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When the British have a two-party system running nicely, some active politician like Robert Peel or William Gladstone picks it up and smashes it. As a result two-party politics is the exception rather than the rule, although people tend to assume that the exception has been the rule. Their attitude to it is accordingly ambivalent: on the one hand party loyalty is felt deeply by almost all politicians and their followers, and on the other hand there is often an audience for appeals which declare that "in the present crisis people must work together and put country before party." These appeals have had particular force during the two great wars of this century, but G. R. Searle shows that they were well established before 1914 and that very little has been said about "country before party" in this century that had not been heard by the late Victorians.
With a brief glance at Peel's flouting of party ties in 1846 and some reference to the way Lord Palmerston united opponents of change across party lines, Searle moves on to the golden age of parliamentary struggle under Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, and then to the shattering impact of Home Rule on party loyalty. Politicians had been talking before 1885 in terms of breaking up existing parties, usually with an implication that patriotic or moderate Liberals ought to cooperate with the Conservatives. Maintaining...