The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.

Existing accounts of how the Conservative party responded to the challenges of mass democracy after 1918 draw heavily on Stanley Baldwin’s leadership. Chapter 2 explores how local Conservative parties related to this Baldwinite public appeal, which was created in their party’s name using the latest mass-media technology but which they often found at odds with their own conception of popular Conservatism. It considers how activists sought to rehabilitate a ‘politics of place’ after 1918, shaping their own policy appeals, choice of language and public identity according to local political traditions and the perceived interests of the local electorate. It argues that the Conservatives’ experience of the 1920s was therefore marked by an uneasy asymmetry of appeals at national and local levels and highlights the mixed reception and doubts about the effectiveness of Baldwinite Conservatism. In doing so, it brings to the fore the attitudes with which Conservative activists approached the formation of the National Government in 1931.

Chapter 1 outlines the purpose of the book. It assesses existing accounts of interwar Conservatism and highlights our inadequate understanding of the Conservative party’s role within, and its reasons for supporting, the cross-party National Government of 1931-1940. The chapter explains the benefits of focusing the analysis on the role of party activists and local politics as a way of reassessing how the party responded to the challenges of mass democracy after 1918, before introducing the reader to each of the twelve constituency case studies which form the analytical basis of the book and to the related archival material. It then offers a re-reading of the electoral performance of interwar Conservatism, arguing that contrary to the picture of electoral ‘dominance’ normally associated with the party’s national performance, the local experience in the 1920s proved to be one of stagnancy and even decline from the pre-war heyday of local politics. It argues that this re-reading of the 1920s is crucial to understanding the attitude with which the Conservative grassroots approached membership the National Government in 1931 and beyond. The concluding section provides a summary of the book’s chapters.