These are unenviable days for the Tories. Out of government, crumbling into internecine factions and bleeding loyalists to its baby-faced rightward rival, Reform. The party’s electoral prospects look glum: if Britain went to the polls today, the Conservatives would win just 45 seats, according to the latest YouGov projections. Just imagine the dismay at Tory HQ.
But last month, an exquisitely tailored ally popped up at the depressed elbow of British Conservatism and began murmuring its talking points to a large and surprisingly receptive audience – cinemagoers. A lavishly costumed, stirringly soundtracked film making the Tory case for Britain has spent the last few weeks at the top of the domestic box office, banking £18m and counting for its frock-coated cast and its creator Julian Fellowes, and as yet untold electoral benefits for his party.
If anything can save the Tories now, it’s Downton Abbey: the Grand Finale.
Even more than the six-season ITV soap opera and the two films that preceded it, the latest Downton film is magnificently unabashed soft Tory propaganda. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure (and whatever your political persuasions, I would contend that the film is a pleasure), allow me to set the stage.
The year is 1930 and we’re back at the gothic revival Yorkshire pile to catch up with the aristocrats who own it and the servants who feed and dress them. The Crawley family – featuring such familiar faces as Hugh Bonneville’s triply-tweeded earl and Michelle Dockery as his marble-skinned but not quite marble-hearted eldest daughter – are fighting for financial and social survival, thanks to some dodgy American investments and Mary’s d-d-d-d-d-d-divorce.
But relax: this is a world that was built to soothe 2010s Britain through its Sunday night scaries. Nothing bad is actually going to happen. (Serious fans might dispute this: like any soap, the show had a couple of dramatic deaths but let’s treat those as an aberration.) Lady Mary, whose eyes are as clear as her complexion, soon hatches a plan to keep the aristos snug in their castle, which can be summarised as: downsizing their second home. “Families like ours,” she tells poor, stricken Hugh Bonneville, as they tour a large, light-flooded Knightsbridge flat, “must keep moving to survive.”
Beneath the flapper beads and cocktail trays, Fellowes, who is a shrewder writer than his dialogue might suggest, has snuck a neat political allegory. The Crawleys are the Tories (it almost literally rhymes): rural elites, landowners and defenders of traditional values like having a butler and changing for dinner. Within the party, Lady Mary is an energetic young leadership hopeful whose ambition borders on insurgency: “Sell Grantham House!” thunders beleaguered Hugh when she first suggests it. “What absolute bloody nonsense!”
But Mary isn’t a radical, far from it: she’s a pragmatist in a long Tory tradition, one who recognizes the necessity of conceding a little power to conserve a lot. On London shopping trips she gamely forgoes a chauffeur to hop on the bus, thoughtfully offers to share her mother’s maid so her own heavily pregnant one doesn’t literally go into labour while styling her hair, and generally goes about the delicate process of making life just better enough for Downton’s (read: Britain’s) working class that it won’t rise up against her.
There’s a whiff of Stanley Baldwin or Harold Macmillan to all this, of a party whose remarkable electoral success in modern times – of the 110 years between 1886 and 1997, there were fewer than 20 when Britain had a single-party majority government that wasn’t the Tories – has been attributed by many political historians to its pragmatism, its willingness to power share, to make concessions, to move, fractionally, with the times. It’s what John Ramsden, in the title of his 1998 history of the party, dubbed its Appetite for Power.
The success of this strategy lies in its appearance of reasonableness. Time and again the Tories have cast themselves as cautious modernisers, the sensible middle ground, more open-minded than reactionaries like Farage (reborn in Downton as Simon Russel-Beale’s grumpy local landowner on a mission to preserve the purity of the county show) and more prudent than the left. This is a role they managed to lose to Starmer’s Labour in the last election, possibly thanks to their actual record in government.
“So you’ve made the full journey from revolutionary to capitalist,” Edith Crawley says fondly to her brother-in-law, once the family chauffeur, now the owner of a prosperous car dealership.
“I prefer to call it being sensible,” he beams, the dialogue equivalent of whipping off his dinner jacket to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with “we should all be Tories”.
Fellowes makes a seductive case for Downtoryism. A highly effective PR man for the party that made him a peer, he has pulled off an impressive sleight-of-hand: creating a fantasy version of British history – a kind of fairy tale of the class system – and then disguising it under the thick, sweet icing of relentlessly accurate period detail. Who wouldn’t want to preserve the old ways when the old ways mean benevolent landlords, servants so relaxed and accommodated that they murmur “Home Sweet Home”, when they come through the side door, and the eternal sunshine of the county show, where lord and lady’s maid mingle beside the pig enclosure? Fiction, much more than politics, has a way of making us believe things we know not to be true.
One person who certainly knows them not to be true, by the way, is Fellowes. Gosford Park, the 2002 film he wrote for Robert Altman and for which he won an Oscar, provides the cool, counterbalancing realism to the fairy tale TV show it inspired. It’s a film that doesn’t shy from the exploitation and cruelty that Britain’s ruling classes have so much more often wrought on the people they employ than the cheery fake friendships Downton proffers, while also managing to be funny and fun. Watch it.
Fiction makes an effective political tool because it can disguise its true aims. I would hazard that a sizeable chunk of Downton’s £18m box office takings have come from people who don’t consider themselves conservative (myself, for one) but who nonetheless enjoyed and have conceivably been influenced by its arguments and who gamely paid their £12.99 price of admission towards the Tories’ re-election fund.
Here’s an embarrassing confession: I cried at the end of the film. What can I say? Perhaps it was watching it a thousand miles (and several degrees of realism) away from home, perhaps it was saying goodbye to all the actors and characters I grew up watching, some living, some dead. The passage of time is a painful thing, so painful in fact that our instinct is often to try and stop it – an instinct that the Tories have historically found great success harnessing, some might say weaponising.
So cheer up, Kemi and the gang. It’s the end of Downton Abbey but with a few more weeks of box office numbers like these, it might not be the end of you.
[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch pitches the Tories as the Lib Dems of the right]
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