when discussing what kind of political animal I am, I often say that conservative doesn’t describe me sufficiently and that I am actually an “old Whig.”
Kirk and also Hayek both used that term as satisfactorily describing their view of where they stood. They did it in reference to Edmund Burke when he referred to the New Whigs, Fox and the like, and their flirtation with the excess of the French Revolution which initially was expected to possibly create an extension of freedom, an extension of the gains of the classical liberalism of the “old Whigs.”
Of course, Burke knew and outlined in Reflection on the Revolution in France what lay ahead for the French model of excess and we have seen it ever since.