At Conservative party conferences through the Margaret Thatcher years, mildly dissident cabinet ministers would make cryptic speeches at fringe meetings in improbable seaside hotels extolling the legacy of Tory politicians like Sir Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli. The whole point of references of this kind - I can remember hearing politicians of the order of Michael Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe, John Biffen and Leon Brittan making them - was that they were an easy-to-crack code. Peel, Disraeli and the rest were perceived to be social unifiers - "one nation" Tories - and thus offered a preferable alternative model to the rebarbative and divisive Toryism of the Iron Lady.
Two decades on, Douglas Hurd now has enough time on his hands to make a much more substantial contribution to this Tory conversation. No biography of Peel will ever be able to compete for colour with any biography of Disraeli, but the former home secretary's biography of arguably his most important predecessor may do for the unlovable Peel this year what William Hague's biography of the equally unlovable Pitt the Younger has done over the previous two.
Hurd's case for Peel is based on his achievements - in criminal justice, in the police, in the post-1832 Conservative party and above all in free trade. Peel was a solid and sensible facts man. "He was a doer", Hurd told his Hay audience. Everything he put before parliament was carried. It is a record of getting this done, Hurd argued, that is unmatched by any prime minister except in the different conditions of wartime. This is not, it should be stressed, how contemporary Tories saw it. To them, Peel was the stubborn leader who split his party and kept it out of power (save for brief periods of minority rule) for nearly 30 years. Hurd's detached view of Peel's achievements is only sustainable with the benefit of distant hindsight.
Peel is a very notable early Victorian public figure but there is a huge danger in implying that his governmental career can be read across into 21st century Toryism. To hear Hurd talk about Peel and the police, for instance, you might get the impression that Peel was an apostle of community policing, bobbies (named after Bobby Peel) on the beat and all that sort of modern thinking. This is both romantic and wrong. Peel's 1829 police were no "evening all" George Dixons, they were first and foremost riot police.
Londoners did not love them. They hated them (in one notable case in 1831 they killed one, and an inquest jury brought in a verdict of "justifiable homicide" on their actions). A similar scepticism is needed over Hurd's view of Peel and Ireland. If he had remained in office after 1846, Hurd suggested, Peel might have brought in something like the home rule legislation that his protege William Gladstone laboured to carry nearly half a century later. Well maybe. In the absence of proof we are left with Peel's record as a very repressive anti-catholic Irish secretary in the 1820s and as the prime minister who presided over the famine in the 1840s.
Remembering all those cryptic fringe lectures during the Thatcher years, I went into Hurd's Hay session assuming that, at some level, Hurd would like to imagine David Cameron (who sits for Hurd's old seat in Witney) as a second Peel. Yet the words David and Cameron were never uttered in the entire entertaining hour. The longer that Hurd talked, indeed, it seemed to me that he was not describing Peel as a role model for the Tory leader but for stubborn, dull, principled and achieving Gordon Brown. Dream on, Douglas. Somehow I don't think Brown intends to split his party and lead it into the wilderness for the next 30 years.
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