Continuing our series on factions, Alfie Steer, historian of modern and contemporary Britain, discusses one of the more controversial party factions, the Monday Club, and reflects on the limitations our oral history archive has encountered with such topics.

On Monday, 3 February 1961, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan addressed the South African parliament. Now remembered as the ‘Winds of Change’ speech, Macmillan’s address both acknowledged the growing calls for independence across Britain’s African colonies and signalled the Conservative government’s commitment to a speedy decolonisation process. For a small collection of Conservatives, still firmly committed to British imperialism, Macmillan’s speech was remembered as ‘black Monday’ and proved the catalyst for the formation of one of the party’s most controversial factions: the Monday Club.

The Monday Club defined itself by its opposition to decolonization, and fierce defence of white rule in Southern Africa, particularly Rhodesia. The club’s president, Lord Salisbury, was a well-known imperialist, who had resigned from Macmillan’s government over its perceived liberal direction. Following the Conservatives’ defeat at the 1964 general election, the Monday Club experienced a surge in popularity. Its claims that the party had shifted too far to the left, and that future electoral success relied on a firm articulation of traditional Toryism, appealed to a disillusioned membership. Its opposition to sanctions on Rhodesia following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) issued by Iain Smith’s government, also gained it some support on the party’s right. By 1970 the club was supported by eighteen Tory MPs. The club produced both a monthly newsletter, a quarterly journal and hundreds of pamphlets, the vast majority in their early years being in defence of the British Empire.  

While the club would remain supportive of Smith’s Rhodesian government, when decolonization became an inevitability by the end of the sixties, the club’s attention shifted to domestic issues, particularly immigration. Its members enthusiastically supported Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Perhaps its most well-known, and controversial, policy commitment was support for a mass voluntary repatriation of non-white immigrants.

Within the Conservative Party, the Monday Club was an unusual faction for having a comprehensive policy platform. While most remembered for its views on decolonization and immigration, the club was also supportive of a free market economy, with a smaller role for the welfare state, widescale privatisation and lower taxation. This was complemented by a firm law-and-order agenda, particularly support for the death penalty and hostility to trade unions. While the club was mostly perceived as a pressure group, many of its members envisioned it as an intellectual challenge to the Bow Group, which had acted as a reformist think tank for the Conservatives since the 1950s.

Before the Monday Club, most Conservative factions were strictly parliamentary; mostly informal, ad hoc groupings of like-minded MPs. Their activity was almost exclusively limited to parliamentary lobbying, and occasional voting rebellions. The Monday Club, however, appeared more like what Patrick Seyd described as a ‘party within a party’, boasting a mass-membership, branches within local Conservative associations and universities, and a willingness to publicly challenge Conservative politicians. In 1969 the club led a sustained campaign in Surbiton against incumbent Conservative MP Nigel Fisher, largely because of his liberal views on immigration. In one of our oral history interviews, David Hunt described early political battles with Monday Club supporters within the Young Conservatives. In another, Terence Higgins described facing opposition within his local party from ‘a very right-wing organization’ that may have been a branch of the Monday Club.

The Monday Club’s high point came during Edward Heath’s government from 1970-74. The club became a site of activity for many on the party’s right, angered by the government’s lack of action to halt immigration or limit the power of trade unions. By 1971, the club boasted 10,000 members, 30 branches, 55 university and college groups, and the support of 35 MPs, 6 of whom were ministers. However, not long after, a series of damaging bouts of infighting, and scandalous revelations about the club’s infiltration by the National Front, seriously damaged the group’s reputation. An image of extremism proved difficult to shake and placed the club beyond the pale for many.  

The rest of the 1970s and 80s saw the club dogged by infighting. Meanwhile, its controversial positions made it frequently the subject of damaging media coverage. By the 1990s many of its key members had resigned. After the landslide 1997 and 2001 general election defeats, the Conservative Party took steps to detoxify its political brand, challenging perceptions that they were the ‘nasty party’. After being elected leader in 2001, Iain Duncan Smith ordered Conservative MPs to disassociate from the Monday Club. Soon after it was suspended from the party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given its reputation, few of the former members interviewed for the oral history project say much about the Monday Club. Some have made it clear that their membership was brief and non-committal (Philip Goodhart) or a long time ago (Jill Knight), others have said they joined for networking purposes (Ivan Lawrence) while others appear to have not mentioned it at all (Teddy Taylor). This gap in our archive reveals some of the limitations that oral history can encounter. Like all other historical sources, oral history interviews cannot always tell the whole story.

What then is the legacy of the Monday Club? While it cannot claim a direct influence on Margaret Thatcher’s government, they certainly welcomed many of her policies. Even though the government never went as far as to support the repatriation of immigrants, the British Nationality Act (1981) and Thatcher’s comments on the country being ‘swamped’ by immigration, satisfied many of the club’s members. In fact, the club’s combination of economic liberalism, social conservatism, and authoritarianism when it came to limiting the powers of trade unions, bears a striking resemblance to the ‘free economy and strong state’ ethos that Andrew Gamble later used to characterise Thatcherism. Ironically, it seems that Thatcher’s rise to power may have contributed to the club’s decline. If the government was pursuing policies they endorsed, its role became redundant. Ultimately, though the Monday Club was outside of the party’s mainstream, it formed a part of a wider pressure for the party to shift to the right, which was eventually achieved with Margaret Thatcher’s election.

A.S.

Further reading

Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).

Lisa Mason, ‘The Development of the Monday Club and Its Contribution to the Conservative Party and the Modern British Right, 1961 to 1990’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 2004).

Daniel McNeill, ‘“The rivers of Zimbabwe will run red with blood”: Enoch Powell and the Post-Imperial Nostalgia of the Monday Club’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (2011), pp.731-745.

Ritchie Ovendale, ‘Macmillan and the Wind of Change in Africa, 1957-1960’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), pp.455-477.

Mark Pitchford, The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right, 1945-1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

Patrick Seyd, ‘Factionalism within the Conservative Party: The Monday Club’, Government & Opposition 7 (1972), pp.464-487.

Auda-Andre Valerie, ‘Resisting the Conservative Mainstream: On Some Writings of the Monday Club’, Cycnos 19 (2002), pp.7-15.

Alfie Steer is a historian of modern and contemporary Britain, currently studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of the Labour Left from the end of the miners strike to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015. His most recent article was published in Contemporary British History, and has written book reviews for Twentieth Century British History and the English Historical Review. Outside of academia he has written for popular publications such as Tribune.