All In This Together

Far from the present situation's being an aberration, the Conservative-led Governments of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s were Coalitions.

Those of the 1950s included four parties: the Conservatives, the Scottish Unionist bedrock of the enormous Tory majorities of the period, the Ulster Unionists, and the National Liberals, all but the last having been there in the 1920s also. Those of the 1930s included no fewer than five parties: Conservative, Scottish Unionist, Ulster Unionist, National Liberal, and National Labour.

That last's founding Chairman, the Ninth Earl De La Warr, pronounced as in the American state named after the Bay that was in turn named after his forebear, had once been the first hereditary peer ever to join the Labour Party. He was appointed to Churchill's Indian Summer Ministry of 1951 along with numerous other figures either with roots outside the Tory machine, or in several cases with no political background whatever but with records of service to the old man during the War. Churchill had wanted even more of those, but they had declined.

The loyalty of the leftovers of the National Labour Organisation was quite striking, considering that in his first year and a half as Prime Minister, Churchill, himself never to his dying day a Tory insider or fully trusted by those who were, had gone to very considerable lengths to try and liquidate National Labour, shunting several of its key figures into administrative sidings at home and abroad. Yet it urged a vote for him in 1945 upon dissolving itself, the second part of which led The Observer to observe that the wonder was that it had taken so long. But six years later, when he was back, then effectively so was it.

The Chamberlains never used the word Conservative in self-description. In Birmingham, hardly peripheral. In 1945, Gwilym Lloyd George had been separately offered the Leaderships of the Liberal and the National Liberal Parties.

The very left-wing Sir Walter Monckton, as invaluable to Churchill as he had been to Edward VIII and remained to the Duke of Windsor, only joined any political party, as it happened the Conservatives, so that the Prime Minister, as it happened Churchill, could rush him into Parliament at a by-election in order to give him an already determined upon Cabinet position, specifically as Minister of Labour and National Service. Such was the man given responsibility for relations with the trade unions.

We are all conditioned to believe that the man who ended up as Duke of Windsor was both a complete decadent of the Jazz Age and a Nazi sympathiser. But how could he possibly have been both? Think about it. Moreover, his principal political ally during the Abdication Crisis was Churchill.

Macmillan sacked all of the remaining National Liberals from his Cabinet in one night. But Michael Heseltine first sought election as one, John Nott is the last person ever to have been first elected as one, and Margaret Thatcher's own formative political experience was entirely Liberal. It showed. When Heath first became Prime Minister, although the Scottish Unionists no longer existed as a distinct party, the Ulster Unionists were still in receipt of his Whip. With Heseltine as his Deputy, John Major became dependent on the Ulster Unionists for a Commons majority.

And now, this. It is not an aberration. Whenever there is a Tory Government, there is in fact a Coalition. Properly so called: not just different factions, but different parties.