Insofar as popular memory preserves any sense of a domestic politics in Britain during the Second World War, it is a mere prequel to Labour’s crushing victory in the 1945 election. According to this narrative, the wartime National Government — regardless of its cross-party composition — was pursuing an essentially ‘Labour’ programme of popular mobilisation for a ‘People’s War’, leading ultimately to the greatest social transformation in Britain’s history. Just as much as Labour’s programme of nationalisation or the creation of the NHS, the electorate’s bruising rejection of Churchill at the ballot box just weeks after they cheered him on VE Day is fixed in the popular imagination as a turning point in twentieth-century British politics. The Conservative Party has no place in this mythology other than as a spent, defeated force, irrespective of Churchill himself (after all, the wartime leader’s relationship with his own party was notoriously fraught). Kit Kowol’s Blue Jerusalem, a meticulously researched and strikingly fresh examination of the Conservative Party during the War, sets out to challenge this myth and show that the Tories were, in reality, both a powerful and a creative — even visionary — political force in the period 1940–45.

It is true, of course, that the Conservatives lost the 1945 election, and lost it badly. Kowol is unsparing in his analysis of the Tories’ failure to connect with and convince voters in a disastrous campaign, with more than a few echoes of the summer of 2024. But Blue Jerusalem is not really about the 1945 election; Kowol’s focus is instead what came before, and the book’s key argument is that the Conservatives were successful in dominating the wartime National Government and in ensuring that the Second World War was fought as a Tory war. Central to this achievement were the events of May 1940, which saw not only the appointment of Churchill and Prime Minister but also the defeat of Chamberlainite hopes of a negotiated peace or, failing that, a ‘liberal militarist’ war fought primarily by blockading Germany and strengthening British naval power. But Churchill’s policy of total war was not, Kowol argues convincingly, a maverick Conservative leader’s acceptance of left-wing ideas of a ‘People’s War’ that mobilised the proletariat against fascism. It was, rather, a markedly imperial project that appealed to Conservative parliamentarians and voters.

Blue Jerusalem vividly conveys the extent to which everything was up for grabs in the summer of 1940 — everything about Britain’s future, and perhaps the very survival of Britain and the British Empire itself. Radical and utopian ideas for Britain’s future were not the exclusive preserve of socialists and liberals, and Kowol’s exploration of Conservative utopians and visionaries in wartime Britain is perhaps the most fascinating feature of the book. As the author notes, the ultimate end desired by the disparate factions in the Conservative Party was broadly the same: the preservation of Britain’s Empire, class system, and social status quo. But their ideas and priorities for how to achieve this were radically different, and ranged from individualism and advocacy of free trade to ruralist visions of a revived landed aristocracy and agricultural self-sufficiency, from imperialism to industrial paternalism and a preoccupation with a militarised and self-consciously Christian Britain. 

Conservatives parliamentarians ranged in their foreign policy views from internationalism — advocating a post-war union of European nations or even world government — to protectionist imperialism. For Conservatives who took the latter view, wariness of America and its potential future dominance of global trade (which indeed came to pass) led some Conservative imperialists to the seemingly counterintuitive position of favouring the Soviet Union over the United States, on the grounds that the Soviets presented less of a threat than the USA to the survival of the British Empire. At the same time, however, other Conservatives agonised over the alliance of convenience with Stalin, unconvinced that totalitarian Communism was any better than totalitarian Nazism.

Yet even visions of a kind of ‘soft totalitarianism’ had their place in the colourful and chaotic collage of wartime Conservative ideology, at a time when even some Tory politicians struggled to imagine that the state would not have to increase its control over people’s lives, or that the post-war economy would not be centrally planned. The only question was which ideological presuppositions would underpin an all-controlling state, and some Conservatives believed that a foundational commitment to Christianity provided an inoculation against the worst excesses of totalitarianism, since God remained the ultimate source of moral and political authority. It was from this revived sense of a Christian nation that R. A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act would emerge — arguably one of the most lasting Conservative achievements of the war years on the Home Front.

Many features of wartime Conservatism, from imperialism to anti-Americanism, paternalist protectionism, ‘soft’ totalitarianism and commitment to a Christian society, seem alien to (or scarcely recognisable in) the contemporary post-Thatcherite Conservative Party. Yet if there has ever been a time for the party to think the unthinkable and re-evaluate the ideological trends that have dominated British conservativism since the 1980s, 2024 is surely the time to do it. Kit Kowol’s Blue Jerusalem does a valuable service in providing a history of a forgotten era of Conservative politics; but he also furnishes a deep history for the modern Conservative Party, rooted in that origin myth and foundational moment of modern Britain: the Second World War.