"How liberalism poisoned England" | David Starkey Talks at Disraeli conference

It was my pleasure to address this year's Disraeli Conference, a gathering of appreciation for one of Britain's greatest political talents, the man who shaped modern conservatism and to whom we can still look for a model of how a conservative party should operate in the 2020s. Disraeli's genius was to navigate the old Tory Party out of the total defeat they endured with the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832. This Act specifically enfranchised a middle-class, urban industrial bourgeoisie, with all the predictable consequences of Liberal dominance that followed. In his recognition that Britain also had, further down the social chain, a skilled working class which was instinctively conservative, Disraeli plotted a course for the resurrection of a new traditional party based on the enfranchisement of these workers. The Second Reform Act of 1867 did just that and laid the foundations of the great Tory administrations of the late 19th century. I firmly believe there are parallels with our current scenario. Tony Blair's reforms have greatly empowered a class of middle-class, metropolitan, liberal graduates, who still dominate our institutions and society. It is they who are responsible for the mess this country is in. By pursuing our own Second Reform Act, or what I would call the Great Repeal Act, we can put power back into the hands of ordinary people, not through the phoney institutions Andy Burnham threatens to create, which would only create more politicians with more of their mid-wit, conformist attendants, but by bringing political power expressly back where it belongs: in Parliament, for which everybody votes and where everybody can be removed by votes. The voting coalition that Disraeli assembled in the middle of the 19th century is still there today; it is the coalition that voted for Brexit in 2016 and Boris Johnson in 2019 (before he betrayed them). It is, sadly, hopelessly split at the moment between the Conservatives and Reform. But if Kemi Badenoch can continue her admirable purge of the Tory wets, perhaps the foundations can be laid for a post-election reassembly of this great coalition, which has saved Britain before and can do it again. As I always say, the answers to our current woes lie in our history, if only we were able to understand them.