1960s

• This country is overtaxed and over-governed, and will be more so if the Prime Minister leads, or allows, the Labour Party to have its way. Taxation has got to be reduced, not as a bribe, but as a national necessity.
  Serious damage will be done to the whole structure of British life from new, vexatious and unnecessary extensions of governmental power at the hands of a party which believes that government alone can make the decisions on which the national life depends.
  Admire Mr. Wilson's manner as we may, these are things that need to be said. If the Conservative party will not say them, Mr. Wilson will be there (and there rightfully) with a large majority for a long time yet.
  • Letter to The Times (21 March 1966), p. 11

• The Conservative party has a serious social purpose which cannot be satisfied by the mere expression of opinion. Its task – in opposition as well as in office – is to do what it can to prevent governmentally controlled changes in the existing social structure. This objective is fundamental. In relation to it everything else is tactical... [T]he Conservative party has a particular commitment to private property – and to inequalities in ownership – as the linchpin of the social and economic order and one of the buttresses of the moral order that is under attack, and this has been so ever since the Labour party became the chief party of opposition.
  • 'Intellectuals and the Tory Party', The Spectator (8 March 1968), quoted in 'Skeletons from Mr Cowling's cupboard', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (1993), pp. 336-337

• What I mean by "liberal"...is a moral rectitude and intellectual certainty claimed by a small but powerful sect of publicists and politicians on behalf of an arbitrary collection of policies, some of which are sensible and some bogus, but which in bulk are made offensive by the way in which they are presented.
  • 'There's been a revolution here, too', The Spectator (24 May 1968), quoted in 'Skeletons from Mr Cowling's cupboard', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (1993), p. 340

• I mean a liberal doctrine and condescending manner which is particularly strong amongst undergraduate politicians and higher journalists, which is to be found in parts of all political parties and which, having its heroes in each generation, in this generation favours Messrs Jenkins, Crosland, Grimond and certain Conservatives whose names can easily be guessed.
  • 'There's been a revolution here, too', The Spectator (24 May 1968), quoted in 'Skeletons from Mr Cowling's cupboard', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (1993), p. 340

• I mean the liberalism which parades conscience more often than conscience ought to be paraded and which assumes that anyone who feels unable to use its language, or support its policies, is an idiot, a knave or a reactionary. I mean the liberalism to be found in the Guardian, the Observer and the new Times whose topics are race relations, crime, Africa, under-developed peoples, the indiscriminate expansion of university education and the maintenance of the illusory influence of a liberal Britain though the multiracial Commonwealth and the United Nations.
  • 'There's been a revolution here, too', The Spectator (24 May 1968), quoted in 'Skeletons from Mr Cowling's cupboard', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (1993), p. 340

• I mean the permissive, metropolitan liberalism which uses the language of protest, progress and the open mind but which has by now become orthodox, predictable and is in many cases the mindless slogan of empty minds. Above all I mean the liberalism which over the last twenty years has encountered virtually no opposition and for which the events of the last six weeks have come as a particularly nasty revelation of the state of public thinking.
  • 'There's been a revolution here, too', The Spectator (24 May 1968), quoted in 'Skeletons from Mr Cowling's cupboard', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (1993), p. 340

1970s

• Between 1920 and 1924 the Conservative party made three longterm decisions. The first was to remove Lloyd George from office. The second was to take up the rôle of 'defender of the social order'. The third was to make Labour the chief party of opposition.
  • The Impact of Labour 1920–1924. The Beginning of Modern British Politics (1971), p. 1

• To history, until yesterday, Halifax was the arch-appeaser. This, it is now recognised, was a mistake. His rôle, however, was complicated. In these pages he is not the man who stopped the rot, but the embodiment of Conservative wisdom who decided that Hitler must be obstructed because Labour could not otherwise be resisted.
  • The Impact of Hitler. British Politics and British Policy, 1933–1940 (1975), p. 9

• If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill... [I]t is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.
  • "The Present Position," Conservative Essays (1978), p. 1, p. 9

1990s

• From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.
  • Mill and Liberalism: Second Edition (1990), p. xv

• If you ask me whether I was deeply Christian, the answer is that I went to college chapel and had a strong polemical Christianity... It could well be that it was a polemical conviction against liberalism rather than a real conviction of the truth of Christianity.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), pp. 129-130

• I suppose on a census I would describe myself as a member of the Church of England. If you ask me, do I think I ought to be an Anglican, the answer is that I probably ought to be a Roman Catholic, but I don't see any prospect of that happening... I'm not saying that I couldn't become a Roman Catholic. What I'm saying at the moment is that I feel quite a large part of the time that I ought to be a Roman Catholic.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 131

• What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of English Protestantism. It's turned into these post-Christian moralistic sentiments.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 133

• I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 134

• Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 136

• I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book. I'm not in favour of Moslems executing death threats or using violence, and they have to observe the law when they're here, but I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. Some thinking Moslems take a view of the nature of religion, and the incompatibility between Islam and liberalism, which runs parallel to what I'm saying in Mill and Liberalism.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 142

• It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... [F]rom the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.
  • Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 144

• Moral tolerance has not been a dominant feature of Conservative thinking in the past and, however desirable, is unlikely to become one of its dominant features, or indeed a dominant feature of the thinking of Labour voters so long as the gay and lesbian lobbies remain rancid and militant. Aspiration and choice, on the other hand, are qualities which every Conservative leader since Baldwin has applauded without embarrassment or affectation and the Conservative instinct for "social cohesion" has been as central as the search for a new prosperity and "new opportunities for millions of people" in the last 18 years.
  • 'Finding a role for compassion', The Spectator (6 December 1997)

• [T]he defence of property, inequality and differentials has been one of the leading motives of historic Conservatism, and that it is doubtful whether the Conservative Party without a strong streak of rural and suburban selfishness would have any reason to exist (any more than the Labour Party would have any reason to exist without its strong streak of working-class selfishness).
  • 'Finding a role for compassion', The Spectator (6 December 1997)

• The present wind of compassion to some extent blew up, and to some extent was blown up artificially, in the two or three years before the general election and has since been prolonged by Princess Diana's death. It is now being replaced by normal politics which will lead eventually to a resumption of the gnarled, sceptical mistrust of all politicians from which Mr Blair will not be exempt and of which Lord Tebbit is the master. It would be a pity if Conservatives were to mistake a temporary aberration for a permanent obsession and were to addict themselves to a style of thinking derived from a period which is passing.
  • 'Finding a role for compassion', The Spectator (6 December 1997)

• [U]nlike its "ethical" rivals, the Conservative party does not (in its right mind) pretend to be holier than they are but tends by and large to a decent scepticism, which the public may yet come to admire, about the more obvious forms of political humbug.
  • 'Rushing to judgment', The Spectator (23 May 1998)

• By descent, upbringing and sensibility, Berlin was Russian, Jewish and English. But he misunderstood Russia, Israel and England almost equally. His England was characterised by "toleration...liberty...pluralism and...untidiness" and by a combination of practicality, eccentricity, fair-mindedness, empiricism and common sense. He did not mention the respectability, prejudice, xenophobia, moral conservatism and the low-keyed mistrust of higher thought which are – or perhaps were – also English characteristics.
  • 'A liberal icon', The Spectator (17 October 1998)

• A Marxist or Trotskyite interpretation of history raises the question of hegemony or class power in its simplest form, uses the theoretical possibility of revolution to dramatise class-dominance, and promises insights into the unspoken attitudes of the elites and classes which have exercised power in modern England. This promise is unlikely to be fulfilled, however, when there is no attempt to appreciate either the mixture of motives among the "rich swine" or the fact that in most modern societies some of the "rich swine" were once poor swine, and when there is no grasp of the central truth that hegemony and inequality are necessary for cultural and economic development and for social and political stability and freedom, and are in any case the invariable consequence of revolution once revolution has produced new classes or elites to replace the classes and elites which it was designed to overthrow.
  • 'Trotskyism at the bath spa', The Spectator (20 March 1999)

• A lot has happened to the student generations of the 1960s and 1970s since they discovered that spontaneous revolutions hardly ever happen. Some have become rich or have taken to conservative reaction; some have taken to liberal progress or to the cautious ambiguities of New Labour. Some have adopted the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Green movement while others have abandoned dirigiste Marxism for libertarian Trotskyism. In all too many (except among the conservative reactionaries and some of the millionaires), there is an entrenched secular orthodoxy which, whether liberal or Trotskyite, is represented as strongly in schools, polytechnics, universities, the media and the social services as on the Labour back-benches in the House of Commons.
  • 'Trotskyism at the bath spa', The Spectator (20 March 1999)

• In the attack on the euro, the Conservative party has discovered what looks like a principle which may well have a snowball effect in shaking the moral invulnerability that has been Mr Blair's strongest card since 1997. Nor is it only the euro which may have this effect. No one any longer believes the government's assurances about hospital waiting-lists; everyone understands that taxation, especially on motorists, is too high; and there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the government's devotion to reverse discrimination and the Macpherson Report.
  • 'The 1980s Tory boys now', The Spectator (26 June 1999)

• [T]he [Conservative] party has to do two things. It has not only to propose policies which derive from principles, it has also to create a pork-barrel interest which will persuade groups of electors severally and in detail that they would gain financially from a Conservative government. Secondly, as beneficiary of the public's dislike of the euro, it has to avoid giving offence to electors who agree with it on this issue only and at the same time has to respond to the culture of political mistrust which is the most important feature of the present situation – more important, probably, than hostility to the euro, because it strikes at the new era of sincerity and good feelings of which Mr Blair and Mr Ashdown have been the leaders.
  • 'The 1980s Tory boys now', The Spectator (26 June 1999)

• [T]he most important feelings for Conservatives to be expressing at the moment...are the cynical feelings of disbelief which have been held at bay since May 1997, which are capable of welding middle-class and working-class sentiment together, and which need to be moved out from being Lord Tebbit's speciality into being what, rather vaguely, they are already: the rhetoric with which Mr Redwood, Miss Widdecombe and Mr Hague will expose the higher humbug which emanates from Downing Street.
  • 'The 1980s Tory boys now', The Spectator (26 June 1999)

• Popper's politics were defective in a number of respects. He was obsessed with ideology, and was not interested in the force, fraud, intolerance, accident, subterranean prejudice and state power which help to create and destroy both historic allegiance and the sentiments of nations. He ignored the relationship between the rise of totalitarianism and the collapse of the German, Russian, Austrian and Chinese states and he mistook the Cold War for an aspect of an ethical foreign policy when in truth it was an incident in the development of diplomacy and military power, both aggressive and defensive, on both sides.
  • 'Piecemeal social engineering', The Spectator (18 September 1999)

• So far as the Labour party is concerned, The Open Society is almost entirely irrelevant. The Labour party from the Webbs to Attlee, though it believed in state-power as the antidote to inequality and competition and misunderstood Stalin's Russia, was neither intellectually Stalinist nor intellectually totalitarian. Its defects were then and are now more domestic and homely – the minority-mindedness and nonconformist conscience which Keynes discerned in Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, the conviction of moral impregnability which makes it intolerant, evasive and querulous when policy conflicts with principle or goodwill stubs its toe on interests, and the sympathy for fads and crankcauses which it inherited from the Liberal party and continues to display in the imprisonment of General Pinochet, the campaign against fox hunting and the nonsense involved in Mr Cook's "ethical foreign policy".
  • 'Piecemeal social engineering', The Spectator (18 September 1999)