The Conservative Party

Abstract

When Quintin Hogg was invited at a campaign conference in 1964 to define the main issue at stake in the general election, he announced that it was quite plainly a choice between madness on one side and sanity on the other. Those who voted Labour, he declared, were stark, staring bonkers. Conservative voters by contrast were sound, well balanced and sensible. This disturbance of the tedium of the election campaign reflected more than the eccentricity and pugnacity of the party’s former chairman. It expressed a long-established attitude among Conservative politicians to the role of their party in the British two-party system. When Conservatives have not regarded their opponents as malicious, they have thought them foolish or ignorant; possibly well meaning but certainly misguided. An electorate that votes such politicians into office when it could choose Conservatives reveals a sad lack of judgement and maturity. Hogg’s outburst displayed the profound confidence of Conservative leaders in their right to be the leading party in the state, a confidence that has since weakened but has not yet vanished.

All other attempts to find a third force which is neither Marxist nor Tory have proved... unrealistic because they are founded on a fallacy. They assume that the choice between Socialism and Conservatism is one between ‘extremes’ of Left and Right. But there is nothing ‘extreme’ about the philosophy of balance and moderation which is the ethos of modern Conservatism... the facts of life do invariably turn out to be Tory.

Conservative Central Office, The Right Approach, 1976