Eighty years ago this week, the institution in which David Cameron and his closest lieutenants learned their trade was born. The press is fascinated by his membership of the Bullingdon Club, but Cameron owes a thousand times more to the apprenticeship he served in the Conservative Research Department.
How dreary those words sound, and how modest the press release on 17 November 1929 announcing the foundation of the new body: ‘In view of the growing complexity of the political aspect of modern industrial, Imperial and social problems, Mr Stanley Baldwin has decided to set up a special department charged with the task of organising and conducting research into these matters.’
But the ambitions which lay behind CRD were anything but modest. Neville Chamberlain, at whose urging it was created and who remained in charge of it until his death in November 1940, used it to develop the measures closest to his own heart: an ambitious programme ‘to elevate the condition of the people’. Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937 and planned to fight an election in 1939 or 1940 in which the Tories would show that they, rather than the socialists, had the best policies to alleviate poverty and distress. This has a contemporary ring: Cameron tells the Tories that they, rather than Labour, would do most to help the poorest.
The earnestness of CRD’s early work did not prevent, and may well have promoted, an enduring tradition of frivolity and eccentricity among its staff. Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford, who at this point was still a Tory, joined CRD in 1929 and flung himself into drawing up a proposal for the education of the working classes. Pakenham told the following story about his colleague, Henry Stannard, a former president of the Oxford Union, when their chief visited them in their room in the house occupied by CRD at 24 Old Queen Street, next door to the present offices of The Spectator and overlooking St James’s Park:
Chamberlain’s reputation as a social reformer was obliterated by Hitler. In a fascinating new collection of essays, Tory Policy-Making: The Conservative Research Department 1929-2009, Alistair Cooke attempts to rehabilitate this much pilloried prime minister, and describes how, after 1945, the Tories had to begin again the struggle to escape being written off as a harsh, anachronistic party of two nations and high unemployment, whose upper-class leaders had no understanding of social reform.
The Tories needed to work out their response to the welfare state being built by the Labour government. Winston Churchill did not believe the answer was to draw up some inconveniently detailed list of policies, but he did allow Rab Butler to revive CRD. Under Butler’s leadership, and with new recruits including Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Brigadier Enoch Powell, CRD was at the heart of the successful attempt to reinvent the party after 1945: which of course meant, as reinvention so often does, accepting without attribution the work already done, in this case by Chamberlain. It also meant accepting large parts of what Labour was doing and incurring the charge that those who worked for CRD were ‘pink pansies’.
The department regarded itself as a cut above the rest of the party apparatus. By the time I spent a brief spell there in 1983-84, the latitude extended to its staff in matters of personal behaviour seemed pretty much unlimited. There was a loucheness which was at variance with the Tory party’s official image of itself: I recall being shown a chair in which one of my predecessors was said to have seduced colleagues of both sexes. The best people working in CRD were very bright and one never had any fear that it might be a mistake to tell a joke. Recent members, some of whom were still around, included Chris Patten (its director from 1974 to 79), Michael Portillo, Bruce Anderson, Michael Dobbs and Matthew Parris.
David Cameron arrived in CRD in 1988, fresh out of Oxford, and has contributed a short essay to this collection. It reads like the kind of thank-you letter written by a very polite Englishman, who is genuinely grateful for the hospitality which has been extended to him, but is not sure that he is ever going to see any way of repaying it. Cameron cites the description of CRD by John Wyndham, who worked there after the war and enjoyed its ‘bohemian sort of efficiency’. This is correct, as is the observation that one of the best things about working there was that at the age of 21 you could find yourself briefing the most senior people in the party.
Cameron thinks that in the Thatcher period, ‘The strong vein of social Conservatism which runs through our history... was not given as much prominence as perhaps it should have been.’ He is now reviving this tradition.
While in CRD, Cameron became friends with many people who now work closely with him in the great enterprise of trumping Blairite social democracy with Cameroon social Conservatism, such as Ed Llewellyn, Steve Hilton, Rachel Whetstone, Catherine Fall, Peter Campbell and Ed Vaizey. From before this period, Oliver Letwin began his political career in CRD, while George Osborne served a CRD apprenticeship a few years later.
Opponents such as Gordon Brown, who concentrate on the Bullingdonian side of Cameron, will never understand that he is a professional politician whose training started early, as did the training of his inner circle. The Cameron gang have been hard at work for 20 years, and are more accurately seen as the heirs, not of Tony Blair, but of Chamberlain and Butler.
Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter.