One-nation conservatism

Perhaps no political figure has undergone it more dramatically than Benjamin Disraeli.

The 19th century British conservative prime minister, a novelist and political outsider, Disraeli has been variously cast as the founder of modern conservatism, the founder of Tory democracy and more recently the intellectual ancestor of one nation conservatism.

But how much of that really belongs to Disraeli? The subject of countless biographies, a hugely successful stage play and an Oscar-winning Hollywood film, Disraeli developed an extraordinary political afterlife.

In many respects, Disraeli of popular and political memory has come to

There's a smorgasbord for people to choose from essentially.

And so you have to do a lot of intellectual work to decide which are the true novels that best represent Disraeli thought.

And so how would you, Emily, describe Disraeli's actual thought versus what, say, Stanley Baldwin interprets in the 20th century is his thought in terms of One Nation conservatism?

So there's a really great chapter in Sybil where he actually does a kind of historical analogy of the 18th century, historical analysis, sorry, where he talks about how, you know, There were these kind of great statesmen in the 18th century that started to kind of bring the origins of political parties that we kind of see in the 19th century to life.

And I'd like to see Davey be a bit more pugilistic on these things, actually, rather than.

I think he's worrying too much about campaigns of the past, like, oh, we need to go after One Nation Tories.

I'm not sure One Nation Tories is a meaningful category anymore.

You know, they don't exist.

Just go for voters, Ed.

So we've spent a long time on one aspect of national conservatism.

But there's this other phrase called one nation conservatism, which goes with national conservatism.

And this predates Pauline Hanson's use of the term one nation.

And I think you touched on it a minute earlier when you talked about nations being an ethnic unit.

Again, speak to that, because that can even sound racist in today's political discourse.

Well, they're an economic and an ethnic and a social unit.

I mean, the person who... who was originally associated with the term one nation conservatism, well before Pauline Hanson was Benjamin Disraeli.

And he was critiquing the open borders liberalism of the late 19th century, which had created this divide between the rich and the working poor.

The press backed the Tories into a corner and arguably dented the party's chances of winning the 2024 election.

Policy also needlessly divided the Tories, with One Nation conservatives expressing alarm over the Safety of Rwanda Act that called for parts of the Human Rights Act to be ignored in order for the plan to get up and running, while the New Right Tories felt that the policy didn't go far enough and instead pushed for the leadership to promise a withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights.

So the press can really impact the success, or in this case the failure, of political parties and their policies.

The press may also seem influential through its decisions on whether to endorse, that is to support, a party or not.

Starmer's Labour was bitterly divided over welfare reform, leading to a culture of rebellion in the Parliamentary Labour Party, which resulted in multiple government U-turns.

Leaders will struggle to make a success of things if their party is divided.

Sunak found it hard to prevent defections to Labour and to Reform UK as he sought to fulfil pledges on immigration, finding it tough to navigate a path between the New Right Tories and the One Nation Conservatives who took different approaches to the Rwanda plan and to leaving the ECHR.

The Green Party has tied itself in knots at their 2026 party conference on whether to vote for a motion calling Zionism racist.