We wanted to know they were going to take the One Nation voice seriously,” says Morgan. The group also pushed to ensure there was “more than just two hard Brexit voices” in the final run-off. At the start of the Tory leadership race, the One Nation Group held hustings to encourage the candidates to sign up to their values. The caucus has commitments around the union, global leadership, the life chances agenda, social responsibility, investment in public services, localism, environmental stewardship, belief in free enterprise, law and human rights and democratic renewal. Elsewhere in the town, John Payne, a retired insurer, said he would be voting tactically in the seat to remove “the worst government in my lifetime”. Daponte-Smith, Noah (2 June 2015). "Is David Cameron Really A One-Nation Conservative?". Forbes . Retrieved 29 February 2016. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, pictured in 2019 at the Surrey Para Games in Godalming, is among the MPs in the ‘blue wall’ home counties seats that will be under threat at next year’s general election. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Disraeli adopted one-nation conservatism for both ethical and electoral reasons. Before he became leader of the Conservative Party, the Reform Act 1867 had enfranchised the male working-class. As a result, Disraeli argued that the party needed to pursue social reforms if it were to have electoral success. He felt that one-nationism would both improve the conditions of the poor and portray the Liberal Party as selfish individualists. [19]Gauke served as one of Osborne’s deputies in the Treasury for six years. The phrase “uncork the Gauke” was coined after the minister went out to bat for the Government, often to defuse rows. Theresa May rewarded him with a Cabinet post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2016. One predictable political consequence of the Tories’ antics is that Labour, under the decidedly uncharismatic leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, has been leading in the polls by 20 to 30 percent or more. As Johnson’s government disintegrated last July amid a flood of ministerial resignations, Starmer made by his standards quite a good joke about “the sinking ships fleeing the rat,” but now comes a different group of deserters: the swelling numbers of Tory MPs who have said they will leave Parliament at the next election. Some are veterans like Sajid Javid, who will doubtless return to banking; others only arrived in Parliament at the last election but guess they would lose their seats if they stood again. His informative book is enlivened by apt quotations. “It is not just that the most humiliating formalities of the feudal era have been retained,” Friedrich Engels lamented about England in the 1840s. “The worst of it is that all these formalities really are the expression of public opinion, which regards a Lord as being of a superior kind.” Well, maybe, but this political success might also have something to do with the prosperity created by the Tories’ embrace of market capitalism, certainly by comparison with regimes that have claimed the inheritance of Marx and Engels. At times Labour has hoped to usurp the Tories as “the natural party of government,” but that has never happened, and the saying that “England is a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour” sounds plausible enough. There is a single exception: the “One Nation Caucus” founded earlier this year. Its “Values Declaration” (ugh!) can only bring itself to use the word “nation” in a negative, when it proclaims that “we are patriotic Conservatives who reject narrow nationalism”. Instead, it continues, “we believe in the United Kingdom as the embodiment of our shared values and as a force for good in defending our values in the world”. This is pure cosmopolitanism. In one respect Johnson decidedly set the tone for a contemporary Tory Party that has been plagued by sexual and financial scandal. Sexual impropriety among politicians is nothing new or necessarily important. The pious William Gladstone supposedly said that he had known eleven prime ministers, seven of whom he knew to have been adulterers, by which he didn’t mean that only the other four were fit for office. And at the time of the Profumo affair in 1963, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend deriding the factitious indignation: “To my knowledge in my life time three Prime Ministers have been adulterers and almost every cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.”

Dorey, Peter; Garnett, Mark (2015). " 'The weaker-willed, the craven-hearted': the decline of One Nation Conservatism". Global Discourse. 5 (1): 69–91. doi: 10.1080/23269995.2014.914823. Griffiths, Simon (19 July 2012). "Cameron's "Progressive Conservatism" is largely cosmetic and without substance". LSE Blogs . Retrieved 20 March 2015. The best one here comes from Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer. Some landed Tories worried about her beginnings in a Lincolnshire grocer’s shop, and her petit-bourgeois zeal for the free market. But others, Moore says, spread a rumour that she was actually descended from an aristocrat named Harry Cust, thanks to an affair her grandmother supposedly had while working as a servant on the family’s estate. As the Conservative MP Julian Amery saw it, there was “blue blood there, no doubt about it”. While One Nation Tories are at pains to stress that they will still be hugely supportive of the Sunak government, this forthright approachrepresents ashift for the group,which has refrained from public interventions in the last few years in an effort to avoid the appearance of confrontation favoured by groups such as the ERG.What can have happened to them? We’ve had something called a Tory Party in England for 350 years, and while it’s difficult to discern a direct line of descent from the Church-and-King Cavaliers and anti-Exclusionists of the reign of King Charles II to the motley crew of the reign of King Charles III, the most remarkable thing about the Tories has been their endless adaptability to the times. In the 1840s the party of the squirearchal “gentlemen of England” brought down Sir Robert Peel, its leader, because of his repeal of the Corn Laws, which favored landowners’ income, but before the century was out the Tories had reshaped themselves to attract not only middle-class but working-class voters. In the early 1900s, the Conservative and Unionist party’s mounting panic about defeat by the Liberals led it into a familiar place: the gutter, from where it repeatedly warned of the danger posed by people entering the UK from abroad. “The whole scum of Europe may come to this country,” said one particularly charming pamphlet, “by merely concocting stories about being political or religious ‘refugees’, however improbable their stories.” It’s clear that these are kind of Sunak-sympathetic, Sunak-curious voters,” says Ansell. “A full Sunak approach, which was less ‘stop the boats’ and more ‘stop the culture war’, might work. The problem is it will lose other parts of the country. The electoral sheet leaves either the feet or the head uncovered.”

Its embrace of Brexit and culture war battles never played well among blue wall voters, they warn, but the threat of Jeremy Corbyn kept them within the Tory tent last time. There is a tussle going to define Boris. We are reconciled to Brexit because of the democratic mandate from the election. But there is still a fight to be had about what sort of party we are – over agriculture and trade, over the economy and coronavirus support. Is this an attempt to bring out the liberal, one nation Boris? Yes, it is.”The describing phrase 'one-nation Tory' originated with Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), who served as the chief Conservative spokesman and became Prime Minister in February 1868. [4] He devised it to appeal to working-class people, who he hoped would see it as a way to improve their lives via factory and health acts as well as greater protection for workers. [5] The ideology featured heavily during Disraeli's terms in government, during which considerable social reforms were passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Conservative Party moved away from paternalism in favour of free market capitalism. In the first half of the 20th century, fears of extremism saw a revival of one-nation Conservatism. The Conservative Party continued to espouse the philosophy throughout the post-war consensus from 1945. One-nation thinking influenced their tolerance of the Labour government's Keynesian intervention in the economy, formation of a welfare state and the National Health Service. Thanks to Iain Macleod, Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, special attention after 1950 was paid to one-nation conservatism that promised support for the poorer and working class elements in the Party coalition. [6] His instinct proved right. And it was the votes of the Tory working man and later working woman that made the Conservatives the natural party of government in the later nineteenth century and beyond — working men like my cotton-spinner maternal grandfather, who voted to make Winston Churchill Conservative MP for Oldham in 1900 and volunteered in the First World War despite the fact that he was married and in his thirties with three children. But inrecent weeks, the One Nation's80-plus MPs, who by their own admission have not been much of a force in Westminster in the last few years, have grown restless and agreedtheycan no longerafford to be spectators as the beleagured Conservativeparty enters a critical period ahead of next year's general election.“[The One Nation caucus] really needs to find its voice in the parliamentary party again sooner rather than later,"oneformer secretary of state told PoliticsHome.

Harris, John (8 August 2009). "Phillip Blond: The man who wrote Cameron's mood music". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 10 August 2012. Invitation to Join the Government of Great Britain" (PDF). The Conservative Party. 2010 . Retrieved 20 July 2012.Campbell, John (2010). Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown. London: Vintage. pp.335–336. ISBN 978-1-84595-091-0. OCLC 489636152. According to a calculation by Oxford University’s Prof Ben Ansell, the South West Surrey seat would now fall into Lib Dem hands on national polling averages. To make matters more perilous for Hunt, the constituency is being redrawn, which could make it more marginal.