The Conservative Party, which was finally pronounced dead from multiple unnatural causes on July 5 2024, was born in 1832. It was the product of an alliance between the Tory party (established in the 1680s) and members of the rival Whig party. Both wanted to defend the existing political and social order against the advocates of radical reform.
Strange as it might now appear, the party was once very popular and respected, even by its opponents. Educated at Eton and Oxford, it established a reputation for governing competence which allowed it to bounce back from serious setbacks, notably the landslide Labour victory of 1945. However, success came at a cost.
From an early age, the party had to accommodate the kind of changes which it had been set up to resist. Founded to preserve the social and political influence of the aristocracy, in its declining years it ended up exhibiting animosity towards that very same group. Having long subsisted on dubious financial contributions, at the very end it was rumoured to be eking out a living by .
The Conservative party could not prevent the introduction of universal suffrage, which its original leaders had . Logically, the arrival of democracy in the years after the first world war, and the spread of the franchise beyond the most wealthy citizens, should have brought the party’s life to a . It owed its survival, as the main electoral opponent of the Labour Party, chiefly to an ill-timed and between the Liberal leaders H.
H. Asquith and D.
