The cult of treachery

For the greater part of the last two centuries it was axiomatic that three great institutions upheld a large part of the structure of our national life. These were the monarchy, the established Church and the Conservative party. In different ways all three were expressions of identical values: loyalty, decency, tolerance, service, respect for tradition. They all taught that the individual matters far less than the whole.

These institutions were, and theoretically remain, wholly antipathetic to individual greed and naked ambition. They are grounded in a homely native empiricism and suspicion of abstract ideas. Any account of why Britain, alone among the great European powers, did not succumb to the murderous ideologies of fascism or communism in the last century is incomplete without an explanation of the role played by these three institutions. The existence of the monarchy meant that Britain already possessed a potent national symbolism; the kind of fascist or communist display that dazzled continental Europe provoked simple bewilderment here. The presence of a robust, indigenous, sceptical conservatism left no room for the extreme Right to break in from the periphery. When war came, the Church and the monarchy helped to provide an unbreakable social glue that bound the British people together in the six-year struggle against Hitler.

The Church, the monarchy and the Tory party have constantly shown an astonishing ability to renew themselves. The Anglican Church was all but moribund in the first two decades of the 19th century, but within a generation it had come back with tremendous force to reoccupy the centre of public life. The British monarchy twice recovered from disquieting calamities, each the product of human frailty. The scandals of the 1820s — as bad as anything alleged today — merely proved in retrospect to be an amusing prelude to the glory of the late Victorian monarchy.