It is one of the enduring curiosities of the historiography of British politics in the First World War that the victor should have been overlooked. This is not to say that the Conservative Party has exactly evaded scholarly attention, but its prominence is the opposite of that of many aspects of the war, where “blotting paper, rather than yet further ink, is called for” (12). Compared to the ex post facto scrutiny directed to the Labour Party, with a single member in government and only thirty-seven in Parliament at all, and the unending inspection of the Liberal Party in its last substantive role in office for nearly a century, the Conservative Party in 1914–18 has been rather underserved. It is doubly ironic, given that the party came electorally to dominate the rest of the century on the basis of the foundation offered by the war. The Party of Patriotism is an attempt to remedy the “over-representation in historical literature of the Labour and Liberal Parties” (1) by considering for the first time as a monograph “the only party not to split over the commitment to war” (100).

John Stubbs alone, in an article now forty years old, concerned himself with the subject. Both Robert Blake’s histories of the party from Peel to whoever happened to be the current leader and John Ramsden’s rather more assiduous volumes were necessarily too broad in scope to do justice to four years, and the slew of political biographies did little to position the party in its context. Pace George Dangerfield, Nigel Keohane considers the prospects of the party before the war: whether it would be likely to win the next election or that it was threatened by the transformation of the world around it. He also successfully counteracts “the historiographical tendency to dismiss the contribution of the coalition” (210). Excluded from government completely until May 1915, and then only relatively peripherally involved until December 1916, the Tories developed “a recusant fortitude” (39) that allowed them to wait on the outcome of events they themselves were shaping. “The war gave a strong boost to the idea of one-nation Conservatism” (110) and was an end in itself. It required little more than patriotism: an emotional, yet innately practical, response that both “ensured the unity of the party” (209) and was “the major assault weapon against the party’s political opponents” (211). The head and heart of the electorate were thereby engaged by an alluring mix of self-interest and sentimentalism. This “new and comprehensive look at the coherence, vitality and continuity of Conservative thought” (6) is constructed through six chapters about how Conservatives conceived of, and coped with, war, politics, and military strategy when “autumn 1914 offered a glimpse of what the war would not look like” (16); the “short-term expedient” (67) of coalition and leadership; how the war transformed its Unionism and the “lurid double-standard” (85) of defending the rights of Ulster in a self-governed Ireland but not of Ireland within the Union; how, using patriotism and antisocialism, the “various themes of anti-pacifism were harmonized into polyphonic song” (119); once again successfully manipulating the “safety valve” (137) of electoral reform; and, finally, being unable ultimately to resist the seduction of the “moral authority of the state” (174) in regard to the ad hoc but, as it turned out, permanent construction of its apparatus.

The author is generous with references to other historians, identifying disagreement, and tending to split the difference: as Asquith might have put it, he is a moderating, intermediate body. The book is measured where there has been exaggeration, dealing in a conspicuously balanced way with the impact of coalition, attitudes to wartime intervention, the subsequent drive for budgetary contraction, and reconstruction more generally: “the party did not close its eyes or ears to wartime developments but deliberated upon them” (214). The book benefits in its belatedness in being able to take advantage of the linguistic turn and considers language as much as maneuver, as well as recognizing when language was both, such as when patriotism was a dialogue with the electorate to exclude socialism. Again, the Conservatives were “fortunate that the timing of the conflict provided such a fruitful counter to the Labour Party” (121), allowing them to undermine nascent opponents. The book’s own language is measured; it is written with a brisk clarity and a gift for compression. Its sources are as broad as such a volume would need them to be, and it is as attentive to the expressed views of constituency chairmen as to those in Westminster: the footnotes are a monument to a national tour of county record offices. Mild concern may be felt when a single minute or comment from a local association is presented as evidence of what the party felt, but substantial issues are certainly substantiated. Structures, processes, and the alphabet soup of ginger groups, are particularly well served, and if the leading individuals fail to leap off the page, that further serves to demonstrate a more balanced focus (as well as a party lacking quite the charismatic, if dysfunctional, characters of those it displaced).

The Party of Patriotism does little to transform the settled sense that there were very good reasons why the Conservative Party was a party that looked like it had done well out of the war. Its patriotism was also pragmatic, and it accepted total war while realizing that it would be of limited duration. This important book does so, however, through scrupulously assessing the accumulated related studies and with material acquired from a deep mining of manuscript collections. Most important of all, it does so with nuance, a refreshing experience when revisiting a period, and at times a historiography, of immoderation. A person interested in the Conservative Party and the First World War has been singularly ill served ever since the armistice; no longer.