The professor will see you now: ethos
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: ethos
The two most important people in British politics are both dead. At least that is the claim usually attributed to one of the greatest historians of the Conservative Party, the late Robert Blake. Since I have never been able to source it, I fear that like most of the best political quotations it may turn out to be apocryphal, but there’s no reason a small matter like that should deter us.
The first of Blake’s important stiffs was Ramsay MacDonald, who helped found the Labour Party, became its first prime minister, but then split from the party in 1931 to lead a national government together with the Conservatives. His actions helped cement in Labour activists the view that their leadership were all treacherous bastards, never more than a heartbeat away from selling them out.
The second was Robert Peel, who split the Tories in the 1840s over corn law reform and by doing so established the modern Conservative Party, but at the cost of almost three decades out of office.
On the Labour side, the fear of betrayal runs deep
It’s easy enough to see the point Lord Blake was making, assuming he did indeed make it. John Major, who knows more than most about dealing with internal party splits, once said that throughout his time in No 10 he was constantly aware of the ghost of Peel over his shoulder. On the Labour side, the fear of betrayal runs deep. Labour MPs elected in 1997 got letters accusing the new government of selling out within months of the election. No doubt similar communications have arrived since July 2024.
For all their enduring legacy, I am not certain these two figures remain top of the celestial pops. For the Conservatives at least, the son of Bury has surely been replaced by the daughter of Grantham. My Queen Mary colleague Robert Saunders has written about the many lives of Margaret Thatcher and the extent to which Thatcher cosplay now dominates the party. Ambitious Conservatives, he noted, do not “curate images of themselves posing as Harold Macmillan. Nor do they launch their campaigns at the birthplace of Sir Edward Heath, like pilgrims seeking blessing at the Church of the Nativity”. For Labour, we could make a case for Clement Attlee – although like Thatcher for the Conservatives, it is often a beatified Attlee, far removed from the one that actually inhabited Downing Street – but if we can include the living, a better case can probably be made for Tony Blair, as inspiration (for some) or a cautionary tale (for others).
Either way, this is all part of a distinction made by Henry Drucker, in 1979, in his classic Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party. A slim book in which the young Gordon Brown gets thanked for his assistance in the foreword, it argued that too much attention was paid to a party’s doctrines – beliefs, policy, and so on – but not enough to their ethos: traditions, habits, feel, “the spirit of the party”.
Ethos is harder to identify or evidence than doctrine – which may be why so few people have picked up Drucker’s baton since 1979. Another of my Queen Mary colleagues, Karl Pike, had a go at examining Labour’s ethos under Jeremy Corbyn; where is the equivalent work on the Conservatives?
But ethos is just as important as doctrine. Parties, Drucker argued, have “a life of their own”, which prevents them operating as simple vote-getting, policy-making machines. Take, for example, the current discussion about Labour’s electoral support. Why, psephologists wail, has Labour not realised that its voter base is now university-educated middle-class liberals? Why is it going out of its way to offend the people who vote for it, in what seems a doomed attempt to pull back support from working-class Reform supporters? A large part of the answer is ethos. Labour sees itself as a party of, and for, the industrial working class; they are “our” people. That this belief has not been true for decades is less important.
Further reading: K Pike, The Party Has a Life of its Own: Labour’s Doctrine and Ethos, Renewal (2017); R Saunders, The Many Lives of Margaret Thatcher, The English Historical Review (2017)
