Forty years ago there was just one authoritative survey of the history of the Conservative Party, written by Robert Blake, who was subsequently ennobled by Ted Heath. Today the whole story is clear in well-researched detail, and John Ramsden did more than anyone to bring about that change and transform the position.

A pupil of Blake at Oxford, he drew deeply on the wide array of surviving unpublished sources to produce a series of lucid, penetrating accounts of the development of the party in the 20th century, both in Parliament and in the country at large.

He was the first to exploit the rich resources of the party’s own archive — by far the largest of the main political parties — deposited at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1978 at his own instigation after he had overcome the party’s inclination to destroy it. He was also the first to see the party’s constituency agents, hitherto dismissed as small-minded helots, as important contributors to historical understanding: he interviewed more than 100 of them, enabling him to interpret the party at grassroots level with unsurpassed authority.

Ramsden’s meticulous research and clear, well-organised prose set the standard in Conservative Party historiography, and he has been well described as “the laureate of conservatism”. At the very moment when Margaret Thatcher’s successful radicalism was increasing interest in earlier, and very different, chapters of Conservative history, Ramsden provided exactly what was needed to explain how the party had demonstrated its gift for reinventing itself over and over again.

He showed how the Tory talent for change had been practised before the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in the three volumes, running to some 1,200 pages altogether (with hardly a dull sentence), which he contributed to a remarkable scholarly series published by Longman. In The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902-1940, published in 1978, he described how Baldwin’s self-proclaimed “New Conservatism” had enabled his party to dominate the interwar period.

“The core of his address to the people was the celebration of the nation’s unity, a direct response to the class-divisive appeal of Labour,” which totally failed to match Baldwin’s

“humanitarian social policy”.

The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940-1957 (1995) demonstrated that there was rather less agreement between the main parties during the period of the so-called postwar consensus than had been supposed. The last, and most brilliant, of the trilogy, The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath 1957-1975 (1996), dealt with perhaps the most daring change of all: the attempt “to devise a domestic policy that would run alongside entry to the EEC in propelling Britain into modernity” as Macmillan embraced “a neo-corporatist doctrine of indicative planning in 1961-62”, against which Mrs Thatcher was to rebel so vehemently some 15 years later.

In all this there was one common theme summed up in the title of the masterly one-volume distillation of all his work, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (1998). What marked out the party at its most successful was its

“fundamental subordination of all else to the drive for power”. That spirit of ruthless determination would be recovered once again, he predicted in a lecture to the Conservative Political Centre after the 1997 debacle, when the Tories lost the general election.

But it did not happen. Instead the party stumbled incompetently to the Right, a position from which Ramsden always said it could not win elections. He found little to admire about the Conservatives in his final years. He did not, as might have been expected, hail the arrival of David Cameron, a leader cast more in the mould of which he approved.

John Ramsden was born in 1947 into an aspirant working-class Sheffield family that defended its Tory political faith tenaciously alongside a deeply rooted Methodism. His father, a miner, rose to a senior position in the National Coal Board. A scholarship took Ramsden from King Edward VII School in Sheffield to Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he gained a first in modern history in 1969. His doctorate in 1974, supervised by Blake and David Butler, marked the beginning of his detailed work on the Conservative Party’s history.