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.