Best Conservative Party Books 2020 – UK Guide

The Conservatives are back, and back with a bang two election wins in a row and, providing they can hold things together, in a pretty good position to win another. But many questions about their recent past, present, and future still remain.

Just why did the world’s oldest and most successful political party dump Margaret Thatcher only to commit electoral suicide under John Major? And what stopped the Tories getting their act together until David Cameron came along?

The first major documentary to look back on the life of this remarkable woman, featuring many excerpts from her powerful speeches and contributions from her colleagues, supporters and detractors. Features unseen footage from the events that shaped modern Britain.

Margaret Thatcher was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold that office. As Prime Minister, she implemented policies known as Thatcherism.

The Conservative Party is often interpreted as being pragmatic and concerned with the pursuit of power. This book offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the political, economic and social thought of the Conservative Party since 1945.

The book begins with chapters examining the major ideological positions: traditional Toryism, New Right, Centre and One Nation. These chapters offer fresh perspectives and research. The book then considers a range of thematic issues such as the Constitution, Europe, Economic statecraft, social morality and attitudes towards economic and social inequality.

This timely and insightful analysis of Conservative economic policymaking over the past half century covers the period from Ted Heath’s assumption of the leadership through the Heath, Thatcher and Major governments and up to the early years of the coalition.

As well as a offering a detailed commentary on the Conservative Party’s macroeconomic and microeconomic policymaking for the past 50 years it also establishes a context for the controversial austerity measures implemented by the Conservative-led Coalition that established in the wake of Britain’s inconclusive general election of 2010.

Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved.

The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy’s fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties – the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege – recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right.

This book provides a range of essays on aspects of the British Conservative Party from the late 19th century to the present day. It offers fresh perspectives on Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism; Britain and Europe; Uk policy towards Ireland; Conservatism and reform, and the conservative ideology, to name only a few of the key issues explored.

An accessible and concise overview, this book is an important primer for anyone studying British politics, history, or social and political theory.

There was no more appropriate person to write this book. Robert Blake was the doyen of Tory historians being most famous for his unsurpassed biography of Disraeli (to be reissued in Faber Finds).

His history of the Conservative Party was first published in 1970. It then went as far as Churchill. A subsequent edition took it up to Thatcher and the final edition, the one being reissued by Faber Finds, to Major. For the span it covers, it remains the definitive one-volume history.

How did Margaret Thatcher change and divide Britain? How did her model of combative female leadership help shape the way we live now? How did the woman who won the Cold War and three general elections in succession find herself pushed out by her own MPs?

Charles Moore’s full account, based on unique access to Margaret Thatcher herself, her papers and her closest associates, tells the story of her last period in office, her combative retirement and the controversy that surrounded her even in death. It includes the Fall of the Berlin Wall which she had fought for and the rise of the modern EU which she feared. It lays bare her growing quarrels with colleagues and reveals the truth about her political assassination.

As the party that has won wars, reversed recessions and held prime ministerial power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society.

And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Sir Robert Peel to David Cameron, via Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success.

The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope.

But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain’s historiographical record.