How the anti-intellectual Tory party has betrayed the legacy of Maurice Cowling

Not long after John Major became prime minister Maurice Cowling, who died last week, asked me to a feast at Peterhouse. In the port-soaked aftermath in a candlelit Senior Combination Room, and between intermittent insults to the then Master, Lord Dacre (‘Come over here, you old bugger, somebody might want to meet you’), we had a conversation about the new prime minister. Precisely because he held the highest power in the land, Mr Major was not deemed worthy of the Cowlingesque sneer; that would come later. But his obvious managerialism and his lack of bottom provided causes for concern. For Maurice, being a Tory was not merely about having a machine to fight elections, important though the acquisition of power was; it was about upholding a philosophy that, without being in the least priggish, was unquestionably high-minded. He would not condemn Mr Major for having no philosophy other than that of keeping his job, for he knew politics was largely about the naked self-interest of politicians. What did rather shock him, though, was that this self-interest was applied entirely to the personal welfare of Mr Major rather than to the furtherance of a particular brand of Conservatism within the broad coalition he believed the party to be.

Maurice was of a genre of intellectuals who needed close links with practising Conservative politicians: not to provide them with ideas to espouse, or causes for which to devise policies (he would never be so vulgar as that), but to offer a means of the advancement of Toryism. Since his death one or two have spoken of his ‘unscrupulousness’ in advocating the pursuit of power. Much of what Maurice said in this regard was pure mischief. He and those like him — Michael Oakeshott, Shirley Letwin and, a generation behind, Roger Scruton — offered a reading of modern political thought and action that their pupils could either take or leave.