Alongside Salisbury, Harris admires Benjamin Disraeli as a great paladin of the party, and as "the greatest Leader of the Opposition, and the greatest weaver of the national legend". Margaret Thatcher is the third member of Harris's triumvirate of transcendental Tory leaders. Yet even these three could not give the party an organic existence, for the simple reason that it is profoundly un-Tory to want any political party to have one. When James Purnell resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary in June 2009 he wrote to Gordon Brown to say: "We both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for 20 years and you far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing," and much more such guff besides. As Harris comments:
No Conservative politician at any stage of the party's history would have written such a letter. No one has ever pretended to "love" the Conservative Party. It is doubtful that even the most sentimental backbench MP would have claimed to "owe" the party "everything". Any serious Tory figure adopting such a pose would incur immediate ridicule. The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power, albeit on a particular set of terms. It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected. It is no better or worse than the people who combine to make it up. It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul.
That is why the party fits in so well with the habits and views of the generally un-ideological British people, and why it has been so phenomenally successful in winning and holding on to power over the centuries. "The link between the conservative mind and Conservative politics is indirect," Harris rightly asserts, "and it stems from the conservative person's attitude to change-namely that he or she is suspicious of it." Yet one of the recurring themes of this book is how often a relatively small group of modernisers — often but not always progressive radicals — can capture the leadership of the party and lead it to places that the rank-and-file only ever fitfully want to go.
