Peterhouse

Peterhouse is a college at the Cambridge University with a tradition of right-wing, reactionary thought. It became associated with the New Right in the 1980s and more recently has become a hub of neoconservative thinking, most notably by serving as a launch pad for the the Henry Jackson Society.

The Peterhouse Right

In the 1970s and ‘80s Peterhouse was a base for a group of reactionary intellectuals known as the ‘Peterhouse Right’ or ‘Cambridge Right’. They were led by the conservative historian Maurice Cowling who was a Fellow of Peterhouse from 1963 to 1993. In an article on the ‘Peterhouse Right’ published in the Guardian in 1993, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrotes:

Cowling came to the college in 1963 after a spot of journalism on The Times and Daily Express and an attempt to get into Parliament.

In 1971, he was joined by Dr Edward Norman, another clerical don and gadfly of the liberal ecclesiastical establishment, and soon after by David Watkin, a prolific conservative writer on architecture.

It was in the early 1970s - when Michael Portillo was an undergraduate - that Peterhouse briefly established a London base, at the Spectator. The magazine was edited for a time by George Gale; Maurice Cowling was his literary editor, and another Petrean, Patrick Cosgrave, was political columnist. Cosgrave had passed through the college on his way from Dublin to London.

He had a season of fame as the one journalist whole-heartedly to back Margaret Thatcher in her bid for the Tory leadership in 1975, and then a short season of favour at her court. Other kindred spirits at Peterhouse in the 1970s included Roger Scruton from the Hegelian Right and John Vincent.

In his biography of Michael Portillo Michael Gove wrote:

Peterhouse was the oldest, smallest and most reactionary of Cambridge's colleges. Portillo's tutor, Maurice Cowling, was spare, crusty and the university's most reactionary don. Cowling and his fellow Right-winger Shirley Robin Letwin, the author of The Anatomy Of Thatcherism, introduced their students to a type of Conservatism at odds with the progressive drift of Edward Heath's government.

Cowling's Conservatism was broadly a belief in letting those born to rule get on with it, rather than succumbing to modish liberalism. He argued that, in politics, 'elites... should eschew guilt and self-doubt to perform the duties of their stations' and that politics itself was 'primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre' among the small group of leaders whose 'accepted authority constituted political leadership'.

Tim Williams, a newspaper columnist who read history at Peterhouse, writes that: ‘The 1970s Peterhouse fogeys combined a desire to turn the clock back… with a revolutionary desire to replace traditional conservatism with a more muscular, aggressive version which would not accept the 1945 settlement but would destroy it, root and branch. These were to be the cultural shock troops of Thatcherism.’

Cowling himself described the ‘Peterhouse Right’ as ‘a small group of dons whose teaching and writing is about the history of politics, art thought and religion’ who ‘share common prejudices - against the higher liberalism and all sorts of liberal rhetoric, including ecclesiastical liberal rhetoric’.

Kenneth Minogue wrote of Cowling on the Social Affairs Unit blog that: ‘His main target was a kind of pious high mindedness that he detected lurking behind the dominant liberalism of political life and the deceptive pretence of impartiality in a lot of academic writing.’ In the 1960s he campaigned against plans within the university to introduce a course in sociology, which he regarded as a vehicle for liberal dogma. This reflected Cowling’s highly cynical view of political debate which he believed simply served the interests of political actors. William Rees-Mogg, who visited Cowling at Peterhouse in the late 1970s, writes that, ‘His central doctrine was that political philosophies are mere rhetoric, designed to advance the politician or his party towards power. He was a brilliant exponent of political philosophies, but he did not believe that they were real.’ Similarly Kenneth Minogue writes that Cowling ‘followed, to a fault, the cynical or Marxist line that utterances about the world are all ‘performatives’ designed to play a persuasive role in argument… He was not averse to describing himself as a “Tory Marxist”.’

According to his Times obituary, Cowling influenced Michael Portillo, Alistair Cooke, for many years a linchpin of the Conservative research department; Hywel Williams, an adviser to John Redwood; and David Ruffley, MP, an adviser to Kenneth Clarke. Others taught by him or influenced by his personality were Oliver Letwin, Charles Moore, Norman Stone, Niall Ferguson, Frank Johnson and Andrew Roberts.