Re-righting history: Nick Cohen meets the young Conservative writer who blames Britain's ills on the party's 'wet' failures in the post-war years

ANDREW ROBERTS is a right-wing sensation. Thirty one years old and an elegant, polemical writer, his latest history book, Eminent Churchillians, all but sold out last week within three days of publication.

Today he is waiting nervously for the Sunday papers in his opulent flat near Sloane Square, where signed photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald and Nancy Reagan gaze affectionately at him from the table by the fireplace. He is worried about what the reviewers will say of his attack on leading figures of the Establishment of 1940 to 1955. But, even if the Sundays do their worst, Mr Roberts is already a success.

At the launch of Eminent Churchillians, at the Guards Museum, near Buckingham Palace, half the right-wing power brokers in London were there to offer congratulations. Michael Portillo, Alan Clark and Norman Lamont represented the anti-European wing of the Tory party. Frank Johnson and Peregrine Worsthorne represented Conrad Black's Telegraph group. Peter Stothard represented Rupert Murdoch's Times. There were aristocrats such as Lord and Lady Dalmeny. There were arriviste young fogeys such as Simon Heffer, deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, and, as an acquaintance put it, the type of man who 'arrived at Cambridge in an anorak and left in a wing collar'.

Friendships have been forged over dinner tables where a butler serves the guests (Mr Roberts is not an academic; he has a private income from a family dairy business), and in discussions of the common ideologies of Euro-scepticism and anti-corporatism.

The book the Tory grandees gathered to celebrate is unashamed Thatcherite history. It is the old Conservative Party which is the subject of Mr Roberts's ire. Churchill is still the hero of the war years, but his 1951 government is condemned for being wet - too nice to the unions and too ready to allow black immigration.

George VI's support for appeasement and dislike of Jews, particularly the refugees from Nazi Germany, are rigorously explored. And in a devastating essay, Mr Roberts reveals how Sir Arthur Bryant, regarded as the grand old man of British history after 1945, was a Nazi in all but name in the Thirties and toadied to every prime minister from Churchill to Thatcher after the war.

Left-leaning historians are watching the Roberts phenomenon with astonishment. Tory historians, they think, seem determined to savage the party. While recent histories of the Labour Party, such as Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wilson and Peter Hennessy's study of the Attlee government, say in effect to Labour, 'Look, you need not be ashamed of what your predecessors did', the message from Mr Roberts to Tories is the exact opposite.

According to Mr Roberts, between Neville Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives did not have one leader with the right, right-wing domestic policy. Tories should be wary of their heritage.

Professor Hennessy said that when he researched the Forties and Fifties he found a country he liked, could almost get sentimental about. 'Many younger historians on the New Right seem to hate it. There is a danger that they tend to damn anyone who offered collective solutions without understanding why the generation which had been through the Depression and the war was not going to let the other ranks in society down.'

David Cannadine, chronicler of the fall from power of the British aristocracy, summed up the leftish view of Mr Roberts. 'There is a deep resentment at Britain's decline among right-wing historians and a desperate search for a scapegoat,' he said. 'The Second World War and the years afterwards are the obvious time to look.'

Mr Roberts does not disagree with much of this. 'There was no need for me to attack men like Attlee,' he said, justifying his choice of targets. 'They were honest and have to be respected. What is shocking is that the Conservatives allowed them to get away with nationalisation and the creation of a welfare state which has impoverished the country.'

And then there is the damnable fact that Britain entered the 20th century as 'the world's most powerful nation' and will leave it as the 15th most powerful - 'an Italy with rockets', to use Mr Roberts's phrase.

He almost sighs when he thinks of it. 'When I look at our country I see so much glorious past behind us and so little to look forward to,' he said.

Many may mock his concern; but other historians will not laugh. The big question in British history - possibly the last big question - is to explain the catastrophic decline of British power.

This does not mean that they agree with Mr Roberts. For all their common ground, there is one crucial difference. Left-wing, liberal and even old- fashioned Tory historians, such as Ian Gilmour, the formerConservative cabinet minister, see Thatcherism as accelerating rather than reversing Britain's fall to a second-rate status.

But when Margaret Thatcher's name is mentioned, Mr Roberts's iconoclasm stops. He may condemn Churchill's peacetime government. His friends John Charmley, a Conservative historian at the University of East Anglia, and Alan Clark, the former defence minister, may even suggest that war to the death with Germany was not inevitable and the Empire and British power could have been preserved. Everything and anything is permissible, except criticism of Margaret Thatcher.

David Cannadine said: 'Ask him when are the right- wing revisionists going to turn on her and point out that she did not reverse Britain's decline?'

It is the one question Mr Roberts and the members of what he describes as 'the team' in Oxford, Cambridge and Fleet Street cannot and will not ask.

When it is put to him, he misunderstands and thinks that I am asking when the ex-prime minister's reputation will be revised to show her in a better light.

'Oh, she's very unpopular now,' he said. 'But I'm sure that revisionists will one day realise her worth and her reputation will rise again . . . Perhaps when the new dawn of Portilloism comes.'

The admiring eyes of Ronald, Nancy and Maggie remained firmly fixed on him.

(Photograph omitted)