Tory table talk

I bet that you are at best dimly aware of the Progress Trust, and that is what the members of this now-defunct fixture would have wanted. It was a misleadingly named group of comfortably off, often landed backbench Tory MPs, and its weekly discussions very rarely leaked. An unnamed member once explained why. ‘We have no shits,’ he said.

The Trust, which would number Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron, briefly, among its members, was secretive from the outset. It was established in 1943 to resume a more partisan style of politics, at a time when both main parties were still in theory committed to a ceasefire that the Conservatives felt Labour was breaking. It gathered together Tories who felt that ‘Rule by regulation and bureaucratic control and interference, however necessary in wartime, should NOT continue in peace,’ but feared that it might.

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Yet while such a view would have appealed to their chief funders, the shadowy British United Industrialists, their disdain for ‘the socialist error of theorising’ led them to avoid opposing nationalisation outright. Although lazily labelled as right-wing, the Trust’s members are hard to classify. Without Hindsight’s author, Richard Ritchie, who knew them well, having worked for the Trust as its research officer from 1982 until it gave up the ghost in 2005, says that they favoured ‘a strand of Toryism which was uncomplicated, evolutionary and patriotic’.

The main task of the Trust was to ensure its members were well briefed. At weekly meetings they discussed matters that concerned them. These included recurrent issues like immigration and Europe, each of which Ritchie devotes chapters to, and matters of more personal interest. The book highlights some topics discussed during the Macmillan era, which included ‘a closed season for red deer’, ‘birching’ and ‘the length of the Minister’s speech on potatoes last night’.