In 1944, an anonymous Conservative supporter, identified only as ‘B’, complained about the current dearth of Conservative intellectual influence in newspapers and periodicals, and traced it back to the interwar period:
Of the London dailies only the Daily Telegraph is consistently Conservative, and it rather timorously so. In the monthlies Conservatism is represented by the Nineteenth Century and the National Review; but the influence of the monthlies is less than it was. The left wing of the Labour movement has that spirited organ, Tribune. Liberalism has the Spectator, Time and Tide and the Economist. On the principle that if one is asked to meet a ‘Conservative’ nowadays it generally turns out that he is a Liberal, the first two of these may be called Conservative; but on no other principle.Footnote 1
As far as the interwar newspapers were concerned, ‘B’ was clearly wrong. Although Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere used the popular press to challenge Stanley Baldwin's leadership of the Conservative party in the interwar years, most editors of the national dailies supported the Conservative party or the Conservative-dominated National government after 1931.Footnote 2 But was ‘B’ wrong about the periodicals?
Concerning these, the current communis opinio seems to be very much on ‘B’'s side. Modern political history has to a large extent inherited ‘B’'s view of the shifting relationship between politics and print in this period. Recent discussions of political stability in interwar Britain have tended to focus on the ability of political parties to attach and cement the loyalties of the new democratic electorate by means of propaganda, the mass circulation press, and radio.Footnote 3 This corpus of work has vastly increased our knowledge of the relationship between politicians and the public in the interwar period.Footnote 4 But the level of attention that Conservative uses of the mass media have received has prevented historians from recognizing the continuing importance of the periodical press. In fact, Conservative contributions to periodicals have been completely ignored in major accounts of the Conservative party's interwar history.Footnote 5 The reason for this neglect probably has something to do with the scepticism of some British political historians towards the use of intellectual history.Footnote 6 But studying Conservative writing through periodicals increases our understanding of the evolution of party politics. As Peter Marks argues, ‘periodicals operated in “real time”, providing invaluable evidence of positions and trends as they developed, not as they reconstituted and were later represented’.Footnote 7 The periodical press played a vital role in sustaining a relatively broad-based and open public debate about Conservatism and its prospects, which in turn ensured that Conservatism remained a dynamic and adaptive creed between the wars. This article argues that in respect of the periodicals, ‘B’ was also broadly mistaken, and that close study of Conservative attitudes to and participation in periodical publication tells us much about the party and its development in the interwar period, and has important resonances for its post-war history.
The article begins with consideration of the relationship between politicians and the periodical press in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and of how the relationship developed in the interwar years. The latter involves examination of circulation figures, the roles of editors and boards of directors, the appeal to different Conservative readerships, and the types of Conservatives that wrote for periodicals. In section II it proceeds to detail why Conservatives saw periodicals as still being important. Conservatives in general continued to believe in them because they thought that they were capable of influencing public opinion, but some also believed that they could be used to help maintain party unity. Particular attention is paid to the influence of newspaper editors, the threat from Labour's intellectual left, and the existence of a Conservative-dominated National government in the 1930s. Section III examines why some political pundits failed to recognize the significance of the interwar Conservative party's intellectual record in the years leading up to the 1945 general election. The final section reflects on the nature of Conservative intellectual debate in the periodical press in the interwar period, its potential for limiting the intellectual threats to British democracy and parliamentary government in this period, and the extent to which it contributed to the intellectual and political development of the Conservative party after 1945.
I
The story of the relationship between politicians and the periodical press is a familiar one for historians working on nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 8 The early nineteenth century was the golden age of the Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and the Quarterly Review (1809), which promoted whig and tory opinion respectively. The radical Westminster Review disrupted these neat political divisions when it was founded in 1824, but it was the introduction of the general monthly periodicals in the mid-Victorian period, especially the Fortnightly Review (1865), Contemporary Review (1866), and Nineteenth Century (1877), which resulted in a more open public forum for intellectual and political debate.Footnote 9
Prominent Liberal and Conservative politicians wrote for both types of periodical in mid- and late Victorian Britain. William Gladstone wrote close to sixty articles for periodicals between 1875 and 1880. He was always in demand as a writer and he wrote about an impressive range of subjects for the Contemporary Review, Nineteenth Century, and Quarterly Review.Footnote 10 Even after this period, Gladstone's ‘steady literary income’ continued to come from periodical articles and reviews.Footnote 11 The ‘explosion’ of the monthlies played a role in the shaping of nineteenth-century Liberal politics more broadly.Footnote 12 But the third marquess of Salisbury was the most important Conservative contributor in this period. Salisbury wrote 608 articles for the Saturday Review mainly in the 1860s and he contributed to all but three of the twenty-six issues of the Quarterly Review between 1860 and 1866.Footnote 13 Only rarely did Salisbury write for periodicals later in his career; he no longer needed the money and he was often in government. But Salisbury continued to advise the editor of the Quarterly on its political content.Footnote 14 He also promoted a new Conservative monthly by contributing four articles to the National Review between 1883 and 1894.Footnote 15 Salisbury believed ‘in the existence and desirability of a sort of Conservative intelligentsia – a clerisy of thinkers, writers, churchmen, dons – whose function lay in preserving in some scientific way the residual Toryism that he identified in most educated people’.Footnote 16 The future leader of the Liberal Unionist party in the House of Commons, Joseph Chamberlain, was also a prominent contributor to the periodical press in the 1870s and the 1880s. Chamberlain serialized his influential ‘Radical Programme’ in the Fortnightly Review before publishing it as a book in 1885.Footnote 17
Salisbury's nephew and successor as prime minister, Arthur James Balfour, was another intellectual Conservative who had strong connections with the periodical press. Balfour wrote articles for the Fortnightly Review, the Nineteenth Century, and the National Review in the 1870s and 1880s, some of which he re-published in book form in 1893.Footnote 18 Balfour's name was even cited in the National Review's circulars to attract subscribers when it was launched in 1883.Footnote 19 Balfour is of course better known for his important books on philosophy, but even these were reviewed in the periodical press by important nineteenth-century intellectuals like T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer.Footnote 20 Balfour continued to publish books and a new edition of his essays was published in 1920.Footnote 21 The National Review also played a role in Balfour's resignation as leader of the Conservative party in 1911. Balfour failed after 1910 to convince his party that he was a ‘true believer’ in tariff reform, which had been developed by Chamberlain and his followers over the course of the previous decade. This resulted in the National Review's ‘BMG’ (Balfour Must Go) campaign in the summer of 1911, which contributed to Balfour's resignation later that year.Footnote 22 The National Review made national headlines on other occasions in this period as well, as when it threw its journalistic weight behind attempts to expose Liberal malpractices during the Marconi Scandal of 1912–13.Footnote 23
British politicians and intellectuals were avid readers of and contributors to the periodical press down to the First World War. Conservatives played a major role in this intellectual culture during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods as the examples of Salisbury, Chamberlain, and Balfour show. While the emergence of the new mass media disrupted this thought-world it did not bring it to an abrupt end. Mark Hampton has emphasized the importance of both the ‘weighty’ and ‘ephemeral’ press. He argues that ‘we should keep in mind the relationship between the two forms: daily newspapers could give immediate publicity to books and periodical articles that purported to deal with less ephemeral topics'.Footnote 24 This practice continued into the interwar period, which was a transitional moment for British intellectual life. It was the deeper embrace of professionalism and the ‘learned journal’ after 1945 that finally signalled the end of the traditional quarterly and monthly reviews.Footnote 25 The same was probably true of the political influence of London clubs, which had shown some signs of decline between the wars.Footnote 26
If we compare circulation figures for the 1860s – the period in which the Victorian reviews are assumed to have been at their peak – with figures for the interwar period, it is evident that there was no sudden drop in circulation. During the 1860s, the Edinburgh Review sold around 7,000 copies and the Quarterly Review around 8,000, the Fortnightly Review between 2,500 and 3,000 per month and the Westminster Review around 4,000 per month, the Saturday Review near 14,000 per week and the Spectator approximately 3,000 per week.Footnote 27 During the interwar period, the Fortnightly Review sold around 5,000 copies per month during 1929–31.Footnote 28The Nineteenth Century and After sold 10,000 copies per month in 1935.Footnote 29 The Saturday Review sold 20,000 copies per week during 1933–6.Footnote 30 The Spectator sold 22,500 copies per week in 1936.Footnote 31 Some periodicals like the Edinburgh Review and Westminster Review declined after the nineteenth century, but others took their place or managed to increase their circulation figures during the interwar years.Footnote 32
One of the reasons why circulation figures of Conservative-leaning periodicals remained strong throughout these years was the ability of editors to target different types of Conservative readers. The most right-wing periodicals were the National Review, English Review, and Saturday Review. The National Review was most representative of the traditional right-wing or ‘diehard’ section of the Conservative party. Under its long-time editor Leo Maxse, the National Review's circulation figures peaked at 10,000 copies, but when his sister Violet Milner assumed control in 1929, those figures had declined.Footnote 33 Yet the National Review maintained its position as one of the most prominent Conservative-leaning monthlies. The fourth marquess of Salisbury was one of the review's leading shareholders, which helped secure its place in Conservative reading circles. The review continued to make a profit and it paid Salisbury a regular dividend throughout the 1930s.Footnote 34
The English Review slowly became more radical than the National Review during the interwar period. Under both Austin Harrison (editor) and the Liberal MP Alfred Mond (proprietor), the English Review shifted its focus ‘from belles-lettres to politics’ in 1910.Footnote 35 It was liberal until Harrison sold his controlling interest in the review to Ernest Remnant in 1923 (Mond sold his shares during the First World War). Remnant ‘gave it an intensely Conservative slant’, which appears to have trebled its circulation almost overnight.Footnote 36 In the 1920s, the English Review strongly supported the Conservative party leadership, especially during times of national crisis.Footnote 37 But a transformation occurred when Douglas Jerrold became editor in 1931.Footnote 38 Jerrold and Charles Petrie (foreign editor) used the English Review as a platform for ‘real Toryism’.Footnote 39 Petrie was known to favour the adoption of a corporate state in Britain based on the Italian fascist model.Footnote 40 Some influential Conservatives published in the English Review while Jerrold was editor, but high-profile Conservative contributors had ceased by the time he stepped down at the end of 1935. Jerrold's successor as editor was Wilfrid Hindle who lasted just six months in the position before handing it over to the future Conservative MP and government minister Derek Walker-Smith. It was probably Walker-Smith who made the claim that the English Review would be able to replicate its status as one of ‘the great periodicals of the nineteenth century’.Footnote 41 But this lofty ambition failed and the English Review was incorporated into the National Review in 1937.Footnote 42
The Saturday Review went through a similar transition in this period. The Liberal-radical journalist Gerald Barry edited the review between 1924 and 1930. Barry then resigned in protest when its board of directors used the review to endorse Lord Beaverbrook's United Empire party. Barry and his editorial staff left to set up the Weekend Review, which attracted the support of Baldwin.Footnote 43 The Saturday Review then shifted to the right during the 1930s. Its directors appointed a number of different editors in a relatively short space of time, including Alexander Wyatt Tilby who edited the review until January 1932. When Lady Houston bought the Saturday Review in 1933 it moved further to the right under its new editor James Wentworth Day. It is notable that no Conservative MPs published in the review after 1934 when Houston used it to promote Hitler and Mussolini.Footnote 44
Two other periodicals focused heavily on imperial matters, the Empire Review and Magazine and United Empire. The Empire Review was edited by the former Conservative MP, Clement Kinloch-Cooke. In contrast with both the English and National reviews, it was generally supportive of the National government in the 1930s. But Kinloch-Cooke made sure that senior Conservative critics of the party leadership's policy on India knew that the review was ‘widely read in India and the Dominions’.Footnote 45United Empire was the official journal of the Royal Empire Society (formerly the Royal Colonial Institute), which worked with government bodies, local authorities, and universities to promote a united British empire. The Institute itself was a meeting place in London for the ‘reading of papers and discussion on subjects of Indian and “Colonial” interest’.Footnote 46 Numerous Conservatives contributed towards the organization through lectures, speeches, and discussions, which were recorded and published in the journal throughout this period.
The broader and more liberal periodicals that were read by Conservatives were the Spectator, the Quarterly Review, the Fortnightly Review, and the Nineteenth Century and After. The Spectator was different from the Conservative-leaning monthlies because it reached a much larger audience and it could respond to weekly political developments, but this was at the expense of publishing shorter articles. The Spectator had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Unionist party in the Edwardian period before establishing itself as a broadly liberal magazine after the First World War.Footnote 47 John St Loe Strachey ran the Spectator almost as his own personal organ until Evelyn Wrench purchased the controlling interest in the magazine in 1925. Strachey, Wrench, and Wilson Harris (editor from 1932 until 1953) were all politically ‘left-centre’, as were most of its younger writers.Footnote 48 As Simon Courtauld argues, ‘Harris had, at different times, voted for all three principal parties, he was happy to adopt the moderate political line of his chairman [Wrench], who would be classified today as a Tory “wet”.’Footnote 49 The Spectator was largely supportive of the National government in the 1930s and its outlook was perhaps best described by an anonymous contributor in 1934: ‘Those who have followed its leading articles in the last few years will have found them approximating broadly to the political doctrines of progressive Conservatives like Mr. Baldwin and Lord Irwin, into which many of the tenets of traditional Liberalism have been assimilated.’Footnote 50
The Quarterly Review prided itself on being a progressive Conservative ‘voice’. It was edited by C. E. Lawrence between 1922 and 1928, and, then, by Lawrence and John Murray V between 1928 and 1940. One authority on the Quarterly argues that its ‘tone was less harsh and its criticism far less malicious’ in the twentieth century compared to the nineteenth century, although ‘one could characterize the politics of both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century runs of the Quarterly as generally enlightened conservatism’.Footnote 51 This was largely true, but in terms of content the Fortnightly Review was more willing than the Quarterly to embrace writers from across the political spectrum. Since the death of its long-time editor, William Leonard Courtney, in 1928, the literary side of the Fortnightly declined, but its political content was sustained under new management. The Canadian Lovat Dickson was editor from 1929 until 1932, but he seems to have grown frustrated with the review before finally leaving it to set up his own publishing company.Footnote 52 The Fortnightly was offered for sale to the board of directors of the Nineteenth Century and After in 1936, which suggests that it was struggling financially in the 1930s.Footnote 53
The Nineteenth Century and After was ‘a serious-minded, independent journal, which prided itself on its impartiality in political matters, although it had, on the whole, always been inclined slightly to the Right’.Footnote 54 It protected its neutrality by refusing to publish anonymous articles, which distinguished it from its main rival on the right, the National Review.Footnote 55 Carol Romer was editor for a period in the late 1920s and the journalist Charles Harris was editor between 1930 and 1935; Harris was a leader-writer on The Times (1925–35) and The Economist (1932–5) during this period.Footnote 56 Both editors seem to have adhered to the Nineteenth Century's founding values, but Harris's successor, the Conservative MP Arnold Wilson, was a controversial editor. Wilson argued publicly that there would be ‘no departure’ from the Nineteenth Century's non-partisan beginnings.Footnote 57 But when he wrote a letter to Baldwin to reassure the Conservative party leader that the journal was in safe hands he quipped that the job demanded both wisdom and impartiality, two characteristics he claimed not to possess. This did not deter Wilson from accepting the position. He told Baldwin, ‘I should hope to do what an obscure editor may to give the public sound material on which to exercise its mind and, on occasion, its choice.’Footnote 58 The Nineteenth Century's board of directors became disgruntled by what they regarded as Wilson's lack of impartiality and, interestingly, Harold Nicolson, one of those directors, wrote in his diary just one year later, ‘We are very distressed by the Fascist and anti-Baldwin tone which is being given to the review by Sir Arnold Wilson.’Footnote 59 Nicolson admitted that they were loath to lose Wilson because he was ‘a dynamic and gifted editor’, but Fabian Ware, the director who had made the decision to appoint Wilson, insisted on his removal because of his poor handling of coverage of the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 60 Frederick Voigt, a Manchester Guardian correspondent, who was one of the first journalists to report on the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and who went undercover as a life insurance agent to report on the war in Madrid, was the perfect antidote to Wilson. Voigt was appointed as editor in 1938.Footnote 61 A board of directors could be just as instrumental as an editor when it came to controlling or maintaining the political direction of a periodical. The Nineteenth Century was perhaps the strongest and most diverse of all of the Conservative-leaning monthlies, and, like the National Review, it made regular profits in the 1930s.Footnote 62
Many Conservatives continued both to write for and read these periodicals because they believed in an elite readership. Traditional ideas of ‘public opinion’ were still prominent in the Conservative party between the wars.Footnote 63 When Wilson was invited to address young Conservatives at Ashridge in 1933, he outlined a hierarchical view that aimed to influence one million individuals in the country: ‘The people whose opinions really matter in England’.Footnote 64 Wilson argued that weeklies, like monthly and quarterly reviews, were still to be found in the reading-rooms of gentlemen's clubs and that they were ‘very widely read by men and women in responsible positions’.Footnote 65 Wilson insisted that quality writing and reasoned argument would always prevail over the less sophisticated writing of the popular press, which, he argued, explained ‘the progressive decline in the influence of the popular press on public opinion and the slowly increasing influence of reviews and books’.Footnote 66 However, like Baldwin, Wilson recognized the potential of radio broadcasting for cementing communitarian and moral values in the country, which meant that he spoke regularly on the BBC throughout the 1930s.Footnote 67 Wilson also sat on a parliamentary committee under Lord Moyne to analyse the future of the British film industry in 1936. This prompted him to conclude that ‘the effect of the cinema on the public mind is probably more important than that of the Press. It is, for many, the principal source of new ideas, and of mental attitudes.’Footnote 68 Wilson understood the increasing value of the new mass media, but he saw no reason why the periodical press would fail to prosper as well.
This is why a significant group of Conservative MPs and intellectuals wrote for periodicals in the interwar period. We know that a group of young MPs known as the ‘EYM’ (Eager Young Men) or the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) used independent journalism to promote ‘constructive Conservatism’ in the 1920s.Footnote 69 In fact, Robert Boothby, John Buchan, Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, John Loder, Noel Skelton, Oliver Stanley, and Harold Macmillan all made important contributions to periodicals in this period. But those who wrote about domestic politics in the 1930s ranged from young Conservatives like John Boyd-Carpenter, Lord Cranborne, Patrick Donner, Quintin Hogg, Lord Iddesleigh, Lord Knebworth, Hugh Molson, W. S. Morrison, and Duncan Sandys to some of the party's more established figures like L. S. Amery, Lord Astor, the duchess of Atholl, Henry Page Croft, Edward Grigg, Cuthbert Headlam, Lord Lloyd, Lord Eustace Percy, Lord Salisbury, Arthur Steel-Maitland, Arnold Wilson, and Lord Winterton. Party rebels of the 1930s, like Macmillan, continued to publish, and the same was true of both Conservative historians like F. J. C. Hearnshaw, J. A. R. Marriott, Charles Petrie, and Hugh Sellon, and marginal writers like Dorothy Crisp and Douglas Jerrold.Footnote 70 The unusual political circumstances that emerged after the forming of the National government meant that the views of Independent and National MPs, like Austin Hopkinson and Ian Horobin, mattered more than they would otherwise have done, especially when they praised Baldwin's leadership or Neville Chamberlain's economic policies.Footnote 71 This list represents regular commentators, but many others wrote occasional articles.
II
Conservatives who contributed lengthy articles to the quarterly, monthly, and weekly reviews recognized the continuing vitality and new uses of the periodical press in the interwar period. Periodicals were important because the editors of national newspapers pushed them and claimed that they were still influential channels of communication. In the 1920s, newspaper editors told senior Conservatives that their intellectual endeavours would be better placed in monthly reviews rather than in the national daily or Sunday press. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, wrote to Lord Salisbury in 1924 to explain that newspapers would not accept major thought-pieces because they required too many columns. Furthermore, Dawson explained that the value of Salisbury's work ‘would largely disappear if it were cut into a series’. Salisbury's doubts about publishing in a monthly review were appeased when Dawson urged him to reconsider: ‘As for the monthlies, it is, of course, quite true that they have not so large a direct circulation as the newspapers; but their influence is by no means limited to their direct circulation. They are greatly read in Clubs, and above all in newspaper offices.’ Dawson added a personal caveat to reinforce his point: ‘My association with the Round Table has taught me that it is a profound mistake in matters of this kind to reckon influence merely by the number of copies sold. As a matter of fact it crops out in all sorts of unexpected places.’Footnote 72 Most Conservatives understood that circulation figures undershot the actual numbers of readers and it was the potential influence of a prospective readership that really mattered. As H. A. Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post, explained to Salisbury after rejecting his article, ‘I have never been one to underrate the intelligence of my readers, but I do fear that if I published it in the morning post it would not receive that attention that it would in a magazine devoted more particularly to the dissemination and discussion of articles such as this.’Footnote 73 Both Dawson and Gwynne recognized the periodical press as an important literary space for the publication of serious journalism. This argument is supported by the fact that weekly magazines like the Spectator tried to downplay the significance of the monthlies, but they continued to summarize their contents throughout the interwar years.Footnote 74
Senior party figures thought that periodicals might be used both to influence ‘public opinion’ and to cement the loyalty of the party's elite. In January 1931, Lord Lloyd explained the different Conservative readerships of periodicals to the editor of the National Review, Violet Milner:
I suggest that there are three publics that need our propagandist attention…The first two are Conservative already, the third is not. Of the two Conservative publics, I suggest there is one lot, partly in England but also largely overseas, who like their views propounded in terms of the ‘Nat’ [National Review]. They have not as yet learnt from anyone to be ashamed of the Imperial spirit and do not want its existence apologized for or its fire watered down…Personally, I belong to that public. But it does not blind me to the realisation that there is another public, also Conservative, that likes another language than the ‘Nat's', another approach to and exposition of the same principles. It is a more timid Conservative, who likes to be in a majority. This kind needs confirming in its views and needs to be delicately led along the path. The third is free thinking. Just as the Fabian Society lured thousands into socialism by clever propaganda, so we need some clever and disguised propaganda to lead free thinkers into Conservatism. I hoped the ‘English Review’ might do this. Perhaps it still will.Footnote 75
Lloyd's mention of ‘disguised propaganda’ is particularly interesting here because what he was suggesting was something very different from the type of propaganda that was then being produced by Conservative Central Office.Footnote 76 In order to strengthen Conservatism, some Conservative MPs, journalists, and publicists believed that the nurturing of Conservative thinkers and their ideas was just as important as constructing a convincing electoral appeal.
This is why Douglas Jerrold decided to form a ‘consultative council’ to advise him on the political direction of the English Review in 1931. As Ernest Benn explained to the Conservative MP Hugh Cecil: ‘It will by contributions from its members, and by the influence of each in his own circle, tend to strengthen the work of “The Review” in its influence on public opinion as a whole.’ Benn added that ‘it will, we hope, form a sufficiently representative group, both politically and intellectually, to convince the public that the causes we have at heart are winning causes, not forlorn hopes’.Footnote 77 The idea that the review's influence would be increased if it was actively supported by a broad range of prominent Conservatives seems to have been Jerrold's who thought that the group ‘must not represent any political caucus, (whether extreme right or centre)’. Jerrold argued that it ‘must definitely be a group which will exercise influence on the intellectual plane and inevitably, at first, among the younger people’. He was particularly interested in capturing ‘the very young M.P.'s and candidates and the M.P.'s and candidates of the future’, but he suggested that the group ‘must be prepared to exert its influence just as much in its literary and art pages as in the sphere of economics and politics. Above all, it must include professional publicists, with a following and a technique. No amateurs'.Footnote 78 Jerrold's view on how to reinforce Conservatism and how to encourage the party to adopt his own ideas matched the outlook of Lloyd and other prominent Conservatives who participated in the English Review Group during the 1930s.Footnote 79
Both Jerrold's and Lloyd's insistence on the need to harness the entire spectrum of Conservative thought would have been shared by the party's biggest literary star, the Conservative MP, John Buchan. Buchan worked in other ways to develop and hold the same Conservative coalition of opinion together, most notably by inspiring and nurturing the writing of the party's young Conservatives. Buchan was comfortable praising the radical toryism of Oxbridge undergraduates, but he could also be very critical of their thinking if he wanted to encourage the liberal Conservatism of young Conservatives at modern universities like Leeds and Sheffield or the Scottish universities.Footnote 80 This flexibility of outlook even led him to encourage literary Conservatives who were edging towards the extreme right.Footnote 81
Conservative ministers and senior party figures thought that the periodical press might be used to influence Conservative thinking on particular contentious issues. One example of this was when government officials and civil servants explored the idea of founding a new periodical in the run-up to the Government of India Bill.Footnote 82 A substantial correspondence documenting the idea survives in R. A. Butler's private papers. It consists of letters and memoranda that were circulated between Butler (parliamentary under-secretary of state for India), A. F. Mosley (private secretary to the parliamentary under-secretary), W. D. Croft (private secretary to Samuel Hoare, secretary of state for India), Findlater Stewart (permanent under-secretary of state for India), Lord Dufferin (private secretary to Lord Halifax, president of the board of education), and H. MacGregor (information officer, India Office). A group of Conservative ‘diehards’ had already established the Indian Empire Review in 1931 to promote the Indian Empire Society's criticisms of the National government's outlook on India.Footnote 83 Although there is no mention of the Indian Empire Review in the surviving correspondence, the proposed pro-government periodical was meant to serve as a reply to diehard propaganda.
It was Dufferin who suggested ‘a scheme for starting a periodical to put the Government point of view during the critical months between the publication of the Joint Select Committee report and the final passing of the Bill’.Footnote 84 Mosley's summary of the group's correspondence and an extract from a letter from Dufferin to Butler confirm that Butler was very supportive of the scheme.Footnote 85 But it was MacGregor who best outlined the objectives of the idea: ‘The primary object of the scheme is temporary and is to provide an independent vehicle of views which will reach leaders of opinion and through them the public masses.’Footnote 86 The most interesting word here is ‘independent’. One of the reasons why Conservatives read the periodical press was because it was not government or party propaganda, and it was for this very reason that the government wanted to use the Conservative party secretly to sponsor a publication that could claim intellectual independence. MacGregor made this clear when he wrote that ‘individual action is always more effective with the Press than action and writing taken as inspired by some political body’.Footnote 87 Publishing a new periodical or articles in established periodicals would create the illusion of political independence.
MacGregor went on to identify the various publishing opportunities that were available to the group and some of the potential problems that might lie ahead:
there is probably room for another serious Conservative weekly in which realism will take the place of the sentimentalism which at present inspire the Spectator. But economic circumstances rule that such a new weekly must be non-paying for a considerable time to come and probably the party funds have much more immediate claims to meet.Footnote 88
Mosley suggested that a new weekly was too ambitious and that the choice lay between the establishment of a new monthly periodical (general or devoted purely to Indian affairs) and trying to buy publishing space, free from editorial control, in the Spectator, which again was MacGregor's idea.Footnote 89 Mosley understood that it would be difficult to persuade the editor of the Spectator to hand over sections of the magazine to pro-government writers, but he argued that ‘Lord Lothian's influence with Sir Evelyn Wrench might come in useful.’Footnote 90
It was Croft who undermined Dufferin's idea for a new periodical on the grounds that ultimately it would be too difficult to make a success of it if it was only a temporary venture, both in terms of finances and reaching the required readership that was needed to support the government's proposal. Croft argued, ‘A new periodical would cost a lot of money and I see no certainty that it would get into the hands of those whom we want to get at.’Footnote 91 Croft doubted whether the group and their powerful friends could win over the Spectator. In any case, Croft wrote, ‘I imagine that the Spectator no longer circulates in Conservative circles to the extent that it used to.’Footnote 92 Croft's remaining suggestions consisted of using the Sunday Referee because he believed that it appealed to ‘a more intelligent public than any other Sunday papers except the Sunday Times and the Observer’, or distributing free a trade paper of lesser quality that could counteract the influence of the Morning Post.Footnote 93 Croft favoured the latter:
The effectiveness of Morning Post propaganda is due to the fact that, though its circulation is not large, it goes to people like Chairman and members of Conservative Local Committees whose influence in these matters is out of all proportion to their individual intelligence or importance. These are the people to whom our stuff ought to go. They would not buy a periodical and I don't suppose they even see the Spectator.Footnote 94
For similar reasons, Mosley dismissed the idea of using the Sunday Referee because ‘it appeals to young intellectuals rather than the ex-colonels we want to get at. Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley & Constant Lambert contribute, I believe.’Footnote 95 In the end, Dufferin abandoned the whole idea of starting a new periodical or trying to use the Spectator because both options proved too difficult to get off the ground. A last ditch attempt ‘to secure a journalist of standing to be responsible for arranging and co-ordinating a steady flow of matter into newspapers and periodicals of all kinds’ failed, even after the Information Office at the India Office offered to help out unofficially.Footnote 96
The failure of this entire enterprise does not detract from the value that government ministers and civil servants placed on the periodical press and its relationship with the broader intellectual culture of Conservatism. The main problem here was that they agreed that it was impossible to found and establish a serious-minded periodical overnight. They themselves agreed that the best policy was to try and influence as many periodicals and Sunday newspapers as possible by submitting articles in exactly the same way as other potential contributors. In other words, the independence of the periodical press could not be counterfeited. Croft's argument about the necessary target-audience not corresponding with the readership of periodicals was only a half-truth. There were many Conservatives at constituency level who did not read periodicals, but a significant number of ex-military officers, former or serving colonial officials, Conservative MPs, and party officials did read them. In the end, this is what motivated Dufferin to suggest the idea and it explains why Butler was supportive of the plan. It was Conservative MPs and not local party workers who passed the Government of India Bill in parliament.
There were other reasons why Conservative backbenchers wrote for the periodical press in the 1930s. The Conservative backbenches were swollen because of the party's commanding majority at the 1931 election, which meant that Baldwin could always rely on a sizeable amount of parliamentary support. But Baldwin had fewer ministerial positions than usual to offer Conservative MPs because he was not running a Conservative administration and he was not prime minister.Footnote 97 Many backbench Conservatives had good reason to question their own ability to influence the Conservative leadership, especially when serious constitutional and imperial crises emerged to challenge their beliefs and traditions.Footnote 98 Therefore, Conservatives looked towards the periodical press as a means of expressing their opinions on these issues.
Baldwin was no intellectual but he does seem to have taken notice of the periodical press at key moments in the interwar period. On at least two occasions in the 1920s Baldwin sent short messages for publication in the Saturday Review. The first celebrated the magazine's seventieth anniversary in 1925.Footnote 99 The second called for the British people to stand behind the Conservative government during the General Strike of 1926.Footnote 100 Baldwin also published one of his speeches in the English Review in September 1930.Footnote 101 This was just one month before he faced a vote of confidence in his leadership.Footnote 102 Baldwin certainly had a reputation for being a serious reader of books and he showed some interest in other politicians' writings.Footnote 103 Examples of this can be found in Baldwin's private papers. Lord Macmillan wrote to Baldwin in 1932: ‘You were good enough to say at the Palace the other night that you would like to see what a “Scotsman's Heritage” amounted to. Here is a copy of the inventory with the warmest regard of one of the contributors.’Footnote 104 Austin Hopkinson also described a similar scene in 1937: ‘Months ago you asked me to send you what I now enclose. Probably you have forgotten; but what writer ever forgets when anyone has shown any interest in his writings.’Footnote 105 This meant that Conservatives would send their articles or books to Baldwin if they believed that he would be interested in a particular subject.Footnote 106
Baldwin also worried about threats from Britain's intellectual left in the 1930s. As Baldwin told Thomas Jones in November 1935: ‘Labour is being drugged by its intellectuals – [Harold] Laskie, [G. D. H.] Cole & Co. – so far as their policy goes. I want to get together a group of our own men to answer these…I am thinking of [Kenneth] Pickthorn of Cambridge and men of that ability.’Footnote 107 Robert Dare has argued that during the interwar period there was a perception abroad that intellectuals were highly valued within the British Labour party and that they were well represented at all levels of the party after 1931.Footnote 108 Conservatives were troubled by this relationship, which is why they tried to match the left intellectually in the 1930s. The increasing popularity of the left-wing weekly magazine the New Statesman (which had merged with the Nation and Athenaeum in 1931 and absorbed the Weekend Review in 1934), the launch of the leftist Political Quarterly in 1930, and the success of Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club accentuated Conservative fears about the Fabian Society's influence on Britain's intellectual landscape.Footnote 109 At the same time, a significant number of British fellow travellers of the right challenged British Conservative traditions in the periodical press.Footnote 110 It was the intellectual challenge from both left and right that prompted Conservative writers to rethink their Conservatism between the wars.
This probably explains why Baldwin and the party leadership monitored Conservative backbench opinion in the 1930s. It seems that the party leadership attempted to neutralize the opinion of a group of young Conservative MPs who were interested in developing a new policy for the economic ‘planning’ of industry.Footnote 111 This group gained some momentum thanks to its use of periodicals and books, and it is likely that Eustace Percy was appointed to the cabinet as minister without portfolio in 1935 because he was seen as the leader of this group.Footnote 112 In August 1935, the duchess of Atholl wrote a letter to Arthur Bryant outlining her fears about the number of prominent Conservative backbench writers who supported industrial planning schemes. Atholl argued that there was now proof that these ideas were beginning to influence the upper echelons of government because of the recent promotion of Percy to the cabinet.Footnote 113 In an article for the National Review, Atholl showed that her fears were based on a series of publications by Percy, Kenneth Lindsay, and Harold Macmillan, including the books Conservatism and the future, Planning for employment, and The next five years.Footnote 114 As a result, Atholl wrote to Bryant to get his support for a concerted opposition to planning in all its forms:
A special organization seems necessary as with Lord Eustace Percy in the Cabinet and presumably engaged on some work of this kind, one cannot expect the Central Office to do any propaganda against Planning. Moreover, as I daresay you remember, they sent out a special letter of recommendation of ‘Conservatism and the Future’, when it was published last April – a book to which he (ie. Eustace Percy) contributed a chapter urging the Conservative Party to take up Planning.Footnote 115
Atholl's letter confirms that some Conservatives considered Percy's appointment to be a radical move by Baldwin and that they saw Conservative Central Office as supporting his ideas by promoting publications like Conservatism and the future.Footnote 116
III
If Conservatives embraced the periodical press as an important forum for political discussion in the interwar period, why was ‘B’ so pessimistic about Conservative intellectual influence in 1944? ‘B’ was certainly aware of the great tide of left-wing sentiment that had swelled up during the war, which had already promised the welfare state and was soon to manifest itself in Labour's general election victory in 1945. But it was ‘B’'s analysis of the defeat of the wartime coalition government's candidate in the West Derbyshire by-election in February 1944 that was most telling. ‘B’ attributed the Conservative candidate's failure to win the hearts and minds of voters on the streets of West Derbyshire to, at least in part, the party's failure to develop a media-based popular ideology before the war.
Lord Hartington was regarded as a well-chosen Conservative candidate to fight the election in West Derbyshire because he was a soldier with deep local connections, but he was defeated by an Independent candidate in a constituency that had been Conservative since 1923. Charlie White resigned from the Labour party so that he could disregard the coalition government's electoral truce and stand as a candidate. White was aided by a coalition of supporters consisting of radical Liberals, one Labour MP, members of the Communist party, and members of the Common Wealth party.Footnote 117 Paul Addison singled out the result of the by-election in West Derbyshire as a possible sign of things to come for the Conservative party, but he also wrote that ‘the result was lost on the pundits’.Footnote 118 This was not completely true because it was not lost on ‘B’ who wrote that voters refused to be dictated to by Churchill, that old nonconformist traditions and political rivalries in the area had been re-awakened, and that the atmosphere was reminiscent of elections in 1910–11. But what really concerned ‘B’ was his view that Richard Acland's Common Wealth party had bridged the gap between socialist intellectualism and practical politics:
he has done what the [Cyril] Joads and the [G. D. H.] Coles have never quite succeeded in doing: he has reduced the teaching of the New Statesman to terms which a child could understand; he has entered into the inheritance of the intelligentsia; he has provided the essential link between Bloomsbury and West Derbyshire.Footnote 119
This is why ‘B’ argued that the New Statesman was the biggest threat to the intellectual culture of Conservatism in 1944. The magazine trebled its circulation during the war years, which would have deepened ‘B’'s fears.Footnote 120 But more worryingly for Conservatives, ‘B’ claimed that amongst ‘educated’ men it was now ‘the only weekly taken’.Footnote 121
‘B’ also blamed Conservative leaders for ‘the intellectual capitulation of Conservatism’ between the wars, which was why the party lacked a convincing intellectual response to the wartime politics of Common Wealth:
It is easy to say that the Conservative party desperately needs a first-class ‘intellectual’ weekly and a first-class London evening paper…Certainly it needs both, and at once. But if it got them to-morrow, the errors and omissions of quarter of a century could not be remedied in a few years. Intellectual predominance and confidence, once lost, cannot be regained in a day.Footnote 122
Although the newspapers were generally pro-Conservative and the Spectator should not have been dismissed for lacking Conservative credentials, ‘B’ was right to argue that the Conservatives lacked an alternative weekly, especially after the Saturday Review ceased publication in 1938.
Although Conservatives contributed to periodicals in significant numbers throughout the interwar and war years, it is also true that most of them were financially moribund. Lovat Dickson, who was editor of the struggling Fortnightly Review, later recalled how Britain's intellectual elite would have viewed the periodical press in this period:
The quarterlies still flourished, the serious monthlies had had no important casualties in their ranks, and under formidable titles like The Nineteenth Century and After, The Contemporary, and The Fortnightly, they still appeared in the same forbidding format in which they had originally made their bows to the world. The weeklies of the same quality were equally unrelenting in gravity and nomenclature…The only change to be observed was in the multiplicity of weeklies, some with pretensions to intellectuality…some more popular…But these were outside the pale in which the great monthlies and quarterlies kept their solemn state…They were doomed. But you would never know it if you had picked up a copy of any of them in the spring of 1929.Footnote 123
Dickson had sensed that it was a good time to get out of the Fortnightly Review, but most Conservatives would not have predicted the final decline of these periodicals between the 1940s and 1960s.Footnote 124
There was certainly some logic behind ‘B’'s criticism of Conservative leaders for neglecting the party's intellectual development between the wars. Although Baldwin and the Conservative leadership showed some interest in periodicals and Conservative intellectual debate, this interest was shallow and short-term. The Liberal MP and journalist Robert Bernays recorded in his diary a number of interesting encounters with Baldwin, which gives us some indication of the limitations of his interest in political writing. In June 1935 Bernays wrote: ‘Baldwin is not futile when roused, the difficulty is to rouse him…He is just not interested in anything except ensuring in a vague way that the Conservative Party is always in control and that it operates as far to the left as possible. Programmes bore him.’Footnote 125 In July 1936, Bernays wrote that Baldwin drew his attention to an article by an unemployed man in the Ashridge Journal. Baldwin told him ‘that it was the illiterate alone that could really write simple straightforward English’.Footnote 126 Baldwin rarely looked to Conservative writing for new ideas or policies, but he showed just enough interest for Conservatives to think that their writing might be worthwhile.
The idea to float a new periodical to support the government's India policy also came to nothing. Similarly, though some worried about it, Baldwin's promotion of Percy led to nothing, and there is even the suspicion that this was done to muzzle him. Importantly, ministers and senior Conservatives were actively prevented, or disallowed themselves, from entering into any public debate that might smack of criticism of the party leadership. Duff Cooper, a strong supporter of Baldwin, quickly ended his regular contributions to the Saturday Review after his appointment as financial secretary to the treasury in 1928. The editor, Gerald Barry, wrote to Cooper to express his disappointment:
I have always interpreted Baldwin's rule as meaning that ministers must not write under their own names because personal views might embarrass Govt policy; that, therefore, anonymous press work was not taboo. But, of course, you are the judge of that & your letter to me put the question beyond doubt. I am grieved.Footnote 127
When Bernays suspected that he might be asked to join the National government in 1937 he too was worried that he might break Baldwin's rule because of the delay between the submission of his articles and their publication. Bernays was even reluctant to sign new contracts until his political future was settled.Footnote 128
Only rarely did senior Conservative party figures consider using independent journalism to criticize the party leadership. When Lord Salisbury heard a rumour that the party leadership was excluding members of the House of Lords from discussions about policy in April 1924 he wrote to his brother Lord Robert Cecil:
I think if we make the devil's own row they will give way and ask the ex-Cabinet colleagues in the Lords to join. But perhaps they might then retort in effect that they expect us not to take independent action – as by writing articles in the Quarterly [Review] or in The Times, let us say. It might have been ungracious to insist upon independence if they were closer than a brother, but if they begin it on their side and do not care to consult us, ought we or ought we not to look upon it as a blessing in disguise?Footnote 129
Salisbury, a man whose voice John Buchan believed ‘carried more weight than anybody else's with our party’, published an article on ‘Christian anti-socialism’ in the Nineteenth Century when he was in Baldwin's second government, but the subject would have definitely pleased the Conservative leader.Footnote 130
Percy's new role in the National government also meant that he was forced to comply with Baldwin's rule, which meant that he could no longer publish independent journalism. The appointment probably served to appease Percy's younger followers who would have believed that they stood a better chance of influencing government policy now that he was in the cabinet. But Percy soon resigned from the government in 1936 after Baldwin admitted to him that his appointment had been a ‘political mistake’. Percy rejected the idea that Baldwin had used him to soften backbench opinion, but it seems that he was aware that others thought that it was a factor at the time.Footnote 131 Baldwin was able to contain Conservative criticism of both his leadership and party policy partly because he banned ministers from writing independent journalism. We also know that Conservative Central Office controlled the party's output on radio.Footnote 132 One Conservative writer judged this strategy to be so successful that he believed that Baldwin's administration had ‘anaesthetised Conservatism into a coma’.Footnote 133
It is also true that a minority of the party's most recognized and economically profitable literary stars tended to ignore the established general periodicals in favour of popular magazines and the mass circulation press. Winston Churchill is the best example of a Conservative who wrote mainly for money.Footnote 134 Some of Churchill's articles for newspapers, especially those written for The Daily Telegraph, were genuine contributions to the Conservative thought-world, but he only received adequate attention from the broadsheet press in 1938 and most of his better pieces were sandwiched between those of lesser quality in the popular press.Footnote 135 Churchill's attempt to use the Daily Mail to pressurize the Conservative leadership into reversing its policy on India in the 1930s highlighted his preference for the popular press, but his campaign backfired because the ‘mass circulation papers were simply not influential in shaping the details of the India debate’.Footnote 136 It was political elites who made Indian policy in the 1930s, which is why Churchill's press campaigns missed their target.Footnote 137 Churchill's one serious intervention in Conservative intellectual debate was his Romanes Lecture, which was discussed by Conservatives deep into the 1930s.Footnote 138 But his cousin Shane Leslie, himself a famous writer, did ask him if he would be interested in heading-up the Saturday Review if he could attract the necessary money to buy it:
I want Brendan Bracken & Randolph [Churchill] to come in and make it a masthead for your person. You have already written for it but while you are out of office why not make it your organ if you do not mind sailing under the Silver flag…Think of what the Saturday was when Salisbury wrote for it or when Frank Harris edited it.Footnote 139
Whether Leslie failed to interest the financiers or Churchill rejected the idea out of hand is impossible to say because there is no record of his response in his private papers. But such an enterprise was never going to be as financially rewarding as Churchill's other literary projects and he had direct personal experience of just how difficult it was to run a periodical successfully after his mother's ill-fated purchase of the Anglo-Saxon Review in 1899.Footnote 140
Underneath all this is the fact that Conservatives were by tradition and disposition anti-intellectual. As Lord Derby told Benjamin Disraeli in 1875, Conservatives ‘are weakest among the intellectual classes: as is natural’.Footnote 141 Baldwin clearly valued intelligence and learning, but he still complained that ‘intelligentsia’ was ‘a very ugly word for a very ugly thing’.Footnote 142 Conservative writers and thinkers received encouragement from the party leadership, but the relationship between Conservative leaders and the party's intellectual figures was never as important as it was inside the Labour party. Looking back on the work of the English Review Group, Douglas Jerrold had to admit that his plan to influence the Conservative party failed mainly because the review's subscribers had ignored its agenda. Jerrold believed that some of the politicians and businessmen who attended the English Review luncheons just wanted to be entertained. Jerrold confirmed that for many interwar Conservatives practical politics were prioritized over reading or writing about Conservatism.Footnote 143 Jerrold's argument partly explains why a significant group of Conservative writers found it difficult to influence the majority of the parliamentary party between the wars. Overall, indeed, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no indication that Conservative writing for periodicals had any effect on the party leadership or its policy, which explains why ‘B’ failed to acknowledge the interwar party's ideas and intellectual culture in 1944.
IV
Yet, this is not the whole of the story because the majority of these Conservative writers were young, ambitious, or marginalized MPs who found themselves out of government in the interwar period. Some of them used the periodical press to make their names as serious Conservative thinkers and to position themselves as important players in the party's future. They could do this because they did not have to echo the views of Conservative Central Office in the periodical press as they sometimes did in the mass press or on radio. As a result, some called for new Conservative thinking to secure the party's position as the natural party of government, which meant that they took cognizance of the opposing creeds of the day – socialism and corporatism – and sought to integrate them into Conservatism in novel, radical, or provocative ways.
Noel Skelton's Constructive Conservatism (a work that was made up of articles written for the Spectator magazine) is a particularly good example of how an influential Conservative MP could offer a distinctive intellectual response to the economic and political challenges of the 1920s. Skelton wanted Conservatism to establish a ‘property-owning democracy’, which was meant to secure one of the traditional facets of British Conservatism in a new democratic age.Footnote 144 Skelton and some of the party's younger MPs tried to use the periodical press to pressurize the party leadership into adopting a ‘constructive’ policy in the 1920s. The same was true after 1931. Quintin Hogg was motivated to write a series of articles about how people were abandoning their traditional political and religious beliefs because of their newfound appetite for ‘Fiction, Food, Sex and Drink’.Footnote 145 Hogg argued that the younger generation expected meaningful political change because they had experienced revolutionary changes in politics and society since the First World War.Footnote 146 According to Hogg, the young were becoming more continental, they were adopting extremist views (communist or fascist), and they were embracing Roman Catholicism or ‘Buchmanism’ (the Christian evangelicalism of the Oxford Group).Footnote 147 Douglas Jerrold, Lord Iddesleigh, W. S. Morrison, Hugh Molson, and Lord Cranborne shared Hogg's fears. Jerrold wrote ‘that a very vigorous reaction, economic, artistic, literary, political and (broadly) religious, is in progress’. He argued that writers on the liberal-left, especially members of the Fabian Society, had shaped the intellectual landscape in ways that prevented an older generation of Conservatives from formulating a genuine Conservative response. It was the responsibility of a younger generation of Conservatives to re-think Conservatism for the modern age.Footnote 148
One of those young Conservatives was Iddesleigh who contributed articles to Jerrold's English Review. Iddesleigh lamented the impact of this new climate on British standards of morality. He criticized Harold Nicolson's promotion of D. H. Lawrence's novels on the BBC because he believed that they were blasphemous and perverse.Footnote 149 Such examples encouraged Iddesleigh to accept that religion could no longer safeguard the nation and that more state intervention would be required to guard against ‘this very evil age’.Footnote 150 Similarly, Morrison wrote about a ‘brave new world’ in which economic standards were being used to gauge ‘the worth of men’.Footnote 151 ‘Pigeon clubs, Freemasons, Buffaloes, Oddfellows (with the emphasis on “odd” – in other words, not whelmed in the mass) are all manifestations of a thwarted humanity seeking comfort’, he argued.Footnote 152 Morrison claimed that Conservatism must ‘adapt itself to changed circumstances, as every organism must adapt itself to new environments’.Footnote 153
For Conservatives like Hogg and Molson, this meant embracing corporatism and adapting it to fit British traditions of liberty and parliamentary democracy.Footnote 154 In fact, Molson saw the election of the National government ‘as an invitation to overhaul and replan the whole of our economic and national life’.Footnote 155 But Molson's ideas were too radical for most Conservatives. Iddesleigh wanted to use the state to do ‘protective work’ but he rejected ‘ameliorative work’ because he could not reconcile economic ‘planning’ with the underlining principles of his toryism.Footnote 156 Both Morrison and Cranborne preferred to build on Skelton's legacy from the 1920s. They argued for an increase in the status of the worker, which they hoped to achieve by extending Britain's ‘property-owning democracy’ and industrial co-partnership schemes.Footnote 157
Young Conservative MPs discussed the merits of the party leadership, the strength of the party machine, the importance of the party's rank and file membership, how Conservatives would be best placed to win general elections, how representative the party was of working-class voters, and whether democracy really was a good thing for Britain. Such honesty was at times revealing. Molson wrote disparagingly about the working-class voter and the party's rank and file membership, especially after he failed to win a parliamentary seat at the 1929 general election. While agreeing that Tories had much in common with members of the Labour party, Molson argued that they ‘cannot in any way associate themselves with a Party which relies so largely upon the support of the feckless, the improvident, the loafer and the half-witted’. Molson agreed that the Conservatives were ‘unduly influenced by the possessing classes’, but his antipathy for the industrial working class was not softened by his claim that the Labour party relied ‘upon the support of the lowest section of the community’.Footnote 158 Ironically, Molson's words in the periodical press did him no harm whatsoever because he was elected as MP for the industrial town of Doncaster in 1931.
Nor at this time did Molson think that the Conservative party needed a policy to return to power. His diagnosis of the party's 1929 defeat was a simple one: ‘The error of making “safety first” a slogan at the last election was that John Bull felt it to be a breach of confidence for the Unionist Party to publish to the world for the first time a private and confidential understanding.’Footnote 159 In other words, the Conservatives had been too honest with the electorate. Like Molson, Hogg analysed the party's appeal in the run up to the 1935 election, explaining to his fellow Conservatives that ‘Avarice may be the most powerful motive to which the Labour Party appeals; fear is the trump card of the Conservatives.’Footnote 160 Hogg argued that a policy was not necessary to win the election because the Labour party was doing more than the Conservatives to scare the electorate; Labour was associating itself far more with Bolshevism than the Conservatives were with fascism. Hogg stated confidently that ‘the Conservative Party will be able to face the next General Election with at least three good cries – the fear of dictatorship, the threat to Protection, and last, but not least, the confused and chaotic state of the world outside’.Footnote 161 Hogg's own preference for a ‘forward policy’ was tempered by the public's reaction to Walter Elliot's agricultural marketing schemes: ‘The farmers (which is most unjust) are too stupid to understand that they are likely to gain from the restrictions which are being imposed upon them, and do not appear to be in the least grateful for his activities.’Footnote 162 Hogg also used the periodical press to criticize local Conservative associations for being ‘rotten to the core’ and undemocratic.Footnote 163 But more worryingly, he revealed that Conservative MPs were ‘almost wholly unrepresentative of the working-class votes supporting them’.Footnote 164
Cranborne's writings appeared to be more in tune with Baldwin's liberal-Conservatism because he celebrated the National government's electoral success in 1931 as a victory for British democracy.Footnote 165 ‘When the vote was given to girls of twenty-one, the Carlton Club rang with lamentation and woe’, Cranborne explained, ‘Yet no one would now deny that it is the very fact that it was elected on an unlimited franchise which gives the National Government its greatest strength.’ Cranborne added that ‘unlimited democracy is no longer a child’, which meant that it ‘need no longer be coaxed and bribed’ by the Conservative party.Footnote 166 Cranborne argued that the Conservatives needed to make the electorate (and here he was mainly referring to the industrial working class) conscious of the reasons for its instinctive support for constitutionalism and the ‘forces of stability’.Footnote 167 With words like these, it was perhaps unsurprising that Baldwin made Cranborne joint parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs in 1935.
Young Conservative MPs and intellectuals, as well as senior isolated figures like Churchill were, in a sense, victims of Baldwin's great electoral victory in 1931, because, once elected, the government need not, and did not, listen to them. Their frustration might have led them down alternative, darker paths, toward real right-wing radicalism, but it is arguable that their writing for periodicals allowed them to let off steam, while remaining Conservatives. Historians should not underestimate what Brian Harrison has referred to as ‘the more impersonal social forces which make for stability rather than change’.Footnote 168 Conservatives discussed radical right and fascist views regularly in the periodical press, but few actually went over to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. This may be explained by their ability to indulge in right-wing thinking and aspirations in other ways, within the party-framework. The majority of Conservatives writers ended up committing themselves to mainstream Conservative politics, constitutionalism, and parliamentarianism. As a frustrated interwar radical right journalist later argued, Britain's intellectual culture was incredibly difficult to penetrate in the interwar period because ‘the readers of The Times, the kindred newspapers and the reviews have in any event definite opinions and tendencies of their own, and buy those publications most generally in accordance with them’.Footnote 169 This is why Mosley's newly established periodicals the Fascist Quarterly and British Union Quarterly failed to make much of an impression on the Conservative elite. Most Conservative-leaning periodicals acted as an intellectual barrier to communist and fascist thought in Britain because they mostly encouraged stability rather than change. In this respect, the lack of Conservative elite support for fascism may well have been a cause rather than a symptom of fascism's failure in Britain.Footnote 170
These periodicals were arguably more important than either the right-wing book clubs or Ashridge College for the vital task of sustaining Conservatism as a genuine intellectual and political project, even though these different intellectual approaches overlapped.Footnote 171 The periodical press played a more independent role in the shaping of Conservative opinion than enterprises that were endorsed either officially or unofficially by the Conservative party leadership.Footnote 172 These intellectual enterprises were never focused on influencing the Conservative parliamentary elite, which might partly explain why these projects failed to rival Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club and the Fabian Society in the 1930s.
There was also something important that ‘B’ could not foresee in 1944. Conservative writing for periodicals in the interwar period gave future generations of Conservatives a reservoir of ideas, which they could draw upon in the future. Some of the party's younger writers like Hogg and Molson who had made an impression in the 1930s played important roles in the reforming of Conservative party policy after 1945.Footnote 173 Anthony Eden highlighted the enduring influence of Skelton's thought when he revived the idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’ at the Conservative party's annual conference in 1946.Footnote 174 While Harold Macmillan's contributions to interwar debate meant that he was in a good position to take advantage of the economic and political circumstances of the 1950s. As E. H. H. Green wrote about Macmillan's ideas, ‘the Conservative party was educated into accepting them, in part by the war but largely by the experience of electoral defeat in 1945’.Footnote 175 This was the long-term legacy of interwar Conservative writing for the periodical press. It was always difficult to translate Conservative ideas into practical politics, but what is clear is that Conservative writers worked hard to overturn the image of ‘the stupid party’ in an era of intense, intellectual, and for the most part still unresolved, political debate.Footnote 176
