In its 185-year history, the Conservative Party has had many incarnations. Depending on circumstance, it has been Europhile and Europhobic, protectionist and liberal, isolationist and interventionist.
But throughout such periods it has traditionally been a coalition of diverse interests and political tendencies. Liberals, libertarians, radicals and reactionaries have all sat on the party’s benches. They have, unsurprisingly, been joined by conservatives. Such figures believe, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, that “to be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
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