career became tainted by association with the Poll Tax and with the “Arms-for-Iraq” scandal. The former was fair, the latter rather unfair, but such is political life. This failure was compounded by two realisations, first that he himself might only have been a successful PM in the sort of easy times that the early Blair encountered and the second that his visions for the future were dissolved by history into incoherence and irrelevance. He acknowledges that in respect of the Falklands and the miners’ strike Mrs.Thatcher did necessary things which he could never have done. He is not prepared to accept the judgement of friends who say that this was because he was “too nice”; no, it was essentially because he hadn’t got the bottle for the job.

But the more interesting part of this failure is the fate not of Waldegrave personally, but of his kind of politics. Here we enter a swamp of misconception and over-simplification, for the logician a badly shaped and messy scribble of Venn diagrams. There was the “post-war consensus” and its supporters, heavily overlapping with “Butskellism”, which referred to the similarity of views between Hugh Gaitskell (Labour) and R.A.Butler (Tory). There was Disraelian “one nation” Toryism for the “right” and its ally “gradualism” on the “left”. There was a corporatist project embraced by the leaders of both parties to different degrees at different times and there were simply centrists and moderates All of the above were called “wets” by some supporters of Margaret Thatcher. Much of this categorisation, I submit, was vague and simplistic, especially where it relied on a picture of “left” and “right” which pre-supposed that you could infer a person’s views on Europe from his or her views on (say) capital punishment.

Waldegrave provides an excellent laboratory specimen for the testing of categories. He has always been (and I think remains) a member of the Tory Reform Group, an organisation established by the amalgamation of several societies in 1975 though descended from a schism among Conservatives at Oxford University in 1962. This officially espouses “modern, progressive Conservatism” based on a “middle way” which sees “equality, diversity and social justice” as among its values. He was also Edward Heath’s research assistant and Heath was the most extreme and unequivocal pro-European of all time in the Conservative Party. So that would make him a wet, an opponent of Margaret Thatcher and a pro-European, wouldn’t it? Absolutely not: Waldegrave recognised early on in his career that the projects I’ll call wetness for brevity’s sake had failed irredeemably and that the aspirations of Brussels were incompatible with our laws and constitution and with any form of accountable government.

The most interesting way of understanding all this is to go back to Waldegrave’s childhood – and to mine. He talks of his early years as being imbued with “the brave refoundation myth”. We were small boys in a country shattered by prolonged war, impoverished, steadily losing our empire and experimenting with forms of socialism which had been dreaded by many before the war. The threat of nuclear war perhaps should have loomed large, but mostly didn’t. But our future seemed bright, symbolised from when we were six by our charming young queen. Technology would save us – and planning. The Labour Part were essentially good and patriotic, at least in part (Bevin good, Bevan bad). The Empire would morph into the Commonwealth and our American friends, those slightly dangerous, but essentially amiable cowboys, would help. The view from Chewton, the Waldegraves’ estate, could see the country as the estate writ large.

My home was rooted in the 1950s revival that the 1960s would eventually deride. Central planning by the great men in Whitehall was the national equivalent of the tiny planned economy of the inherited estate. Capitalism got rather short shrift. One of my father’s favourite sayings was that people are paid in roughly inverse proportion to the worth of what they do. I’m not sure he was wrong. His respect went to farmers, and to the technologists who were enabling them to feed the world cheaply in the first green revolution, to local ex-tractor drivers who started their own businesses and to his friend Charles Hill in Bristol who built ships. (p. 37)

Waldegrave tells us that he is pretty sure his father would have voted Labour. (“Would”, of course, because as a 7^th earl he was a member of the Lords and therefore not allowed to vote in Commons’ elections.) Several hundred miles to the north, in the Edwardian villa in which I was initially brought up attitudes were broadly similar. My father might have voted Labour – he wasn’t saying – but the rest of the household was Tory and also pretty optimistic once the fifties arrived. For both Waldegrave and I the official outlet of patriotic optimism, bought for us by our parents, was The Eagle comic, edited by an Anglican vicar. The front page hero was Dan Dare, a British officer with a batman called Digby who was from Wigan. He roamed the furthest reaches of the galaxy in opposition to a creature, the Mekon, who seemed part Communist, part Fascist and part reptile. Though Waldegrave does not record doing what I also did which was to spend my own money, much of which was fiddled from bus money and Sunday School collections, on The Rover, a D.C.Thomson comic emanating from Dundee. In The Rover the RAF hero was Matt Braddock who had to flatten useless posh officers before getting into the air to fight the Germans and the athletic hero was Alf Tupper who had to weld all night and live on chips before beating college-educated toffs on the track. In those stories only one social class had any virtue and it was neither the one that Waldegrave was in nor the one that I was in.

Waldegrave’s personal “failure” if we can call it that was partly a question of character, as he insists, but also of luck with the events that tainted him. As Harold MacMillan (absolutely not his inspiration – that was Ian McLeod) pointed out events get you in the end. This personal failure was absolutely normal and not that interesting. But what is interesting is the collapse of the world-view which he (and I) had growing up. Again, it is normal for such world-views to collapse. Think of anything that a reasonably optimistic, reasonably conservative person might have expected and believed in late Victorian or Edwardian times. Or of the fate of socialism. But understanding the nature of that failure is to understand the core of the historical period that we have lived through.

The broad vision of “one nation” conservatism is of a society which remains hierarchical (which society is not?), but has at the same time a sense of unity: (nearly) everybody feels they belong. There is economic growth which allows good public services, social mobility and a degree of redistribution. In our lifetime this broad project became dependent on another which political scientists came to call corporatism or neo-corporatism (how many academic promotions were gained by adding “neo” to something?) and governments “incomes policy”. The idea was that government, business and trades unions would co-operate in creating a semi-planned capitalist economy. It worked, more or less, in Germany, Austria and several Scandinavian countries. Many, but never all, in the two major parties saw the logic of this; thus the “post-war consensus”.

The trouble was that only a minority of British trades unionists ever saw the rationale of this. The others fell into three main categories. There were those who saw the game as zero sum and would never abandon a good relative position for a better long-term one. There were those instinctively incapable of co-operating with their enemies as they saw them. And there were those who were actively trying to destroy the social and political system including more Soviet agents and those in receipt of Soviet money than was realised at the time. Thus even an apparent “wet” like Waldegrave fully accepts Margaret Thatcher’s category of “the enemy within”. There really was an enemy within – there nearly always is – and Waldegrave never sounds quite as “right wing” as when he is discussing the unions. By the time Thatcher got into power there was no alternative to cutting public expenditure and controlling wages and prices by blunt monetary instruments, no “wet” options left. As my late colleague Jim Bulpitt used to argue the core achievement of Mrs. Thatcher’s statecraft was to declare the problems which had dominated British politics as not solvable or not problems.

But, of course, the nature of politics has been transformed by the massive transformation of the class system. On the day of the last election in December 2019 I walked about fifteen miles around Warwick district with a friend (for fun, not for research purposes). We noticed that we only saw Labour posters and that almost all of them were on houses we estimated to be worth over half a million pounds. By the end of the day the unthinkable had happened: Burnley was a Tory seat and Warwick and Leamington – once known as the “Garden of Eden” as the seat of a Tory prime minister – was Labour. “Modern, progressive Conservatism” had been torn apart by a new dominant

class, the chattergerials, from backgrounds of law, finance, journalism and academia with not an inherited country estate among them and no real experience of either leadership or the environment.

Though the Tories won that day it was a strange victory because the chattergerial issues of gender, identity, Europe and the environment were pretty much guarranteed to tear Conservatism apart. I wish it were not so; I would have preferred to live under Prime Minister Waldegrave in a society that was more at ease with its traditions and hierarchies, was less divided ,but also had much greater genuine social mobility. Of course, it was not to be and, as Waldegrave himself points out from his Chewton vantage point, there might have been much worse fates as well as better ones.

Lincoln Allison August 2023