Some thoughts on the death of Lord Crickhowell

Lord Crickhowell, who died today, was a pivotal figure in the history of modern Wales and without doubt one of the most prominent and important Welsh Conservatives for a generation. As Mrs Thatcher’s opposition spokesman on Welsh Affairs, and then her Secretary of State from 1979-1987, he had a significant hand in directing Wales – and even some form of Welsh identity – in the direction it has travelled in the past few decades. He held a key role in a pre-devolution era when an assertive Welsh Secretary could essentially be a mini-Prime Minister, especially if the real Prime Minister had little care for the nation in question.

As Welsh Secretary, Nicholas Edwards, as he was then, was responsible for rejuvenating Cardiff Bay and making it a successful example of urban renewal. He utilised the Development Board for Rural Wales and the Development Corporation for Wales to good ends. He also – although this will seem odd to many – did more to buttress the nature and the notion of Welsh identity than anyone else who held his position. Ably assisted by his lieutenant Wyn Roberts, a Welsh-speaking Welshman from north west Wales, Edwards made very significant gestures, both symbolic and tangible, to improving the fortunes and the status of Welsh, be it by introducing (under pressure from Gwynfor Evans who was threatening to starve himself to death) S4C, by increasing enormously the funds available for things like bilingual and Welsh publications, by increasing grants to the National Eisteddfod (where he was largely hated), or by rolling out more thorough guidelines on the teaching of Welsh in schools across the land.

He was the Welsh face of Thatcherism in the 1980s, a decade that was a much happier one for the party than the popular imagination might remember (14 parliamentary seats in 1983! One short of the ‘Welsh Tory rugby team’ that Mrs Thatcher had optimistically called for). Over the years, much has been made of the fact that Edwards offered a ‘softer’ version of Toryism, and he certainly had a relatively free hand to be slightly more interventionist in the Welsh economy, creating schemes and ideas like Enterprise Zones. But, ultimately, the continued wind-down of heavy industries carried on in Wales with Edwards in the Welsh Office, and the speed at which this happened without doubt left swathes of people and communities throughout Wales without work, a purpose and a sense of identity. Token nods towards economic diversification and new service-based alternative work simply did not reverse the sense of decline and depression in these places. We have to be careful, then, when thinking and talking about a ‘different’ kind of 80s-style political experience in Wales under Edwards and his team.

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In 2013, when I was first sizing up the project that would eventually become my PhD thesis, I contacted Lord Crickhowell to ask if we could meet and talk. I did so because I knew he was a key figure and also because I wanted to write a case study on Conservatism in his former seat of Pembrokeshire to see if my ideas had enough weight to ensure that the history of the party throughout Wales could be told. I was invited to the House of Lords and proceeded to have what remains one of the most frightening experiences of my research career to date, which has included over 130 similar kinds of interviews and meetings. He was a formidable man: tall, direct, brusque, intense, and with a piercing stare. I realised why so much of the flak he took during his time in government was personal (‘too posh’, ‘too public school’, ‘too Anglicised’): it was easy to transpose these supposedly negative traits onto such an imposing character.

And yet I found him strangely charming. Not only was it very kind of him to offer to give tea in the Lords to a random student who was never a constituent of his because he’d been born four years too late, but he also paid for it, gave me a signed copy of his book, and listened intently to everything I had to say despite some of it being very naïve and banal (in hindsight). He sat in stony silence, hands clasped, staring at his teacup while I outlined what I wanted to talk to him about, before responding in a way that proved he had digested every word. There were no profuse ‘what a pleasure’ greetings or farewells, merely a ‘good to see you’ and a ‘good luck’ at the meeting’s beginning and end. In a world where everyone is ‘delighted’ or ‘thrilled’ to meet you, this was rather nice. When we met again a couple of years later the experience was similar, once I had reminded him for a couple of minutes who I actually was and that we’d met previously.

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His role as Secretary of State was, of course, of great interest to me, but what we spoke about more than anything when we met was his time as the Member of Parliament for the Pembrokeshire seat that was called ‘Pembroke’ but was essentially drawn around the county borders. For me, this was – and still remains – the most interesting part of his career, if only because it was never meant to be. When he won it, Pembrokeshire was not particularly a Tory seat, even though it might have appeared so with its largely Anglicised populace and relatively rural profile. It was once the seat of the (admittedly rightward-leaning) Liberal Gwilym Lloyd George and from 1950-1970 it was held by a Labour MP, Desmond Donnelly. This is where Edwards appeared in the narrative. Donnelly, who had always been a maverick Labour MP, oscillating from one side of a debate to the other, broke with the Labour Party in 1968 and formed his own ‘Democrats’ movement. At the following election in 1970, he stood under this new banner, but Labour fielded its own official candidate in the form of the very likeable and decent school master Gordon Parry. What this meant, therefore, was that Labour-inclined voters had two possible options. Would they stick with their long-term eccentric MP, or with the new official – and local – party candidate? The result was that the Tories, with Edwards carrying their banner, snuck in ‘on the blind side’. Everyone, including the man himself, was shocked. As he told me when we met, he had expected Pembrokeshire to act as the constituency where he ‘cut his teeth’ – but he remained there for the next seventeen years.

How did he hold onto the seat? That was a question that pre-occupied me for a long time, especially when one considered the two 1974 general elections –which were poor results for the party nationally. On those occasions, however, there was no split Labour vote in Pembrokeshire. I think the reason he continued winning there was twofold. Firstly, the profile and demographics of the county were slowly changing and perhaps Pembrokeshire was on course to become a Tory seat regardless. But I also believe that the force of Edwards’ personality and his politics swung key marginal votes in his favour. Between 1970 and 1974 he very deliberately became ‘Mr Pembrokeshire’, which was no mean feat for someone not from a place that has a deep-rooted sense of its own locality. He attended endless farmer’s markets, wrote letter after letter on headed House of Commons paper to local people and businesses, cut ribbons at all sorts of events, and rebelled against his own party’s policy on Local Authority boundaries in an unsuccessful attempt to save Pembrokeshire from being subsumed into ‘Dyfed’: no better action to demonstrate your local, rather than your party political, credentials! He also did things that will sound odd now, but which were crucial to local politics at the time: he always campaigned wearing a red tie and a red rosette, because that was the Conservative colour in Pembrokeshire, not blue as in most other places in Britain. During my research I met and spoke with people who were delighted by such an action and what it signified.

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Many of the tributes to Lord Crickhowell will rightly focus on his big achievements as Secretary of State. I concur with those who think he left a very significant mark on Welsh political life, but as a historian of contemporary politics I find his story as a new MP just as revealing in what it tells us about crucial themes and trends in voting behaviour, such as the power of localism, personal politics, and civic pride. I also find myself oddly sad at his passing, and not because he once bought me some scones. On a personal level, I obviously didn’t know him well enough to decide if liked him or not, but he was certainly a member of a gentlemanly, stoic and plain-speaking generation who said things as they saw them, firmly but politely. When all is said and done, he took a pay cut and entered politics almost certainly because he wanted to do the right thing as he saw it. He had the ability to formulate a bold vision and see it through to a conclusion. If only we could say the same about our current rulers.

The bubble

Virtually no one on my Facebook timeline or twitter feed was advocating leaving the European Union. Many were being actively vocal about wanting to stay, and some had even been out in public trying to convince others to vote their way. But then I move almost exclusively in pro-European circles: young, university educated, liberal in politics and outlook, gay. I also work in similarly enthusiastic circles in academia and spend a bit of time in London, where voting Remain seemed like so obvious a choice that it was a no-brainer.

And yet. I went back to my home town of Haverfordwest a few weeks ago, and I chatted to some old friends in the pub, with their families. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more different, and it was one that friends in other non-London, non-academic places were noticing too. Almost everyone I spoke to was quite adamantly for Leave. I just assumed this was unscientific anecdotal stuff, and stuck to my guns that Remain would win with a 10 point margin, as I had been confidently predicting to the few who would listen.

Yet even before the results, and certainly after them, there was lots of talk of a ‘divide’. There were mutterings of an urban/rural divide, a young/old divide, and a class based one. I don’t think any of this quite hits the mark, however. What it’s really about is a divide between lofty and high-minded liberalism (which I am very much part of), and those who don’t have that outlook. My feel from what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard is that people voted to leave not solely because of immigration, or because of sovereignty, or because of ‘control’, but because of how a blend of these things is often communicated to them in a way that suggests less liberal views aren’t being taken seriously – as if any concern they might have is irrelevant and trifling. Like the Labour MP who took some calls on the radio in Sawley from people concerned about immigration, and, accidentally whilst still on air, complained that the people (who were probably Labour voters) were ‘horrible racists’ and that she was never going back there – ‘wherever this is’.

I’ve said it before, but there is a sense that in the areas in Wales that I work, grew up, and live in, one senses that MPs of all stripes – very much including Labour – would rather not be in the Valleys, but in some leafy Cardiff suburb (or if not in Islington) clutching an iced latte. The fact that this bubble exists and that it is potentially dangerous, was only exacerbated by those on television and on social media yesterday morning who were essentially saying that those who voted out were uninformed, stupid, driven by prejudice, and not thinking straight. My facebook feed at the moment is full of people explicitly saying that others who disagreed with them were not ‘in possession of the facts’ – and that’s one of the milder examples with the least fruity language.

One of the most significant conversations I had at home was with a friend of mine’s dad who is a retiring and pleasant kind of guy – and a plumber – who said he was definitely voting Leave because he felt if he said that his wages had stagnated for ten years partly because of the competition from immigrant labour, he wouldn’t just be ignored – he would be called a bigot, by liberal types. Now, I actually have no idea if what he says is the case or not, but people need to feel like these kind of concerns are being addressed, and that they are at very least being listened to, not dismissed out of hand

But because liberal people like me think we are on the enlightened wing of the argument, we can become peculiarly resistant to thinking less conventionally liberal views might have some clout or some validity, and I really do think that this surprising vote was a real reaction against that more than anything else.

I think it’s also worth saying that the Welsh vote, which lent towards Brexit, is all part of a pattern and a trend that I have been arguing about here and in my work generally for a while: 1) if we want to see this vote as a small ‘c’ conservative reaction against something, then that is entirely compatible with a lot of Labour voting South Wales, which returned very significant Leave votes; 2) If we want to see it as a big ‘c’ Conservative reaction against something, that is also more compatible with Welsh politics than many think. (The one very interesting anomaly was Monmouth, which I don’t know enough about to offer an easy explanation for); and 3) the Welsh vote reflected English trends, and certainly more so than it reflected anything going on in Scotland. On issues like this, I think it is becoming less, not more, relevant to talk about a unique and specific Welsh politics.

Thoughts on the Assembly elections. Did any party have a good night?

Thank goodness I didn’t stay up through the night to watch the election results roll in. I woke up at 6.30 (normal-ish time), and saw much of the excitement happen live anyway. I’m in Hawarden at the moment in the record office there, so I wasn’t willing to sit up into the small hours.

So just some quick observations, informed by a few years of having researched welsh political history, and by a short stint volunteering in the Senedd.

I was quite pleased by the results from the seats of the two female party leaders. I’m not particularly enamoured by the politics of either Kirsty Williams or Leanne Wood, but I think what their victories in Brecon and Radnor, and the Rhondda, both demonstrated was the continuation of a long tradition in Welsh politics: the power of localism. I’ve been writing about this (including in blog form) for a while, and I stand by it. When campaigns are fought on local issues, by entrenched local personalities, the balance can well be tipped. I’m not saying it’s the sole factor that wins a person an election, but in marginal cases, it makes a huge difference. There’s a reason why local Associations from all parties, for decades and decades, have argued for having a ‘local boy’ (and, more recently, ‘girl’) as their candidate. Leanne Wood’s campaign was fought very much on this basis, and this seems to offer a decent explanation as to why Plaid captured Rhondda over and above others (like Llanelli) that it should have won instead.

This is reassuring for anyone who doesn’t particularly like political parties treating areas as natural territories, or fiefdoms. The Conservatives do it in lots of places in England, and the Labour Party is guilty of it in Wales. UKIP, as I have written before, are a symptom of this as well. When people assumed the party was just a home for retired Conservatives who were too conservative for their former political party, lots of people were quite happy to call them out as stuffy old bigots. Now that a lot of the Welsh working class are voting for them, observers, naturally, are being more cautious about what they say.

UKIP, with its plain-talking, no-nonsense political discourse, appeals to people – particularly in industrial south Wales – who don’t like the hand-wringing liberalism of the modern Labour Party, and the discombobulating way it presents its policies. There is a sense that many senior members of the Labour Party in Wales (although not so many, I will admit, from its Assembly contingent) would rather be eating a falafel wrap or goji berry salad somewhere in Islington (or Cyncoed), instead of being in the valleys. One doesn’t get that feeling from UKIP – although we are going to learn more about them in the months to come.

There’s been some chat already about this being a bad night for the Tories, which I think is fair. It wasn’t an ideal night for Labour – which makes me think, again, that Plaid Cymru could have capitalized even more on the fact that the two ‘big’ parties are not on tip-top form.

But, yes – the Conservatives held their constituency seats, which is better than had been predicted in the run-up to polling day. But they still couldn’t take the Vale of Glamorgan, or Cardiff North; seats that have been in their hands as Westminster constituencies for a while now. And they didn’t replicate that Gower shock (or the Vale of Clwyd) that happened last May. Kirsty Williams’ local campaign also easily fought off Conservatives in a seat they hold in Westminster.

I think there are two interpretations about this. One is that whilst Corbyn’s Labour Party are supposedly in turmoil, I happen to think it’s nowhere near as damaging as what’s happening to the Conservative Party nationally at the moment. Not only is the parliamentary party fundamentally split over quite a big issue, the majority of grass-roots activists and supporters are – what’s the polite term? – cheesed off with the way the party’s leadership have handled the issue of the EU referendum. I know, because I talk to them for my research quite a lot. They are furious with David Cameron’s smoke and mirrors methods, and on maters like this they don’t particularly distinguish between the central party, and its devolved cousin. Yesterday’s election acted as a mini-referenda on how the party is doing, therefore, and voters said ‘hmm, not great’.

The second interpretation I have goes against the conventional wisdom of many political commentators and historians. I have just submitted a review of Kenneth Morgan’s very good collection of essays Revolution to Devolution, in which I took issue with his assertion that devolution has been the making of the Conservative Party in Wales. I think that many potential Tory voters actually think of the party as most suited to, and most competent in, a Westminster setting, which isn’t particularly related to devolution. They’re happy to send Conservatives to the British parliament, but less willing to trust them to be good in the fundamentally ‘Welsh’ setting. When crucial ‘swing’ voters come to cast their vote in somewhere like the Vale of Glamorgan, they think Conservatives most suit the parliament that is based in England and represents Britishness, and that the Labour Party is more suitable for a Welsh institution.

This is logical, is it not? The Conservatives represent Britishness and, to an extent, Anglicised influence in Wales. They have done historically, and despite efforts to move away from that image, they are almost certainly still supported by those who aren’t particularly enthusiastic about devolution.

But these are all just thoughts, composed very quickly from the Flintshire record office car park during a lunch break. I’d welcome disagreement.

I try quite religiously to update this blog every month. I have just realise that I would’ve failed to do so this February if the leap year hadn’t come to my rescue. The reason I’ve gone quiet has, ironically, been due to doing so much writing elsewhere.

Most of that effort has been spent on the PhD thesis and its chapters. Wow – it is difficult work. I have written quite consistently throughout my two and a half years as a research student, but up to this point it has largely been a case of: put thoughts on paper; refine later.

My brother is a chemical engineer and works in an oil refinery, and has always told me that he, unlike me, does a proper and strenuous job. Well, I can now doff my cap to him. I understand his pain: refining is very tricky indeed.

There is something sad about this process aside from the fact that it’s difficult. It’s not just that writing requires a particular type of exhaustive concentration, or that you finish a day feeling like the work is worse than when you started and that you are your own worst enemy, nor indeed that after reading a chapter three or four times it becomes almost impossible to see what’s in the wrong place, and what isn’t. (Is this just me who thinks these things?)

No – the saddest thing is that my research is in its twilight period; the Autumn of its years. Maybe I shouldn’t say this because I don’t really want the word to get out, but researching Conservative Party history must be one of the greatest joys (in practical terms) in the field of historical research.

What else could take you so regularly to such an array of brilliant places – to the truly magnificent Bodleian Library in Oxford,  or on semi-regular trips to the Palace of Westminster? And to all of those underrated but always friendly and mostly atmospheric record offices dotted around the country. For Welsh Tory history, there are worse places to spend a day than in the Denbigh Archives in Ruthin’s old gaol. And I do have a real soft spot for the National Library of Wales, sitting up on its hill overlooking beautiful Aberystwyth.

This is quite a shallow, looks-based point of view. I understand that. But I do think that if you are going to travel somewhere to spend a week locked away amongst the grime and the dust and the parcel string and the yellow-ing newspaper clippings, it might as well be in an oak-panelled room with stained glass windows and ancient portraits hanging on the walls. I know of academics who say, for example, that they can’t stand Oxford, or the Bodleian Library. I don’t believe them!

Of course it’s not just about the aesthetics. If these places were of no use to my research, I wouldn’t go there. But they offer the double joy of housing excellent collections, whilst making you feel like a real and proper historian beavering away in what must be some of the most scholarly environments in the country. I’m sure there’s some theoretical work somewhere on the subject of how the physical environment affects mental capacities. I’ve got better things to do than to read it, but I think the general notion is true, and I might go back to some of these locations just to write there.

And in doing so I can pretend that I’m still doing the fun bit of the PhD – the bit that, in all fairness, has lasted for a very long and indulgent period and for which, even if nothing comes of it (‘nothing comes from nothing’, my scientific brother might tease),  I will be forever grateful for having had the opportunity to do so.

Reds Under the Beds: Party Politics and Colour in West Wales

Anyone vaguely interested in current affairs will associate most political parties with a colour. Labour are red, the Tories blue, the LibDems yellow etc. But, as this brilliant piece demonstrates, that was not always the case. In some constituencies – usually in ones on the geographical peripheries – local party colours trumped the more conventional national ones, and they continued to do so until very recently.

And lo and behold, the same applied in Wales. This is not a new avenue of research on my part, more a filling in of a few gaps with some anecdotal examples from my own research. But I would like to ask what the discussion around local party colours tells us about how the public and politicians view ‘issues’. Should we speak of politics in the micro or the macro sense; the local drains or the latest foreign policy decisions?

Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire defied conventional colour schemes well into the twentieth century. Blue denoted the Liberal Party, and the Conservatives wore red. I have never unearthed a full and frank explanation as to why, although I like the suggestion that it comes from the fact that when the parties had their headquarters in Carmarthen, Liberals were based on Blue Street, and the Tories on Red Street. Another suggestion is that the House of Dynevor, an old Tory family, had red as its official colour, while the Whig House of Golden Grove rallied under a blue flag.

The ambiguities of these colours was picked up by the Welsh and local press. In 1974 the Western Mail wrote that in Carmarthen a ‘true-blue tradition makes the Tories look right Reds’. At the same time in Pembrokeshire, a reporter noted that the Conservative candidate Nick Edwards wore ‘a rosette the size of a small dinner plate, exactly matching his scarlet tie (I still can’t get used to the idea of ‘True Blue Tories’ being reds under the beds in Wild West Wales)’. It’s worth noting that this reporter was not from Pembrokeshire but was, as they like to say down there, ‘an outsider’.

As time wore on, I think some people were probably rather confused by all of this, but others considered it an essential. I met a Conservative supporter in Pembrokeshire a while ago who still wears a red tie during election time. His grandmother once met John Major, and dressed up for the occasion by dressing from head to toe in red. (Major apparently commented on how nice it was to see her sporting the local Conservative hue – he’d been well briefed).

This grandmother would apparently go up to people where she lived on the Pembrokeshire/Cardiganshire border and demand to know ‘Ydych chi’n goch neu yn las?’ – Are you red or blue? – and they would know what she meant. Why is it that this happens in places like rural West Wales, as well as areas of Cornwall, East Anglia, Durham and the Scottish border?

I fear I am wading into controversial waters here, but I would at least like to preface this by saying that I don’t make such judgments from some urban sophisticate’s Ivory Tower. I was born and raised in Pembrokeshire, and am very proud to say so. The county is parochial, however. Its place at the ‘end of the line’ is not just a geographical positioning. Here, as in other parts of West Wales, politics is local. And this is a key theme of any history of a political party.

It is remarkable, looking back, at the extent to which Nick Edwards tried to ingratiate himself with his constituency after he was elected in 1970 on a thin majority which was likely to disappear. He rebelled against the government to oppose unpopular local government restructuring; he devoted all of his time to improving locals schools, and hospitals, and roads, and streetlights. His politics, at the beginning at least, was Pembrokeshire red, not Westminster blue.

When the parties chose candidates in Cardiganshire or Carmarthenshire, the one essential quality was that they were local people, with local connections. Hence the Conservatives often went with local farmers, if indeed they could find local people willing to stand.

The Western Mail used to do a fantastic series of special reports from various constituencies at each election. Their well-connected and perceptive correspondent David Rosser would tour Wales and write about the personalities and the issues in each area. The most striking thing is that in the Cardiff constituencies, or the tourist-y North Wales coast, or in Swansea ‘national issues dominate’. Not so in rural West Wales, where personality and local politics were the order of the day.

As with everything else I write about, nuance and subtlety is often needed. When asking, for example, how much ‘the Welsh Question’ meant for voters in Wales, the answer is that it depends entirely on which region you are looking at. In North West Wales, the politicisation of the Welsh language, Welsh broadcasting, and representation by a Secretary of State were hot topics in the post-War era. In Monmouth, however, they mattered not a jot. Similarly, the politics of rural Wales reflected the inescapable fact that people on the whole looked inwards here, more than outwards.

How and why the Conservatives did or did not fall into line with this mentality (failing spectacularly in Cardigan; seizing the opportunity in Pembrokeshire) is another part of the tale – it involves more than what obscure colour a candidate wore on their chest, although that was a decent place for them to start.

Another article

I have written an article for the Conservative History Journal, which can be bought here – https://conservativehistory.wordpress.com/join-us/  – if anyone is interested.

My piece concerns the events surrounding the time when Cardiff South East Conservative Association chose the strangest possible parliamentary candidate ever in the form of Ted Dexter. Dexter had no real knowledge of politics, but he was chosen to fight the Labour heavyweight James Callaghan. The seat was a marginal one at the time, so this wasn’t even a hopeless punt.

The article explores how the local Association did this, why they did it, and how events ended up panning on. Spoiler: it was disastrous.

I loved writing this article – more than anything else I’ve written so far for journals, newspapers, think tanks etc. It was such good fun to dog through the archives to work out what really happened, and I was lucky to correspond with Dexter himself, too.

I hope people get a chance to read it.

Flintshire and Denbighshire: the archives and the aura

I spent last week in North Wales, doing my very best to ensure that my final thesis has as little geographical bias in it as possible when I provide working examples of the Conservative Party in Wales. So I went to the Flintshire and the Denbighshire Record Offices, which are located in Hawarden and Ruthin, respectively.

I’ve said it many times in these blog posts, and I’ll say it again: it’s worth studying the Conservative Party purely for the archives and the other places to go for your primary material. How many PhDs are constructed from the fruits of labouring in the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Houses of Parliament, the National Library of Wales, and all these fantastic little record offices scattered around the country? Flintshire’s Record Office was in a wonderful old building, whose reading room was all big bay windows, and views of the gardens, and portraits on the wall. In Ruthin, the archive is inside the old gaol! You walk through narrow stone corridors to reach the reading room, and several of the study facilities are in former cells. It’s fantastic. Most unfortunately, I got everything I needed to do here done! With the Bodleian, where I will never totally finish seeing everything that might be of interest, I will always have an excuse to return. Sadly, I probably won’t go back to Ruthin gaol.

As ever, neither of these archives were a let down in terms of their content deposited material, wither. They provided me with the usual anecdotal and analytical research nuggets. But I also got a different form of education while I was there. I’m very much a south Wales man, despite many parts of the north being childhood holiday destinations and therefore some of my favourite places in the world. I grew up in Pembrokeshire, lived for years in Cardiff, and now work in Swansea. I have no intrinsic feeling about the society or the culture of north Wales as I do with these areas.

But working in Hawarden and Ruthin for a week, strolling around the towns, eating in the cafes, and talking to some of the locals (and one of the area’s former MPs Robert Harvey), at least gave me the smallest of flavours about these places. I need this kind of experience, because large swathes of both counties were significant Tory territory in post-War Wales. Denbigh was the seat of Geraint Morgan, and West Flint of Nigel Birch and then Sir Anthony Meyer. These two seats stayed Conservative in 1966 – along with Barry – when all else fell to Labour, including Monmouth and Cardiff North.

I know when I walk around Pembrokeshire, or the northern suburbs of Cardiff, or parts of western Swansea why these places might have been areas where the Conservative Party could find success. They tick many of the boxes: material signs of relative affluence, pleasant housing etc. Similarly, it is easy to understand why the once industrial eastern end of Swansea, or the docks in the south of Cardiff, never lent Conservatives enough votes to mean the party could represent them in Westminster.

Places like Hawarden and Ruthin ooze the kind of qualities that one naturally associated with Conservative representation. Walking around the centre of Ruthin and snacking on the produce from the lovely bijou delicatessen I felt like I could have been in deepest middle England: in, say, Whitney, or a Berkshire market town.

This is hardly an academic analysis. The interviewee who I met for a drink and a chat put it rather opaquely, but, simply enough for anyone to understand, when I asked him who his core voters were in this part of Denbighshire. He gesticulated in the direction of Ruthin town square outside the window and said ‘these kinds of people’.

I think one has to know this kind of thing to do a good political history – like the one I am attempting. I now have a tiny but invaluable bit of experience about one or two of the settlements that were probably contributing to Conservative Party success in Wales, even in, and especially during, its darker hours. Whilst the archival material, the ‘hard facts’, and the experiences of people is what should rightly drive my conclusions, I think I am all the better for having gone and experienced what these places are like, and the kind of atmosphere and aura they give off. Why people vote for parties, after all, is the end result not just of their rational thoughts and their dispassionate weighing up of what’s on offer. It is also very much about political socialisation – in other words, class and how you identify with a party you think represents you, your area, and your community. The fact that Conservatives tend to represent places like these tells us a great deal about the party, and its voters.

Western Mail article on Welsh Tory politicians

I have written an article about Conservative politicians who have Welsh roots, focusing particularly on Lords Howe, Heseltine and Howard.

Here it is:  http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-senior-tory-10333334

I wrote this before Geoffrey Howe died. I met him two years ago, and  when I did all that had been written about him being a gentleman seemed true to me. We didn’t have the best of interviews. I was working off no sleep, and he was very frail. It was precisely because of that, though, that I learnt a great deal from the meeting. He didn’t divulge any gems for my research, but I learnt about how age eventually trumps power. He could have been any elderly gentleman, without an ego, or without any sense of having once been one of the most powerful men in the land. Considering how frail he was when we spoke, the fact that he made time for me was the most moving thing of all.

History tells us that the ‘centre ground’ of politics is meaningless

I have always quite liked the idea of doing a project on political ideologies vis-à-vis the Conservative Party. I am suspicious of the suggestion that the Conservative Party of the past 65 years did anything really driven by Conservatism: they argued very little about the welfare state, or the permissive reforms of the 1960s, or indeed against European integration: it was the Conservatives who wanted to join the European Community in the first place, and under Mrs Thatcher’s leadership campaigned vigorously to stay in it during the mid-1970s.

What also made me think about this general topic was the recent talk on the subject of Jeremy Corbyn, and his apparent recent success. I only want to focus on one aspect of this here, and that is the rather bizarre talk about the ‘centre ground’ of politics – and indeed how Corbyn is dangerously unelectable for straying so far from this supposed hallowed turf.

And before anyone thinks that I am going wildly off-piste here, I really do believe that the conclusions I draw below are conditioned by a mind-set I have developed as a result of spending so much of my academic life with the documents and the thoughts of people from the past. This experience has helped me spot the pitfalls and weaknesses of this sort of political jargon.

There is a general consensus amongst the chattering classes, many liberally minded newspaper columnists (take, for example, David Aaronovitch, who wrote an open letter to young people as his column for The Times recently begging them not to support ‘JC’), and the ‘mainstream’ political parties that current political practices are automatically desirable because they must be moderate and because they emanate from a centrist position.

But what about ‘liberal intervention’ (AKA military attacks) in the affairs of other sovereign nations, for example? The 2003 invasion of Iraq; the bombing of what is now the failed state of Libya; the air raids on Syria which feel like they are just waiting to happen. Corbyn has been opposed to all these ghastly adventures on what many people would probably consider perfectly moderate grounds: we don’t know who our enemies are in these places; bombs don’t discriminate between the guilty and the innocent; we are acting in exactly the way that the enemy portrays us in their narrative. All very reasonable and relevant points, I would say.

And yet this stance is part of the reason Corbyn is portrayed as a bit of a loony leftie. Aaronovitch in that Times column I mentioned above did just so. Just because most of the Conservative Party, most of the Labour Party and some of what is left of the Liberal Democrat Party are gung-ho for military action, what necessarily makes this moderate?

Nationalisation of the railways is another example. Could it perhaps be fair to argue that whilst in many industries competition and the profit motive are sound economic ideas, that on train lines where one operator runs one service, therefore making the notion of competition redundant, the system could be operated (theoretically) for the public through public ownership – and possibly at a much lower eventual cost? But again, the ‘centre ground’ isn’t on that particular page, therefore amongst much of the elite who wield the power and make the decisions, it’s not a good idea.

There is a peculiar lack of critical thought going on here. And we need to turn to history to re-think some ideas about the very nature of continuity and change.

As much as this might surprise many people, the two major political parties were pretty much singing from the same hymn-sheet throughout the post war period. Denis Healy, the former Labour Chancellor, admitted this, arguing that nationalisation was the only major policy areas where the two parties had serious ideological differences.

And yet how much of that centrist agenda (and from the archives one sees the concept and the notion of ‘centrist’ politics cropping up again and again) do we now look upon with horror? What about our general modern consensus on the death penalty? What about before Leo Abse’s Private Members Bill to decriminalise homosexual acts in private, when such behaviour was considered by much of the mainstream as abhorrent, or at least unpleasant? To suggest that gay people should be allowed to marry in a church in the 1960s would have been the subject of the most intense ridicule – from the centre.

We have to be open to the idea that in 50 years’ time some of our political practices and mainstream ideas from 2015 will probably receive just as much ridicule. It would be to display the most outrageous arrogance to claim that somehow we have reached the pinnacle of sophistication and discovery and enlightenment. Many things supported by the centre ground now will be seen as hopelessly stupid in 50 years’ time – unless we are the first generation ever in human history to make no mistakes. This is why it is always dangerous to dismiss someone for not conforming to the trendy positions of the moment. (And whilst Corbyn is trendy amongst a lot of the public, amongst the liberal political classes, he clearly is not).

This is all about the definition of ‘moderate’ and ‘centre’. And definitions are fluid, and, in political contexts, often flawed. Just because something is labelled in a certain way, it is important to ask if that label stands up to scrutiny. As it happens, I do think that Corbyn is wrong about many things, not least his attitude to the IRA. But I reasoned that out, concluding that he may also be on the right side of history on other matters – like bombing campaigns against badly identified enemies.

If someone had stood on a platform during the 1955 General Election, for example, and argued for open borders to and for all European countries, for the closure of coal-fired power stations on environmental grounds, for same sex marriage, for gender neutral pronouns, they would have been considered on the extremist fringe. Similarly, if a ‘moderate’ from 1955 had stood on a platform at the 2015 General Election and talked about the evils of divorce, the moral duty of colonial government, for the justifiable criminalisation of homosexual acts etc., they would be equally castigated. ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. One day that will be applied to much of today’s conventional wisdom.

I think it is healthy that a politician challenges so much of the consensus. Labels are a fad, and I think many of the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn don’t fully grasp that.

The Social as the Political: thinking about Con Clubs

Two archival coincidences have been making me think at length about how important the social and socialising element in political life is – or more accurately, was. I spent a day in the lovely South Wales Miners’ Library a few weeks ago looking through the contents of the old Salisbury Conservative Club in Swansea. The place has been closed down, so things like its book collections, its folders of receipts, and all its old signs and photographs have had to go somewhere. It’s a great collection, more full of memories and a sense of a recent but lost past than most source collections I have looked at.

Similarly, a recent trawl through old constituency Association minute books in Aberystwyth demonstrated the importance of these Con Clubs to local finances and support. When these Associations met, ‘the Clubs’ were always on their minds and on their agendas.

The interesting question is how ‘political’ these Con Clubs were. Were they fundamentally integrated with the local Conservative Party, or was it simply a matter of them sharing, perhaps uneasily, the same name?

What has survived from the Salisbury Con Club would suggest that this was an organisation completely bereft of politics. OK, more of the books from its reading room are of a political flavour than perhaps one would expect, but they are not overtly party political, they cover a wide variety of subjects, from travelling to philosophy, and the evidence suggests that people (mostly men) met in the club to drink and play billiards. Annual outings were organised to the Newbury races, and to Ilfracombe – via boat. Not to party conferences.

There are plenty of examples of political meeting being held at Clubs in Wales, but with most of the patrons refusing to even walk up the stairs to the meeting on the first floor, opting to stay downstairs in the bar. In Cardiff, Skittle competitions were held between the Clubs, the Executive Committees and the Conservative ‘Organisations’. This kind of activity, along with card games and snooker tournaments, constituted the core purpose of Conservative clubs.

So the politics in Con Clubs was rarely of an explicit or outwardly enthusiastic nature. But sources like minute books reveal the key – and arguable more powerful – role that Con Clubs could play: as implicit buttresses for the local party. In all areas of the country, clubs paid subscriptions to the relevant local Conservative Association. In April 1947 the Penarth Cub told the Executive Committee of Cardiff South East that it actually wanted to double its subscriptions!

The Clubs, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s were asked by Associations to push the political message to their patrons. Prospective Parliamentary candidates would visit to meet people there, and at election time the buildings themselves were often used as campaign headquarters and venues for hustings or speeches. In areas where there were weak Conservative organisations, like in the ‘Valley’ areas of Aberdare and the Rhondda, the Clubs provided the vital (and usually free) office space for skeleton staff during general election campaigns.

But it was not just through the clubs that social activity could be utilised to drum up political support. Political meetings were often arranged by the Conservative Party in Wales in conjunction with concerts and dances. Fetes were by far the biggest fundraisers for Local Associations, but they were not nakedly political. It is hard to believe that people went to such events, however, without some understanding that the event was geared towards politics in some sort of way. ‘Big name’ individuals often opened such occasions, and spoke on the theme of the Conservative Party. Lord Woolton, the Party’s popular Chairman from 1945 to 1955, was considered a good catch for such events.

Fusing the social with the political, but with such lightness of touch, was key to building up a level of support amongst people who were not necessarily keen and eager paid-up party members, but who may have been willing to lend the party their vote on polling day. Cardiff North, once the most successful Conservative seat in Wales, threw many a fete and bazaar, raising hundreds and hundreds of pounds each time. As anyone involved with political organisation ‘on the ground’ will know, money often equals success.

All of this talk about fayres and billiard-playing club members seems so quaint and otherworldly now. The thought that an event organised by a political party would attract hundreds of people who turned up and willingly gave their money for (including in times of austerity) is laughable in the context of the early twenty-first century. As I have written here before, this is undoubtedly down to apathy and a political system which no longer represents real people with real concerns. But perhaps it also has something to do with what I’ve been discussing above. With wealth and luxury came individualism. People are far less likely to socialise in contemporary Britain now they have various gadgets and the TV for company instead. For my generation, paying to be part of a social club, or attending events like fayres (or whatever their modern day equivalent is) to meet people seems like an eccentricity, akin to church-going. Being part of tightly knit social groups, which were often organised under the banner of politics as a means of co-ordination, is now rare. Perhaps the extent to which political parties relied on this has been underestimated, and therefore the decline in the bonds of real social friendships and social interactions has consequently weakened them as much as the dearth of real ideas and ideology has. I don’t know why we aren’t more worried about this.