This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Maurice Cowling died in 2005. He has not changed much since except, perhaps, in becoming more so. Gen Z has never heard of him. The Guardian, if provoked, would invoke cancellation by placing him amongst its favourite confection of “Far Right” historians. Conservative politics no longer resembles the environment within which Cowling functioned and one could plausibly say that he has nothing to offer — least of all “lessons” — to remedy our predicaments.
Two things suggest a reconsideration if not a renewal.
The anniversary of his death prompts a retrospect but also a posthumous prospect. Next year, he would have been a hundred years old and it seems natural to wonder how he would have reacted to the world he never saw but in which he would have taken a riveted interest.
The year also allows those of you who never met, let alone were taught by, Maurice to hear, as he might have put it, how the old bugger talked, the video of my 1998 Institute of Historical Research interview having surfaced online. Maybe this is a moment to recall this significant Conservative force and wonder about his legacies and echoes.
I did not know Maurice in his early years as an academic; he had been a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for six years before I arrived in 1969. And I saw him as a research student, so was spared the blood and tears of his undergraduate teaching. I got to know him well over the following 30 years all the same, and was close to him at the end. The closeness mattered because Cowling resisted intimacies: they interfered with the posturing intrinsic to the personality that defined the public figure, which was the only one that others were meant to see.
Peterhouse, Cambridge — the college in which he taught from 1963 to 1993 — already had its own theatre but Cowling provided a second in his demeanour as a colleague and teacher. Michael Ratcliffe of The Times once wrote, in reviewing an untheatrical book, that Cowling was essentially a dramatist: such an acute observation. In both his teaching and his political interventions, the need for audience and the wish to manipulate it came close to the heart of the enterprise.
Not everyone liked it. Some pupils went away disappointed or embittered; some political contacts could not handle the unsparing clear-headedness; all liberals could not understand why anyone would seek his company. Those of us who responded did so because we had never met anybody like him, feared the power of his intellect (which was real) and felt the weight of a crushing personality. Cowling created around himself his own opera: whisky and gin the props, a ringing phone the continuo, laughter, growling and a virile body-language the mis-en-scène.
Westminster politics and academic writing ran together in a dialectical relationship once Cowling had failed to enter parliament in 1959. Any temptation by commentators to separate the streams misses the point: his political vision of what an English society ought to be and his histories of politicians trying to create or protect or subvert that vision issued from the same source.
Ultimately but obliquely, the source emanated from religion and the need to enfold its cultural presence in any conservative concept of English society and its legacies. It governed Cowling’s understanding of what politics was for and, once understood, it lent coherence to an academic oeuvre that otherwise may appear disparate.
Maurice’s early connection with Michael Oakeshott, one that soured later, may have helped instil the idea that the task of political governance did not involve doing things in order to steer the ship but simply in adjusting sails to prevent the rudderless ship from sinking.
He reworked the metaphor in a now-famous remark about the degree to which politics is “broken-backed”: politicians communicate a necessarily-absent robustness through “rhetoric” whose point consists not in enlightening but persuading. Their life aboard the ship of state never advances beyond absorbing the buffeting of waves but they do what little they can to navigate and point to some inspiring destination.
Quite which destination Cowling himself wanted to reach, remains open to argument. He wanted a politics that responded to national(ist) sentiment. He wanted “social cohesion”: a much-rehearsed phrase which has since become commonplace. He wanted the Church of England to keep its reserved role as a coagulant. (The young Maurice had wanted to be a bishop until he found out how little they were paid). He wanted hierarchies to continue for their stabilising effects rather than out of snobbery.
The legendary démarche at dinner with strangers — “Are you lower middle class?” — in fact comprised autobiography more than patronage; though comfortable and well-received in aristocratic society (“beautiful manners”), he disliked tuft hunters.
He understood sympathetically the working class and its prejudices. If he did not see himself as a “Tory Marxist”, which dilutes both terms, he saw much to admire in Marxist analysis of social stratification and its hard-nosed sense of class awareness. He died before populism took flight but already displayed a streak of it, a point to which we should return.
The impact of books
The politics was consistently Conservative but not without complication. Closest in personality came the Thatcher-era cabinet minister John Biffen, largely forgotten now but a fearsomely intelligent man, and Enoch Powell whom Cowling admired for his intellect and willingness to take charge rhetorically when others floundered.
Margaret Thatcher’s arrival he welcomed and supported; one senses some approbation in the collection of Conservative Essays he edited in 1978. That enthusiasm waned; they usually did. Maurice’s mind often turned corrosively critical, which made permanent commitments unlikely.
The thought prompts a question that he never asked himself, one that has frequently occurred to me in retrospect. Suppose he had magically achieved dictatorial powers that enabled him to promote the Conservative society in which he claimed to believe; and suppose that he had realised that objective in a Cowlingite England. Would he have enjoyed living in it? Could he have tolerated the vaunted cohesion and stability? Or would congenital negativities and withdrawals supervene and the critical machine resume its murmuring?
Instead, Maurice’s critical acumen turned away from future to past and informed the histories as Cowling invigilated British politics, society and religion since 1840. Deprived of a Cowlingite England, he sought its antecedents and obstacles in two trilogies, one considering waves rocking the ship, the other depicting thinkers below decks as they unknowingly injected religion into their sense of the ship’s compass. The six volumes constitute a serious achievement, and it is sad that they now figure only occasionally in the bibliographies of undergraduates, and those in separate faculties, where they figure at all.
The political trilogy examined three potentially destructive impacts: of a supposed revolution (1867); of a rising Labour party (The Impact of Labour) and of the Third Reich (The Impact of Hitler). They mattered in two respects. They reversed the flow of influence from constituencies and regions to the cabinet level of government; and they incorporated a contrasting historical method in insisting on archival research of material deposited by people “at the top” rather than depositories of public material emanating from people at the bottom.
The three succeeding volumes on the history of thought — Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England — shifted laterally to a different elite and introduced a reading of the message of “public intellectuals” that appeared very different to what they thought they had said.
Each trilogy made Cowling himself a public intellectual, unloved in his impassivity but hard to liquidate. His political opponents lost their force before he did. His historical critics found new zest in the “cultural turn” that made political history change its clothes and indeed turn into the history of clothes.
A cumulative impact persisted none the less and by the time of his death, Cowling had made his own “impact” if only as a saboteur of secular liberalism and its benignities.
Prefiguring populism
In deeming him reactionary, people mistake Cowling’s outlook. He lived, rather, in an intense present/future and scoured both dimensions with peculiar relish. Living in the moment and sharing it on the telephone, he communicated a heightened sense of Dasein, of simply being alive and specifically located, with a vigour that one would need a Geiger-counter to measure. Now that he is no longer alive, we can wonder what he would have made of the present/future that he never saw. He would have looked forward, in both senses, to stamping his personality on it.
Even the economic collapse, just three years after his death, might have beckoned as opportunity and given him the chance to examine another impact and trace it, as he always did, across all parties and demonstrate intertwining and mutual conditioning.
He had said in print many years before that the third, in truth the fourth, of those monographs would appear as The Impact of Inflation. It was never written. At that time his preoccupations turned on the 1970s with the oil crisis and its accoutrements of a three-day week, Heath, Wilson and Callaghan. What a pity that he could no longer excoriate their hapless successors.
Then came Brexit. If there persists a blurredness over what he might have done with inflation, clarity settles over his vision of “Europe”. You went there for your summer holiday — proper hotel, no coach parties, pool essential — and consumed books.
But he collaborated in Uncle Matthew’s prejudice that “abroad” was intrinsically ghastly and had nothing to do with the British state and its society. Maurice had no language to my knowledge, and we have Herbert Butterfield’s testimony that he reacted badly at dinner if anybody tried to speak one. He would have voted “Out” in 2016.
This does not imply that he would have believed the rhetoric, and even less that he would have believed in Boris Johnson though he would have liked the brio. He did believe in Michael Gove, despite his error in going to Oxford as an undergraduate, and enjoyed his journalism and astute speeches as an ex-journalist would. Gove was the sort of man who ought to lead the Conservative party because he had brains and the right kind of concealed cynicism. George Canning once said that a decent politician could get on his feet and talk for two hours without making the party look ridiculous. Maurice would rightly have seen that quality in Gove.
He had seen it in Powell and followed him for a time. During that period, he once described himself to me as a “Powell democrat”. I lend the word emphasis because it is both telling about Cowling’s instincts and pregnant in our own context.
Long before populism arrived as a powerful force of the Trump-Orbán kind, Cowling had conceived a form of Conservatism led by its followers, one that would gain credibility by taking seriously the concerns of ordinary people, leaving the “deplorables” to liberal delusion, and re-establishing depth of contact for a Conservative future. That future seems no more, but it invites the question that posterity might most want to pose to the Peterhouse prophet.
Common prejudices
Would Cowling have abandoned the Tories and invested his hopes in Reform? The Powell moment suggests he sat lightly when alternatives presented. But Nigel Farage is not Enoch Powell. Inventing “policy” on the back of a fag-packet, as someone sweetly wrote recently, would not have attracted him.
The point about Powell was the massive intellect, an affliction that no one has wished on Farage. But the rhetoric about Englishness, the aggression about illegal migrants, the apparent willingness to register concerns over which the established parties register unconcern: these dispositions he would have found attractive. Surely it would have made another impact book. Can anyone doubt that it would have been called The Impact of Immigration?
On the other hand, he may have felt the bafflement now encountered from the Red Wall to the country houses of Kent and Sussex. Kemi Badenoch would arouse ambiguity. Cowling remained unconstipated by race. He would have seen much to admire in her personally but would have offended against our own squeamishness in thinking colour an issue: not in some intrinsic deficiency but as a strategic discrepancy.
Could Badenoch cut it in the shires and amongst conventional centres of Conservative voting where Toryism is an atmospheric disposition and not a commitment to liberal niceness and inclusion? He would have no interest in Jenrick as a poor man’s Boris. His eye would, I suspect, wander towards what is left of Tory intellect and smile on someone like Jesse Norman who understands the power of Mind.
Autres temps, autres mœurs. Whether millennials would find any interest in these orientations is questionable. Their location lies far beyond youth experience. Today’s Conservatives can reasonably claim that their problems are not Cowling’s problems, that their time is not his, that they must find their way through thickets that no one in Peterhouse or beyond needed to encounter in the later years of the 20th century.
Yet a present/future speaks always to a present/past and an absorption in those years of Conservative success may bring to our own present a certain perspective and sense of possibility. The anxiety, thinking more darkly, surrounds our youthful conservative enthusiasts who may simply prove too frail, too pure, too sanctimonious, to cut the leash, stretch their sympathies, and make that dislocating return journey.
They should; they really should.
