T HE CONSERVATIVE PARTY has been in the business of winning elections since the 1830s. In the 19th century it vied with the Liberals as Britain’s dominant political party, but it was the Liberals who eventually found themselves beached on the shores of modernity. In the 20th century the Conservatives held office for longer than any other party. In the 21st century they are on course to hold power, either in their own right or as the dominant partner in a coalition, for 14 of the first 24 years. Not bad for an outfit that John Stuart Mill dismissed as “the stupid party”.

To be sure, the Tories have had more than their fair share of Chris Grayling-style dunces and time-servers. They have also suffered long periods in the wilderness, particularly after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and during their long flirtation with imperial preference after 1906. During Tony Blair’s ascendancy the Conservatives were so enfeebled that Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book entitled “The Strange Death of Tory England”, a deliberate echo of George Dangerfield’s rather more enduring “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (1935). But unlike the Liberals, the Conservative Party has always managed to revitalise itself.

Another helping

Evelyn Waugh once complained that the Tories had never succeeded in turning the clock back for a single minute. But this is exactly why they have been so successful. The party has demonstrated a genius for anticipating what Harold Macmillan once called “the winds of change”, and harnessing those winds to its own purposes.

In the 1840s Robert Peel recognised the rise of industrial capitalism and championed the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had kept the price of grain unreasonably high. This split the party but allowed it to incorporate the new “men of business” in the longer term. In the second half of the 19th century, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury recognised not only that democracy was the coming thing but also that, thanks to the conservative instincts of the middle and working classes, it could be used to extend rather than undermine the party’s power. In the 1970s Margaret Thatcher reached the future first in recognising that the post-war consensus was about to give way to a new world of free markets, privatisation and what Peregrine Worsthorne, an old-school Tory, called “get your snouts in the trough with the rest of us” Conservatism.

The Tories have three other great weapons in their arsenal. The first is highlighted in the title of one of the best books on the party, John Ramsden’s “An Appetite for Power”. The Conservatives have always been quick to dump people or principles when they become obstacles to the successful pursuit of power. Theresa May immediately sacked her two chief advisers, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, after the party’s poor performance in 2017, whereas Jeremy Corbyn is still clinging on to Karie Murphy and Seumas Milne after Labour’s devastating failure last week.

The second is patriotism. The Tories have always played this card better than any other party, whether in the form of imperialism in the 1870s or retaking the Falkland islands in the 1980s. They have been much aided in this by those radical intellectuals who admire any institution or cause so long as it is not British.

No one should underestimate the party’s third weapon: jollity. The Conservatives have always been the party of “champagne and women and bridge”, to borrow a phrase from Hilaire Belloc, whereas the Liberals and Labour have been the parties of vegetarianism, book clubs and meetings. Conservatives are never happier than when mocking the left for its earnestness.

Boris Johnson fits perfectly into this great Tory tradition. He was one of the first members of his political generation to spot the rising tide of nationalist populism and recognise that it was about to reshape the global landscape. This earned him the hatred of the metropolitan class into which he was born, which is convinced that the future lies with multilateral institutions and globalisation. But it put him at the front of Britain’s Eurosceptic movement, which could have degenerated into a narrow faction under Sir William Cash or a noisy fringe under Nigel Farage, but which entered the Tory mainstream because of Mr Johnson.

He succeeded in this where Mrs May failed because he possessed the other great Tory weapons. He has been willing to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of office. Beneath the bumbling exterior lies a ruthless, power-seeking machine. His withdrawal of the whip from 21 colleagues (some of them close friends) in September made Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” in 1962 look tame. Mr Johnson has never missed an opportunity to wave the flag—even when it has made him look absurd, as when he got stuck on a zip-wire clutching two little Union Jacks. Predictably, the left has played into his hands. Some Remainers have gone out of their way to give the benefit of every doubt to the EU , and Mr Corbyn has devoted his life to supporting anti-Western causes.

Above all, Mr Johnson has embraced the women-and-champagne side of Toryism, if not the bridge. He made his career as a Eurosceptic not by agonising about sovereignty but by making fun of the EU ’s (imagined) imperial ambitions to regulate the shape of bananas or the size of condoms. He cracked jokes that were calculated to rile the guardians of political correctness as much as to delight the masses (post-mortems on the election have underestimated the role of these guardians in turning working-class voters against Labour).

The hunt is on to discover the meaning of Johnsonism. How will he flesh out the sketchy promises in his manifesto? What can he do for working-class voters in Blyth Valley? How will he reconcile the free-marketeer and big-government factions of his party? The best way to answer these questions is not just to engage in the British version of Kremlinology by interrogating every ministerial leak. It is also to study the long history of a party that Mr Johnson now leads with such a resounding mandate. ■