Edmund Burke, who spent most of his life either in the wilderness of Parliamentary opposition or as a champion of lost causes, knew how uncharitably we treat political failure. 'The conduct of a losing party,' he wrote, 'never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments - success.' Burke might have been speaking of his old enemies, the Hanoverian Tories, who have now been rescued from ignominy by Linda Colley. Her book brilliantly rehabilitates the 18th-century Tory Party and lambastes the 'vulgar judgments' of those historians who have dismissed it as an insignificant political presence.

LRB 2 December 1982 | PDF Download