RIP: Maurice Cowling
Cowling argued that liberalism as a political creed was not about
freedom and choice, but about intolerance and priggery. He regarded it as his
life's work to subvert what he called the "rancid solemnities" of the post-war
liberal consensus and its intellectual antecedents.

His popularity [in Cambridge] owed much to his idiosyncratic and irreverent
style. He often conducted supervisions dressed in a green dressing-gown; about
favoured undergraduates he would say, "Ah, he's evil", and he was endlessly
indulgent of their youthful foibles.

Maurice Cowling
(Filed: 26/08/2005)

Maurice Cowling, the historian and Fellow of Peterhouse,
Cambridge, who died on Wednesday aged 78, was a leading political historian of
the England of the 19th and 20th centuries; he was also a scourge of liberalism,
and was often credited with being a major influence on Margaret Thatcher.

Cowling argued that liberalism as a political creed was not about
freedom and choice, but about intolerance and priggery. He regarded it as his
life's work to subvert what he called the "rancid solemnities" of the post-war
liberal consensus and its intellectual antecedents.

In Mill and Liberalism (1963) he argued that the true intention
of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill was to impose a secular religion to
replace Christianity and that, far from his being an apostle of liberty, Mill's
real aim was totalitarian - to use the state to force-feed everyone with the
dictates of an elitist secular morality.

Cowling's analysis provoked outrage among Mill's defenders and
among liberal intellectuals. So it was hardly surprising that they credited him
with being the eminence grise behind a political leader who demonstrated a
similar distaste for their views. But though Cowling supported her leadership of
the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher's ideological brand of Toryism was in
many ways anathema to him.

To Cowling, politics was not about principles but was a game in
which the players are motivated at best by party interest and at worst by
self-interest. In "high politics" (Cowling's phrase) the participants secure
advantage not by espousing the right policies, but by making "corners for
themselves" or finding a "range of rhetoric appropriate to the
circumstances".

In The Nature and Limits of Political Science (1963), Cowling set
out to demonstrate that both political science and political philosophy are
irrelevant to the practice of politics, and argued that too much philosophising
could be an impediment to political action.

He believed that the strength of Conservatism lay not in any
particular set of principles, but in its appeal to a "combination of unashamed
materialism and disbelieving scepticism about the power of political parties to
give effect to Utopia".

To Cowling, the strength of Thatcherism lay not in its "mad-monk
Hayekianism which ignored the constraints of practicality" but in its desire to
"shift the post-war consensus and a populist language". In other words, Mrs
Thatcher succeeded not because her ideas were right, but because "there was a
public sentiment to respond to and she and others had a bag of tricks and a set
of policies to respond".

As an analysis which excluded any concept of public duty,
conviction and good faith, it was not calculated to appeal to Margaret Thatcher
herself or to what Cowling once described as "the intellectual mafia of
ex-communists" who surrounded her during her early years as leader.

But if Cowling's influence with Mrs Thatcher was overstated (he
once described himself as a symptom and not a cause of Thatcherism), he had
considerable influence over some of her more prominent adherents, in particular
Michael Portillo, the Conservative Right-winger who became Defence Secretary
under John Major but lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1997.

Portillo had been a pupil of Cowling's at Peterhouse, and despite
Cowling's observation at Portillo's graduation that he would one day make a good
executive in a medium-sized company, Portillo was generous enough to give
Cowling the credit for converting him to Conservatism.

Throughout the leadership crises that beset the Tory Party during
the 1990s, Portillo was often mentioned as Mrs Thatcher's natural heir, sharing
her ideological outlook. Yet those who understood Cowling's views wondered
whether the succession was as natural as it appeared.

"What Cowling taught Michael," remarked one senior Conservative,
"is that to be successful as a politician you need to be astute in responding to
different circumstances as they arise. To regard Michael as a Thatcherite
ideologue through and through is to miss the point."

In 1995, when opinion polls rated Portillo one of the least
popular members of John Major's Cabinet, Cowling predicted that Portillo would
survive as he expressed " by instinct the hopes and fears of Conservatives".

Maurice John Cowling was born on September 6 1926 and educated at
Battersea Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read History.
From 1944 to 1948 he served with the British and Indian Armies, becoming a
captain in the Queen's Royal Regiment.

He began his academic career in 1950, but interrupted it in the
mid-1950s to embark on a career in journalism, working first as a leader writer
for The Times. In 1957 he moved to the Daily Express, but after a year in which
only one of his articles was published, Lord Beaverbrook informed him that he
was too much of an old Tory for the newspaper, so he resigned.

This was the first of a series of false starts. Once, when asked
to edit a special number of the monthly The Twentieth Century, he seized the
opportunity to write a diatribe against the influence on international affairs
of David Astor and the Observer. That the piece was never published was hardly
surprising: Astor owned the periodical.

In 1970 Cowling became literary editor of The Spectator, then
under the editorship of George Gale, and he was part of the Bohemian crowd that
moved in and out of Gale's house at Wivenhoe, Essex. Cowling resigned from The
Spectator in 1971 over an article about Princess Anne, published by the deputy
editor in Gale's absence, which began: "Has Princess Anne had sex?".

In 1959 Cowling tried unsuccessfully to persuade the miners of
Bassetlaw to put him into Parliament, standing for the Conservatives against
Captain Frederick Bellenger, who had been War Minister in the first Attlee
administration.

Cowling returned to Cambridge in 1961, becoming successively
lecturer, then reader, in Modern History. He was re-elected to a Fellowship at
Jesus, then moved to Peterhouse in 1963.

There was no doubting his popularity with his students. He had a
profound influence not only on politicians such as Michael Portillo and John
Biffen, but also on historians such as John Vincent and Jonathan Clark.

His popularity owed much to his idiosyncratic and irreverent
style. He often conducted supervisions dressed in a green dressing-gown; about
favoured undergraduates he would say, "Ah, he's evil", and he was endlessly
indulgent of their youthful foibles. But there was more to it than that: he
possessed a biting intelligence and could be extremely formidable in personal
encounters.

At Peterhouse, Cowling enjoyed being a thorn in the side of Lord
Dacre of Glanton (the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper) who - partly through
Cowling's influence - had been elected Master in 1980. He was a founder member
of a college dining club, The Authenticators, nicknamed after Dacre's
authentication of the fake "Hitler Diaries".

Invitations to the club carried a seal reading: "I'd stake my
reputation on it." Dacre was said to have retaliated by comparing Cowling's
circle to "a band of social outcasts living in a mountain cave under the command
of a one-eyed Cyclops".

But none of this deterred Cowling from more serious academic
pursuits. In The Impact of of Labour 1920-1924 (1971), Cowling illustrated his
political philosophy through a detailed study of the politics of the period in
which Labour replaced the Liberals as the alternative party of government to the
Conservatives.

The book described in the minutest detail the infighting,
personal squabbles and rivalries that took place, and demonstrated how the
Conservative Party's unerring instinct for power led it cynically to destroy
Lloyd George and the Liberals and identify Socialism as the enemy.

In The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy,
1933 to 1940 (1975), a typically provocative work, he suggested that Lord
Halifax's disagreement with Chamberlain was motivated by the thought that
appeasement was destroying the chances of the Conservative Party retaining its
hold over the broad centre in politics that it had maintained since 1931. He
implied that Churchill and Eden wanted war for the sake of their careers.

In 1989 he caused controversy when, in a newspaper article
entitled "Why we should not have gone to war", he argued that fighting Hitler
was a mistake because it made Britain socialist; and that Britain was dragged
into the war by liberal moral delusions.

Cowling was not immune to the criticism that, while he excelled
at debunking the beliefs of others, he offered no positive beliefs of his own.
But in Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (three volumes, 1980, 1985
and 2001) he attempted to set out a coherent Christian conservative response to
the modern world as an alternative to the prevailing progressive doctrines of
the age. The result of 20 years' work, it represents a major statement about the
history of religion in England between 1840 and the present.

Maurice Cowling retired as a fellow of Peterhouse in 1993.

He married, in 1996, Patricia Gale (née Holley), who survives
him.

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