Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918-1945

It was once a truism of modern British historiography that the history of the Conservative party was grievously understudied. This has not been the case for some time: things began to change with the pioneering work of the late John Ramsden in the 1970s, and then from the 1980s as historians such as Philip Williamson began to offer significant reassessments of aspects of the party’s past. A key intervention came in 1988, when Stuart Ball published Baldwin and the Conservative Party on the party’s period of crisis in opposition to the second Labour government (1929–31). That book was important not just in its findings, but also in its method: it sought to use archives from every layer of the party, and, in particular, made very considerable use of constituency association records to advance its case that the severity and timing of the crisis had been significantly misjudged in the existing literature as a result of too narrow a source base. Ball has since established himself as a key figure in the field, through a series of works including the hefty coedited volume Conservative Century in 1996, as well as two volumes of diaries of the gloomy northern Conservative MP and junior minister, Cuthbert Headlam.