Matthew Groves: Monarchy is the institution that holds this nation together

Matthew Groves is on the parliamentary list and ran for Parliament in 2010 in the constituency of Plymouth Moor View. He achieved a 7.9 per cent swing for the Conservatives. He was also a local councillor in Surrey for eight years. Matthew has recently launched his own blog, "A voice from the Shires".

There have been some very good years for the Monarchy, with the Royal Wedding, the Diamond Jubilee and now the birth of Prince George.  Polls show that the current approval ratings for this longstanding institution are at an all time high.  It is difficult for even the most embittered republican not to find himself smiling benignly to hear the latest from our national family about the nappy changing of Prince George!

That is of course one central part of our monarchy – its role as our national family, bringing us together as a family who share in the joys of weddings and births and the sadness of funeral.  George III in particular saw the advantage of strengthening the Monarchy through emphasising the Royal Family.

When the Family went through its crises in the nineties, with the break down of two marriages, the Queen suffered her annus horribilus and the final crisis of Princess Diana’s death, the institution suffered.  It was wounded, but not fatally and that is because while being the national family is so important, it is not the only vital role that the monarchy performs.

Monarchy unites all the strands of this nation, government, parliament, the armed forces, the church, much of our charitable sector.  It is the monarchy that stands for permanence in the vicissitudes of modern life.  It does not move at the pace of ephemeral Westminster politics.  With the birth of the new prince, the media is now commenting about Britain in decades, not days or weeks.

Matthew Groves: When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change

Matthew Groves was a Conservative Councillor in Surrey for eight years before running for Parliament in Plymouth Moor View at the last general election, where he achieved a 7.9 percent swing to the Conservatives.  After this he worked for the Church of England's Parliamentary Unit promoting the role of the church in education as well as raising with MPs the constitutional dangers of Nick Clegg's plans Lords reform.

Conservatism is more of an attitude than a political dogma.  While there are many in the modern Conservative Party who adhere to political creeds such as libertarianism or liberal conservatism, surely a desire to conserve and a scepticism about sudden change is more about values and attachment to the tried-and-tested than ideology or political theory.  And that is a good thing.  I still believe that while the majority of the British public are not necessarily overly enamoured with the concept of the invisible hand of the market or shrinking the state, they do possess an innate conservatism.  It is that commonsense sceptism about political theories that kept the ancient institutions of state, the monarchy, the established church and the House of Lords intact in the turbulence of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and saw the Conservative Party flourish in the era of universal suffrage in the last Century.  Lose touch with that conservative attitude and the Party loses the foundations of its support.

That is why it is deeply worrying that the Conservative Party seems to have developed an enthusiasm to be seen to be doing and changing.  My suspicion is that most people would prefer it if politicians did less not more.  The trouble with politics is that it can attract the sort of person who wants to make their name and usually a name is gained by changing something, whether or not the change is good – Edward Heath taking Britain into the Commonmarket or Nick Clegg’s abortive attempt to destroy the House of Lords spring to mind.  The Conservative Party should be the natural foil to this – it represents the attitude so pithily summed up by the second Viscount Falkland:  “When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.”

It seems that many of the areas of policy where the Conservative Party has been perceived as vulnerable in recent times are where they have been more radical.  It is people’s natural conservatism that leads them to resent the growth of the supermarket at the expense of the local high street and it is again conservatism that leads people to resist development in their backyard; indeed the whole urge to protect the environment is a sort of conservatism – the conservation movement.