Tories: Natural Party of Government, or of Opposition?

When the bulk of the Tory Party repudiated Robert Peel in 1846, most of the party's talented leadership went with him. The Tories settled - rather contentedly - into being the 'stupid party', not interested in developing policy innovations as much as doggedly holding-up and moderating  the course of change. This, many Tories felt, could be done as well, in fact better, from the Opposition benches. In government, promoting reform is unavoidable. From Opposition, change can be obstructed and controlled.

Benjamin Disraeli had famously characterised Tory government as 'organized hypocrisy', for the very demands of governance must inevitably pull the party from its true function: voicing scepticism in the face of all attempts at 'improvement', championing conservation of traditional ways hallowed by age and usage. But, in fact, Disraeli didn't much enjoy the calculated obduracy of the Tory squires, and he set himself the task of making the Tories once more the 'natural party of government'. They became so by the 1880s, and held on to that role for most of the twentieth century.

The 90 Tory MPs who opposed House of Lords reform seemed pretty indifferent to the near inevitability of Clegg's revenge. But the price of their rebellion, failure to reform constituency boundaries, substantially decreases the chance of a Tory government from 2015. Is Opposition a price worth paying for delaying Lords reform for a few years? Are these backbenchers consciously attracted to the old Tory tradition of opposition for opposition's sake?