POLITICS: The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron,by Tim Blake, by Tim Bale, Polity, 504pp, £25

EDMUND BURKE, the noted Irish philosopher-politician, warned politicians facing difficulties back in 1774 that they should learn from past mistakes and avoid “the unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare”.

For years after the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign the British Conservative Party failed to heed Burke’s dictum – and paid the price for it by being in office but not in power in the House of Commons for much of the period after 1992, and out of office from 1997 onwards.

Today the Conservatives are, perhaps, just months from regaining a majority in the Commons, following their leader David Cameron’s efforts to bring the party back into line with British public opinion.

In his book The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, the academic Tim Bale offers a highly insightful, and often very funny, commentary on the party's dysfunctionality in the post-Thatcher era. Faced with the voters' verdict in 1997, the Conservatives refused to heed it, insisting instead that the voters were wrong and that, one day, would come to understand the errors of their ways. Voters rarely do, and they did not.

Preferring Labour’s message of more money for public services, voters instead chose to reject the Conservatives in 2001 and again in 2005, leading to the fall of John Major, William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan-Smith.

The Conservatives concentrated on Europe, tax cuts, privatisation, immigration and crime, and marginalised themselves from the electorate – who, though they agreed with some of the party’s desires, were appalled by its members’ often hysterical conduct.

Following his defeat at the hands of Tony Blair, Howard did the Conservatives one favour by putting detailed opinion-poll research before his Commons team that showed how poorly they were perceived outside the Westminster village. Similar research had been done before the 2001 debacle, but the Tories were not yet ready to heed its message, preferring instead to bang on about tax cuts and the euro.

Saying that he believed Hague must have decided to ignore the research, the pollster Nick Sparrow said later: “The campaign looked to be only slightly influenced by the research; very largely it depended on political dogma.”

Every time a leader failed to make ground, the leader was changed: “Defeat is seen not as a corporate act but something for which someone has to be personally culpable,” Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, told the author.

The job of making the Conservatives electable once more should not have been so difficult, since, unlike Labour, the party is “an essentially top-down organisation” whose leader has authority until he shows he cannot win power. In which case, he or she is finished.

However, the fact that it is “an autocracy tempered by assassination” became part of the Conservatives’ problem, since the expectation of a defeat well ahead of the elections helped to create the destabilisation that made leadership coups inevitable.

Bale has done his research, revealing how Hague and his inner cabinet sat down to debate headlines they could garner in the Daily Mailand Daily Telegraph, before deciding how they would craft the policies necessary to bring the headline about.

Indeed, the extraordinary extent of the influence of the Tory-supporting press – particularly a few commentators and opinion writers in each of those papers – on successive Conservative leaders is brought vividly to life by Bale.

In the aftermath of the 2005 election, a spoofer, using the nom de plume “mike-howard”, put the party up for sale on eBay, but not without warning potential purchasers that they were buying damaged goods. “There is a slim chance of rejuvenation, but this would take a brave person and would require action now. Gypsies need not apply,” said the “seller”, as he urged “progressive, fair-minded, outward-looking normal” people not to bother bidding.

Even then, many in the party believed the real Howard had made significant progress and held off the challenge of the Liberal Democrats, and that, “with one more push”, power could be won in the 2010 election.

But research that showed they had done appallingly badly with women, and had failed in places such as the west midlands and northern England, which would be vital to take back if they were ever to win a Commons majority again, helped finally to puncture the optimism.

But cometh the hour, cometh the Dave. Cameron made his pitch, emphasising his pragmatic nature and his willingness to ditch, or at least put in the background, policies that had been shown time and again not to work.

Conservative compassion was necessary to rebuild society, he said, adding that “we are all in it together with a mutual responsibility to care for those left behind”. Unlike Thatcher, in Cameron’s world, there is such a thing as society.

Bale clearly shows how Cameron has since then, partly by emphasising his late son’s health battles, shown voters that the National Health Service – an organisation so long derided by Tories – would be safe in his hands.

By doing so he has changed the Conservatives, superficially at any rate, so much so that with barely a hesitation they stood to applaud him thunderously last October, at the party’s annual conference, in Manchester, when he spoke passionately about the need to fight poverty.

Bale has produced a fine piece of writing and research about the Conservatives. In this election year, if you are going to read one book about the party that may shortly once again govern our nearest neighbour, read this one.

Mark Hennessy is London Editor of The Irish Times