We need ideology in politics

‘Studying history at Balliol,’ writes Chris Patten, ‘I knew that the one thing which made me uneasy was a grand theory or over-arching generalisation.’ The remark comes from a Lord Patten’s latest book, First Confession. Henry Keswick wrote an unpleasant review in this magazine, and I’ve spent some time recently discouraging mutual friends from bothering to protest (‘Leave it, Jono, he isn’t worth it’). To hear Patten himself talking about this honest, engaging and very personal memoir, I went recently to see him in a packed opera house at the Buxton Festival.

I count Chris, who as director of the Conservative Research Department in 1977 gave me my first job in politics, as a friend and as a politician whom I admire tremendously. At Buxton he was at his civilised, funny, thoughtful best, prowling the stage without notes and musing on life, faith, government and experience with a reflective candour that had the audience in the palm of his hand for an hour.

He returned often to that theme — his distrust of grand theories — and it resonated, I think, with his listeners. ‘What works,’ as Tony Blair put it, is much in vogue today. In First Confession Patten puts it like this: ‘Conservatives should run a mile at the suggestion that they have an ideology aimed at changing the culture of the nation’, and in Buxton, quoting (he said) the late Garret FitzGerald, he illustrated his suspicion of ideology with a jest of Dr FitzGerald’s. The Irish Taoiseach was responding to a policy proposal. ‘It may work in practice,’ said FitzGerald, ‘but would it work in theory?’

Patten’s audience roared with laughter. So did I. But I’ve been thinking about those grand, over-arching theories that Chris so distrusts, and reached the conclusion that his wholesale dismissal of ideology in politics overlooks a rather important part of the way we think, and need to think.

What, after all, is religious faith but a grand, over-arching theory of what things mean, how to read the world, how to handle human motivation, and (sometimes) how (and why) to change the culture of a nation? Chris is a convinced Catholic, albeit not a dogmatic one.