But such things are anathema to a dying Conservative party, until lately presenting itself as the guardian of Burkean tradition, with a patrician attitude to political contest so leisurely as to be indistinguishable from surrender. Yet if “Burkean” may not be the first adjective to strike the observer of Reform’s recent party conference, in all its Trumpian campness and glitzy bad taste, the shock defection of Danny Kruger, until last week one of the Conservative Party’s few serious thinkers, signals a new and counter-revolutionary mood on the British Right.

For all that Farage styles his party as “radical but not revolutionaries”, Kruger’s vow to undertake “change on a scale that the system has not seen since the modern civil service was created in the 19th century” is a pledge far beyond the Tory comfort zone. The Conservatives have, in recent decades, settled into an intellectual stupor of grouching against liberal innovations, while pledging fealty to supposedly Burkean values of only incremental reform, with a certain effete and cosmetic appeal to tradition unevidenced by their record in power. Yet, like reproaching Reform, now the default party of the British Right, for its “unconservativeness”, this may say more about how we misunderstand Burke, a figure more often invoked than read by conservatives, than it does anything about conservatism itself.

During the Cold War, Burke was reshaped primarily by American conservatives into what the Irish critic Seamus Deane later mocked as “the Disney versions” of his thought. He was reduced to a now hackneyed checklist of banal precepts — revolutions are bad, little platoons are good, timeworn customs are better than radical new innovations — which have functioned, as the great historian J.G.A. Pocock later observed, as a taboo against conservatives taking any concerted or radical course of action at all, ceding the ground for liberal hegemony.

Yet taking Reform, and now Kruger, at their word allows us to rescue Burke from the tweedy hesitancy of the latter-day Burkeans: for first we must recognize that he was less a conservative, voicing support for only slow and incremental reform, than he was an explicit counter-revolutionary, who in his Letters on a Regicide Peace excoriated Fox’s “New Whigs” for making peace with France’s revolutionary government, and instead urged the prosecution of what he correctly foresaw would be a long and bloody Continental war to overthrow the new regime.

For the Burke of Regicide Peace, and of Thoughts on French Affairs, the new order established by the French revolutionaries was “a general evil” brought about by a “cabal” of ambitious and ideological lawyers and journalists. These were “the creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favor”, who undertook to overthrow the time-worn social order and replace it with their “theoretick dogmas”. Their idealist doctrines worked against both custom and human nature, which bore “a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part”, than to politics as previously understood. As Burke declared, “All their new institutions, (and with them every thing is new) strike at the root of our social nature.” The central task of politics, for Burke, is not to draw a line in the sand against future revolution, but to overthrow in its entirety the new revolutionary order: for “He who does not stay the hand of suicide, is guilty of murder.” In the actual Burke of the late 18th century, and not the neutered Burke of the mid-20th, we see the aggrieved and combative conservative mindset of today.

Further reading

Is Nigel Farage a man of the people?

By Terry Eagleton

With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequined conference sing-along. As summarized by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers.

Indeed, Burke’s thundering and apocalyptic discourse against the Révolutionnaires may be more accurately compared to the “divisive” rhetoric of today’s radical Right than to the empty platitudes of the Conservative wets. As Burke’s fellow Irish essayist Seamus Deane would later observe, Burke’s chosen enemy “belongs to no state, is beyond loyalties and affections. He is the first cosmopolitan”. This was an early evocation of a recognizable modern type, who in Burke’s words “broke the locality of public affections, and united descriptions of citizens more with strangers, than with their countrymen of different opinions”.

Deane encapsulates Burke’s view of his opponents: “Those who yearn for abstract principle are those who belong to no community; they live in a state of psychic anarchy and therefore seek justification for themselves in the promulgation of doctrines which would annihilate the very idea of historical community and continuity.” What is remarkable now is how current this discourse sounds, and not how time-worn and safe an expression of staid conservative principles. Burke’s cabal of lawyerly malcontents and insidious revolutionaries, upturning both age-old custom and the bonds of familial and national affection in pursuit of their new order, is little different, in terms of the rhetoric employed against it, to today’s Matrix Chambers set and its Grub Street hangers-on.

Further reading

The village that made Nigel Farage

By Tom McTague

And so, for Starkey as for Burke before him, “the New Labour government of 1997 right up to the present is effectively 25 years of quasi-Revolution which has effectively demolished and deliberately disintegrated the historic constitution of Britain as it was reformulated first in 1660 with the Restoration and again in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution”. The aspiration, for Starkey, “should be for a new Restoration, a second Restoration”.

In just the same way, in his book Covenant, Kruger proposes “a new Elizabethan (or indeed Restoration or Hanoverian)… settlement, a new version of that peculiarly English compromise that accommodates the defeated opponent and involves them in the task of creating the peace that follows” the coming dismantling of the legal architecture imposed by New Labour, which frustrates British governance and democracy alike. The enemy is to be allowed back into the political order only after his total defeat. These explicit calls for counter-revolution are, in their appeal to the age-old constitution, a directly Burkean framing, highlighting the ambiguities and ironies of conservative counter-revolution then as much as now.

For rather than a Tory — he abjured the term, not least for its Irish and Jacobite connotations — Burke was a Whig, whose fundamental loyalty was to the political order installed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. How, then, could Burke condemn revolution when his own loyalty was to a mere century-old revolutionary regime? The answer lay in denying that the Glorious Revolution was any revolution at all, but was instead merely a course-correction back to England’s age-old constitutional order, bringing to an end an aberrant period of Continental-influenced despotism.

As Burke insisted in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “the fundamental subversion of this ancient constitution… justified the Revolution”, a political coup justified “as the only means left for the recovery of that ancient constitution formed by the original contract of the British state, as well as for the future preservation of the same government”. The revolution was no revolution but merely a restoration to the natural order of things, a great reset in line with the country’s hard-won and ancient freedoms.

Just as Burke declared of England’s constitution that “it was formed and grew up among ourselves; that it is in every respect peculiar to this island; and that if the Roman or any foreign laws attempted to intrude into its composition, it has always had the vigor to shake them off, and return to the purity of its primitive constitution”, so can and will today’s conservative Reformists shake off the ECHR as a foreign imposition on parliamentary sovereignty. As Deane, cataloging Westminster’s quixotic ways, observes with Irish nationalist detachment, “All [Burke’s] citations of Magna Carta, Coke, Bracton, the men of 1688, are designed to convey an essential point about the English character — that the English have always chosen the appeal to precedent and to history over the appeal to abstract principle and universal rights.”

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There is no revolution that the English mind cannot derive from ancient precedent, justifying total political change as a reversion to the ancient, hallowed norm. Indeed, Pocock’s wry observation that “there was no reason why that realm’s history, and that of its Burkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of a Teutonic dawn” today finds uncanny echoes in Liz Truss’s recent claim that “The USA is arguably today the most unadulterated iteration of ancient British liberties that would still be recognized by our Saxon forefathers”, an appeal to America’s tradition of free speech perhaps more convincing a fortnight ago than today.

Whether Tacitus’s Germans, in their gloomy Nordic forests, would have recognized Trump, let alone Truss, as modern avatars of their rude democracy may be doubtful. Yet there is more than a hint here of an appeal to American intervention as a Glorious Revolution 2.0: America as the repository of age-old Anglo-Saxon freedoms, preserved by their own very English revolution, returning to the motherland in her hour of need. For what the Glorious Revolution was, in truth, was the dismantling of an unpopular government at the behest of Westminster political elites through the intervention of a foreign ruler. A revolution is, as Burke warns, “the very last resource of the thinking and the good”, for “Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past”.

What are we to make, then, of Farage’s repeated claims that Reform should plan to enter government in 2027, before the conclusion of Labour’s allotted term? It does not take a great prophet to foresee the already-struggling Labour government entering a period of terminal crisis before 2029: yet the mechanism through which Reform might enter power before then, the nature of the crisis that may supersede custom, is, for now, obscure.

And there are other, so far unasked questions to be raised about the coming, promised Restoration: if the Glorious Revolution was bloodless in England, it was not so in Ireland, as Burke knew well. In a less dramatic way, if the constitutional architecture of the Blair regime is to be overturned through the revival of Westminster’s sovereignty, what is to be done with devolution, in a context where a Reform government adopts the mantle of British Unionism against the peripheral nationalisms of Scotland and Wales? As Deane rightly observes, “Counter-revolution or national resistance could succeed in one sense against their enemy, but they could not reinstate the world that was lost; they could only pretend to do so, while actually inaugurating a new world.”

Reform’s coming Burkean counter-revolution may promise a return to Westminster’s ancient constitutional order, interrupted by the failed experiments of the revolutionaries: but what we will get is something entirely new, perhaps more American than European, and likely more English than British. “The revolutionary is in love with risk; the conservative is in love with precedent,” Deane notes. For now this principle has been inverted, as conservatives set themselves the task of a revolution that, as in 1688, does not quite dare speak its name.

I was reminded of her iron self-control and bird-like fragility watching our Queen enter St George’s Chapel for the funeral of Prince Philip on Saturday. She stumbled momentarily as she approached the chapel door; inside, she sat alone. Born 12 years after my grandmother, she has been our Queen since 1952 and remains so today, her 95^th birthday.

And yet despite the dignified pathos of last Saturday, we can be sure that some will celebrate the Queen’s birthday by calling for her deposition. For many progressives view the Queen as an unacceptable relic of the past. Never mind personal travails; monarchy, they say, is undemocratic, even if the Queen never wields her power. We should have an elected head of state.

But far from being a relic of despotism, constitutional monarchy is our best protection against its reappearance. The story we like to recall traces a thousand years of royal continuity — the same deep history which progressives say demonstrates the obsolescence of our monarchy. But in truth this story skates over a profound rupture: the end of absolute kingship.

Medieval England was broadly Catholic, ruled spiritually from the Vatican by a Pope whose word was officially infallible. It was Henry VIII’s break from Rome in 1534 that signalled England’s secession from this absolute spiritual rule. But Henry retained absolute rule in the temporal world: he was not just a symbolic but an executive head of state, who believed his right to be obeyed came direct from God.

School history today doesn’t often dwell on England’s transition from the absolutism of Henry VIII’s day to the modern settlement. France had its Revolution, America had its Founding, but the significance of Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 is under-discussed, despite its importance.

Perhaps it’s still too much of a sore point. After all, it was also the moment that completed the rupture with Rome begun by Henry VIII. Over a few tumultuous months, the Catholic James II was challenged and then deposed by a cabal of senior English statesmen, in favour of the Protestant William of Orange. Certainly, relations between Catholics and Protestants in the British Isles have been uneasy since, a fact that still drives political unrest in Ireland today.

Just as the Reformation represented England’s secession from spiritual absolutism, the Glorious Revolution represented something similar in the political sphere. Having got rid of one absolute monarch, the statesmen who defenestrated James II set about making sure their new monarch, William, knew his place. A 1689 Bill of Rights set out constitutional principles we have to this day, including regular Parliaments, open elections and freedom of speech. The Bill also limited and specified the monarch’s powers.

The Reformation and Glorious Revolution produced an England in which both spiritual and temporal rule had the same figurehead: a head of both Church and Parliament. The change was subtle but profound, as the authority of England’s priest-kings now theoretically extended across moral and political domains. But in practice, they wielded no direct power.

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This homeopathic dilution of theocratic tyranny proved exceptionally liberating. The new settlement drove the emergence of our parliamentary system, our two main political parties, and — as the monarchy sought a new role — many of the High Victorian institutions such as the Royal Societies, whose grand buildings form the majestic backbone of London today.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an age of public enquiry, noisy debate, scientific discoveries, imperial expansion and a fair few atrocities — but also of a bouncing, self-confident conviction that Britain’s destiny was in British hands, not those of fate, or of a despot or even God.

Two world wars, one collapsed empire and a de-industrialised North later, things look rather different. Today, younger adults widely believe the world has been getting worse throughout their lives, and are pessimistic about the capacity of science, government or their own agency to change this. In parallel, the freedom of speech first guaranteed in the 1689 Bill of Rights is increasingly regarded as a stalking-horse for hatred. Growing numbers believe that what’s right and wrong — especially where it concerns the rights of marginalised groups — are sufficiently self-evident they shouldn’t be up for debate.

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But who decides on the exceptions to our post-Glorious Revolution norm of debate? It’s been nearly half a millennium since Henry VIII ended England’s official embrace of the Pope in this role. Progressives have yet to offer a clear alternative to either the Pope or the Defender of the Faith, though many assert that no hereditary ruler should be allowed such spiritual clout.

Unsurprisingly, then, progressives (such as Jeremy Corbyn) who support abolishing the monarchy, often also argue for disestablishment of the Church of England. Meanwhile a growing chorus of other progressive voices calls for a lengthening list of often self-contradictory articles of faith to be excluded from legitimate debate — a move that bears comparison with the religious ordinances of England’s Catholic and Anglican eras.

But what if the progressives are wrong and power can never truly be democratised? This was the argument advanced by political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that democracy is always compromised by absolutism, because no matter how flawless a set of rules you devise, and no matter how fair your electoral system, sooner or later a situation will crop up that doesn’t fit the rules.

When that happens, you have to break the rules: a situation Schmitt called the “state of exception”. Coronavirus lockdowns are a good example: of the past year, countless ordinary freedoms were abruptly suspended in the name of virus control. Schmitt argued that you can tell who’s really in charge by who gets to implement such a state: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception”.

Carl Schmitt was, of course, a Nazi. For him, exposing the traces of arbitrary rule that persist even in democratic government was part of a wider argument in favour of strongman rule.

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Critics might argue that quoting a Nazi in defence of the Queen isn’t likely to make the monarchy seem more progressive. But if we accept Schmitt’s argument that even democracies can’t avoid the odd despotic moment, it’s far easier to understand why constitutional monarchies are so often more egalitarian than republics. For even if Schmitt is right, it doesn’t follow that because someone has to decide the exception, that decision-maker has to be a dictator. It wasn’t the Queen who decided to suspend our ordinary liberties for the pandemic, but Parliament, which is made up of our elected representatives.

The role of our Queen is to symbolise that tyrannical twitch we can’t wholly eradicate even in democracies, lest such twitches break out more regularly among our elected leaders. And she must do so without availing herself of actual power. As such, she acts as a kind of inoculation against real tyranny.

Our Queen has two birthdays: her actual birthdate, which is today, and her “official” birthday on the second weekend in June. This aptly reflects her double existence. On the one hand she’s a human individual with a family, a birthday and a recent, terrible bereavement. On the other, she’s an interchangeable cipher, a part not just replaceable but designed to be replaced by her heir apparent when the time comes. Her role is to act, with total self-effacement, as the fulcrum between tyranny and democracy. It’s a position that, once understood, is rightly seen as profoundly sacred.

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That understanding feels fainter than ever today. It wasn’t just our monarch who seemed fragile and bird-like in mourning for Prince Philip. A whole world feels as though it’s wearing thin, and that with the death of Philip yet another of its underpinnings has sheared away: the world of enquiry, debate and optimism; one that felt liberated by having only a titular head of Church and State and responded with two centuries of flourishing culture.

Increasingly, I fear that a new generation feels less liberated than abandoned by such light-touch authorities, and yearns — under the banner of progress itself — for something closer to the moral and political strongmen envisaged by Carl Schmitt.

For ultimately, progressive calls to abolish the monarchy — whether as head of Church or state — amount not to a democratisation of power, but a removal of the principal safeguard we have against a return of the political and moral absolutism that preceded England’s Reformation and Glorious Revolution. Should the mounting demands for authority over the moral exception merge with similar calls for authority over the political one, the relative freedom guaranteed for us by our ceremonial priest-kings may be replaced by something far more direct and assertive.

If there’s any hope, it lies in the despised rural and post-industrial backwaters: Deep England. Perhaps only outside the bubble of elite discourse, our nation’s instinctive appreciation for the paradox of constitutional monarchy is robust enough to survive the progressives who seek to tear down its moral and political dimensions.

Never mind heaven on earth. On the whole, Deep England would just like to be left in peace. On this difficult birthday for Her Majesty, we can only pray that the destructive forces of progress accord her the same courtesy.