T. E. Utley Quotes (1921-1988)

“My impression still is that Mrs Thatcher has failed fully to grasp one of the clearest truths about British politics in the 20th century – the truth that the British people are not that much concerned about capitalism (though they are perfectly happy to accept its advantages); in the abstract, they do not understand or like it. They only become enthusiastic for it when it is presented in a patriotic context. Joe Chamberlain knew this; the last Conservative politician to have known it with perfection is Enoch Powell. After that came Margaret Thatcher. She also knows it. Why they like her is because she "speaks for Britain", not because she is a very good economist (though she is probably as bright as any of that bunch), but because she expresses the sentiments and prejudices of the British people.”

“Disraeli has become a code name for "collectivist" or, as they now put it, rather inaccurately, "corporatist" policies. He is the mascot of the "wets". This is a grievous distortion of history. It is true that, in his romantic youth, he wrote the only phrase which the majority of his present-day admirers have ever read from his pen – about there being a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor. His paternalism, however, was superficial. In so far as he ever favoured authoritarian measures for the defence of what are now ludicrously called the "under-privileged" he favoured them not so much in the name of abstract social justice as in that of national cohesion. What he believed in was the Nation which he tended in those benighted days to call the Race. This is his one, valid, surviving contribution to Conservative thinking. He was an imperialist.”

“It [Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England] is a very odd book indeed – written with all the thoroughness of a first-class technical historian; but no one would recognise it as, in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, a "history of opinion". In large part, it is simply an account of the extraordinary effect which certain brilliant men in the Cambridge of the 1930s and 1940s (Kenneth Pickthorn, Charles Smyth, Edward Welbourne and Herbert Butterfield for instance) had on the mind of an unusually intelligent undergraduate. As I was exposed to precisely the same influence at much the same time the book has for me the appeal of what the BBC would call "a trip down memory lane". For the general reader, however, its importance is greater; for these men (whom Mr. Cowling still looks on, as I do, with the awe of youth) were all unconsciously engaged in giving intellectual expression to a brand of English Conservatism which now seems almost extinct among the articulate but, in those days, represented the unstated assumptions of many generations. The dominant characteristic of that brand was that it was Christian. We were encouraged to believe that the State could not be indifferent to the moral assumptions of its subjects. Society rested on Christian foundations, and it was the positive duty of government to protect these foundations, largely through the agency of an educational system which could not be based on the illusion of ethical objectivity. Beyond that, we learned that the nation-state was probably the best means which human ingenuity had discovered of reconciling freedom with public order, that a government's principal task was to maintain the nation against the seldom distant threat of foreign aggression and the never absent danger of social disintegration.”

“Few people have possessed such a complete understanding of the central tenets and principles of Toryism as Peter Utley. Certainly no one has articulated them with more eloquence. He stood in the tradition of the great Tory philosophers—Hooker, Burke and Lord Salisbury. Drawing on that tradition, he delivered powerful and incisive judgments on leading political, social and moral issues over a period of more than forty years. Though his range was remarkable, questions affecting the Anglican Church and the unity of the nation always had pride of place in his work. He was, quite simply, the most distinguished Tory thinker of our time.”