Scrutony

Britain never knew what to do with Roger Scruton. He was a complete outlier. For one thing, he was not only an academic, but a philosopher, rather than either a roaringly unbookish country squire or impersonator of such, or a net curtain twitcher whose only book in the house was Regimental Cap Badges of the British Army or some heavily illustrated hagiography of the Queen.

Moreover, Scruton was a British conservative intellectual who might actually have been in a conservative rather than a liberal party on the Continent, or at least have voted for one. That is almost unheard of. Usually, they are like Oliver Letwin, or David Willetts, or Nick Boles, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Burke, who was, after all, a Whig, a critic of the French Revolution only really in practice, and a supporter of the American Revolution at least in principle.

Now, Scruton was not Joseph de Maistre, or Charles Maurras, or Juan Donoso Cortés, or Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. He was not even where those thinkers' successors, who certainly do exist, are today. But he was that occasional curiosity, an English writer with at least some affinity with any of that. Yet even then, he was peculiar. He had a straightforwardly English background, he not only went to Oxbridge but thrived there, he was attached to the middle-of-the-road Church of England, and he had at least some sort of association with the Conservative Party.

By contrast, figures in roughly his position on the periphery of our national life have been at least one of basically foreign, academically undistinguished in any formal sense and so mostly self-taught, either fiercely Catholic (but not either Recusant or Irish) or on the extreme Anglo-Catholic fringe, and possessed of an utter contempt for the nominally Tory political project, sometimes to the point of not voting as a matter of principle.