Saturday 28 February 2015

Maurice Cowling

Maurice Cowling, the historian and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, who died on Wednesday aged 78, was a leading political historian of the England of the 19th and 20th centuries; he was also a scourge of liberalism, and was often credited with being a major influence on Margaret Thatcher.

Cowling argued that liberalism as a political creed was not about freedom and choice, but about intolerance and priggery. He regarded it as his life's work to subvert what he called the "rancid solemnities" of the post-war liberal consensus and its intellectual antecedents.

In Mill and Liberalism (1963) he argued that the true intention of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill was to impose a secular religion to replace Christianity and that, far from his being an apostle of liberty, Mill's real aim was totalitarian - to use the state to force-feed everyone with the dictates of an elitist secular morality.

Cowling's analysis provoked outrage among Mill's defenders and among liberal intellectuals. So it was hardly surprising that they credited him with being the eminence grise behind a political leader who demonstrated a similar distaste for their views. But though Cowling supported her leadership of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher's ideological brand of Toryism was in many ways anathema to him.

To Cowling, politics was not about principles but was a game in which the players are motivated at best by party interest and at worst by self-interest. In "high politics" (Cowling's phrase) the participants secure advantage not by espousing the right policies, but by making "corners for themselves" or finding a "range of rhetoric appropriate to the circumstances".

In The Nature and Limits of Political Science (1963), Cowling set out to demonstrate that both political science and political philosophy are irrelevant to the practice of politics, and argued that too much philosophising could be an impediment to political action.

He believed that the strength of Conservatism lay not in any particular set of principles, but in its appeal to a "combination of unashamed materialism and disbelieving scepticism about the power of political parties to give effect to Utopia".

To Cowling, the strength of Thatcherism lay not in its "mad-monk Hayekianism which ignored the constraints of practicality" but in its desire to "shift the post-war consensus and a populist language". In other words, Mrs Thatcher succeeded not because her ideas were right, but because "there was a public sentiment to respond to and she and others had a bag of tricks and a set of policies to respond".

As an analysis which excluded any concept of public duty, conviction and good faith, it was not calculated to appeal to Margaret Thatcher herself or to what Cowling once described as "the intellectual mafia of ex-communists" who surrounded her during her early years as leader.

But if Cowling's influence with Mrs Thatcher was overstated (he once described himself as a symptom and not a cause of Thatcherism), he had considerable influence over some of her more prominent adherents, in particular Michael Portillo, the Conservative Right-winger who became Defence Secretary under John Major but lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1997.

Portillo had been a pupil of Cowling's at Peterhouse, and despite Cowling's observation at Portillo's graduation that he would one day make a good executive in a medium-sized company, Portillo was generous enough to give Cowling the credit for converting him to Conservatism.

Throughout the leadership crises that beset the Tory Party during the 1990s, Portillo was often mentioned as Mrs Thatcher's natural heir, sharing her ideological outlook. Yet those who understood Cowling's views wondered whether the succession was as natural as it appeared.

"What Cowling taught Michael," remarked one senior Conservative, "is that to be successful as a politician you need to be astute in responding to different circumstances as they arise. To regard Michael as a Thatcherite ideologue through and through is to miss the point."

In 1995, when opinion polls rated Portillo one of the least popular members of John Major's Cabinet, Cowling predicted that Portillo would survive as he expressed " by instinct the hopes and fears of Conservatives".

Maurice John Cowling was born on September 6 1926 and educated at Battersea Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read History. From 1944 to 1948 he served with the British and Indian Armies, becoming a captain in the Queen's Royal Regiment.

He began his academic career in 1950, but interrupted it in the mid-1950s to embark on a career in journalism, working first as a leader writer for The Times. In 1957 he moved to the Daily Express, but after a year in which only one of his articles was published, Lord Beaverbrook informed him that he was too much of an old Tory for the newspaper, so he resigned.

This was the first of a series of false starts. Once, when asked to edit a special number of the monthly The Twentieth Century, he seized the opportunity to write a diatribe against the influence on international affairs of David Astor and the Observer. That the piece was never published was hardly surprising: Astor owned the periodical.

In 1970 Cowling became literary editor of The Spectator, then under the editorship of George Gale, and he was part of the Bohemian crowd that moved in and out of Gale's house at Wivenhoe, Essex. Cowling resigned from The Spectator in 1971 over an article about Princess Anne, published by the deputy editor in Gale's absence, which began: "Has Princess Anne had sex?".

In 1959 Cowling tried unsuccessfully to persuade the miners of Bassetlaw to put him into Parliament, standing for the Conservatives against Captain Frederick Bellenger, who had been War Minister in the first Attlee administration.

Cowling returned to Cambridge in 1961, becoming successively lecturer, then reader, in Modern History. He was re-elected to a Fellowship at Jesus, then moved to Peterhouse in 1963.

There was no doubting his popularity with his students. He had a profound influence not only on politicians such as Michael Portillo and John Biffen, but also on historians such as John Vincent and Jonathan Clark.

His popularity owed much to his idiosyncratic and irreverent style. He often conducted supervisions dressed in a green dressing-gown; about favoured undergraduates he would say, "Ah, he's evil", and he was endlessly indulgent of their youthful foibles. But there was more to it than that: he possessed a biting intelligence and could be extremely formidable in personal encounters.

At Peterhouse, Cowling enjoyed being a thorn in the side of Lord Dacre of Glanton (the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper) who - partly through Cowling's influence - had been elected Master in 1980. He was a founder member of a college dining club, The Authenticators, nicknamed after Dacre's authentication of the fake "Hitler Diaries".

Invitations to the club carried a seal reading: "I'd stake my reputation on it." Dacre was said to have retaliated by comparing Cowling's circle to "a band of social outcasts living in a mountain cave under the command of a one-eyed Cyclops".

But none of this deterred Cowling from more serious academic pursuits. In The Impact of of Labour 1920-1924 (1971), Cowling illustrated his political philosophy through a detailed study of the politics of the period in which Labour replaced the Liberals as the alternative party of government to the Conservatives.

The book described in the minutest detail the infighting, personal squabbles and rivalries that took place, and demonstrated how the Conservative Party's unerring instinct for power led it cynically to destroy Lloyd George and the Liberals and identify Socialism as the enemy.

In The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933 to 1940 (1975), a typically provocative work, he suggested that Lord Halifax's disagreement with Chamberlain was motivated by the thought that appeasement was destroying the chances of the Conservative Party retaining its hold over the broad centre in politics that it had maintained since 1931. He implied that Churchill and Eden wanted war for the sake of their careers.

In 1989 he caused controversy when, in a newspaper article entitled "Why we should not have gone to war", he argued that fighting Hitler was a mistake because it made Britain socialist; and that Britain was dragged into the war by liberal moral delusions.

Cowling was not immune to the criticism that, while he excelled at debunking the beliefs of others, he offered no positive beliefs of his own. But in Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (three volumes, 1980, 1985 and 2001) he attempted to set out a coherent Christian conservative response to the modern world as an alternative to the prevailing progressive doctrines of the age. The result of 20 years' work, it represents a major statement about the history of religion in England between 1840 and the present.

Maurice Cowling retired as a fellow of Peterhouse in 1993.

He married, in 1996, Patricia Gale (née Holley), who survives him.

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