Daniel Hannan: Never underestimate the power of a political brand with a very long history

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

In 1711, Joseph Addison, the journalist, sometime MP and founder of the Spectator magazine, was watching a play when he noticed something about the women in the audience.

It was fashionable, in those days, for ladies to wear small patches or silk or velvet on their faces – either to cover the ravages of smallpox or simply as an accessory. As he looked around, Addison noticed that he could infer a woman’s political leanings by where she placed her patch. It was especially striking in the theatre, because the ladies of the two tribes sat together in blocs:

Upon Inquiry I found, that the Body of Amazons on my Right Hand, were Whigs, and those on my Left, Tories; And that those who had placed themselves in the Middle Boxes were a Neutral Party, whose Faces had not yet declared themselves. These last, however, as I afterwards found, diminished daily, and took their Party with one Side or the other; insomuch that I observed in several of them, the Patches, which were before dispersed equally, are now all gone over to the Whig or Tory Side of the Face.

Nothing new about polarisation. But how extraordinary that, more than 300 years ago, party allegiance had spilled over into a familiar-seeming culture war.

Britain was more than a century ahead of anyone else in developing a party system. In the 1690s, Tories and Whigs were gathering in separate coffee houses, reading partisan newspapers, wearing differently coloured rosettes at elections, fundraising for colleagues in marginal constituencies.

We take this astonishing fact for granted, as we do the fact that one of the two parties, our own, is still going. The Conservative Party was launched in 1834 with Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto. But it grew out of the pre-1832 Tory Party, which traced its origins to Pitt the Younger.

There had been an earlier Tory Party, that had intermittently held office between 1680 and 1714, that struggled on in opposition as a small but coherent bloc until the 1760s, and some of whose members bridged the gap to become Pittites after 1782. In other words, it is possible to trace the lineage of our party back to the end of the 1670s.

To put it in context, the world’s second-oldest political party, the US Democratic Party, was founded only in 1828; even if we count the Jeffersonians as its forerunners, they still get back only to the 1790s.

The tribalism of the 1690s and 1700s, known to contemporaries as the Rage of Party, is the subject of a wonderful new book by George Owers. He tells the story of the two parties from their birth during the Popish Plot to the accession of George I and the Tory proscription.

It is a gripping tale. The two parties did not come into existence because groups of high-minded MPs clubbed together the better to advance the causes of, respectively, Church and King or Protestantism and Parliament. They formed in response to deluded allegations by a gay, defrocked clergyman, a kind of supercharged Carl Beech, named Titus Oates.

Today, the worst accusation you can make against a public figure is child abuse. Then, it was Catholicism. Oates claimed that there was a plot to overthrow Charles II, install his Catholic brother as king and repress Protestantism by force. It was all nonsense but, in the moral panic that ensued, one set of politicians spotted an opportunity to dish their rivals, and the other set had to band together for self-defence (and afterwards revenge).

Thus was born a bipartisan rivalry that survived the Glorious Revolution, which forced both groups to reposition themselves. The Whigs, traditional defenders of parliamentary supremacy, backed William III in his war against the Catholic powers. The Tories, until then defenders of the divine right of kings, found themselves opposed to much of the monarch’s programme. A major challenge for the party of Church and King was that there was no Anglican king between Charles II (or arguably Charles I) and George III.

We tend to neglect late Stuart politics, but Owers brings the age magnificently to life, dwelling on the personalities and the colour: the boneheaded stupidity of the High Tory faction in pushing for policies that Queen Anne had set her face again; the Whig Sarah Churchill openly accusing Queen Anne of lesbianism; the bigoted Dr Sacheverell, put on trial for an incendiary sermon, implausibly delivering the greatest Tory landslide of the era. He tells the story of how Toryism, initially the creed of Royalist elites, became populist in the face of Whig oligarchy. It makes for a terrific read, whether you are a historian or completely new to the era.

We now read that the Tories are finished.

One poll shows them winning only 24 seats. I feel it is far too soon for threnodies. But, for the sake of argument, let’s consider a realistic worst-case scenario, where Reform pushes our party into a poor third place, leaving us with no option but to fall in behind them.

Something similar happened in Canada, whose governing Tories were wiped out in 1993, holding just two seats. The insurgent party of the Right, not coincidentally called Reform, eventually gobbled up what was left of the Conservative Party, though it took a decade.

But what is the merged party called now? The Conservative Party of Canada. And, while it may technically have been established in 2003, most of its members, including those who came from Reform, look back to 1867 as their real origin, and see the great Sir John A Macdonald as their founding patriarch.

They are still known as Tories.

Our party has been through numerous mergers, relaunches and name-changes. Indeed, it did not exist as a legal entity until 1998. It may one day be absorbed into some wider Faragiste bloc. But if that happens, I make a firm prediction.

Supporters of the new entity will end up being called Tories. Three and a half centuries makes for a very strong brand.