This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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On the edge of my desk is a mug that’s been through my dishwasher too many times. Wrapped around its face are four Warholic images of a svelte Boris Johnson aw-shucksing his hand through his hair, with the words “Conservative Future” printed alongside. Like everything in the Cameron years, there is something not quite right about it.

Somewhere between old mugs, Boris Johnson and conservative futurism my eyes wander back to Kit Kowol’s brilliant book on wartime conservatism. Specifically to the Cleveland housewife who attributed all the evils of the world to Adolf Hitler’s failure to get his end away: “Why doesn’t Hitler marry and settle down?” she wrote to her MP in 1940.

This majestic kitchen-sink image opens an image of Britain in the Second World War that is immediately more believable than the leftish mainline of British history-writing: not necessarily the counter-narrative to the socialist “people’s war” thesis it sometimes claims to be as much as the war of a people rather different from the socialist mythology — an imperial state anything but absent-minded about its empire; a Christian nation where Christianity meant piety and duty rather than Archbishop Temple’s musings about welfarism; a hierarchical society torn between agrarianism and bourgeois commerce rather than proletarian industry; and a patriotic country.

The image is not altogether unfamiliar and highlights the enormous gulf between public memory and academic history. Even in its resolutely high political passages, Kowol’s portrayal of a conservative wartime British society cannot fail to bring to mind Dad’s Army. The Home Guard was not a nation-in-arms of the Jacobin kind, but an armed Rotary Club of Victorian shopkeepers acting out an Edwardian social farce and reminiscing about imperial wars — pompously self-assured and meaning business, but unlikely to be called on to fight.

Kowol’s elegant recovery of the Conservative way of war is also the recovery of something deeply familiar in popular culture. Sure, the little ships at Dunkirk have a hold on the imagination, though it is far from obvious this hold has much to do with a socialist people’s war so much as older ideas about British maritime supremacy. Regardless, as a source of blockbusters, Dunkirk has struggled to compete with the images of aristocratic martial prowess (not necessarily demonstrated by aristocrats) in A Bridge Too Far, Battle of Britain or Sink the Bismarck. 

Memory of the war is full of personality cults: the cult of “Monty” rivals those of Wellington and Nelson, and Churchill’s is nonpareil. They sustain a publishing sub-industry (to which academic historians make a singularly small contribution) vastly larger than that devoted to the “people’s war”. The statue most recently unveiled on Sword Beach is not of Tommy Atkinson (how curious that the Second World War produced no new everyman-soldier), but of Lord Fraser of Lovat’s personal piper.

Books, documentaries and podcasts on the design and performance of tanks, fighters, bombers and battleships — which, as Kowol traces, were questions of fundamental political importance during the war itself — dwarf those concerned with the lives and opinions of the people who manufactured them. And material that does engage with their lives also tends to conjure the image of a citizenry infused with old-fashioned martial virtue just as much as a people’s war.

It is extremely refreshing to find a serious work of history that makes sense of all these memories and traditions and puts them into the context of the war itself. In doing so, Kowol contributes to a broader reappraisal of British political history — thus far most heavily focused on the relationship between post-war individualism and the rise of Thatcherism, which tends to demonstrate the extraordinary disconnection between left-wing historians and British political culture. 

Far from the motor of history, the Left was an electoral failure in post-war Britain. Since the Attlee government, Labour has won only four resounding victories and never as a party of the left: it won as a technocratic party in 1964, as a bourgeois-conservative party in 1997, as a neo-imperialist party in 2001 and it ran unopposed in 2024. Whilst anodyne conservatism often struggled to adjust itself to spasms of socialist innovation, it was almost always the driving cultural force — including, as Kowol demonstrates, during the moments of greatest disruption.

But Kowol’s story has an unsung hero — unsung although it appears on almost every page. Wartime conservativism dabbled in all sorts of grand enterprises: imperial and European federations, committees of public safety, returns to the soil and militarised society; futurisms halfway between Gabriele D’Annunzio in Fiume and Harold Wilson’s “white heat”; reactions halfway between Albert Speer and Johan Galtung. 

The real story, however, was wartime conservatism’s lack of transformative “vision”. Churchill’s Conservative-dominated government retained its faith in an established system of parliamentary government, Tory democracy and liberal capitalism. 

Instruments of government that would have been recognisable to Gladstone functioned well enough to fight a total war. And in the end, that system triumphed — not elegantly, but more effectively, humanely and at immensely smaller cost in human lives than the systems of the totalitarians. 

Someone once quipped: “Napoleon said the Austrians were always one idea and one army behind the rest of Europe: but the Austrians always had an idea and an army — it was Napoleon who ran out of both.” Something similar could be said of Hitler and the British shopkeepers’ plutocracy. This is a point worth remembering at a time when lots of people are getting very excited about a Chinese superpower and spreading extremely strange ideas about politics and government.

There is not much evidence that the British lost their faith in the British system during the war: Labour won the 1945 election not as a revolutionary force, but as a party which had proven itself as a bulwark of that system during its greatest trial. The extent of the restructuring that the Attlee government would initiate and the collective loss of faith was not widely anticipated.

About 20 years ago, some bloke with a website out in California said “politics is downstream of culture”. And 20 years later, Conservative cabinet ministers sitting on a majority of 80-odd seats in Britain were saying the same thing and talking about going into opposition for a much-needed period of soul-searching and regrouping. Unfortunately, the House of Commons is not a Benedictine monastery and elections do have consequences.

Or, to put it more bluntly, getting the ever-loving snot kicked out of you in a general election matters a very great deal. Politics is tectonic, and there is no better illustration of this than the dismantling of the world that Kit Kowol has excavated.