Throughout the 1970s, William F Buckley Jr reigned as the genteel patrician of American conservatism, best known for his founding of the conservative periodical National Review. But in 1976, he began a lucrative second life as a fiction writer. Within two months of its publication, his first novel Saving the Queen earned him somewhere around $150,000. He would eventually write 11 spy thrillers, all sharing a protagonist named Blackford Oakes – a swashbuckling, blond-haired, blue-eyed CIA agent – a Yale man of unimpeachable judgement, love of country, and “an assured sense of metaphysical equality”.
Oakes, the story goes, must track down a mole leaking atomic secrets to the Soviets. To do so, he infiltrates the inner circle of the British monarch, the “young”, “ravishing” and fictitious Queen Caroline. Before long, Oakes beds the Queen in a disquietingly vivid scene that somehow reads as simultaneously lurid and banal. He is dashing, confident and irresistible, and his prowess astonishes even his colleagues: “My God, Oakes, your instructions were to penetrate society, maybe the court. Not the Queen,” one exclaims.
Saving the Queen might be described as a pastiche of John le Carré, draped in Cold War-era American jingoism and unburdened by moral ambiguity (“I wanted to create an anti-anti-hero,” Buckley once attested). The novel also stands as a monument to Buckley’s own Anglophilia. His plot largely unfolds in the United Kingdom, and his narrative is replete with rich detail of a mid-century English world, albeit imperfectly so. The Sunday Telegraph’s review of the book snickered through an index of misreferences (Buckley’s mentions of Britain’s “Home Minister” and London’s “Chelsea Station” among them) before concluding that the project “can best be described as a comedy thriller – though perhaps not quite as the author intended it”.
Oakes is an undeniable facsimile of some autobiographical ideal held by Buckley, almost childlike and endearing in his smoothed, uncomplicated self-composition. And yet romance with Britain wouldn’t always be as explicit as Oakes’s encounter with the sovereign, nor would it be without contradictions – contradictions that both animate, and anticipate, the twinned futures of American and British conservatism. Today, these two conservativisms remain more ideologically allied than they have been in four decades. But such harmony belies the antagonism coursing throughout their relationship, where an American president can publicly badmouth the United Kingdom. Buckley, here, is indispensable – a miniature of American conservatism’s prevailing ambivalent, love-hate relationship with Britain.
Born in New York in 1925, Buckley spent many formative years in Mexico, where his father made his riches speculating on oil. Spanish would be the young Buckley’s first language; French his second. In his magisterial recent biography of the man, Sam Tanenhaus quotes a characterisation of his subject that paints him as “a Catholic aristocrat of the Spanish persuasion”. Yet for all his European aristocratic sensibilities, Buckley, who began his schooling in London, cultivated an affinity to British cultural, social and intellectual traditions that would endure for life. His secondary education was taken at Millbrook School in New York, a preparatory school based on the British system; his most formative instructor at Millbrook was an Anglo-American man who emphatically pronounced his English inheritance, and his best friend at school would be Alistair Horne (later an MI6 agent and a historian) with whom he remained close for the next seven decades of his life.
In the early years of the Second World War, however, the Buckleys – now living in a sprawling manor in Connecticut – seethed with Anglophobia. “All the Buckleys were anti-British,” Tanenhaus writes, thanks to a swirl of Germanophilia and American exceptionalism, which was heightened by the family’s militant isolationism. The Buckleys were ardent supporters of and fundraisers for the America First Committee (AFC), the primary vehicle that organised the American isolationist movement. “If there is one sound reason for not aiding Britain [during] her present crisis,” the young Buckley argued in a school debate, “it is because of her past effort to impede this country’s progress – both economically and politically, and because of her warped idea of democracy, upon which has been based her treatment of her colonies and other nations”. But such commitments faded, quite literally, overnight. Mere days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the AFC dissolved. Like millions of former isolationists, Buckley fully embraced the Allies’ cause against the Axis juggernaut. He would be drafted into the US Army in 1943, and served through the war’s end.
Perhaps it was the American assertion of post-war primacy that cooled Buckley’s Anglophobic fervour. With the United Kingdom sliding back as the junior partner in the Special Relationship, the nation no longer presented as a rival to American ambition. Rather, the British now emerged as an essential ally against the true enemy: the godless, communist Soviet Union. Even his father, the Buckley clan’s fiercest Anglophobe at the start of the war, seemed to have shed his enmity by the early 1950s. “You should spend a couple of years in study [at] Oxford or Cambridge,” he wrote to the younger Buckley, who was fresh off his wildly popular debut book, the campus-Kritik screed God and Man at Yale. “The English have an innate mastery of politics and government which is not reflected in their stupid incursion to Socialism.”
That 1950s were a particularly decisive decade for American conservative politics. Twenty years of Democratic Party rule scrambled the ideological horizons of domestic politics, and the Republican Party, as a national organisation, wasn’t yet a reliable vehicle for the conservative movement’s activist and intellectual base. Dwight Eisenhower, elected in 1952 as a Republican, was primarily regarded as a moderate consensus-builder, towering above the vulgar machinations of partisan politics. As such, he became as a bête noire for this conservative base, which spent much of the war and those early post-war years banished to the political wilderness. Politicians across both parties sneered at this constituency, which they saw – with some good reason – as a carnival of paranoid cranks, anti-Semites and fascist sympathisers.
In 1953, Buckley began planning a new publication aimed at steadying and cultivating this nascent conservative movement. Two years later, National Review launched, and Buckley recruited a stable of conservative luminaries for the magazine’s inaugural masthead – a young American historian named Russell Kirk, among them. By the time Buckley reached out, Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind had already become a bible of the incipient conservative renaissance. It ultimately ran through seven editions and sold over one million copies, and through the turn of the century would be read as a founding text of modern American conservatism. George Nash, who authored the next-most-important intellectual history of American conservatism, wrote that Kirk “demonstrate[d] that intelligent conservatism was not a mere smokescreen for selfishness. It was an attitude toward life with substance and moral force of its own.” Indeed, The Conservative Mind supplied the emerging conservative movement, then flailing for legitimacy, with an ideological spine and historical mythos.
Kirk’s narrative roves between the American and British traditions of conservatism, braiding thinkers and statesmen across both sides of the Atlantic into one robust, storied movement. Figures such as Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, Thomas Macaulay and others receive hundreds of pages of examination in The Conservative Mind. Modern conservatism, as a coherent tradition, is said to emerge from Edmund Burke. The twists and turns of British imperial statecraft, politics and intellectual history are made inextricable from the supposedly exceptionally American manifestations of conservativism.
By the late 1960s, National Review had matured into the conservative powerhouse that Buckley initially envisioned. But he remained remarkably uninterested in carrying out original research, which he lacked the attention span, curiosity and time required to produce. He delegated the responsibility of official movement mythmaking to bookish court historians like Kirk; for his part, Buckley remained content to skate on the surface of conservative ideology, delivering the movement line through his widely syndicated columns, or otherwise flourishing his preternatural rhetorical gifts in front of a television camera on his intellectual talk show Firing Line. Yet even as he lacked Kirk’s scholarly aptitude, Buckley too remained awestruck by the legacies of old-world Toryism. While the rest of Europe hurtled into an egalitarian modernity, eschewing its traditions and institutions, Britain proved more unbending. She remained a fortress against a changing world – her manners and modes twining around the immutable order of natural life. Britain wasn’t France, capitulating to the anarchic swarm of radical democracy; and nor was it America, for that matter.
“During the Revolution of 1776, when the United States of America broke away from England… which side would you have been on?” asked Huey Newton, Black Panther Party co-founder. Buckley’s lightning-quick wit, one of his greatest strengths, usually ensured that he’d never be caught on his back foot; this conversation, from 1973, would be one of the rare exceptions. “I think I probably would have been on the side of George Washington,” Buckley stammers, his staccato reply sounding far from assured. “I’m not absolutely sure… On the whole, I’m against revolutions, though I think, as revolutions go, that was a pretty humane one.” It’s a strange equivocation, especially from a man reared on an ideological diet of American exceptionalism and wartime Anglophobia. But it’s made less strange when considering the Cold War Manichaeanism structuring American politics, which swallowed any contradiction in service of its geopolitical ends. Conservatives could now indulge, and even mobilise, that subterranean, atavistic, monarchist impulse. Once deemed the antithesis of the American ideal, British imperial ambition would now be canonised as continuous with it.
During the age of decolonisation, Buckley’s National Review doubled as something of an American convalescence home for an Anglo-European imperial imaginary in retreat. Buckley and his coterie watched with horror as waves of liberation movements washed over Africa and Asia. Almost categorically, they supported those colonisers’ counter-revolutionary efforts. The British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising, for example, would find its way into a 1957 column entitled “Why The South Must Prevail”. “The question… is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism,” Buckley writes, in a piece that justified the violent white Southern backlash that followed integration. But it wouldn’t just be the British Empire that won Buckley’s sympathy. White ethnostates – Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa – found rosy treatments in the pages of National Review. Buckley, himself, played an important role in selling American politicians and policymakers on the Katanga cause of the early 1960s, a movement that saw Belgian-backed secessionists take up arms against the government of independent Congo’s first elected leader Patrice Lumumba.
Yet Buckley’s – and American conservatism’s – swelling Anglophilic and imperial sympathies couldn’t paper over divergences from their British counterparts. In 1969, the year following his infamous parliament address, Buckley interviewed Enoch Powell in a conversation that lingered on the immigration question. “[D]oesn’t one suppose that the passage of a generation spent in Birmingham produces Englishmen?” he asks Powell, who replies: “Not if it is spent in areas which are totally occupied by people of one’s own culture, language, and we must remember that we are primarily talking of East Indians…” The conversation moves towards future policy, when Powell begins explaining a prospective scheme to repatriate those East and West Indians filling British cities. “[T]he notion of having a master plan strikes me as highly interventionist… which is not normally associated with you,” Buckley presses Powell. “Have I said anything which can fairly be described as a master plan?” Powell snipes, to which Buckley follows: “[T]he notion of the revolving situation where x-number are admitted, y-number are ejected… strikes me as schematic.” Buckley, at the crest of his ideological influence among American conservatives, brandishes a distinctly fusionist American ideal grounded in small-government libertarianism and civic faith; Powell, ostracised from his party and in political freefall, sketches out an inchoate vision for a blood-and-soil Britain.
Five decades after Buckley and Powell’s conversation, the conservative American pundit Ben Shapiro sat for a BBC interview with Andrew Neil. Before long, the conversation grows tense. Shapiro accuses Neil of being a “person on the left”, to which Neil laughs and replies: “Mr Shapiro, if only you knew how ridiculous that statement is, you wouldn’t have said it.” Minutes later, Neil probes Shapiro on his views on abortion. Shapiro – fidgeting, twitching, breathing heavily – finally bursts. “I am not inclined to continue an interview with a person as badly motivated as you,” he says, before abruptly exiting the interview.
Would a creature like Neil or Shapiro better embody the state of modern conservative British politics? Twentieth-century Toryism, that sacred citadel of natural order as projected by Buckley, grows more decrepit by the day. The Reform Party, propelled by its grievance-driven, profane mass politics, stands largely irreverent to the strictures and pageantry of conservative tradition. At the next general election, Reform promises to topple the Tories, supplanting them as the nation’s conservative bloc in parliament. And in doing so, they will more decisively resolve that Thatcherite ambiguity, one that precariously balanced High Toryism and grassroots libertarianism. Reform, it seems, has inherited the latter and infused it with a set of distinctly 21st-century priorities. There is no doubting that today’s predominating strand of British conservatism draws from aspects of Tory political tradition, as well as Britain’s own indigenous political culture of right-wing reaction. Powell’s swift rehabilitation, especially throughout the pages of the Spectator, evince the British right’s remarkable predisposition to this tendency.
But one can’t help but think of America’s pronounced role in ushering this present incarnation of British conservatism. Nigel Farage’s gaze westward is most pronounced on migration matters, both in style and substance. Earlier this year, inspired by the ICE terror gripping American cities, he cited his intention to create an ICE-style agency to carry out “mass deportations”. Over the years, the Reform leader’s regular sojourns to the United States have consistently generated both political connections and funders. Sometimes, this American influence will force some clumsy graft of American conservatism onto its British counterpart, such as with Farage’s recent and now abandoned push to roll back abortion rights – an utter non-issue among the British electorate. But largely, the insurgent British right-wing has benefitted enormously from this relationship.
And it’s not merely Farage who benefits. According to recent Politico reporting, many right-wing American streamers and podcasters have boosted Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain, channelling cash – and legitimacy – their way. The British conservative orbit is now littered with organisations, such as Turning Point UK, spawned out of American dark money networks, networks that have pumped billions of dollars into building and cultivating conservative organisations. The British right-wing’s ever-growing presence at the US-funded Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conferences, along with the literal creation of a British CPAC, has also fortified the interrelationship between these right-wing movements.
For decades, that Anglophilia steadily fed the imaginations of “respectable” American conservatives. No longer, however: that influence now flows in the other direction. The American right is entirely uninterested in Britain. Even its British inheritances (Burke, and the like) are dislocated, treated as abstract founding figures, not British heroes. Modern American conservatism, in its dizzying heterogeneity, is fastened together by a sort of hyper-nationalism – perhaps one that is reflexively closed off to its British philosophical founding fathers. Modern Britain, in the American conservative imagination, serves more of a cautionary tale of “open borders” and “socialism” than any object of reverence.
But thanks, in part, to the Americans, a new British right is flushed with cash, manpower, and potentially soon, political power. Shorn of its pageantry and commitments to “civility”, they are looking increasingly like their American counterparts. If this resurgent British right-wing does seize power at the next general election, as all election polling currently predicts, such a victory will bear some American imprint. For Buckley, ever the institution-builder, this reversal of roles probably would have come as an Oedipal delight. At the very least, we know how Blackford Oakes would respond. Lying with the Queen after their passionate tryst, “in a voice kind, but gently stern and mocking he whispered to her: Courtesy of the United States, ma’am.”
[Further reading: A tale of two kings]
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Subscribe here to commentExcpt FWIW they may not come to power at the next election.
I think the Anglophile in the USA is fairly recent – particularly strong during the Cold War. It is just now resetting to pre-WW2 norms.
Since Burke is mentioned here it is worth recalling in view of Buckley’s “stuttering” as to which side he’d have chosen in 1776, that Burke took a more rather sympathetic view of the grievances that led to the American revolution than he did of the French. Since the main one was taxation this could be seen as an authentically Conservative response as the ideology developed.