In October 1968, Britain’s most famous fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, published his memoirs. His autobiography, My Life, attracted substantial coverage and broadly favourable reviews in several British newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Telegraph.Footnote ¹ These featured many examples of the kind of myths, misconceptions, and apologias that have come to shape Mosley’s place in Britain’s national memory. Reviewers excused Mosley of the charge of being personally anti-semitic and remained silent on Mosley’s white supremacist rabble-rousing against Commonwealth migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. They wrote of him as a proto-Keynesian economist, a kind of Icarus of mid twentieth-century British politics; an intellectually vibrant, prophetic, and ambitious political thinker but one who, regrettably, flew too close to a swastika shaped sun.

By the time of the publication of his autobiography, Mosley was 71. The book represented his latest effort at political writing, part of a long campaign to present himself as a serious and respectable political philosopher. Of all of Britain’s fascist leaders, Mosley nursed literary and intellectual pretensions most intensely. Around his British Union of Fascists (BUF), Mosley created several national and local party newspapers, publishing imprints, and pseudo-scholarly journals. Mosley also authored a series of books, manifestoes, and pamphlets himself, while recordings of Mosley’s speeches were available for purchase to his adoring followers. Nor was this just about Mosley. Alongside their literary ‘Leader’– equal parts man of action and man of letters – the BUF attracted others with literary ambitions, as well as established writers.

In this chapter, we consider the genres, formats and styles of the political writings and literary culture of British fascism. We contend that a study of the published output of British fascist organisations, their aesthetic and cultural performance of words and texts, and their construction of a British fascist culture illuminates the ways in which fascism in Britain than is normally assumed. The chapter maintains that British fascism was more than a straightforward imitation of continental fascism. Moreover, it demonstrates that far from being rooted in a fascist parallel political universe, British fascism was rooted in what we would recognise as mainstream British politics, culture, and history.

The literary activities and pretensions of Britain’s fascists have largely been overlooked. In the 2004 collection The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, the editors remarked that ‘[t]he empirical approach’ to the study of British fascism ‘has constructed a narrative of the far Right’s political marginality, personal eccentricity and quirkiness, and “otherness”’.Footnote ² Two decades on, the field of ‘fascist studies’ remains in this empirical rut. With some exceptions, much of the historical writing on British fascism has treated the movement as distinct from Britain’s political culture and its broader history.Footnote ³ Taking this methodological approach and focusing on genres of political writing, and juxtaposing British fascist writing with that of other political hues, should persuade us that Britain’s fascism did not, in fact, occupy a parallel political universe.

The aforementioned Culture of Fascism collection responded to the then recent ‘cultural turn’ in fascist studies. Where subsequent studies departed from studying fascism through this lens, either preoccupied with psephological analyses of fascist electoral performance or else with hiving off fascist movements as isolated political subcultures, this chapter seeks to revive the ‘joined-up’ approach to the study of British fascism pioneered by historians of political culture. It builds upon the small collection of studies that have focused on the print culture and public relations strategy of the British fascist movement and broader ‘radical Right’.Footnote ⁴ It shares the conviction behind David Vessey’s recent work that we should think about the political right in inter-war Britain as a broad formation, in which the fascist press overlapped with ‘radical Right’ periodicals like the Saturday Review as well as more respectable national newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express.Footnote ⁵

Tracing the continuity and genealogy of political ideas is an important part of developing our understanding and analysis of British fascism in innovative, critical, and, above all, actually interesting directions. Thinking in terms of ‘genealogy’, political writing formed the branches and sinews that linked together the political ‘family tree’ out of which British fascism sprouted and developed. Political writing was central to the British fascist movement, both in terms of the political writing activists did themselves and the political writing that they consumed. This chapter focuses partly on the production and consumption of political writing by Mosley’s inter-war British Union of Fascists. It also traces the longer history of British fascism, beginning with the BUF’s ideological forerunners, the British white supremacist and reactionary groups of the 1920s, including the anti-semitic literary society The Britons, Britain’s first self-identifying fascist organisation, the British Fascisti (BF), and the Imperial Fascist League, which broke away from the BF in the late 1920s.

Political Writing and the Emergence of British Fascism

In the case of British fascism, political writing preceded the political movement. What became the British fascist movement during the early 1920s was forged out of three overlapping ‘genres’ of political writing: die-hard Conservative political periodicals, anti-semitic conspiracy theory literature, and ‘white crisis’ literature.Footnote ⁶ ‘Die-hard’ Conservatism refers to a ‘fragmented movement of opinion’ comprising Conservative MPs, peers, and party supporters concerned with the preservation of ‘traditional’ authority, aristocratic privilege, and the preservation of the Empire.Footnote ⁷ The Die-hards were deeply dissatisfied with the performance of David Lloyd George’s second coalition government, especially when it came to crises in Ireland, India, and Egypt. The radical Right was horrified and mobilised by the Bolshevik Revolution and preoccupied with fears of the ‘Reds’ and ‘Pinks’ closer to home. By the time of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922, this section of opinion was hungry for something of a more assertively reactionary flavour when it came to the home front and the imperial frontier.

For this radical wedge of die-hard reaction, dissatisfaction became a full-blown panic about a civilisational crisis with the arrival in Britain of an English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the infamous (and famously bogus) anti-semitic outline of Jewish world plot – in the autumn of 1919. The English manuscript of The Protocols was initially delivered to H. A. Gwynne, editor of the die-hard daily newspaper, the Morning Post, who shared it with Lady Bathurst, the Morning Post’s proprietor, and his friend and mentor, Rudyard Kipling, as well as with several others.Footnote ⁸ During the summer of 1920, this led to the publication of ‘The Cause of the World Unrest’, a serialised exposé in Morning Post of the contents of The Protocols that offered a decidedly imperialist interpretation of a document that ostensibly had little to do with the British Empire. Contributors to the series included Gwynne; another member of the Morning Post’s staff named Ian Colvin; the so-called ‘grand dame of British conspiracy theory’, the writer Nesta Webster; and several others.Footnote ⁹

At around the same time, Britain’s first white supremacist organisation came into being. The Britons was founded in 1919. Its founder was an ex-soldier, former Ceylon tea-planter, and southern African settler-farmer, Henry Hamilton Beamish, and beyond Beamish the organisation consisted of a rag-tag group of ex-servicemen, ex-imperial administrators, imperial explorers, itinerant colonial labourers, and eugenicists. The group held its inaugural meeting on 18 July 1919, although its leading members often repeated the lie that it had been founded earlier to give the impression it had emerged out of the patriotic fervour of the First World War. In ideological terms, The Britons were pre-fascist; to call them ‘proto-fascist’ feels narrowly teleological. They were not simply a British forerunner of Mussolini. Rather, they represented a fusion of experiences and prejudices acquired as a result of British settler-colonialism, late nineteenth-century imperialist anti-semitism energised by the South African War, and the influence of American racist and conspiracy theorist literature by ‘Nordicist’ writers like eugenicist and conservationist Madison Grant and moustachioed Klansman Lothrop Stoddard.

Estimates of membership, based on records of average attendance at the meetings The Britons held, range from 30 to 50 members. Additionally, Special Branch officers estimated that their newspaper enjoyed a circulation of about 150 a month.Footnote ¹⁰ Though tiny, the group played an energetic role in the creation and dissemination of anti-semitic and white supremacist political writing. The organisation’s activities began in earnest in 1920, when The Britons negotiated a deal to take over the publishing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Eyre & Spottiswoode, the company responsible for the first English edition.Footnote ¹¹ Beyond The Protocols, they also championed the anti-semitic pamphleteering of American automotive magnate and later Hitler devotee, Henry Ford, disseminating copies of his newspaper the Dearborn Independent in Britain.Footnote ¹²

Their newspaper – initially published under the title Jewry Ueber Alles and later changed to The Hidden Hand or Jewry Ueber Alles and finally to The British Guardian – reveals clues as to the other kinds of political writing that fuelled and shaped the prejudices of The Britons. In 1924, Professor George Mudge, a founding member of The Britons, and professor of zoology at the University of London, provided an elaboration on the group’s ideology of ‘Nordic’ supremacy in a series of articles entitled ‘The Pride of Race’.Footnote ¹³ Mudge’s articles make heavy use of eugenicist terminology borrowed from the work of Madison Grant and quoted from Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.Footnote ¹⁴

Alongside this, in a series of other pamphlets and articles in their newspapers, pseudo-scientists, pseudo-historians, and pseudo-archaeologists projected the battle between the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ race (terms they used interchangeably) and the ‘Jewish power’ back into the distant past. In doing so, they made use of the old Orientalist theories of Anglo-Indian scholars dating back to the late eighteenth century, which were originally used to justify British domination of India.Footnote ¹⁵ The Britons appropriated theories about the foundation of ancient Indian civilisation by light-skinned ‘Aryan’ invaders, claimed as the ancient ancestors of British colonisers, and its ruin at the hands of dark-skinned barbarian ‘Dravidians’. They further credited Aryan initiative and other qualities not only for the splendour of ancient India but also for the advancements of ancient civilisations in India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Sumer. As in the original Orientalist narrative, the amateur racial theorists among The Britons attributed the fall of these great civilisations to racial mixture. However, they also fused old Orientalism with anti-semitism. The author of one pamphlet, writing under the pseudonym ‘Apionus’, claimed that ‘Semitic’ subversion played a key role in the fall of great civilisations from Babylon and Rome right through to the French Ancien Régime and Tsarist Russia.Footnote ¹⁶ The Britons fused Orientalist pseudo-history with anti-semitic conspiracy, crafting object lessons and warnings of the potential future which might befall the British Empire.

Though the political writing that which they produced might initially appear rather esoteric, there is some evidence that the organisation maintained links to the ‘mainstream’ political right. They republished, in pamphlet form, the writings of die-hard Conservative, former Governor of Victoria (1901–1903) and Bombay (1907–1913), and anti-semite, Lord Sydenham of Combe.Footnote ¹⁷ The Britons also appear to have had some kind of political relationship with Henry Page Croft’s National Constitutional Association (NCA). Before it returned to the Tory fold in early 1921, the NCA was known as the National Party, a xenophobic, militarist, imperialist party that broke away from the Conservatives in 1917.Footnote ¹⁸ The NCA’s National Opinion newspaper recommended and advertised publications produced and sold by The Britons as informative texts on the ‘Jewish Question’.Footnote ¹⁹

Not long after the founding of The Britons, its leader, Henry Hamilton Beamish, fled Britain for Southern Rhodesia to avoid fines for a libel charge brought against him by Sir Albert Mond, the First Commissioner of Works. Beamish had accused Mond (of German-Jewish extraction) of providing financial assistance to Germany during the First World War. In his stead, the homeopath Dr J. H. Clarke assumed leadership of the organisation, which was then later taken over by J. D. Dell. From 1925, its journal ceased to appear altogether, and it confined its activities more or less entirely to publishing. Nevertheless, The Britons left a durable and entirely poisonous political legacy that extended beyond the inter-war period. From the 1920s right through to the 1970s, they provided nourishment to the most extreme, most openly Nazi and (in the post-war period) neo-Nazi sections of the British fascist movement. They continued to publish an English edition of The Protocols, and by 1968 were issuing their eighty-fourth impression of the work. Beamish also acted as a mentor to Arnold Leese, a former veterinary specialist in the treatment of camels and, later, founder of the Imperial Fascist League, a breakaway group from the British Fascisti in 1928. Leese took the torch of white supremacist politics from Beamish and The Britons. Through Leese’s obsessive activism and prolific political writing, the political writing produced and disseminated by The Britons acted as a key ideological influence on a new generation of fascist activists in the 1950s.

Away from The Britons and their white supremacist networks of political writing, the frustrated aristocrats on the most reactionary rightward end of die-hard Conservatism continued their agitation. The Morning Post dropped its promotion of The Protocols shortly after they were unmasked as fraudulent.Footnote ²⁰ However, for other die-hard Conservatives, The Protocols confirmed and connected all of their worst fears in a way that was far too persuasive to let facts get in the way. For Alan Ian Percy, the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, The Protocols confirmed his conviction that unseen forces were operating against the British Empire. He used his journal, The Patriot, as a mouthpiece for these views. Northumberland was a signatory of the 1922 ‘Die-Hard’ manifesto and ‘the alternative leader of the Die-hards’ next to Lord Salisbury and John Gretton MP.Footnote ²¹ Northumberland’s Boswell Press also printed a range of right-wing conspiracy theory literature.

Months before Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ or the emergence of the first self-identifying fascist organisation in Europe, Northumberland was already pining in the pages of The Patriot for a ‘resuscitation of Conservatism’ to establish ‘strong government’ and save the Empire from ‘Democracy’ and ‘Socialist bureaucracy’.Footnote ²² The journal functioned as a forum for those attempting such a resuscitation. In late 1922, it offered supportive coverage and column inches to a short-lived reactionary organisation called the Loyalty League, led by a veteran army officer and former Royal Irish Constabulary district commissioner, Brigadier-General Cyril Prescott Decie.Footnote ²³ The Loyalty League burst onto the political scene a few weeks before the ‘March on Rome’ and shortly before the general election of November 1922.Footnote ²⁴ Members of the League variously styled it as anti-communist, a British equivalent to the Italian ‘Fascisti’, and ‘an information bureau’.Footnote ²⁵

While relatively little was heard from the Loyalty League after 1922, the calls for a more radically assertive reactionary movement continued unabated. With the rise of Mussolini, they only grew in volume. Looking to Italy, while thinking also of recent imperial controversies, an early article discussing the Italian fascisti longingly pondered whether ‘Ireland might have been saved from her present anarchy if she had possessed a Mussolini.’Footnote ²⁶ In The Patriot’s letters pages at around the same time, one lieutenant-colonel thundered that:

Four months later, the first of six advertisements appeared in the back pages of The Patriot for a group calling themselves the British Fascisti and appealing enigmatically to ‘[a]ny reader interested in purely practical work of a definite nature’.Footnote ²⁸

The British Fascisti (1923–1935)

Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a public-spirited young woman from a prestigious colonial-military family, placed those adverts in The Patriot.Footnote ²⁹ She went on to found and lead the first British organisation to call itself ‘fascist’. The British Fascisti (or BF) grew to an estimated 30,000 members at its height.Footnote ³⁰ Around this burgeoning movement, Lintorn-Orman and her followers established their own newspaper, published under various titles throughout the group’s existence as The Fascist Bulletin, The British Lion, and simply British Fascism. Though it never developed the same kind of large-scale operation as Mosley‘s BUF, through their publications and political activities, they constructed a rudimentary British fascist political culture.

Early British fascist political writing ‘spoke’ with the ‘voice’ of the colonial officer class. Many of its most prominent members had served, worked, travelled, or lived out in the Empire. Its ranks contained former Indian colonial police officers, veterans of colonial military campaigns from Khartoum to the North-West Frontier, and high-ranking intelligence officers who served in the Irish War of Independence. These experiences meant that early British fascist political writing was characterised by a rhetoric of ‘anxiety, fear and angst’ – in short, the language of colonial panic.Footnote ³¹ As a political project, both in word and deed, early British fascism was shaped by the fear of a collapse of power, on the one hand, before the black masses abroad in the Empire and, on the other, before an increasingly militant and ‘Bolshevised’ working class at home.

One leading figure in this conspiracy craze – the writer Nesta Webster – served as a member of the British Fascisti’s ruling ‘Grand Council’ from 1926 to 1927 and exerted a formative influence on the group’s ideology.Footnote ³² Webster had also been a contributor to the Morning Post’s ‘The Cause of the World Unrest’ series and to Northumberland’s journal The Patriot. A deeply eccentric figure, Webster argued that a coordinated body of Freemasons, the Illuminati and ‘German-Jews’ lurked behind all of the British Empire’s enemies from Ireland to India.Footnote ³³ However, Webster’s ideas reflected more than her own personal eccentricities. Her analyses spoke to a vein of casual anti-semitism and conspiracy-mindedness within British imperial thinking. Webster had travelled the British Empire extensively and even married the son of a well-established Anglo-Indian family who was also a superintendent in the Indian imperial police.Footnote ³⁴ Her grand narratives of anti-imperial plots clearly struck a nerve among her fellow men and women ‘on the spot’, even attracting plaudits from Winston Churchill in 1920.Footnote ³⁵

British Fascisti members articulated their movement’s aims and intentions as primarily defensive, an auxiliary response to the sinister world plot outlined in Webster’s books. In one of the first manifestoes printed in their newspaper, the British Fascisti defined their aim as to defend ‘the British Constitution and Empire’ from the forces of sedition and even from ‘the constitutional authority’ itself, if it ever became ‘treacherous’.Footnote ³⁶ They essentially imagined the extensive application of the ethos of colonial military service, that of taking whatever steps necessary to ensure the maintenance of law and order, reinstating this throughout the Empire as well as applying it in the metropole.

The active section of the British Fascisti’s membership spent their time preparing for the crisis that they anticipated in their political writings. Within this context, their newspapers also acted as an organisational tool, including branch details and meeting reports from groups both within and beyond the United Kingdom. The group was organised into paramilitary units, with (from 1927) a uniform of a dark blue shirt, to which they added (from the early 1930s) a beret and a pair of dark trousers or a skirt. British Fascisti members engaged in military drills and made a habit of carrying small firearms without a permit.Footnote ³⁷ BF members also took the fight to the allegedly seditious elements in Britain whom they saw as agents of the plot against the British Empire, breaking up Communist Party meetings and providing security for anti-communist political meetings.Footnote ³⁸ Just as contributions to their newspapers often looked back to the glory days of the Empire or the memory of heroism in the Great War, their members also held marches and demonstrations to commemorate Empire Day and Remembrance Day.Footnote ³⁹

A Times newspaper report on one such march noted the ‘large number [of] women’ in attendance. While the exact number of female members of the British Fascisti remains difficult to determine, they constituted a significant and visible activist presence. Their newspapers featured political writing by and for women, on perceived ‘women’s issues’ and women’s political role in the fascist movement. The British Fascisti newspaper and pamphlets provided a key forum for the discussion and promotion of youth work by the so-called the ‘Women’s Unit of the British Fascists’. The women involved articulated and advocated their activities as a form of ‘Empire building work’ to which women fascists were uniquely suited.

This youth work took the form of Fascist Children’s Clubs, founded by Lintorn-Orman and several other women fascists in 1925. By February 1926, their newspaper claimed that there were now 30 Children’s Clubs with an overall membership of 1,000.Footnote ⁴⁰ While we should take these numbers with a pinch of salt, there is evidence that the Clubs existed throughout the United Kingdom as far as Belfast and remained active as late as 1934, just one year before the collapse of the British Fascisti. The Clubs provided their members with a combination of physical, ‘moral’, and political education in a manner reminiscent of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scout Movement.Footnote ⁴¹ Lintorn-Orman herself had been an early ‘Girl Scout’ – one of the keen young women who anticipated the founding of the Girl Guides.Footnote ⁴² As well as a range of Scout-like activities, this section of the movement also produced political writing targeted at younger audiences.Footnote ⁴³ Through the Children’s Clubs, they distributed the kind of books that they thought would provide children with a fascist political education. In one case, a fascist activist named Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Lane presented one hundred copies of his anti-immigration diatribe The Alien Menace to members of the Fascist Children’s Clubs.Footnote ⁴⁴

Elsewhere, one edition of their newspaper in 1926 contained a New Year’s message addressed to ‘The Children’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This leaflet-length address, envisioned as the first issue of a regular publication that seems never to have materialised, contained a few short poems and rhymes, a story, a competition, and a rule or moral. It also included a letter from a British Fascisti member who had recently visited the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The contents of this letter read like a plagiarised extract from Scouting for Boys, encouraging young fascists to emulate the ‘heroes of old’, the ‘gallant British gentlemen [and women]’ who left home and struck out overseas to find their fortune and forge an ever-larger empire. Elsewhere, their newspaper featured a ‘Fascist Children’s Creed’ very similar to the ‘Scout Promise’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The BF’s forays into youth political organising, and the accompanying literary efforts, represented a fascist adoption and adaption of wider trends. The expansion of the franchise after 1918 led to increased competition for an increased pool of voters and this led ‘to a drive to politicize youth’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The form and tone of the Fascist Children’s Clubs and their publications bore semblance to the kinds of material seen not only in the Scout Movement’s The Scout magazine but also from Conservative Party youth groups like the Junior Imperial League (JIL), with their newspaper The Imp, and the Young Britons League (YBL), with their The Young Briton. Founded in 1906, the JIL was revived in the 1920s, while the YBL represented a 1920s reinvigoration of the Primrose League youth group known as the ‘Buds’. These groups, both of which dwarfed the BF’s efforts, hoped to inculcate Conservative and imperialist principles in young people and to inoculate them against the Left’s efforts at youth political organising. Styled as ‘an empire league for children’, the YBL in particular bore striking similarities to the Fascist Children’s Clubs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Much like the BF’s sputtering attempts at children’s publications, the YBL made didactic use of their Young Briton magazine, which ‘regularly expound[ed] on British history, martial heroes, the constitution, and the empire’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Where Conservative youth groups represented an innovation in the age of mass democracy, in their attempts at youth organisation, the BF sought to harness democratic means and put them to authoritarian ends. As with much else of their political experimentation, their project was not merely imitative; they sought to create fascists out of a residual popular imperialism, not to drum up support for the already existing forces of parliamentary Conservatism.

With the formation of the British Union of Fascists in October 1932, the BF faced stiff competition for the fascist brand. By the early 1930s, the movement’s fortunes were in terminal decline, and their leader, Lintorn-Orman, was struggling with alcoholism. Enterprising members in the British Fascisti and the British Union Fascists made attempts to merge the two organisations, first in 1932 and again in 1934. Lintorn-Orman strenuously and successfully resisted both attempts. With this, several members of the British Fascisti’s leading ‘Grand Council’ jumped ship to the BUF. The Fascisti dwindled even further, finally foundering altogether with the death of Lintorn-Orman in 1935.

The Greater Britain on Page and Stage: Mosleyite Fascism

There was a significant shift in political status, positioning, and proximity to the centres of power when Sir Oswald Mosley began his faltering yet determined journey from Labour rebel to full-on fascist. While there are a number of continuities with the BF in terms of definitions of fascism, ideas about the state, and the institutionalisation and para-militarisation of fascist belief, Mosleyite fascism represented a new phase of the movement and its expressions. The intermediary New Party phase (1931–1932) was important too in determining the literary qualities and aesthetics (and artistic sophistication) of British fascism, even as many of the most intellectual figures – such as John Strachey and Harold Nicolson – abandoned Mosley once he enthusiastically adopted and adapted Mussolini’s fascism to the British terrain. The New Party phase was intellectually vibrant and vitalist, and the main publication, Action, edited by Nicolson, sought to provide a forum for the interplay of hitherto conflicting ideas, temperaments, and modes of political rhetoric.

In articulating ‘What this Paper Stands for’, Nicolson wrote that ‘our purpose, in a phrase, is to provide you with hope. To provide you with a new sense of purpose. To give you renewed zest’. The New Party’s watchwords were ‘Truth, Courage, Intelligence, Vigour’, with an editorial policy to match. As such, Action was a bit of a pastiche, combining political editorial, policy pronouncements, news of the New Party’s activities and organisation, set alongside book, theatre and film reviews, gardening advice (by the famous gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Nicolson), with a woman’s page and an ear for compelling human interest stories. It contained favourable reviews of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary; it advertised Henry Havelock Ellis’s More Essays on Love and Virtue; and Christopher Isherwood contributed an article on ‘The Youth Movement in the New Germany’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The New Party was to be the ‘modern movement’, an echo of the anti-modern modernism of Marinetti, the Futurists, and the British Vorticists.

Mosley developed his political writing in the New Party in an attempt to clarify his economic ideas, and, of course, as a means of gaining recruits. Action had an air of the debonair, the sophisticated, and the avant-garde, while it would be in the youth wing’s, NUPA’s, New Times (nos. 1–3. June–August/September 1932) where proto-fascist speech was given free rein. Mosley’s so-called ‘Biff Boys’ luxuriated in their own aggressive natures, their reaction, their puerile enjoyment of political violence, anti-semitism, and rage.

The assumptions of the literary merits, or lack thereof, of British fascist writing and literary production are largely based on the fact that British fascism quickly proved to be intellectually bankrupt, and that, within less than a decade from the publication of Mosley’s The Greater Britain (October 1932), the movement was an unmitigated political failure. This has too often led to the caricaturing of British fascism and of fascists as potential intellectuals or literary figures, and assumptions that there was little merit, interest, or quality to the movement’s literary productions. The most powerful narrative is that Mosley’s impact was not on policy or political ideas, but on public space and generating political spectacle of a kind that was new and innovative, while broadly unwelcome and easily parodied and satirised by an array of critics. This narrative was first articulated by contemporaries and opponents, as the comic portrayals of the BUF served as a powerful political tool in the multi-pronged fight against fascism. The automatic assumptions about the anti-intellectualism of fascism and the ideological sterility of Blackshirts – as Biff Boys and brutish, brainless Blackshirts – were born in the heat of political strife and have remained deeply branded in the historiography. But are these assumptions simplistic and, ultimately, counterproductive?

Certainly, performance took priority over substance from the advent of Mosleyite fascism. Already in the New Party ‘propagandists’ were being reminded: ‘it is the big drum, the show outside and the roar of the lion that draws the crowd in – showmanship pays. The average Englishman will follow any crowd. Get a crowd, then.’Footnote ⁵¹ Political spectacle quickly became the BUF’s stock and trade. For instance, it was after the Albert Hall meeting in 1934 – there is debate among historians as to whether it was at this meeting that political antisemitism was launched as BUF official policy – that Robert Bernays MP felt more certain than ever that the future of British democracy was in peril.Footnote ⁵² He noted that Mosley had pulled off a tour de force insofar as he spoke for an hour and thirty-five minutes in his celebrated oratorical style, without ‘a note and he never once stumbled’. But Bernays was unimpressed by the content of the over-long speech, noting a number of factual errors and weak argumentation, and that there was little ‘intellectual depth’. He was most shaken by Mosley’s appeal to the young men in his audience, who had ‘about them a fire and enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁵³ This example serves to underscore the way the political establishment identified Mosley as the man of action, the ‘Rudolph Valentino of Fascism’, and as such, bereft of political ideas.Footnote ⁵⁴

However, it is important to recognise the variety of political writing and the range of writers who represented fascist ideas and ideals in their work. Further, this can also support a keener understanding of British fascism as embedded and integrated into the British political and literary culture of the era. With this in mind, and turning to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (1932–1940), it is important to think about the changing modes, styles, literary features, structures, graphics, and aesthetics of fascist literary production in the 1930s, especially as they reflect the evolution of fascist policy and theory on a range of issues such as race, class, and gender, and on matters of economics, political theory, empire, and foreign policy. Further, it should be stressed that fascist writers were not writing in a vacuum – ideas, styles, and designs ricocheted off respective political adversaries.

In the early phase of the movement, Mosley was given plenty of space in the national press. The main platform was Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and Sunday Dispatch newspapers, from late 1933 to mid-1934. Not only were BUF events favourably and extensively covered, but Mosley was given plenty of column inches to pontificate about the new creed and try to rouse Daily Mail readers to action. In true tabloid style, these articles were invariably accompanied by matinee idol–quality photographic portraits of Mosley. The mighty ‘Hurrah’ and the press exposure Rothermere provided so generously was not the only publicity the BUF was allowed, however.Footnote ⁵⁵ Up to 1935, Mosley was frequently invited onto the air waves. For example, in March 1933, he was pitted against Megan Lloyd George in a debate broadcast on the BBC, and this was followed up by a three-page article where he put his case across as to why ‘Does England Need Fascism?’ in The Listener.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, Mosley emphasised that ‘our policy does not consist of academic theory or dreamy internationalism. Our policy meets the hard facts which face Great Britain, just as Fascism has met and overcome the particular problems which have faced other countries’ – a typical refrain about the rejection of intellectuals, talking shops, and ideologically driven political movements.

The various genres of fascist writing were weapons in what was as much a war of words and ideas as it was a battle for the state and the streets, at least in the British context. Perhaps, it is an obvious but no less an important point that British fascists were in competition with their opponents for the most effective means of disseminating their messages, all part of the same bellow and bluster of new ideas in a new age of mass communications, marketing, public relations, public opinion polling, and totalitarianism. While the ideas might have been diametrically opposed between, for example, Blackshirt and the Communist Party of Great Britain‘s Daily Worker, the forms, layout and rhetorical structures were comparable. Further, we should bear in mind that British fascism was grist to the mill for another genre of political writing and pamphleteering, a body of specifically anti-fascist political literature that existed to make a mockery of fascism in ideas and in practice, issue warnings about the menace of fascism, and expose the corruption and criminality of the movement and its members. John Strachey’s The Menace of Fascism (1933) was one of the pioneering works in this canon. Of course, this genre was given institutional form with the foundation of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, and, to a lesser extent, with the launch of the Penguin Specials.Footnote ⁵⁷

British fascist political writing must be seen in relation to its distribution and performance. There is little benefit in close textual analysis and literary criticism of British fascist political writing in isolation or divorced from the mode of dissemination. Newspapers were material objects and consumer products sold at meetings and on street corners. To put it anachronistically, they were the movement’s ‘merch’. Manifestoes were recruiting documents. An array of pamphlets on a great variety of subjects were sold on bookstands at political events, as well as at the BUF’s own book shops. It is difficult to know how many of these shops existed, and some only lasted a short time before ceasing to be economically viable – we have no official BUF records of membership or branches. Songs were sung on the march as an essential feature of fascist spectacle. Recordings of songs and speeches were then made available for purchase as gramophone records. Short stories, poetry, and novels (rarely of good quality) were intended to be instructive, didactic, and inspirational. Speeches were part of the elaborate choreography of fascist meetings and rallies. The BUF devoted considerable resources to training Blackshirts as speakers, and the movement placed a premium on public speaking, either through spontaneous presentations on the soapbox or through set-piece speeches at indoor meetings and rallies. Many of these speeches were then published in the BUF press, filmed or audio recorded and made into records. The gestural politics of fascism is well illustrated by the title of the aforementioned proto-fascist New Party weekly newspaper Action! (1931), and then the BUF’s more middlebrow and outward facing of its two weekly newspapers, again called Action! that ran from 1936 to 1940.

Certainly the state was concerned with the content, reach, and dissemination of fascist literature. In the systematic surveillance of the BUF, from 1933 Special Branch and MI5 tried to gauge support and the level of threat by monitoring the movement’s propaganda machine. In one example, they were aware of the BUF’s ‘Scheme for Provincial Bookshops’, and the pragmatic attempt to mobilise women Blackshirts to take charge of these shops and deal with requests for information.Footnote ⁵⁸ In another example, in November 1936, Special Branch was made aware that the British Union was trying to ‘win over’ D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, and to persuade him to become a contributor to Action. At the same time, the authorities were aware that through Lovat Dickson, of the publishing house L. Dickson Ltd., there were moves afoot to establish a Book Club which ‘while not openly fascist, would popularize books circulated to awaken sympathy for Fascism, in the same manner as the Left Book Club’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Further, and helpfully, Special Branch reports include print figures for the BUF’s newspapers, and in October 1937, for instance, these were as follows: ‘Action (Sept. 16,500, Oct. 17,500) and the Blackshirt (Sept. 12,250, Oct. 13,350)’.Footnote ⁶⁰ These figures do suggest that the BU was far more influential in print than it was by the measure of its active membership, which the authorities estimated at around 5,800 in January, 1938.

Is ‘Action’ the opposite of writing? What is the relationship between the pen and the sword? Fascist writing and writers struggled to reconcile the movement’s fundamental anti-intellectualism, its vitriol against the intelligentsia, with their own sense of stylistic possibility and self-importance. This then raises questions about British fascism’s relationship to Britain’s broader history, as well as its place within the broader universe of the political right. Spurning a conception of fascism as ‘other’ – concocted under the humanities’ equivalent of laboratory conditions – we need to critically analyse British fascism embedded in and constructed from a wider cultural and political context. While the movement inveighed against intellectuals, Modernist artists, Bloomsbury Group aesthetes, the allegedly ‘Judaic’ discipline of psychoanalysis, and literary decadence, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ were to be the backbone of the Corporate State. Many of these figures made all or part of their living from writing as well. Indeed, this discourse and the violent exchange of criticism and critique foreshadows the ‘culture wars’ of our own time.

As with most authoritarian movements, the cult of personality and the personal preferences of the dictator figure determine the tastes, styles, aesthetics, and literary and artistic modes of the organisation as a whole. This was certainly the case of the BUF, an organisation made in the image of its leader. Mosley was also foremost among the fascist literary figures. He had been hailed as a stylish rhetorician, a dynamic (if verbose) speaker, and a man of ideas rapt by the literary philosophising of writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oswald Spengler.Footnote ⁶¹ After breaking with the ‘party system’ and ‘old gang’ politics, and falling out with collaborators like the politician and bohemian diarist Harold Nicolson and Labourite-then-communist John Strachey, his new circle included British South African and Shakespeare enthusiast, A. K. Chesterton; English graduate and later ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce; and the so-called ‘Alfred Rosenberg of British fascism’, philosopher Alexander Raven Thomson. Away from high-minded fascist philosophising, other allies were well-versed in the literary medium, such as advertising man William E. D. Allen.Footnote ⁶² Allen, writing under the pseudonym James Drennan, published BUF: Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, a part puff-piece biography of ‘The Leader’ and part rumination on the political and cultural decadence of the era that called for the fascist revolution. In the book, Allen described fascism in terms of grandiloquent eroticism as the:

This Spenglerian overblown rhetoric was self-consciously European in other ways too. Drennan/Allen wished to differentiate the British fascist outlook from dominant expressions of British political culture, especially in terms of the place of humour:

British fascism, self-avowedly extremist and iconoclastic, had the stated purpose ‘to recall to British men and women those fundamental standards upon which the British people have built their national life during two thousand years of history, to proclaim those human values which, for men and women, are eternal’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, the place of humour or the inability and unwillingness of the movement to laugh at itself is a key characteristic of the British fascist aesthetic. The only humour permitted is that which parodies and degrades the political and racial other.

Beyond Drennan’s romantic language and highfalutin prose, the BUF’s published output featured the work of several fellow-travelling literary celebrities, including artists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and authors Henry Williamson (of Tarka the Otter fame) and Francis Yeats-Brown (author of the swashbuckling imperialist memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, later adapted into one of Hitler‘s favourite films).Footnote ⁶⁵ The movement also nurtured literary talent, for example, Olive Hawks, who rose to the position of head of the Women’s Section in 1940, cut her literary teeth in the movement’s publications, and wrote her first novel while interned in Holloway Prison – a fictionalised account of a Blackshirt family in the East End of London titled What Hope for Green Street? (1945).

Surveying the genres of British fascist political writing is revealing of the movement’s ambition, strength, financial position, and, of course, a clear window onto its aspirations of establishing a British dictatorship, a dictatorship that was racially pure, determinately imperial, and economically autarkic. The British fascist movement produced and disseminated writing in almost every literary form. We know quite a lot about the BUF’s internal operations in this regard, and Mosley and others bankrolled the movement’s own publishing company, the Sanctuary Press and Abbey Supplies Ltd.

The BUF consistently published not one but two weekly newspapers: Blackshirt ran uninterrupted from 1933 to 1940; Fascist Week from 1933 to 1934, and Action: Britain First from 1936 to 1940. There were a number of local newsheets and bulletins for internal distribution, as well as the cyclostyled the Woman Fascist (1934, a limited run). The newspapers contained an array of materials – news articles, editorials, pen portraits of the movement’s leaders, poems, short stories, cartoons, book and film reviews, and a lot of visual material too (photography and graphic design). For example, the first issue of the 1936 run of Action contained a review of Korda’s new film of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come. The reviewer judged that it was a film ‘British people can truly be proud of’, despite the fact that it offered a dystopian rendering of a fascist state.Footnote ⁶⁶ But in that same first issue, one column set out the intended seriousness of the newspaper’s style; it was to be the literary embodiment of the creed of action and the rebirth of the British spirit: ‘It will not be required of us that we should attempt to find a mellow style or strike a reassuring note. This is no time either for belles lettres or for the Utopian policies of the flaneur.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Alongside the newspapers, longer-form policy documents were published as pamphlets, and usually in accord with an established template. By the mid-1930s the BUF wished to assert the scholarly calibre of fascist theory, and therefore began publishing a (pseudo)academic journal, the Fascist Quarterly (later titled British Union Quarterly) from 1935 to 1940.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Fascist Quarterly was launched in 1935 (1935–1936) with the stated aim of formulating and articulating ‘the intellectual background of the Fascist creed’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1937, it was renamed the British Union Quarterly (1937–1940), published by Action Press. It contained everything from articles on the philosophy and economics of fascism, to commentary on colonial and foreign policy from BUF members and guest writers (including Joseph Goebbels; Ezra Pound; and, on one occasion, Norwegian future ‘fifth columnist’, Vidkun Quisling), and British fascist literary appraisals of the work of figures like Thomas Carlyle and William Morris.Footnote ⁷⁰ There were also links with other highbrow and commercially minded publishing enterprises, such as the Right Book Club, an attempt to create a competitor enterprise to Victor Gollancz’s much more successful Left Book Club.Footnote ⁷¹

A focus on fascist political writing exposes the common assumption that British fascism was an alien European import cordoned off from British political culture writ large. Instead, we are suggesting that it was an enduring feature of British metropolitan and imperial political culture. By reviewing the full range of British fascist literary production, we come to understand the movement in the round and as a whole, and not merely as a spectacular political failure. We need to highlight the performative nature of fascist language – songs, poetry, selling of the papers, speeches, rallies, etc. – in order to measure the full impact of British fascism on the movement’s followers and on the parameters of the political discourse of inter-war Britain. The exchange of ideas and political aesthetics was two-way and much more interactive than we might at first suppose. As all fascist movements, the BUF aestheticised politics, and part and parcel of this was what was written on the page, and the development of a distinctly British fascist literary aesthetic. It is by surveying the range of literary production and the place of these texts in the performance of British fascism that we are better able to situate the movement’s literary output within the context of the genres of political writing of their political opponents, rivals, and competitors.

When the celebrated novelist and disenchanted former communist Arthur Koestler edited a collection of essays for publication in the literary magazine Encounter in July 1963 entitled ‘Suicide of a Nation?’, it inspired eighteen writers to respond with a book on behalf of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). One of the most important writers in the volume, which was entitled Rebirth of a Nation, was the Conservative MP Enoch Powell. Powell was concerned about the potential influence of Koestler’s collection because he believed it had embraced a narrative of decline ‘to furnish a philosophy of a political change and to provide the means to accomplish it’.Footnote ¹ Powell understood that these leftist writers were calling for a much greater emphasis on the state direction of the economy.Footnote ² Powell’s views on how political writers tried to influence and shape public opinion were revealing. As he explained, all political activity was based on the assumption that opinions could be influenced: ‘This is why politics is always more than an infinitely complex and exciting game played for high stakes. It is a continuing fight for the mind of a nation.’Footnote ³ One of the reasons why, like Powell, many British Conservatives came to believe in the importance of different genres of political writing was that they feared what they saw as the left’s literary dominance and its ability to use different forms of writing to influence the political elite, opinion formers, and ‘the average reader’.Footnote ⁴

This chapter focuses on ‘serious’ or ‘erudite’ ideas pieces written by Conservatives, which were published as articles, books, and pamphlets between the 1940s and the 1970s. It argues that many Conservatives continued to take this form of political writing seriously, even in an era of mass communication, because they still believed in their ability to shape the opinion of political, business, and media elites. Electoral ambitions were usually not the chief concern of these writers, because they wanted to use publications to shape the future direction of the party, advance their careers, and earn a second living. However, Conservative writers would sometimes allow their ‘serious’ writing to be advertised, edited, and repurposed by the party for use as part of its electoral propaganda.

Historians of British Conservatism have made use of Conservative writing and publishing in their research, but few have studied it systematically. Philip Norton wrote about how the publications of the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) were used by the party to extend political education to party activists, party members, and the wider public after 1945.Footnote ⁵ Otherwise, historians have usually focused on the question of how Conservative writers tried to use publications to influence politics in specific historical contexts, or alternatively, they have mined these texts to research the intellectual history of British Conservatism.Footnote ⁶ There has been no attempt to compare these different forms of writing or to look more deeply into the relationship between party-sponsored and independent forms of Conservative publishing.

This chapter explores these issues in three stages. The first section covers the 1940s – a formative decade when Conservatives debated the pros and cons of different genres of political writing, and, ultimately, decided to take them more seriously by establishing the CPC. The second section considers the 1950s, which at first sight appeared to be a triumphant decade for the party, because high-profile groups like the One Nation group and the Bow group integrated themselves into the formal structures of the party in return for allowing some central control of their writing. In the process, they helped R. A. Butler establish a common framework for the publication of semi-independent Conservatism. Butler valued these publications because they were part of his ‘octopus plan’, which was meant to ‘educate’ the party. The final section explores these issues from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, because it was during this period that more Conservatives started to value writing for publicity purposes. The CPC’s outputs became less convincing when they became more firmly subjected to the ‘market test’. At the same time, some Conservatives started to write more for external think-tanks because they believed such organisations had access to information and expertise that the party lacked. These developments were both a cause and a consequence of the party’s return to a form of politics that did not prioritise the types of broader intellectual appeals that it had celebrated in the 1950s.

I

There was a strong feeling in the wartime Conservative party that it had neglected ‘serious’ writing and publishing during the 1930s. Shortly before the war, Butler had persuaded Geoffrey Faber to publish a series of pamphlets with his firm Faber & Faber, but the venture had been ended by the outbreak of hostilities.Footnote ⁷ As Chairman of the party’s Post-War Problems Central Committee (PWPCC), Butler encouraged Conservatives to send their writing to Faber, but the latter did not use his firm to publish many Conservative works. Faber was of the opinion that pamphlets and books about Conservatism were unlikely to be commercially viable if they did not include an official stamp of approval from Conservative Central Office (CCO) or a foreword from an authoritative Conservative figure.Footnote ⁸

This attitude among even Conservative-leaning editors was one of the reasons why it was difficult for the party to publish enough pamphlets and books to compete with the left. But there were other reasons too. Butler struggled to find enough talented writers who were willing to chart a course between electoral propaganda and the type of ‘serious’ writing that could help the party in the long term. He also preferred ‘pedestrian’ works that could represent the party as a whole because he could often not look beyond the next general election.Footnote ⁹ When the intellectually ambitious leaders of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC) pressured him to embrace a different approach, he simply put an end to most of their activities.Footnote ¹⁰ This was because Butler had wanted to unite the party and maintain control over the flow of Conservative publications ahead of the general election, but he still told them that he did not believe ‘thinking’ was ‘an essential part of the Conservative armoury’. He agreed that ‘there must at least be some thought’, but he took the view that Conservative writers should ‘fit in’ with ‘the statement of general party aims’.Footnote ¹¹

There were also disagreements inside CCO about which genres of publication should be prioritised, what these different forms of publication should focus on, who their potential readerships were, and who would publish them. When Butler wanted to commission a pamphlet on Conservative principles, it was telling that ‘a straightforward and somewhat pedestrian document’ by David Stelling of CCO was chosen over a livelier attempt made by the Conservative MP W. S. Morrison.Footnote ¹² The ‘pedestrian’ approach suited Butler’s general aim of representing the party without promoting any particular brand of Conservatism. Stelling argued that his pamphlet should not be published ‘with the imprimatur of the Party’ because it was ‘designed to appeal to those who wander in No Man’s Land as well as to members of our own Party’.Footnote ¹³ But he had no choice because he could not attract a commercial publisher. When his pamphlet was published by CCO, his suspicions were confirmed; it met a demand within the party, but it did not reach the bookstalls or a larger public.Footnote ¹⁴ Whether to write for the party elite, the party faithful, or prospective Conservative voters was an issue that troubled Conservative writers who wanted to tailor their publications accordingly.

Butler and his ally David Maxwell Fyfe tried again one year later. This time, they approached the Conservative MP, writer, and publisher Christopher Hollis to write a book. But Hollis was confused by what type of book they wanted because he drew a sharp distinction between a work dealing with electoral issues and one on ‘a philosophic consideration of political principles’. He told Maxwell Fyfe that ‘the Conservative party … must not be, a party like the Labour party, or the Fascists, or the Communists, with an imposed party line and dictated arguments on every detail of policy’. For these reasons, he concluded, ‘it is much best that this and similar books should be published by general publishers (probably various general publishers) and that, while they should be well vetted by the committee or its delegates, the name of the committee or of the Conservative party should not anywhere appear on them’. He insisted that such books were ‘more important than sellable’ but that a great deal could be done ‘by a strictly limited’ and ‘very judiciously selected distribution of complimentary copies’.Footnote ¹⁵ Butler rejected Hollis’s approach, even if he was happy for him to publish elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶

Butler wanted the party to publish more writing, but he was less interested in commissioning highbrow philosophical work than he was in the production of shorter statements that could be used to help educate party activists. He was also unwilling to cede control. This meant that few of the party’s most talented writers wanted to do its bidding. The one author who showed great promise and who had told Butler he wanted to write a book on Conservatism was Quintin Hogg. But Butler explained to Maxwell Fyfe that it was ‘clear from conversations that we would find it difficult to give our official imprimatur to his work’.Footnote ¹⁷ Butler had been put off by Hogg’s forthcoming book The Left Was Never Right (1945), which was written ‘to counteract the profound effect of a series of pernicious works published by Gollancz’.Footnote ¹⁸ But Geoffrey Faber had been attracted to the idea from the start.Footnote ¹⁹ He explained to Hogg that

In the end, Butler’s idea for a new book was abandoned, and Hogg struck an agreement to publish with Faber & Faber.Footnote ²¹

The party’s election defeat in 1945 encouraged it to adapt its approach to political writing and publishing, but the changes would not start to bear much fruit until the early 1950s. A number of influential Conservatives, party organisers, and intellectuals who were interested in Conservative writing had been arguing for a stronger focus on Conservative ideas and the establishment of an in-house publisher.Footnote ²² After the election, Faber urged Butler to redouble his efforts and argued for ‘the establishment of a really first class Conservative weekly to balance the New Statesman’, because he thought it was ‘no good merely attacking on the popular level’. He thought the ‘intelligentsia’ was ‘the real key to any political revolution or mass political movement’. Faber did not think the party should run the proposed weekly itself, but he did think Conservatives had to be found to pay for its staff and production.Footnote ²³ This idea for a new weekly failed to gather momentum, but Butler did make the important move to establish the CPC as the party’s new in-house publisher under the direction of Cuthbert Alport.Footnote ²⁴

On the one hand, Butler’s mindset continued to shape the party’s writing in the late 1940s. His decision to choose David Clarke, a party official who had been building up the Parliamentary Secretariat and the CRD since 1945, to write a new book on Conservatism for the party, entitled The Conservative Faith in a Modern Age: A Study of the Historic Principles of Conservatism in the Post-War World (1947), was yet another example of continuity rather than change. This was the book Butler had wanted to produce in wartime, and he wrote a foreword to it, but again it was mostly aimed at party activists and members. On the other hand, Hogg’s new book The Case for Conservatism (1947) was an independent one that had a much wider appeal. He had agreed to write the book for Faber & Faber, but he was then approached by Penguin books.Footnote ²⁵ The firm understood Hogg’s desire to reach ‘the Penguin public’ and was happy to release him.Footnote ²⁶ Geoffrey Faber wrote, ‘I entirely agree with you that it is very important for a defence of Conservatism to get home to the general masses, in so far as books can reach them; and obviously a Penguin will do that better, in this case, than a proper book.’Footnote ²⁷ Faber did not make it clear why he thought a Penguin was not a ‘proper book’, but his comment probably reflected his attachment to the hardback book rather than any refusal to accept the ‘paperback revolution’.Footnote ²⁸

Dryer statements produced by committee or by party leaders would continue to be given more prominence in official party publications in this period.Footnote ²⁹ No doubt this was one of the reasons why many independent Conservatives still looked to publish in traditional periodicals, some of which had been hastily resurrected after the war, like the New English Review.Footnote ³⁰ Nevertheless, the changes that were afoot in this period were enough for Alport to argue that for the first time in a generation or more, ‘those who might be styled “Tory intellectuals”’ had been allowed ‘to play a constructive role in the councils of the party’. In his view, the party’s opponents could no longer jeer at the Conservatives for being the ‘Stupid Party’.Footnote ³¹ These claims were exaggerated, but important changes had taken place in terms of the institutionalising of Conservative writing and publishing through the CPC. There was a lingering scepticism about both the degree to which the party should embrace independent forms of political writing and what purposes different genres served, but there was a renewed sense of confidence among Conservatives about the party’s ability to profile itself as one that could win the ‘battle of ideas’.

II

Butler’s attitude softened when the party was in government. Although he thought ‘some central control of writing must obviously be retained’, he wanted ‘as many people as possible in the party’ to be ‘brought in to the background work’. He called this his ‘octopus plan’, which was designed to ‘reach out to groups’ and ‘collect their reports and ideas on specific and general subjects’, because he thought the CPC’s publications could be used as study material for the party’s ‘Two-Way Movement of ideas’.Footnote ³² But Butler’s more relaxed attitude also owed something to his close relationship with members of the One Nation group, some of whom had been his ‘backroom boys’ in the 1940s.Footnote ³³ Butler’s preference for semi-independent forms of writing and publishing was embraced by the group when it published One Nation. A Tory Approach to Social Problems with the CPC in 1950. This long pamphlet, which has actually been referred to inconsistently over the years as a pamphlet, booklet, or book, set the tone for other Conservative writers and groups who wanted to publish their writing and generate publicity for themselves in ways that would be accepted by Butler and the party organisation.

One Nation was the most influential Conservative publication of this genre (longer-form erudite ideas pieces) in this period. Its success depended on a number of factors. First, its authors were an exceptionally talented group of Conservatives who valued ‘serious’ writing as a potential means of influencing the party’s long-term policy.Footnote ³⁴ Second, they were mostly young men who recognised writing as a way of quickly advancing their political standing and careers.Footnote ³⁵ Third, some of them had previously worked for Butler at the CRD, and they were careful to work within the framework he had established for the publishing of semi-independent writing through the CPC. Not only did they get Butler to write the foreword to their first publication, but they pledged their allegiance to the party’s official programme.Footnote ³⁶ Fourth, the authors had considerable experience in writing, publishing, and marketing, which they used to good effect.Footnote ³⁷ The group were able to promote the publication in the press, and they went out on a coordinated speaking tour to promote their work and the party.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, timing and subject matter were undoubtedly important, because the party was on the cusp of returning to government but perhaps it felt it lacked a clear alternative to Labour in areas of social policy. Although One Nation went ahead of the party leadership in some specific policy areas, it was a balanced document that could appeal to a range of Conservatives from across the party. As a result, it outperformed all other CPC publications in the 1950s by quite some margin, managing to sell 25,000 copies in its first month after publication.Footnote ³⁹

When Enoch Powell, one of the writers of One Nation, promoted the pamphlet in the press, he explained what he thought was significant about this particular genre or form of publication:

The activities of the One Nation group and the publication of One Nation as a contribution to the development of Conservative ideas were not completely innovative. But the difference was that the group had learnt from the mistakes of earlier groups like the TRC, they purposefully cultivated a strong relationship with Butler, and they were able to publish with the party’s in-house publisher.

It is interesting to think about why the pamphlet’s successor Change is Our Ally: A Tory Approach to Industrial Problems failed to obtain the same impact when it was published in 1954. As Maude admitted, the publication addressed areas of industrial policy that the party had not been keen to prioritise, and it was meant to cause a ‘stir’.Footnote ⁴¹ As Walsha has argued, ‘Change is Our Ally was bolder than its predecessor’ and was ‘born out of a belief that the party leadership lived too much in the shadow of socialism and could do more to ensure that free competition could thrive’.Footnote ⁴² The strong emphasis on change was too much for some Conservative MPs, but as Maude re-emphasised to Nigel Birch, ‘We have a limited function which has always been clearly defined and understood by the leaders of the Party; first, to educate Conservatives, and secondly, to recapture for the Right the intellectual lead’. Maude thought that the group’s publications were proving to be successful in terms of bolstering the party’s reputation for intellectuality because ‘the reviews of “Change is Our Ally” in the intellectual weeklies showed clearly that books of this kind do help very much’.Footnote ⁴³ Change is Our Ally’s criticisms of the government’s industrial policy meant that it struggled for sales compared to One Nation; in the first weeks of publication, it sold 5,250 copies compared to 8,500.Footnote ⁴⁴ The group blamed the relative lack of sales on ‘closer print, closer reasoning and above all unpopular ideas’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Disagreements emerged in the One Nation group in the late 1950s about whether its members should invest so much time in writing political pamphlets. One of the group’s founding members, Gilbert Longden, argued that ‘any impact we may have had on the fortunes of the party has been due to our two books; our election as officers of most of the Party Committees; our P.P.S.-ships; and our corporate action on several critical occasions’.Footnote ⁴⁶ But newer members like Keith Joseph felt that they ‘should try to put the result of our research and thinking into the form of Bills or Motions, rather than only in articles or pamphlets – though these may be necessary too’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the end, the group agreed to ‘have one further shot at a publication’ in 1959.Footnote ⁴⁸ But editor William Deedes struggled to work up the required number of contributions.Footnote ⁴⁹ Unlike the group’s earlier efforts, the chief motivation for writing The Responsible Society seems to have been publicity because the CPC wanted a new One Nation pamphlet to be used to mark the celebration of its 200th publication. The CPC budgeted for advertising and a ‘reception-cum-press conference’ to celebrate the occasion. The pamphlet and the occasion were advertised in Encounter, the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Economist, and Time & Tide.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although the event appears to have been a success and records show that 5,700 copies of the pamphlet were ordered from the printers, it would seem that the publication of The Responsible Society lacked the commitment and sincerity of the group’s earlier publications.Footnote ⁵¹

The relative success and publicity of the One Nation group’s pamphlets should not mislead historians into thinking that there was a ‘golden age’ of Conservative writing and publishing in the 1950s. Conservatives remained particularly anxious about the lack of talented writers in the party to do intellectual work, the lack of appropriate media for publishing independent Conservatism, and the struggle to win the ‘battle of ideas’ against the left. One of the main anxieties was the view that there was still an urgent need to use writing and publishing to reach ‘opinion formers’ or elite readers who could then be counted upon to influence the ‘man in the street’ in the long run. This was particularly true of some of the party’s best writers like Powell, Maude, and Hogg (known as Lord Hailsham from 1950).

Although Powell surrendered to Butler’s insistence on ‘semi-independent’ party publishing as part of the One Nation group, he had kept open other independent, albeit sometimes pseudonymous, channels of publication since the early 1950s. One of these channels was Scope: Magazine for Industry, where Powell wrote a regular column throughout the decade under the pseudonym ‘Pharos’, which Butler only seems to have been made aware of in 1954.Footnote ⁵² The magazine’s general purpose was to ‘make technical subjects vivid and urgent to the executive’, but its ‘first duty’ was ‘to spread at the executive’s level, policies, processes, ideas and facts which keep him ahead and alert in a revolutionary world’.Footnote ⁵³ Powell lectured executives on how to influence public opinion and how better to use their influence. Instead of pitching their message in relation to the next election, he asked, ‘Is it not possible … that by convincing the rank and file of Labour supporters over the years that a free enterprise system will pay them best, the whole lump may be leavened, so that in Britain, as in America, both parties may agree on the virtue of free enterprise, whatever else they differ about’. He told the Institute of Directors to focus on influencing both ‘key individuals and groups at the very centre’ of the Labour party and those working in ‘industry and commerce themselves’ where the Conservative party could not reach.Footnote ⁵⁴

Powell’s independent journalism, whether written as ‘Pharos’ or in his own name, was very much concerned with explaining how to influence and shape opinion in the long term. It zeroed in on political writing and publishing within this broader vision, particularly when responding to important publications by Labour MPs and intellectuals. When Powell challenged the authors of New Fabian Essays in an article for the socialist weekly Tribune in 1953, he argued that ‘the multitudinous seas of ink will not drown the original sin of the Labour Party’, which in his view was its refusal to abandon ‘nationalisation’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Powell consistently played upon divisions in the Labour party to claim that the left’s publications were useless, but he also used his journalism to promote the publications of the One Nation group as being something innovative. Writing under his own name to promote Change is Our Ally, he mused, ‘Has the Conservative Party stumbled on a new and successful method of pioneering its policy?.’ Powell played up the semi-independent nature of the One Nation group’s publications: ‘The ten M.P.s who wrote Change is Our Ally are neither outside their Parliamentary Party, as is the Fabian Society, nor in any sense a rebel group. Their very orthodoxy and representativeness are noteworthy.’Footnote ⁵⁶

Whether the One Nation group’s conformism was innovative or not is open to question, but the group’s successes in these areas could not address some of the party’s deeper problems. When Powell’s political ally Angus Maude was made Director of the CPC in the early 1950s, he became frustrated by what he saw as the general lack of talent in the party for doing this type of work. Therefore, he turned in desperation to Hailsham who had made the most substantial contribution in this area in the 1940s. But Hailsham refused to engage in much party activity in this period because he believed that his intellectual and practical work had not been valued highly enough by the party.Footnote ⁵⁷ Butler insisted that he had always valued Hailsham’s help and he would make occasional appeals to him to write for the CPC, but they failed to rouse Hailsham out of his determination to focus on his work as a Barrister.Footnote ⁵⁸ Maude pleaded with him: ‘My trouble is the almost total lack of people who will think & talk & write on positions of political philosophy, & I need help badly!’Footnote ⁵⁹ But Hailsham could not be moved, and when Maude appealed to him on another occasion, he complained again about the lack of ‘first-class people on whom I can call for help in the somewhat thankless task of trying to establish the intellectual pre-eminence of the Right’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, this perception about a lack of talented and willing Conservative writers extended across the party and the press.Footnote ⁶¹

After Maude stepped down as Director of the CPC, he became even more disillusioned, which meant he explored the opportunity of returning to serious journalism and the idea of editing a new weekly periodical that could finally try to combat the perceived influence of the New Statesman. This came to nothing.Footnote ⁶² However, the party’s other celebrated group of writers in this period, the Bow group, managed to establish a new Conservative periodical entitled Crossbow in 1957, which relied on a timely donation by Edward Hulton. The Bow group consisted of recent university graduates, had a maximum age limit of 35 years, and had made its name through the publication of pamphlets in the 1950s.Footnote ⁶³ The group struck a deal with the CPC to publish some of its pamphlets, and some party officials liked this arrangement because they believed it offered them the ability ‘to scrap a publication if political considerations require[d] it’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But the group also set up its own publishing company to publish other pamphlets and Crossbow. The group’s publications made an important contribution to Butler’s ‘octopus plan’, but its pamphlets never sold as many as those written by the One Nation group.Footnote ⁶⁵ The establishment and launch of Crossbow with the help of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan attracted significant attention, but unlike Maude’s proposal for a weekly journal, it was never designed to be a serious rival to the New Statesman. Crossbow was to be a ‘high-calibre quarterly journal’ aimed at ‘intellectual Conservatives’, which limited its potential readership.Footnote ⁶⁶

When Hailsham finally did re-emerge as Conservative party chairman in 1956, he was determined to promote the party ahead of the next general election rather than to strive to make a new intellectual contribution. But he still played to his strengths by making use of his talent as a writer. In an unpublished memoir written in the 1960s, Hailsham wrote, ‘I believe that, as a factor in the making of public opinion, about five hundred thousand of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen play an almost predominant role. I call these people “the opinion makers”’. But among these ‘opinion makers’, he argued, Conservative ‘party workers’ were always his ‘most important target, at least at first’. He was determined to reach the thousands of party activists who attended the CPC meeting at the Conservative party conference in 1957, but as he also explained, the event was important because it was always boosted by the fact that speeches were ‘printed in advance and circulated in a pamphlet afterwards’. Hailsham was even willing to argue that his ‘speech and pamphlet which followed it was the turning point in the fortunes of the party and paved the way for the victory in 1959’.Footnote ⁶⁷ His performance at the CPC meeting also resulted in his book The Case for Conservatism being reissued by Penguin ahead of the 1959 general election as The Conservative Case.Footnote ⁶⁸

Hailsham’s example shows how serious writing could be repurposed and, in this case, even a decade later, to serve different political interests. But the precise conditions that had made both The Case for Conservatism and One Nation successful in the 1940s and 1950s never quite aligned again. An intellectual ‘revolution’ in the party was being celebrated in public throughout these years, but it was already showing signs that it would not last. By 1961, some prominent Conservatives like Hailsham thought the party was ‘losing ground’ and that ‘the writers in the intellectual papers’ were ‘beginning to deride us again’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The work of the CPC was offered up as ‘definitive’ proof that the Conservatives could no longer be jeered at for being the ‘stupid party’ and this was important for re-profiling the party while it was in government, but it could only live off the reputation of a few notable successes for so long and some of the most important writers in the party continued to explore independent channels of publication for their writing.

III

In the early 1960s, this narrative of change in terms of Conservative attitudes towards ‘serious’ writing and publishing within the party’s wider culture was important, but the impacts and influences of most erudite ideas pieces are harder to measure. This is not to say that this type of intellectual work was wasted in the long run, as we know some of the ideas that were formulated and written about in the 1950s and early 1960s would become important ones in the late 1970s and 1980s. (In addition to the works of the One Nation group, Geoffrey Howe’s essays on economic policy for the Bow group come to mind.)Footnote ⁷⁰ But when the party was in opposition under Heath’s leadership, the enthusiasm for political writing that had been generated in the party throughout the 1950s seems to have been lost.

One of the reasons for this was the feeling among some Conservative writers that there was less scope for rethinking Conservative ideology. Maude wondered if the Heath era represented the end of Tory ideology because he could see ‘no great causes to excite us’ or ‘anything very big and obvious that needs reforming’. At the same time, he lamented the influence of public opinion sampling, market research, and social science on politics, and called on Heath to give ‘Conservative policies at least a new rationale, and to establish them on a surer basis of principle’.Footnote ⁷¹ As Charles Lockwood has shown, the party’s ‘public doctrine’ changed in this period. The party adopted a ‘technocratic, “modernizing” approach to government’, which ‘assumed that voters would defer to administrative competence, rather than rhetorical and moral appeals’.Footnote ⁷² These shifts were part of what Lockwood has called a ‘psephological revolution’ in the party in this period.Footnote ⁷³ The conditions inside the party that facilitated the publication of a long and broad engagement with Conservative thought like One Nation were mostly missing during the Heath years. With Heath holding on to the Chairmanship of CRD and overseeing its wide-ranging policy review, not even the Bow group could compete with it and, as Barr has argued, ‘by 1970 it was widely believed to have little clout’. This competition helped to change the group’s priorities, and by the end of the decade, ‘the driving force behind the group was a more disparate search for political self-advancement’.Footnote ⁷⁴

We can see how these changes in the party directly affected the CPC and its publishing of ‘serious’ writing by looking at the party’s review of its publications and promotions policy in 1967. The review was primarily driven by the need to save money and generate income ahead of the next election. The appointed committee’s mandate included orders to examine all the party’s publications to ‘make sure that real needs were being met’, to ‘cut out overlap or waste’, to ‘rationalize the machinery of production and distribution’, and to ‘increase circulation and make a bigger impact’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In terms of pricing and sales, the committee wanted to renew the party’s efforts ‘to persuade commercial retail outlets to carry Party publications’ and it argued that a ‘special C.P.C. campaign directed towards University Bookshops should be continued and expanded’. In terms of subscriptions to party literature, it was agreed that ‘greater attention’ should be paid ‘to the solicitation of subscriptions, particularly from the approximate two million Party members’. In terms of the CPC’s publications, it was also argued that more care had to be taken with regard to pricing, direct mail efforts would have to be expanded, and discounts for party agents would have ‘to be financed from reduced production costs and publication of fewer pamphlets each year’. When it came to proposals for new publications, what was suggested was the amalgamation of a wide variety of the party’s outputs into one quarterly or monthly periodical, which could be ‘used as a controlled medium for dissemination of Party policy and statements from the Leader and other members of the Shadow Cabinet’. However, this did not incorporate the CPC’s pamphlets and only its ‘Monthly Report’. The amalgamated party periodical was to be financed ‘largely or totally’ by advertising revenue.Footnote ⁷⁶

Moreover, the committee tried to identify in detail the specific audiences (or readerships) of the party’s publications. ‘The Audience’ was divided up between ‘The Faithful’, ‘The ‘Fluentials’, and ‘The Floaters’. ‘The Faithful’ incorporated MPs and candidates, local government representatives and candidates, party agents, and other party workers. The ‘Fluentials’ included all those working in the press and television both at home and abroad, the ‘intelligentsia’, and ‘community opinion formers’. ‘The Floaters’ consisted of ‘the future Conservative voter’, ‘the future Socialist abstainer’, and ‘youth’, as well as other occupational, membership, and ‘spontaneous’ groups. In terms of ‘interests’, the report only clearly identified the intelligentsia as a group that read ‘erudite idea pieces (semi-political)’, which was a reference to CPC pamphlets. But it is not difficult to see how these pamphlets could be reused in different ways to target other respective groups. As Toye has argued in his chapter in this volume, the ‘paratexts’ that accompany and/or extend the main text of a publication are also important for building the reputations of political writers and reaching readerships. The CPC would often print a ‘precis’ and press releases for a pamphlet, which would then be sent to members of the press and broadcast media. Pamphlets could also be used to raise issues that would then be reformulated for shorter talks and promotion pieces directed either at the party ‘faithful’, ‘community opinion formers’, or ‘the floaters’. In other words, the CPC pamphlets and other forms of ‘serious’ writing under discussion here were the head of the ‘octopus’ and they were used to inspire the party’s print culture in various ways, but they were primarily used to target the ‘fluentials’ and within that category mostly the ‘intelligentsia’.Footnote ⁷⁷

There was much discussion within the party organisation about the review and how to respond to its recommendations in view of the party’s financial position. Brendon Sewill proposed that the party should raise its subscription price to the CPC’s complete list of publications because he was sceptical about the ability of agents to sell more subscriptions.Footnote ⁷⁸ But Russell Lewis disagreed as he thought recent experience showed that such a policy was not likely to succeed. Lewis explained to the party’s Finance Committee that he thought the party should adopt ‘a more adventurous and imaginative policy which pitches prices in relation to a higher sales volume and promotes marketing effort designed to attain it’. He believed the country was now becoming more receptive to the party’s ideas and that this was not the moment to prioritise cost-cutting over ‘bold policies for propagating these ideas’. He claimed he was not advocating a subsidising of the CPC’s publications, but he wanted the party ‘to escape from the tyranny of the short term view’.Footnote ⁷⁹

CPC records show that its top ten pamphlets published in 1966 had achieved sales of 8,786 copies combined by November 1967.Footnote ⁸⁰ As a result, attempts were made to encourage agents to do better on subscriptions, and over 100 literature stands were introduced in the constituencies. The CPC continued ‘to do some outside mailing to such people as American Professors of Politics and various specialist institutes and libraries’. Plans were drawn up to advertise specialist publications more widely, but it was admitted that they would require a new influx of funds. In desperation, the CPC contemplated introducing a ‘How to be a Conservative: Do it yourself kit’, which would offer ‘a complete package of booklets, briefs, etc. on what Conservatism is about, its ideas, its history, its great figures, the development of policy’. The justification for the latter was based on the argument that the proposal would ‘enable us to sell off a lot of old books at reduced prices which are currently moldering on the bookshelves’. The CPC thought that the idea ‘may also have some appeal to university students who are just looking around for a package of doctrine which they can swallow whole, or even sixth formers in the same psychological condition’.Footnote ⁸¹

These developments had not been helped by the fact that the CPC bookshops, which had been set up by Alport in 1946, had been judged to be unprofitable in their current state, and party officials had been unwilling to use scarce party funds to modernise them.Footnote ⁸² Lewis had made an attempt to strike a deal with a commercial publisher who was sympathetic towards the party to take over the CPC ancillary bookshop in Cannon Street, but in the end the local Conservative association that owned the lease preferred to sell the premises.Footnote ⁸³ Both of the remaining bookshops in Victoria Street and Cannon Street closed in 1967, and a new pamphlet ‘bookshop’ that was opened at CCO was only designed to serve visitors.Footnote ⁸⁴

Conservative publishing was now being examined much more from a business perspective in terms of profits and losses. The CPC itself was mostly concerned about making sure that ‘as many as possible of the right people receive and read our publications’, but at the same time it claimed that ‘the best test’ of the success of its publications was ‘the market test’: ‘If people buy our pamphlets, especially now the pamphlets are priced to cover the costs of production and distribution it is a pretty fair indication that they want them.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Heath urged the CPC to renew its efforts to promote its publications because he did not believe it was ‘enough just to send pamphlets to people’. As a former member of the One Nation group, he understood that they had ‘each got to be talked to and ginned up beforehand – bribed and cajoled into giving the pamphlet good publicity!’.Footnote ⁸⁶ But for Lewis to oblige, he needed more money, and this was not forthcoming because the party chairman insisted that there could be no expansion of activities that ‘will not contribute to winning the Election’.Footnote ⁸⁷ By 1971, Lewis was once again forced to defend the CPC from cuts being proposed by the party’s treasurers, only this time they included the proposal to transfer the functions of his publications officer to the ‘Design Department’, which he argued would mean he would ‘no longer have control’ over his publications programme.Footnote ⁸⁸

It was also in 1971 when Butler’s framework for semi-independent Conservative publishing was finally tested, because of the divisive issue of the proposed referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Communities. Those who were against Britain’s membership like the Conservative MPs Enoch Powell and Neil Marten were disillusioned with and highly critical of the CPC when it refused to publish their pamphlets on the issue. When Marten thought the CPC was about to change course, he argued that it could ‘now begin to restore its original reputation of stimulating discussion – a reputation which (it is widely recognized) has been sadly and seriously tarnished over the Common market issue’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lewis interpreted Marten’s remarks as a smear on the CPC, but he confirmed that the CPC would not publish pamphlets that were critical of the ‘common market’ issue.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the end, government ministers and then Michael Fraser, chair of the party’s Europe Co-ordinating Committee, overruled any attempts by Lewis to produce a pamphlet outlining both sides of the argument.Footnote ⁹¹ Lewis agreed that the party could not afford to ‘create an unfortunate impression of neutrality’. But in an anonymous document, party officials admitted that the episode had exposed the CPC’s attempt ‘to maintain an independent role of critic at the same time as being inescapably associated with the Party’. Furthermore, they also argued that while conflicts were ‘bound to arise’ if the CPC pursued ‘an active and controversial publishing policy’, they would just have to ‘resolve these conflicts in each case as best we can’.Footnote ⁹² In hindsight, it was perhaps remarkable that Butler’s model had held firm for so long.

Finally, there is the question of the rise of what historians refer to as the ‘New Right’. Lewis had been advising some Conservative writers to approach think-tanks like the IEA to publish books during the late 1960s, because by this time the CPC was only willing to publish short pamphlets.Footnote ⁹³ Powell, building on his work for Scope in the early 1950s, had continued to write for a number of specialist periodicals, such as The Banker, Lloyds Bank Review, Stock Exchange Review, The Statist, and New Society, between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s. Therefore, it should not surprise us that he had already embraced the IEA; he had published his book Saving in a Free Society under its banner in 1960.Footnote ⁹⁴ Geoffrey Howe had also turned towards the IEA in this period, and, more importantly, as Barr has argued, there was now ‘a variety of alternative ports of call for politicians looking for new ideas by the end of the 1960s’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Others have shown how the neoliberal IEA acted as an independent publisher of economic research and how the Centre for Policy Studies, another think-tank set up by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, acted as a clearing-house for these ideas, helping to adapt and integrate them into mainstream Conservative politics.Footnote ⁹⁶ But arguably, this was a very specific form of intellectual activity that appealed to a rising faction within the Conservative party in the 1970s. It can and should be contrasted with the party’s earlier attempts to direct, absorb, control, and channel Conservative ideas, writing, and publishing in ways that were meant to benefit the party as a whole.

IV

The turn towards a more ‘technocratic’, ‘psephological’, and ‘market-orientated’ view of doing politics in the Heath years undermined the CPC’s role in the party and specifically its ability to publish erudite ideas pieces that were focused on rethinking Conservative ‘principles’ and ‘ideology’ or designed to make the party look more intellectually respectable again. In some ways, the shift towards a reliance on the ‘think-tank archipelago’ resulted in a narrowing of the ecology of Conservative writing and publishing, which is why Conservative writers like Robert Rhodes James recalled a ‘disturbing trend … towards what must be described as the revival of anti-intellectualism in the Conservative Party’. In his view, not only had the party failed to attract many intellectually-minded people, but some had ‘been positively alienated’ by the party’s new direction in the late 1960s.Footnote ⁹⁷ Conservatives became more reliant on the research and writings of a small body of intellectuals who were seen as independent of the party in the Thatcher era. For those Conservatives who were happy to draw ‘ideological sustenance from neoliberalism’, the party would have appeared to have been more intellectual than it had ever been.Footnote ⁹⁸ But for those Conservative MPs who had a talent for thinking and writing about Conservatism more broadly, there must have been some recognition of the fact that their efforts were unlikely to be rewarded.