T.E. Utley and renewal of conservatism in post-war Britain

Abstract

This article examines the writings of T.E. Utley (1921–1988), a prominent contributor to the Conservative press in the post-war period. It does so in the context of Maurice Cowling's concept of ‘public doctrine.’ While attention is increasingly given to the ideas that shaped the Conservative Party in the 20^th century, it has fallen short of investigating the broad foundations of Conservative ideology and their authoritative status expressed in Cowling's term. Yet Utley's thought underlines the importance of inquiry at this level, especially in distinguishing Conservatism from rival ideologies after 1945. His concern to ground Conservatism in a theory of moral and political obligation is crucial here; it was targeted against diffuse forms of secular liberalism that conceived ‘happiness’ as the end of human life. The article focuses on the shift in his allegiance from the post-war consensus to the New Right challenge of the 1960s but against the backdrop of his unchanging Tory beliefs. It explores the significance of his association with the Daily Telegraph in this regard and his relationship to ‘Powellism’ and Thatcherism. The article concludes by relating the decline of public doctrine in Conservative Party circles recently to the erosion of the sense of British nationhood that inspired Utley's Conservatism.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions for improvement.

Notes

^1. K. Hickson (Ed.), The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); D. Seawright, The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics (London: Continuum, 2010).

^2. A. Gamble, The Conservative Nation (Basingtoke: Macmillan, 1977).

^3. Gamble, ibid., p. 15; see also T. Bale, The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

^4. M. Cowling, ‘The present position’, in M. Cowling (Ed.), Conservative Essays (London: Cassell, 1978), p. 21.

^5. M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. xiii.

^6. Cowling, op cit., Ref. 4, p. 23.

^7. ‘T.E. Utley’, Daily Telegraph (hereafter DT), 23 June 1988, p. 17; he celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Third Programme in the Times Literary Supplement (hereafter TLS), 28 September 1956, p. 569.

^8.The Times, ‘Mr. T.E. Utley: defender of traditional values in politics and religion’, 23 June 1988, p. 16.

^9. See Gamble, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 50.

^10. B. Harrison, ‘Joseph, Keith Sinjohn, Baron Joseph (1918–1994)’, in H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Eds) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 30 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 722.

^11. C. Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Vol. 1, Not for Turning (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 170.

^12. C. Moore and S. Heffer (Eds), A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T.E. Utley (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989).

^13. An informative but brief account of his life and thought is included in M. Garnett and K. Hickson, Conservative Thinkers: The Key Contributors to the Political Thought of the Modern Conservative Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

^14. See I. Harris, ‘The Anglican mind of Maurice Cowling’, in R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green and R. Whiting (Eds) The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London: Tauris, 2010), pp. 224–240.

^15. On the sharp difference between Cowling and Oakeshott on this score, see K. Minogue, ‘Liberalism, conservatism and Oakeshott in Cowling's account of public doctrine’, in Crowcroft, Green and Whiting (Eds), ibid., p. 33.

^16. He expressed his concern about the right-wing extremism of the group in France with which Chatham House was seeking collaboration in his letter to Sir Andrew MacFadyean, 29 September 1945, MacFadyean Papers, 9/1, File 3, British Library of Political and Economic Science. The project was abandoned soon after.

^17. For the background to his appointment, particularly the role of E.H. Carr, see D. May, Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (London: Harper Collins, 2001), pp. 277, 305.

^18. For Cowling's theory of political action, see P. Williamson, ‘Maurice Cowling and modern British political history’, in Crowcroft, Green and Whiting (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 14, esp. pp. 140–141 for the importance of ‘rhetoric’.

^19. T.E. Utley & J. Stuart Maclure (Eds), Documents of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 1–5. This was written as a sequel to Oakeshott's Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (1938).

^20. Utley, ‘Political thought’, TLS, 25 August 1950, p. 540.

^21. For the wider intellectual context of this conception of the primacy of community in primitive society, particularly as the ideological foundation for indirect rule in India from the 1860s, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

^22. Utley, ‘A critic of democracy’, TLS, 22 November 1947, p. 597.

^23. Utley, ‘The art of government: Fitzjames Stephen and liberal doctrine’, TLS, 27 November 1948, p. 661.

^24. Utley, ibid., p. 661.

^25. Utley, ‘Leadership’, TLS, 29 May 1948, p. 303

^26. Utley, ‘Spirit and law’, TLS, 7 August 1948, p. 443.

^27. Utley, ‘Foundations of Europe’, TLS, 15 May 1948, p. 275; ‘Political obligation’, TLS, 8 January 1949, p. 25.

^28. Utley, ‘Political obligation’, op. cit., Ref. 27, p. 25.

^29. Utley, ‘Lion and unicorn’, TLS, 4 May 1951, p. 277.

^30. B. Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1951–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 340.

^31. Utley, ‘A counter-attack’, review of A. Lunn and G. Lean, The New Morality, in The Sunday Times (hereafter ST), 12 January 1964, p. 13.

^32. He had expressed this concern in a leader centred on Charles Smyth's biography of the 19^th-century scholar and Anglican Dean Henry Hart Milman; he emphasized Milman's importance in transmitting the 18^th-century emphasis on reason in religion against its distortion for partisan, including democratic ends: ‘High and dry’, TLS, 9 December 1949, p. 809.

^33. Utley reflected on the issues raised for the remaining monarchies of Europe by the marriage of Princess Irene of the Netherlands to a Catholic in 1964: ‘Defender of which faith?’ ST, 9 February 1964, p. 12.

^34. Utley, ‘All too human’, review of V. Gollancz, Our Threatened Values, TLS, 20 July 1946, p. 329.

^35. Utley, ‘Bentham commemorated’, TLS, 21 February 1948, p. 101.

^36. Utley, ‘Liberty’, TLS, 10 July 1948, p. 387.

^37. Even before the 1945 General Election, Conservatives such as the future Chancellor Reginald Maudling urged the Party to embrace state control as ‘part of the machinery of freedom’, not a trade-off with it: ‘Conservatives and control’, The Spectator, 12 November 1943, pp. 452–453.

^38. Utley, ‘Conservative dilemma’, The Spectator, 25 March 1949, p. 388.

^39. Gamble, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 50.

^40. Gamble, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 52–53.

^41. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 23; Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (orig. publ. 1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 202–210.

^42. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 38, p. 388.

^43. J. Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940–1957 (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 15, 152.

^44. Bale, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 31.

^45. Utley, ‘Status and contract’, in Essays in Conservatism (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1949), pp. 29–30.

^46. Cf. Powell's memorandum in 1953 to fellow members of the ‘One Nation’ group, warning the party against the folly of pursuing—like the Thracian boxer in Demosthenes—‘delayed reactions’ to threats already passed rather than warding off threats that were imminent; quoted in Seawright, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 50–51.

^47. Utley, ‘Science’, TLS, 24 July 1948, p. 415; see also Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (London: William Heinemann, 1951) and George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg, 1949).

^48. R. Wollheim, ‘Old ideas and new men: some reflections on the debate between the left and the right in Great Britain’, Encounter, October 1956, pp. 3–12.

^49. Utley, ‘Thinking and the right’, The Spectator, 19 October 1956, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 94–97; for increased support for the Conservative party in University circles in the 1950s, see J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 342

^50. R. Wollheim, ‘Thinking about politics’, TLS, 28 February 1958, pp. 109–110.

^51. See N. Rollings, ‘Butskellism, the postwar consensus and the managed economy’, in H. Jones and M. Kandiah (Eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–1964 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), p. 100.

^52. Utley, Not Guilty(The Conservative Reply) (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), p. 38. See also Utley's two letters to the editor of the Daily Telegraph as the Suez crisis deepened and party unity became imperative. He urged the Government to withstand pressure from the Conservative right to change course on the domestic front; but at the same time, to articulate ‘the more permanent aims of Tory policy’ it would be free to pursue once the current need for ‘makeshifts and compromises’ had passed: ‘Obstacles to Unity: Need to Explain Policy’, DT, 14 August 1956; and ‘Newly-Found Strength: Conservatism's Tasks Ahead’, DT, 24 October 1956, p. 6.

^53. Utley, ibid., pp. 78–79, 84; for Lecky, see Utley, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 597.

^54. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 52, pp. 101, 98; Ramsden, op. cit., Ref. 43, pp. 256–257.

^55. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 52, pp. 61–66.

^56. Utley, Occasion for Ombudsman (London: Christopher Johnson, 1961), pp. 115, 119, 134, 144. The book was written at the request of the Society of Individualists and National League for Freedom; for the background, see the Society's file in the papers of Donald McIntosh Johnson, British Library of Political and Economic Science. For analysis of the failure of the Conservative government to match high public spending with economic growth and fiscal reform, see M. Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 251–278.

^57. Utley, ‘Toryism at the crossroads’, DT, 18 February 1960, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 4.

^58. Bale, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 73. Utley did not comment on the Act although the limits of his tolerance of unleashing ‘the gambling instinct’ is clear in his defence of Macmillan's introduction of Premium Bonds in 1957 against Nonconformist critics in the Labour party: such a provision ‘appealed to a modest form of [that instinct] and offered a small reward in private fortune as an incentive to keeping money out of circulation’. Utley, op.cit., Ref. 52, p. 69.

^59. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 57, p. 4.

^60. Garnett and Hickson, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 108. Utley was to endorse Stephen's views concerning the need for morality to be enforced through law against the permissive trend of the 1960s. He now championed the will of the majority that, following Stephen, he had previously condemned, against the agendas of Private Members whose bills were largely responsible for this trend: ‘What laws may cure: a new examination of morals and law’ (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1968), in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 319. An example of such a Private Member's bill was Leo Abse's Matrimonial Causes and Reconciliation Bill, allowing for divorce without matrimonial offence. Utley criticised this in ‘Let no Man Put Asunder’, ST, 7 April 1963. For Powell's conception of morality and religion as lying beyond the brief of politicians, see Camilla Schofield, ‘“A nation or no nation”: Enoch Powell and Thatcherism’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders (Eds), Making Thatcher's Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 102–105. However, Schofield's contrast between the views of Powell and Mrs Thatcher in this respect is limited to economic morality. For Mrs Thatcher's non-judgemental views on sexual and private morality, see Moore, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 165n.

^61. Utley, ‘Toryism for tomorrow’, ST, 6 October 1963, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 20.

^62. Utley, ‘Answering utopia’, The Spectator, 11 October 1963, p. 448.

^63. Utley, ‘Eleven years of Tory rule’, The Spectator, 10 May 1963, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 10–11. On the difficulties the Government had faced from its own Party in pushing through even the limited decontrol of rent provided by the Act, see J. Ramsden, The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath, 1957–1975 (London: Longmans, 1996), pp. 30–31.

^64. Utley, ‘Supermac and the super myth’, ST, 11 February 1979, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), Ref. 12, pp. 61–64.

^65. Utley, ibid., p. 62.

^66. Utley, ‘Enoch the oracle’, ST, 5 April 1964, p. 15; for the context of his remarks, see S. Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 351.

^67. Craig Brown, introduction to C. Brown and F. Welch (Eds), C. Welch, The Odd Thing about the Colonel & Other Pieces (London: Bellow, 1997), pp. 16–17; see also R. Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (orig. publ. 1994; London: Fontana, 1995), pp. 183–184. For the newspaper's failure to be convinced by Utley's earlier defence of ‘Butskellism’, see the column ‘Way of the World’, ‘Muddling through’, DT, 15 August 1956. This was a response to his letter to the editor, 14 August 1956 (see note 51 above). See also Utley's response in turn—‘Political Tactics’, letter to the editor, DT, 20 August 1956.

^68. Peter Simple, Way of the World, Second Series (London: The Daily Telegraph, 1958), pp. 8, 56.

^69. M. Wharton, ‘A rush of satire to the head’, DT, 23 February 1963, p. 10.

^70. Editorial, ‘Tory policy — 11: commonwealth ties’, DT, 23 July 1964, p. 4.

^71. Utley, ‘Will parliament lose its sovereignty?’ ST, 30 September 1962, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 98–101; cf. C. Welch, ‘Is it too late for the Tories?’ DT, 9 January 1963, p. 10.

^72. It was echoed in his acerbic remarks on the White Paper on the steel industry the following year: ‘Steel: the road to monopoly’, DT, 6 May 1965, p. 18.

^73. ‘To sum up’, DT, 30 July 1964, p. 11.

^74. Utley, ‘Trade unions and the law’, DT, 4 September 1964, p. 16.

^75. ‘Advance on known lines’, DT, 18 September 1964, p. 16.

^76. ‘New Tory radicalism’, DT, 12 April 1965, p. 16.

^77. ‘New leader’, DT, 28 July 1965, p. 14.

^78. See, respectively, R.F. Dewey, British National Identity and Opposition to Membership of Europe, 1961–63: The Anti-Marketeers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); and Ramsden, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 374. For Margaret Thatcher, Heath's timing on the question of abolishing Resale Price Maintenance was wrong, costing the Conservatives the election: see Moore, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 170.

^79. ‘The new salariat’, DT, 18 January 1965, p. 12. For the background to this championing of the ‘salariat’ in growing recognition among Conservative party policy-makers of the need to transform British society through a radical re-shaping of the tax system, see Daunton, op. cit., Ref. 56, pp. 305–308.

^80. ‘No consensus’, DT, 15 November 1965, p. 12.

^81. ‘Ferment on the right’, DT, 13 December 1965, p. 12.

^82. Cowling, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 432.

^83. Powell, ‘Legend and living force’, review of Robert Blake, Disraeli (Eyre & Spottiswode, 1966), ST, 23 October 1966, p. 48.

^84. Utley, ‘John the Baptist’, ST, 20 April 1969, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 48.

^85. Utley, ibid., pp. 49–50.

^86. Utley, Enoch Powell: The Man and His Thinking (London: Kimber, 1968), Chapter 1.

^87. Utley, ‘For god and the right’, DT, 9 February 1981, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 67–68.

^88. Utley, One Nation: 100 Years On (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1981), pp. 8–10, 13.

^89. He had championed Butterfield—another prominent Cambridge Conservative—against Isaiah Berlin in a TLS leader on Geoffrey Barraclough's lecture at Chatham House in 1958; ‘Public morals’, 24 January 1958, p. 45.

^90. For analysis of Powell's views on defence policy on becoming Shadow Defence Secretary in 1965, see A. Alexander, ‘Defence and foreign policy’, in Lord Howard of Rising (Ed.) Enoch at 100: A Re-Evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell (London: Biteback Publishing, 2012), pp. 180–196. For Utley's more temperate approach, see T.E. Utley and E.R. Norman, Ethics and Nuclear Arms: British Churches and the Peace Movement (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1983). For the sharp differences between Mrs Thatcher and Powell in their approach to the world, not least because of Powell's stronger sense of nationhood, see Schofield, op. cit., Ref. 60, p. 108.

^91. Utley, op. cit., Ref. 87, p. 66.

^92. ‘Mr. T.E. Utley’, DT, 23 June 1988, p. 16; see also Peterborough, ‘Double First’, DT, 25 June 1991, p. 17. For his comment on the significance of the speech, without disclosing his authorship, see ‘Hidden dynamite in that sermon’, The Times, 27 May 1988, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 213–216. For the speech, see C. Collins (Ed.), Margaret Thatcher: Complete Public Statements, 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), CD-Rom. The divide between Mrs Thatcher's Wesleyan and Utley's Anglican background emerged in a speech he helped her to write in 1978: see Eliza Filby, ‘Margaret Thatcher: her unswerving faith shaped by her father’, ST, 14 April 2013, p. 4.

^93. Utley, ‘Bewildered but still loyal’, DT, 19 October 1981, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 71.

^94. Utley, ‘The rise and fall of Enoch’, ST, 1 May 1977, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 60.

^95. A. Cooke, ‘Enoch Powell and Ulster’, in Lord Howard of Rising (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 90, p. 267.

^96. Utley, ‘Monstrous invention’, The Spectator, 9 August 1986, in Moore and Heffer (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 74–78.

^97. Utley, ‘The significance of Mrs. Thatcher’, in Cowling (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 48.

^98. For an attempt to explain popular acceptance of inequality in the post-war years, not least within the working class itself, see P. Dorey, British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (London: Tauris, 2011), Chapter 5. For an opposite appraisal to Utley's of the role of ‘status’ in Britain at this time—as exacerbating rather than softening class divisions — see C.A.R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (orig. publ. 1956; London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), pp. 109–111.

^99. Utley, ‘The significance of Mrs Thatcher’, op. cit., Ref. 97, pp. 46–47.

^100. ‘Mr. T.E. Utley’, The Times, 23 June 1988, p. 16.

^101. ‘A thinker for the Tories’, The Times, 26 October 1987, p. 12.

^102. M. d'Ancona, ‘Last chance saloon: the history and future of Tory modernisation’, in Tory Modernisation 2.0: the Future of the Conservative Party (London: Bright Blue, 2013), pp. 12–24.

^103. D. Davis, B. Binley and J. Baron (Eds), The Future of Conservatism: Values Revisited (London: ConservativeHome, 2011); Robin Harris, ‘Here lie the remains of Tory modernisation’, Standpoint, June 2013.

^104. ‘Postmodern Tories’, Prospect, 21 February 2013; see also ‘What do conservatives believe?’ 6 January 2014, http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2014/01/roger-scruton-what-do-conservatives-believe.html