Kenneth Clarke announced last week that he was returning to frontline politics to support Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative party leader. What prompted this surge of loyalty was Duncan Smith's belated embrace of the Tory "One Nation" tradition in his speech to the Harrogate spring conference. For Clarke, this signalled a welcome determination to show the public that "we have a genuine concern for the vulnerable and less well-off people". Like many of his fellow Tories, Clarke believes One Nation conservatism is about alleviating class inequality. Yet it was a question of race rather than class which first inspired the philosophy.
The One Nation tradition began with Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel, entitled Sybil, or The Two Nations. The book formed part of a literary trilogy, including Coningsby and Tancred, addressing the "condition-of-England" question: the problems thrown up by mass urbanisation, large-scale industrial capitalism, and the collapsing social infrastructure of early Victorian Britain. Alongside his fellow polemicists, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, Disraeli attacked the laissez-faire economics of Robert Peel, the heartless utilitarianism of the New Poor Law, and the glaring inequality of industrialising cites.
In the early stages of Sybil, the earnest young aristocrat Charles Egremont is made to confront the ills of Victorian society in a meeting with the radical Chartist Walter Gerard. Egremont foolishly suggests that "our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed". "Which nation?" retorts Gerard. For she reigns over two nations, he argues. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food... and are not governed by the same laws." These two nations are "The Rich and The Poor".
Since the publication of Sybil, One Nation Toryism has been taken to mean a support for liberal paternalism and a vague interest in lessening class divisions. Just as importantly, the One Nation moniker also came to delineate the Conservative party's internal factions. The post-war Tory administrations, the party of Butler, Eden and Macmillan with their generous support for the welfare state, saw themselves as a link in the One Nation chain stretching back to Disraeli. In the mid-1970s, this vision was purposively abandoned in favour of what Keith Joseph liked to call "real Conservatism": precisely the type of economic liberalism and social individualism Disraeli campaigned against. Typically, Margaret Thatcher went further by haranguing her One Nation critics for their "No nation Conservatism".
The racial dimension at the heart of Disraeli's two nations concept is clear from a reading of his novels, but it had a wider cultural context. In the late 18th century, Britain joined every other European country in a Romantic quest to uncover its racial heritage. The Enlightenment belief in the universal rationalism of man was replaced by histories of primitive tribes, national languages and racial genealogies. As the French rediscovered the Gauls, the Victorian public became bewitched by Britain's Saxon heritage. Archaeological societies mushroomed, Beowulf was translated, and mewling Aelfreds and Aelfrics were dragged to church fonts. The Saxon spirit of manly independence, gruff manners, and no-nonsense militarism quietly merged into what were taken to be uniquely British characteristics. In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, the northern factory owner Mr Thornton proudly declares his Saxon roots. "I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit."
As the Saxons rose in historical favour, so the Normans necessarily fell. The early Victorians regarded William the Conqueror and his henchmen as little better than illegal usurpers who had attempted to crush the free Saxon spirit. Under Norman rule, the Saxons had been stripped of their land, hounded from office, and ground under the boot of military occupation. The Norman temperament was one of arbitrary rule, tyrannical Catholicism, and underhand continental ways. But luckily, according to a popular history book of the 1820s, "as the Saxons continued in the country after the Conquest, and were much more numerous than the Norman settlers, we are still almost all of us of chiefly Saxon descent; and our language, and many of our habits and customs, sufficiently declare our origin."
Among those drawn to the new racial history was the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Nowhere is this more evident than in his most famous work, Ivanhoe. Tony Blair's favourite novel tells the story of England under the thrall of the Norman yoke. The free-willed Saxon is hounded by the vicious Norman in a country lost without the consensual hand of Richard the Lionheart. Only the brave Ivanhoe can unite these warring classes. Scott envisioned the Saxons and Normans as two distinct races: "the vanquished distinguished by their plain, homely, blunt manners, and the free spirit infused by their ancient spirit and laws; the victors, by the high spirit of military fame, personal adventure, and whatever could distinguish them as the flower of chivalry." Font-de-Boeuf and de Bracy fitted the historical icon of the rapacious Norman, while Rowena and Ivanhoe played the parts of virtuous Saxons with equal appropriateness.
The medieval world conjured up by Ivanhoe, with its baronial hospitality, communal faith and democratic folk spirit, was enormously seductive to a Britain in the midst of unprecedented social collapse and industrial unrest. The impact of Scott's novels on Victorian society was breathtaking. They crossed social boundaries, as eagerly devoured in lowly Mechanics' Institutes as in royal palaces. Among the many entranced by Scott was the French historian Augustin Thierry. In 1825, Thierry brought out his own account of the Norman conquest, Conquete de l'Angleterre par les Normands , which mirrored Scott's racial approach. In turn, Thierry's book became the primer for popular Victorian understanding of the period. And no one took its vision of an enthralled Saxon race lorded over by Norman invaders more to heart than Benjamin Disraeli.
The future Conservative prime minister's personal preoccupation with race was often reflected in his fiction. His own Jewish heritage and interest in the racial divisions of the Orient were tortuously explored in Tancred, or the New Crusade. And in Coningsby, or the New Generation, the quixotic Sidonia pronounces: "All is race; there is no other truth."
Sybil, too, is a tale of race. It's a story of how the 19th-century descendants of an arrogant Norman aristocracy continued to live off the plundered wealth of dispossessed Saxons. The Normans are the rich and the miserable Saxons now reduced to the state of factory hands in grimy cities the poor. Egremont is a Norman and Gerard is a Saxon; they are "formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food". The divisions of the two nations are historic and racial. In one hackneyed scene, Sybil, the Saxon "daughter of the people", even reads chapters of Thierry's history to her father, Gerard. The tale of the noble Harold moves her to ask, "Why have we not such a man now?" Gerard meanwhile is keen "to take a cup of the drink of Saxon kings". The two nations are only united when Egremont realises his wealth is in fact the stolen property of Gerard - which he returns to the family by marrying Sybil. With that the historical crime of the conquest is at last absolved.
Disraeli's solution to the warring two nations of Victorian Britain was a stronger Church of England and a reinvigorated aristocracy displaying a keener awareness of noblesse oblige. Neither of which seem likely policy options for today's Conservative party. But does the language or dilemma of the two nations still have any currency when its racial origins are so completely defunct? The humorist and Guardian columnist John O'Farrell certainly thinks so. In his book Things Can Only Get Better, he describes canvassing for the Labour party in London. "It struck me that the classes in Britain were still basically divided along the lines of Normans and Saxons. The Normans of Fulham still drank wine and owned land in France and the Saxons of Fulham still drank ale, used 'Anglo-Saxon' vocabulary and tended small strips of land behind the playing fields." Perhaps the ever canny Kenneth Clarke is on to something.
· Tristram Hunt presented the Civil War series on BBC2 earlier this year. He is writing a book on Victorian cities.
