The Strange Death of Tory England

Description:

"The Conservative party dominated British politics for 120 years from Disraeli's victory in 1874, culminating in an unprecedented eighteen-year spell in government after 1979. And yet at the very end of the century the Tories imploded so disastrously as to suggest the party might be doomed to oblivion as the Liberals were a century ago." "Geoffrey Wheatcroft has observed this drama at close hand, interviewing all the key players on (and, more often, off) the record: from spirited exchanges with Margaret Thatcher to unprintable asides from Alan Clark. In this provocative and often acerbically funny book he first examines how the Tories came to enjoy their unlikely victory: how what was meant to be 'the century of the common man', with the unstoppable ascent of Labour, turned out to be the era of the Conservative, as the Tories reinvented themselves over and over again, not least entirely changing the party's class character. In the early 1980s Margaret Thatcher enjoyed countless triumphs, and yet by the time she was ejected from power it looked as though she might have transformed her country, but wrecked her party." "The Strange Death of Tory England goes on to show how the gradual eclipse of military virtues and patrician ideals came to discredit Toryism, how the party tore itself apart over Europe and how it suffered from the malign influence of a quasi-intellectual New Right which held sway in the Tory press."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: History,  Politics and government,  Politik,  Intellektueller,  Conservative Party (Great Britain),  Konservative Partei,  Great britain, politics and government, 20th century