The conservative party and the 1945 general election

Kandiah, Michael

doi:10.1080/13619469508581326

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…As Michael Kandiah has pointed out, the key point was that the Conservatives had been accustomed to being much better endowed with full-time agents and other staffers than their rivals. 189 It was this loss of relative superiority that so affected the Conservatives, both practically and emotionally, in 1945.…”

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Conservative Party Agents in Second World War Britain

Thorpe

2006

Twentieth Century British History

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Organization played a significant part in the competition between British political parties in the twentieth century. Faced with the mass electorate that had developed from the nineteenth century onwards, and particularly in response to the introduction of universal manhood suffrage (and limited women's suffrage) in 1918 and universal adult suffrage ten years later, parties were well aware that they must organize or die. The details of how they did so varied, however. It is generally reckoned that, in the period prior to 1939, the Conservative party was the best-organized, and this is generally seen as a factor -although not necessarily the most important one -in the party's electoral dominance during the inter-war period. Labour's machine, while by no means contemptible, was generally regarded as less effective in peacetime, not least because it tended to be rather under-resourced. But Conservative organizational dominance was not predetermined. It depended upon a number of contingent factors; and some of these were significantly affected by the outbreak of war in 1939. One such factor was its ability to sustain certificated, full-time, salaried agents -'the linchpin of the organization', as Stuart Ball puts it -in the majority of parliamentary constituencies. 1 Some have argued that the war hit the party very hard and at least implied that Labour gained a relative advantage; others, however, have suggested that this is a rather bogus claim, because there were still more full-time Conservative than Labour agents, 2 or that 'the Tories'were 'not … much worse organized than anyone else '. 3 This article sets out to investigate these claims by focussing on the Conservative party's records, not only at the national level, but also at the level of the constituency Conservative associations (CAs). Using a sample of a hundred associations (roughly one in six of the national total), it will attempt to offer a more nuanced version of the position of Conservative party agents during the Second World War. In particular, it suggests that there can be no question but that the party was hit hard by the departure of agents. It will also show how

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confidence: 99%