All three episodes are free to listen to on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts:

• Episode 1: Hugh Gaitskell | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

• Episode 2: Anthony Crosland | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

• Episode 3: John Smith | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

In the series, we discuss why we chose to focus exclusively on Labour politicians - but to re-establish some balance, we’ve recorded a special bonus episode on two of the most dramatic, and consequential, Tory lives cut short: Iain Macleod and Airey Neave.

We hope you enjoy listening.

About the hosts:

Lee David Evans is an historian of the Conservative Party and the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London. He is on social media at @LeeDavidEvansUK.

Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London and a historian of the Labour Party. He tweets at @richardmarcj.

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• "Alice, who the **** is Alice?"

• Whatever happened to the Young Conservatives?

• Was 'Black Wednesday' actually a good day for Britain?

Who were the people in the ‘Labour isn't working' poster?

by Lee David Evans

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It’s probably the most famous British political poster of all time. For those on the right of politics, it’s come to define the chaos and the consequences of the Jim Callaghan-led government of the late 1970s. On the left, it’s a symbol of the problems that Margaret Thatcher promised to fix but made worse. No matter what your political persuasion, it’s iconic.

Of course, I’m talking about the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster produced for the Conservatives by Saatchi & Saatchi in 1978.

The involvement of professional advertising agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi in politics was still in its infancy in the 1970s. A few companies had trodden the ground before, but without the savvy, consumer-minded approach of the Saatchi brothers. Out went long, boring addresses from politicians staring down the lens of a TV camera; in came engaging montages with compelling voice-overs - and snappy posters.

Saatchi & Saatchi’s efforts to shake up the party’s communications didn’t get off to the easiest of starts. Some in the agency disliked the idea of working for a political party, whilst some in the party worried about the costs of the ad men. But Tim Bell, an advertising executive who took to politics so well he became a Tory peer, found he could work well with Thatcher. In Mad Men & Bad Men, he is quoted describing how they established their advantage over Labour:

Firstly, Thatcher might not have been the best speaker in the world but she was miles better than Callaghan or anyone else they had. Secondly, the Tories had more money to spend than Labour and it's always nice to fight the enemy with a weapon they can't afford. Thirdly, she believed in the power of advertising. She knew we were professionals and put her faith in us. Meanwhile, Labour were still morally hostile to the very idea of using ads.

By the summer of 1978, the Tories’ ad agency was preparing for the upcoming general election, which many people thought would (and Labour supporters continue to believe should have) come in late 1978. One of their executives, Andrew Rutherford, proposed a series of posters critiquing the state of Britain under Labour. For each poster, the idea was much the same: a queue, a reference to a public service, and a promise that ‘Britain’s better off with the Conservatives.’ One would focus on unemployment, with a long line of people waiting to be seen at the unemployment office. But who, exactly, would form the queue?

To recruit the stars of the poster, a message went out to the Young Conservatives (YCs) in Hendon, north London. They were invited to come along for a ‘top secret’ task that would help the Conservative election cause. Their meeting point was a municipal car park near the Welsh Harp reservoir. For the poster to work - and the queue to look long enough to make its point - it was hoped that 100 people would come along, made up of local YCs and their parents. Fewer than 20 people answered the call.

The man behind the camera, Martyn Walsh, told the BBC that the shortage of volunteers cast the entire project in doubt. ‘At one point I thought briefly about calling it all off. But the deadline was very tight and it was a case of it's now or never - we've got to do it today.’ And so they laid out a rope, about the length of a 100 person queue, and photographed the same small group along the line. The photographs were then spliced together - undoubtedly a more difficult task in 1978 than today - to create the desired effect. Faces were blurred to keep up the ruse.

Nobody taking part in the photo shoot that day expected their lionised place in the campaign history books. Charles Saatchi himself was said to be sceptical of whether the poster would resonate with voters. And when she was first shown the poster, Thatcher was unimpressed. ‘No! You know perfectly well that you should never have the other side’s name in your own poster!’ she decried. The Saatchi & Saatchi executives set about persuading her that including Labour’s name - and using it as a pun for the labour force - added to the power of the poster. She relented. ‘I must admit there is something very compelling about the whole thing,’ she said.

Rutherford was always confident that the poster would cut through. He understood that the Tories didn’t need to engage in a specific or detailed debate about unemployment, they needed to create an impression of out-of-work Britain being led by an out-of-ideas government. ‘The floating voter isn’t sat down poring over the party manifesto,’ he reflected. ‘He’s making his mind up on the basis of broad impressions.’

In an age before the internet and its viral potential, getting the poster out and establishing that broad impression in floating voters’ minds was costly. The Tories spent around £50,000 on the poster campaign. But the very nature of the poster’s production helped them achieve a lot more bang for their buck. A rumour went around that the people in the poster were not genuinely unemployed, but actors. Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor, went on the attack. He accused the Tories of being dishonest and ‘selling politics like soap powder.’ The spat made the poster headline news - and raised the salience of the attack on Labour. Bell estimated that the subsequent furore earned them around £5 million of free advertising. Labour, and Healey in particular, had given the Tories an enormous donation-in-kind.

The general election finally came in 1979 and the poster was adapted to say ‘Labour still isn’t working’. Its impact helped ensure that some of the most consequential job losses that year were on Labour’s own benches, as Thatcher’s Tories gained 62 seats to win an overall majority. She remained prime minister for eleven and a half years; the Conservatives stayed in office for eighteen. Lord Thorneycroft, the Tory chairman, credited the poster, with its dozen or so Young Conservatives, with beginning this remarkable run in office.

Whatever its impact may have been in 1979, no poster since has come close to rivalling its iconic status.

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• The Attlee vs Churchill Elections Part 3: The 1951 General Election

• Was ‘Black Wednesday’ actually a good day for Britain?

Image: Anthony Muirhead’s heraldic shield in the chamber of the House of Commons.

Who was the first MP to die in World War Two?

by Lee David Evans

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In so many respects, Anthony Muirhead was a typical Conservative MP in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born on 4th November 1890 into a grand Oxfordshire family and attended Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford before serving with the Oxford Yeomanry in the First World War.

Muirhead’s gallant service was such that his name was mentioned in despatches three times and he was honoured with the Military Cross and Bar. The London Gazette in 1919 celebrated his service near Armentières between 29th September and 6th October 1918, recording how he had carried:

out many daring reconnaissances, always under fire and exposed to danger, in order that the situation might be kept in hand. The enemy rearguard of machine gunners and snipers were all over the country. This officer did the work entirely on his own initiative, and the results were very valuable.

Many who had seen the brutality and bloodshed of the First World War would have been glad to see the end of fighting. But Muirhead’s war didn’t end with Armistice Day; he followed his commanding officer to a role in the Lithuanian Army from 1919-20. It was clear that Muirhead had found a calling and vocation. From 1924 until his death, he served in the Territorial Army.

Entering politics

Back home, Muirhead first won the electors’ favour in 1925 when he was elected to Oxfordshire County Council as the representative of Thame. But County Hall was not the limit of his ambition and ahead of the 1929 election he went hunting for a parliamentary seat. He struck it lucky in Wells, Somerset, and was selected in March to fight the next election. In a sign of how these things used to work, at least in the Tory party, his adoption was unanimous. A Countess served among his principal proposers at the adoption meeting and general election.

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What’s the longest ballot in UK Parliamentary history?

by Lee David Evans

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Ballots for the Canadian House of Commons are getting long - very long. Thanks to the Longest Ballot Committee, a campaign group opposed to the use of First Past the Post for Canadian elections, a raft of ‘no hope’ candidates are flooding the ballot in targeted ridings/constituencies.

At Canada’s recent federal election, campaigners targeted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s riding of Carleton, driving the number of candidates up to a staggering 91. Poilievre lost that contest and is now fighting to re-enter the Commons at the Battle River-Crowfoot by-election, a riding recently won by the Conservatives with over 80% of the vote. It looks like a shoo-in, but the Longest Ballot Committee have once again thrown a spanner into the works. 214 candidates have been successfully nominated for the contest, 199 of which have been described as ‘effectively fake.’ The list of candidates is so long that election authorities have decided not to print ballot papers, but are instead asking voters to write the name of their preferred candidate on a piece of paper.

We’ll know in a couple of weeks what the impact of these shenanigans has been on the by-election. But in the meantime, it got me wondering: what’s the longest ballot in a UK Parliamentary election?

Flocking to take on the PM.

The number of candidates standing for Parliament has been rising in recent years. At the beginning of this century, 3,319 candidates stood in the 2001 general election. Last year, the total had soared to 4,515, with nine different parties fielding at least 50 candidates.

The increase can be seen across the nation, but it has been most marked in the blockbuster constituency contests - which, in a general election, often means the seat of the sitting prime minister. And so to begin the hunt for the longest ballot, I’ve gone back and looked at the number of candidates standing in the constituency of every incumbent prime minister since the war.

Early in the post-war years, prime ministers tended to get away with very few rivals. Churchill, in 1945, had neither a Labour nor a Liberal opponent, and there were never so many as four other candidates on the ballot with a prime minister until 1979.

The number of candidates first hit double-digits in 1983, when ten candidates stood against Margaret Thatcher in Finchley, before a new record was set with 15 candidates in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s constituency, in 2005. (With Thatcher and Blair winning absolute majorities in their seats, the crowded ballot caused neither leader any concern.) Since 2015, there have been at least ten candidates in every prime ministerial contest - but never again as many as 15.

Seeking the limelight at a by-election.

I’ve searched and searched and I can’t find any general election contest with as many candidates as Sedgefield in 2005. But what about by-elections? These are the other contests that tend to attract a lot of media attention, often enough to persuade people it is worth the effort and cost of getting nominated to stand for Parliament.

Four by-election contests match the Sedgefield record, including the Kensington by-election of July 1988. Candidates in this contest included a self-described ‘Anti Yuppie Revolutionary Crowleyist Vegetarian Visionary’ and a convicted brothel-owner standing for the ‘Rainbow Alliance Payne and Pleasure Party.’ In spite, or perhaps because, of their efforts, the seat remained in Tory hands. The other by-elections with 15 candidates are all pretty recent: Peterborough (2019), Wakefield (2022) and the most recent by-election, Runcorn & Helsby (2025).

Breaking new ground are the four by-elections with 16 candidates. In 1983, the Bermondsey by-election pitted the Liberal Simon Hughes against Labour’s Peter Tatchell, with fourteen other candidates - including a Revolutionary Communist, the National Front, and one candidate just described as a ‘Systems Engineer’ - making up the numbers. The contest is famed for the homophobia which was directed at Tatchell, a celebrated gay rights activist. The safe Labour seat was won by the Liberals.

A similar pattern, sans homophobia, played out in 2003 in Brent East. The constituency had been Labour since it was formed in the 1970s, but the Lib Dems sensed an opportunity when sitting MP Paul Daisley died. Spurred on by the controversy over the War in Iraq, the Lib Dems achieved a 29% swing (the biggest Lab to Lib swing since Bermondsey) to take the seat, seeing off fifteen other candidates.

The other two sixteen-way contests came within weeks of each other in 2021: Hartlepool, arguably the high-point of Boris Johnson’s party leadership; and Batley & Spen, which followed a couple of months later. In the former, the Tories gained a seat from Labour whilst in government. In the latter, Labour’s candidate held on, with Kim Leadbeater fending off both the Conservative candidate and the regular feature of by-election ballots, George Galloway.

Making our way towards the top of the list of the seats with the most candidates, we find two contests with 17 names on the ballot. The first was in 1984 in Chesterfield, when Tony Benn re-entered Parliament after being defeated in his Bristol constituency at the general election the year earlier. Benn was a familiar face in by-election contests: he stood in four - in 1950, 1961, 1963 and 1984 - winning on each occasion, although in 1961 a court ruled his victory invalid.

If Chesterfield saw the return of a famous face, the other seventeen-way by-election was triggered by the departure of an even more famous one. The Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election in 2023 followed the resignation of Boris Johnson. A whole range of the usual (and not so usual) parties stood, alongside a cluster of independents. At the bottom of the long results table was ‘77 Joseph’, otherwise known as Thomas Darwood, whose given name on the ballot was a reference to Joseph’s interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams in the Book of Genesis. He attracted just 8 votes.

On the bronze podium of lengthy ballot papers is the Kensington & Chelsea by-election of 1999, with eighteen candidates coughing up £500, seventeen of them in an attempt to try and prevent Michael Portillo returning to Parliament. The then safe Tory seat had been held by Tory grandee, diarist and philanderer Alan Clarke. Portillo returned to Parliament without trouble, although he took little pleasure in his second period as an MP and departed the Commons in 2005. Life aboard trains has seemingly proved a happier one than fighting Pro-Euro Conservatives, the UK Pensioners Party, the People’s Net Dream Ticket Party (your guess is as good as mine) and the Earl of Burford to sit on the green benches.

Newbury in Berkshire claims the silver medal, with nineteen candidates on the ballot in the 1993 by-election. This contest marked one of several lows in John Major’s premiership. Judith Chaplin had won the seat with a majority of more than 12,000 in 1992, but when she died the Liberal Democrats hoped to repeat their habit of achieving enormous swings against the Tories, recently seen in by-elections in Eastbourne and Ribble Valley. Alan Sked, the future leader of UKIP, was one of the candidates cluttering the ballot paper (an ageing Enoch Powell spoke for him), but no number of candidates could have prevented a Lib Dem victory. They won almost two-thirds of the vote.

Finally, at the top of the podium, with an absurd 26 candidates, is the Haltemprice & Howden by-election in 2008. That it has seven more candidates than the second placed contest is all the more remarkable as Labour and Liberal Democrats both declined to stand - Labour on the grounds that they thought the contest a farce; the Lib Dems because they said they agreed with the reasons why David Davis, the incumbent MP, had triggered the by-election. Davis was a fierce critic of Labour’s approach to civil liberties, which he deemed authoritarian, and hoped triggering a by-election would spark a debate about the actions of Gordon Brown’s government in passing the Counter Terrorism Act 2008.

More than a dozen independents made the ballot, along with a scattering of minor parties and a few people hoping to promote their cause. There was little in it for most of them. Make Politicians History attracted just 29 votes; Socialist Equality was slightly more popular with 84. Perhaps the surprise performance was the Miss Great Britain Party, which trumped them both with 521 votes and an impressive fifth place finish. Beyond the fringe parties and candidates, Davis was re-elected with just under 72% of the vote. He didn’t really get the debate on civil liberties he so desired, but he did achieve a place, for now at least, in the record books as having triumphed in the face of the longest parliamentary ballot in UK history.

The impact of the deposit.

Whilst 26 is an absurd number of candidates in an election, it’s nothing compared to the 214 fighting it out in Battle River-Crowfoot right now. So why has no British campaign group sought to do the same as the Longest Ballot Committee?

One factor is nominations. On the face of it, the nomination threshold in a Canadian election - 100 signatures - is greater than in the UK, where it is just 10. However, in Canada the same 100 people can nominate as many candidates as are willing. In a UK Parliamentary election, you can only nominate as many candidates as there are vacancies, which is now only ever one. (The same principle applies in local elections, although in these cases the number of vacancies may be higher).

Nevertheless, the relatively small number of signatures required to stand for election in Britain means that you don’t need very many people to get behind you to make it on the ballot. The same 100 people you need in Canada could get ten candidates on the ballot paper. So what else, aside from having not thought of it, has prevented campaign groups bringing about long ballots over here?

The major difference is surely the deposit. To stand for the British House of Commons, you - or your party - need to stump up £500, which will be returned so long as you get more than 5% of the vote. (The deposit itself has an interesting history which I’ll write about one day - including the time I was at an election count and the returning officer agreed, at 4am, to a partial recount to try and get the Lib Dems an extra 0.065% of the vote to save their cash. None of the other parties were happy.)

Canada did have a deposit which, at around $1,000 Canadian dollars is just over £500. But in 2017, a court ruled that the deposit was incompatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Longest Ballot Committee was formed two years later. It surely serves as a warning to those of us in the UK to keep a reasonable deposit in place for parliamentary elections, and perhaps even to ensure inflation does not eventually make the cost of standing too trivial, lest our ballot papers become even longer than they have been so far.

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After a few months' break while I was writing a book on Tory leadership elections (don’t worry: if you’re a paid subscriber, your subscription was paused/extended), the Since Attlee & Churchill Substack is back with new, regular posts on British political history since 1945.

Whilst the Substack has been on pause, Richard and I have been continuing with the Since Attlee & Churchill podcast, including a recent series on the Attlee vs Churchill elections (1945, 1950 and 1951).

We were thrilled with the response these podcasts received - they were by far and away our most popular episodes yet - and you can listen to them all here:

• Episode 1: The 1945 Election | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

• Episode 2: The 1950 Election | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

• Episode 3: The 1951 Election | Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

As a bonus for Since Attlee & Churchill subscribers, we’re relaunching the Substack with an extra episode on the 1955 election. This wasn’t an election in which Attlee and Churchill fought it out, but came immediately after Churchill’s resignation, leaving Attlee to take on Anthony Eden for the tenancy of 10 Downing Street.

Was it the most gentlemanly and consensual election of the post-war era? Was Attlee too old and knackered to lead his party? Was Eden cynical to suggest a Labour government might bring back rationing? And what did this election mean for the future of British politics? We discuss all those questions - and more.

We hope you enjoy listening.

About the hosts:

Lee David Evans is an historian of the Conservative Party and the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London. He is on social media at @LeeDavidEvansUK.

Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and among his other areas of expertise is an historian of the Labour Party. He tweets at @richardmarcj.

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• Did Edward Heath deserve the name ‘The Incredible Sulk?’

• Who was Labour’s greatest champion of overseas aid?

• And what use is the House of Lords, anyway?

We are thrilled that our most recent episode on Ted Heath’s post-premiership, the so called ‘incredible sulk’, smashed our records for downloads. So we’ve decided to do a special bonus podcast for subscribers: an interview with Dr Mark Garnett, a renowned historian of the Conservative Party and researcher for Ted Heath on the former prime minister’s memoirs.

In this episode, we discuss Heath’s approach to writing his memoirs, his ideological grounding, how he came to terms with Thatcherism, and why he stayed around in the House of Commons for so long - a full 26 years after he lost the Tory leadership in 1975.

We hope you enjoy listening. If you do, we’d be very grateful if you could leave us a review whe…

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• Have confidence votes been a disaster for the Tory Party?

• What use is the House of Lords, anyway?

• Who are the best political heroes?

• And whatever happened to Labour Zionism?

Image: Alec Douglas-Home (left) and Neville Chamberlain (right) in 1938.

The day war broke out - and Alec Douglas-Home got arrested.

by Lee David Evans

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That extraordinary exchange, between Alec Douglas-Home (then known by the courtesy title Lord Dunglass) and a Special Constable, took place on 3rd September 1939. It’s one of the most consequential days in British history - and an unforgettable one for Douglas-Home.

Earlier that day, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, had addressed the nation from the Cabinet Room in Number 10 Downing Street and announced that:

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

The declaration of war was a ‘bitter blow’ to Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler in pursuit of peace. It was also a defeat for Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who had been by the prime minister’s side throughout the negotiations with Hitler. After their infamous meeting in Munich, Chamberlain said to his young parliamentary assistant that Hitler ‘was without question the most detestable and bigoted man’ he had dealt with. But recognising that Britain was negotiating from a position of weakness, not strength, the prime minister did what he could to delay war. By September 1939 he concluded it could be delayed no longer.

Depressed that Chamberlain’s efforts had failed, Douglas-Home got out of London. He called his younger brother, Henry, and suggested they drive to the South Downs to look for Chalkhill Blue butterflies. Anything to take his mind off events in Westminster. Once there, the brothers pursued the small yet beautiful butterflies only to arouse the suspicions of a local Special Constable. With the declaration of war ringing in his ears, he worried that the men might be part of the fifth column.

Douglas-Home protested, saying their activities in the woods were wholly innocent and sought to reassure him that he was a very senior politician - the prime minister’s PPS, no less. It might have done him better to plead almost anything else. So absurd did it sound that Chamberlain’s right hand man would be butterfly hunting on such a dramatic and consequential day, the Special Constable replied: ‘Oh, yes sir, and I'm the Queen of Sheba!’ Tensions continued to rise as the pair were taken to the police station, until a call was made to Downing Street and their identity confirmed. The brothers were released.

Later that day, Douglas-Home returned to Number 10. When leaving around midnight, he stood briefly on the steps with fellow MP Chips Channon and the heavens opened. Rain poured down and thunder cracked over their heads. The gloomy PPS later wrote:

I remember that almost simultaneously the words came to us that this was the gods weeping for the folly of man.

With war underway, Douglas-Home attempted to sign up for the army only to be deemed unfit. At first it was thought that the tribulations of the pre-war government had shredded his nerves. Having been told that ‘every nerve in his body was jangling,’ Douglas-Home was ordered to rest for three months. He took the advice but, three months later, was similarly deemed unable to serve on health grounds. His doctors realised the cause was much more troubling than jangling nerves: he had tuberculosis of the spine.

The treatment in the 1940s was nothing short of gruesome. Doctors flaked his shin bones and grafted them onto the affected vertebrae in his spine; worse, his recovery necessitated staying totally immobile for two years. ‘I often felt that I would be better dead', Douglas-Home later wrote. He went to convalesce at the family estate in Scotland, set in a plaster cast. 'It was not possible to move any parts of my body other than my forearms, so that I could do nothing but talk and read.'

Those years of recovery proved a formative time in Douglas-Home’s life. He ‘read the lives of all the famous politicians of the nineteenth century - Melbourne, Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, and found study of their differing characters fascinating.’ Alongside Victorian politics, he devoured all the books he could find on Communism, including the entirety of Das Kapital. (Douglas-Home is perhaps the only British leader to have ever read Marx’s great tome from cover to cover. Harold Wilson, the socialist politician who would succeed him as prime minister in 1964, said: ‘I only got as far as page two - that's where the footnote is nearly a page long.') Rather more cheerily, Douglas-Home learned embroidery and stitched a set of dining chair seats.

The paradox of this period for Douglas-Home was that he had sought to sign up for a grim fate - fighting in the war - and, via surgery and recovery, found himself in a position more miserable than combat. But having learned great patience and made himself one of the most well-read politicians in the country, and with Britain having triumphed over Hitler, Douglas-Home was fortified to lead one of the most consequential political lives of the post-war era, as Commonwealth Secretary, Foreign Secretary (twice) and prime minister.

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• Whatever happened to Labour Zionism?

• How did Margaret Thatcher take over the Conservative Party?

• Why did Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev say, if he were British, he'd vote Conservative?

Image: Kemi Badenoch chairing the Shadow Cabinet. Source: The Conservative Party.

Badenoch is following the Thatcher playbook - but will it be enough?

by Lee David Evans

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It’s fifty years to the day since Conservative MPs made Margaret Thatcher their leader. She would sit at the top of the party for the next decade and a half - and dominate its thinking for a long time thereafter. Hers was a leadership that transformed both the Conservative Party and Britain. But in Thatcher’s early years at the helm, her objective was much more modest: get the Tories back into office.

Thatcher was the first of four women to lead the Conservatives, but one of just two to lead them in opposition. Theresa May and Liz Truss, albeit briefly in the latter case, only led the party in government. The task for Kemi Badenoch, like Thatcher before her, is to revive the Tories in what is often called the ‘worst job in British politics’: Leader of the Opposition.

Badenoch’s first months as leader have largely followed the Thatcher playbook. One of the Iron Lady’s first moves after winning the 1975 Conservative leadership contest was to invite Willie Whitelaw, the One Nation Tory whom she defeated in the second round, to serve as her deputy. Soon after she made Geoffrey Howe, another man she had also bested in battle, her Shadow Chancellor. It was a sign that Thatcher was building a broad coalition around her. As she would later boast of her Cabinet, her top team ‘include[d] every strand of Conservative opinion.’

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Harold Macmillan’s Controversial Resignation Honours

by Lee David Evans

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'I beg that you will not take a step which would be widely thought to lower the standards of political impartiality of which the Civil Service is rightly proud.' These were the pleading words of Sir Laurence Helsby, Head of the Home Civil Service, to outgoing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in October 1963.^[1] The controversial action proposed by Macmillan concerned an issue that has cursed his predecessors and successors alike: resignation honours.

The primary beneficiaries of Macmillan’s resignation honours were his Private Office team, with whom he had enjoyed a close relationship throughout his premiership. Freddie Bishop, who served both Anthony Eden and Macmillan as Principal Private Secretary before departing in 1959, reflected on how Eden would never consult private secretaries for policy advice, but Macmillan almost always did. Often before lunch, and again after working hours, Macmillan would hold ‘sherry sessions’ for his team where they would discuss the issues of the day. As a group they helped clarify Macmillan’s thinking and focus his policy agenda. The achievements of the Macmillan premiership can be credited to the Number 10 Private Office as well as the politicians who so often attracted the glory and blame.

Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963, after a year in which political storm clouds threatened to overwhelm his premiership, was confirmed by an 'unhappy stroke of fate' - the inflammation of his prostate gland - which necessitated urgent medical intervention.^[2] He informed the Queen that he would be resigning and was taken to hospital for an operation. His final days as Prime Minister were physically and mentally draining for the sixty-nine-year-old premier. In such circumstances, it would have been easy to overlook the interests of his soon-to-be erstwhile staff. Yet from his bed at King Edward VII Hospital for Officers, he crafted a resignation honours list that would leave scarcely a member of his close and loyal private office neglected.

Among the honours on this 'inflationary' list, to use the description of Macmillan’s official biographer Alastair Horne, was a peerage for his Private Secretary, baronetcies (hereditary knighthoods) for his Parliamentary Private Secretary, PR Advisor and Physician, and a KBE for his Principal Private Secretary.^[3] This list continued with a CBE, three OBEs and one MBE, before concluding with four British Empire Medals shared between a detective, driver, ladies’ maid and cook.^[4]

Macmillan’s desire to reward his team in this manner was met with firm resistance from the Civil Service. Records in the National Archive show it was not the length of the list that caused concern, but its challenge to what Harold Evans, Macmillan’s PR Adviser and himself the beneficiary of a baronetcy in the honours, called 'the delicate traceries of the mandarin pattern.'^[5] Macmillan was judged too generous to several members of the civil service and, in his benevolence, posed a threat to civil service impartiality.

Helsby, the recently appointed Head of the Home Civil Service, was the man to take the fight to Macmillan. He set the KBE due to Timothy Bligh, Macmillan’s Principal Private Secretary, firmly in his sights. After seemingly speaking to Bligh first - who had already suggested to Macmillan that a KBE would be an overly generous reward - Helsby penned a memorandum to Macmillan:

I should fail in my duty as Head of the Civil Service if I did not advise you that the appropriate honour for Bligh at this stage in his career is C.B. His predecessors in the post of Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister have received this distinction - and nothing higher - for many years.^[6]

Helsby’s note was sent on 18th October 1963, a testing day for Macmillan’s nerve. The day before, Macmillan had settled on the Earl of Home as his replacement.^[7] As the news began to percolate around Westminster, senior members of the government plotted to frustrate his choice and reassert the case of Deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler. Macmillan heard of the plot early on the morning of the 18th and, determined to frustrate the conspirators, hastily resigned. He wrote to the Queen, who subsequently visited him in hospital, and advised her to send for Home. The plot fell apart.

Later on that dramatic day, and clearly still in a mood to assert his will, Macmillan (by now stripped of Downing Street letter paper) responded to Helsby:

This, for Macmillan, was the crux of it: if he wanted to give the honour, and the Queen would accept his advice to do so, then the honour would be given. The London Gazette soon confirmed Macmillan’s victory over the civil service.^[9]

Whereas recent resignation honours controversies have dominated the headlines, the furore about Macmillan’s was internal and almost completely overlooked in the press. One reason for this is the somewhat trivial nature of the concerns raised; nobody seriously claimed that the beneficiaries were undeserving of honours (as was the case when Harold Wilson issued his infamous resignation honours list in 1976). It was the pride and the traditions of the Civil Service which were at risk from the list, something unlikely to incite the emotions of those beyond the service itself.

If Macmillan’s will triumphed, he did not necessarily win the argument. Many of the civil servants Macmillan rewarded chose to leave the service of government soon after he did, perhaps suspecting that their position had been compromised by their closeness to the former premier. Philip de Zulueta, a Private Secretary who was widely tipped to rise to the top of the Foreign Service, went into the City in 1964.^[10] Sir Harold Evans, Macmillan’s PR advisor, left for a role at the Independent Television Authority.^[11] Bligh, the focus of Helsby’s memorandum, also found himself leaving the civil service for the media, working for part of the global media conglomerate now known as Thomson Reuters before his premature death aged 50.

In spite of the controversy, Macmillan appeared pleased with his decisions. On 30th July 1964, he recorded in his diary a gathering of the key members of his former team using their new titles:

I gave a dinner at HofC to my own 'staff’, who have been so loyal. Ld Poole; Ld Egremont; Sir T Bligh; Sir Philip de Zulueta; Ld Normanbrook; Freddy Bishop; Sir A Rumbold; Ted Heath and Martin Redmayne (my Chief Whip) Knox-Cunningham and Maurice... The party was agreeable but rather sad. I have certainly been wonderfully served.^[12]

Macmillan felt their service deserved commensurate honours, even if they defied the established norms of the Civil Service. Like premiers before, and many since, he was willing to risk his own reputation to ensure they got them.

Did you know that as well as a Substack, there is also a Since Attlee & Churchill podcast on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms? Recent episodes have included:

• Why did the 1964 Labour government get off to such a bad start?

• What happened to the grace and favour house for women ministers?

• And Which U.S. Presidents were the favourites of British monarchs?

Footnotes

^[1] The National Archives (TNA), T 352/31

^[2] Harold Macmillan (1973) At the end of the day: 1961-63. London: Macmillan. pg. 505

^[3] Alistair Horne (1989) Macmillan: 1957-1896, Volume II of the Official Biography. London: Macmillan. pg. 571

^[4] TNA, op. cit.

^[5] Harold Evans (1981) Downing Street Diary: The Macmillan Years 1957/63. London: Hodder & Stoughton. pg. 303

^[6] TNA, op. cit.

^[7] Harold Macmillan (1973) op. cit. pg. 514

^[8] TNA, op. cit.

^[9] London Gazette, Supplement of 18 October 1963, issue 43136 (22 October 1963), pg. 8597

^[10] Alistair Horne op. cit.

^[11] Harold Evans, op. cit., dust jacket

^[12] Harold Macmillan (2011) The Macmillan Diaries Vol II: Prime Minister and After: 1957-1966, ed Catterall, P. London: Macmillan, pg. 638.

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• Could Harold Macmillan have been a Labour prime minister?

• Why did the 1964 Labour government get off to such a bad start?

• And what happened to the grace and favour house for women ministers?

Our most recent episode is an interview with Presidential historian Alvin S. Felzenberg about the relationships between American presidents and British monarchs. You can listen to that episode on Apple and on Spotify.

From time to time we’ll also be uploading special episodes for paid subscribers to the Since Attlee & Churchill Substack. In this first bonus podcast, we turn our attention from monarchs to prime ministers and interview Al on the special and not-so-special relationships between American presidents and British premiers.

We hope you enjoy listening.

About this episode:

What did the death of FDR and the defeat of Churchill mean for Anglo-American relations? How did Macmillan win back American support after the chaos of Suez? And which transatlantic duos represented the zenith, and the nadir, of relations between American Presidents and British Prime Ministers?

Alongside Presidential historian Alvin S. Felzenberg, Lee and Richard discuss the good, bad and the surprising post-war relationships between Presidents and Prime Ministers.

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• Could Harold Macmillan have been a Labour prime minister?

• What happened to Peter Shore's Labour Party?

• Did the late Queen secretly reference a Prime Minister's illness in her Christmas speech?

• Why did the 1964 Labour government get off to such a bad start?

• And who was the Macmillanite in Thatcher’s Cabinet?

All listeners, subscribers and reviewers welcome!

A good election to lose? The 1997 Conservative Leadership Contest

by Lee David Evans

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In May 1997, the Conservatives lost a general election for the first time in over two decades. The last time it happened, in 1974, Edward Heath decided he would carry on as leader, ultimately having to be removed by his own MPs. (See here). Twenty three years on, John Major set a precedent which has continued ever since: with the election lost, he resigned. Bloodied, bruised and diminished to just 165 MPs, the Conservatives had to find a new leader.

Before the process could begin, a question had to be answered: who would choose the new leader, and by what means? The leadership rules introduced in 1965 had been brought in following the party’s defeat after thirteen years in office. Similarly, the rule change to enable MPs to remove a leader had followed defeat in 1974. And so it was no surprise that the 1997 election triggered an almost immediate bout of introspection about how the party functions and, most importantly, how it chooses its chief.

The likelihood of any change before the next leadership election diminished when Major stood outside Number 10 Downing Street on the 2nd May and declared, ‘when the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do.’ Major advised his colleagues in Parliament that they should ‘consider’ the selection of a new leader; those hoping for a change in the rules might have been reassured when he conceded that it would ‘take a little while to organise.’ But his preference that his remaining days at the top would be just a ‘reasonably brief interregnum’ hinted that if agreement on a new set out rules couldn’t be reached soon, then the contest should go ahead using the 1965 rulebook. This left advocates for change with a narrow window in which to win the argument.

Two developments confirmed their defeat. The first was the speed with which candidates for the succession emerged. Major left Downing Street for the final time around 11:30am on 2nd May; Ken Clarke, his former Chancellor, waited no longer than an interview with BBC’s World at One to announce, ‘I certainly intend to be a candidate in the leadership election.’ Other interested candidates felt Clarke had moved inappropriately quickly, but their own declarations soon followed.

The second development came in response to a proposal by the National Union, the senior volunteers in the party, which would have given the party’s grassroots a say in the election of the new leader. Robin Hodgson, Chairman of the National Convention, had damned the existing rules as ‘totally unsatisfactory.’ Plenty of people sympathised with his view. But reformers had the problem of which alternative rules to propose. It was widely accepted that a ballot of all members was not feasible, not least as the Tories did not have a central membership list but approximately 600 different associations with lists of varying accuracy. The National Union proposed that the party give the right to vote, but not to nominate, to the most senior volunteers in the country: Association Chairman, European constituency chairmen, and the executive of the National Union. Their proposed level of influence was 20 percent, with an electoral college preserving four-fifths of the votes for Members of Parliament.

The decision whether to allow the National Union their say effectively depended upon whether the 1922 Committee were willing to surrender that slither of their influence. The question could not practically be decided until Parliament met and the remaining Tory MPs elected a new Chairman of the 1922 Committee. (Marcus Fox, the chairman going into the election, had lost his seat of Shipley). Archie Hamilton, MP for Epsom and Ewell, won the contest to be the shop steward of Tory MPs and immediately ruled out any change in the rules before Major’s successor was announced. To placate the grassroots he told the media, ‘I totally accept, and we’ve all agreed, that there will be a very much wider franchise for the leadership elections in the future.’ But, he was clear: not yet.

The influence of the grassroots would remain limited to informal consultations and whatever public comments the National Union chose to make. To add some weight to their views, the volunteers decided to hold ballots before each round. Constituency chairmen, MEPs, peers and National Union officers were all asked to vote on which of the candidates they wanted to succeed. It would, they hoped, influence the battle to lead the world’s oldest political party in opposition. But, as in previous contests, MPs would be free to accept or ignore their preferences however they wished.

The candidates

After eighteen years in government, in which just two people had held the role of prime minister but many ambitious MPs had gained senior ministerial experience, the Tory party was brimming with aspiring leaders. But the field of candidates had some limitations placed upon it. One was the severity of the election defeat; at least four possible candidates lost their seats. Michael Portillo, who would have begun the contest among the front-runners, and three less likely candidates, Malcolm Rifkind, Ian Lang and Norman Lamont, all suffered rejection from their voters. Another likely candidate was Michael Heseltine, who had played a role in the last three Tory leadership contests; he lingered behind a stalking horse in 1989, challenged Margaret Thatcher directly in 1990, and was preparing to stand if there was a second ballot in the 1995 contest. Heseltine had remained in the Commons and his ambition had not been quenched, but two days after polling day in 1997 he was admitted to hospital with angina. Having already suffered a heart attack in 1993, and being much older than any other leadership candidate at 64, he announced he would not be standing. (Heseltine, of course, is still alive at 91. Whether that suggests his health was good enough to stand, or that not standing helped preserve him, is of course unknowable!).

Of those aspiring leaders who remained in the Commons and felt fit to stand, Ken Clarke was the first to make his intentions known. His announcement that he intended to stand the day after the election shocked few people with its substance. He was a former Chancellor, widely rated as a success in the role, and was by some margin the most popular Tory in the country. The other person everybody expected to stand was John Redwood, the challenger to Major in 1995. Back then, he had been brave enough to resign from the Cabinet and challenge Major, warning his colleagues that if there was no change at the top the Tories had ‘no chance’. The election result had appeared to vindicate his claims and he hoped he would be rewarded for his foresight.

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Since launching earlier this year, there have been 25 articles on the ‘Since Attlee & Churchill’ Substack, telling stories of Conservative leadership elections, firebrand scouse Labour MPs, the day Parliament fell silent after learning about the Holocaust, how MPs have paid tribute to former prime ministers, and much more.

Now, I’m pleased to say there’s a ‘Since Attlee & Churchill’ podcast, hosted by Richard Johnson, an historian of the Labour Party and Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and me, Lee David Evans, an historian of the Conservative Party and the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London.

The idea is that each week we delve into a different topic in British political history, sandwiched in between a discussion of something that has caught our eye that week and also what we’re reading at the moment.

Episode one is already up and you can find it on most podcast platforms:

On Spotify

On Apple

On Amazon Music

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll have episodes covering:

• The prime minister who made a covert appearance in one of the late Queen’s Christmas broadcasts

• Peter Shore and constitutional socialism

• One Nation Conservatism

• Labour Zionism

• Ernest Marples, the man who gave Britain its motorway network

• The first Conservative leadership contest

• Labour and the Monarchy

• And more.

Subscribe on your favourite podcast platform to listen - and all feedback and reviews are welcomed!

We hope you enjoy listening to the podcast.

On Spotify

On Apple

On Amazon Music

P.S. Still looking for a Christmas gift for the politico in your life? I recently compiled a list of the best books I read in 2024 - and the books I’m looking forward to reading. In case you missed it, here’s a summary:

Highlights of the books released this year.

• Unleashed by Boris Johnson. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• British General Election Campaigns 1830–2019 edited by Iain Dale. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Kingmaker by Graham Brady. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• On the Back of an Envelope by Peter Hennessy. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

Books for the socialist in your life…

• Great Britain? by Torsten Bell. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s.

• Keeping the Red Flag Flying by Mark Garnett, Gavin Hyman & Richard Johnson. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Years Of Hope: Diaries, Letters and Papers 1940-1962 by Tony Benn. Buy from Amazon UK

… and the Tory.

• Back from the Brink by Peter Snowdon. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Truss at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Jonathan Meakin. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Blue Jerusalem by Kit Kowol. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

General history.

• Uproar! By Alice Loxton. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• All In It Together by Alwyn Turner. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• OUT by Tim Shipman. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

Something completely different.

• The Wager by David Grann. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

And here are the books I haven’t read yet, but that I’m looking forward to reading this Christmas:

• Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party by Anushka Asthana. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

• Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns by Kerry Hudson. Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

Finally, thank you for being a subscriber - whether paid or free - to ‘Since Attlee & Churchill’. I wish you a very happy Christmas.

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Image: Alec Douglas-Home. Source: Wikipedia.

Parliamentary tributes to… Alec Douglas-Home

by Lee David Evans

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It’s a miserable thought that even a former prime minister can be so easily forgotten. But that was Alec Douglas-Home’s fate in his own lifetime. On a train journey back to his native Berwickshire in the Scottish borders, Douglas-Home was approached by an elderly couple who professed themselves to be great admirers of the Tory politician. 'My husband and I think it was a great tragedy that you were never Prime Minister', said the lady. ‘As a matter of fact I was, but only for a very short time,’ replied the faultlessly polite Douglas-Home.

Sixty years after he served as prime minister, the forgetfulness of the elderly train hoppers is hardly remarkable. According to YouGov, just 58 percent of Britons have heard of Douglas-Home, making him the least well known prime minister of the post-war period. Whilst consolation can be found in comparison to Baron Grenville, the least well known premier of all who is recalled by just 21 percent of the population (some of whom are almost certainly lying), the forgetting of Douglas-Home is the overlooking of one of the great political figures of the twentieth century.

That, thankfully, is not what the Commons or the Lords did when he died, at the age of 92, in October 1995. In this post, I look at the tributes paid in both houses to this remarkable, if understated, politician.

But before we begin, a note on names and titles. Throughout his life Alec Douglas-Home lived with many different names. He was born Alec Frederick Douglas-Home. In 1918, when his grandfather’s death elevated his father to the peerage, he took on the subsidiary title Lord Dunglass. And so he remained until his own father’s death in 1951, when he entered the House of Lords as the fourteenth Earl of Home. In 1963 he renounced his claim to a seat in the Lords and the corresponding titles for life. He was thenceforth known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, hanging the bauble of a knighthood, specifically the Order of the Thistle, to his birth name. And that’s how he was known as prime minister and later as foreign secretary until, in 1974, he left the Commons once again and returned to the Lords, not as an Earl but as a baron. From then, until his death in 1995, he was Lord Home of the Hirsel, taking the name of his family home in the Scottish borders. So, the question arises: what to call him? For ease, I refer to him simply as Alec Douglas-Home throughout this piece.

Image: Douglas-Home as a member of the Eton XI in 1921. Source: Wikipedia.

Douglas-Home died on 9th October 1995 at his home in the Scottish Borders. The following week the Commons met to eulogise the former prime minister. John Major, his beleaguered successor-but-four, led the tributes by declaring Douglas-Home ‘one of those people who light up politics with their integrity… a man of many qualities and few pretensions.’

Describing Douglas-Home as a person who never let politics take over his life (although he was involved in politics from the 1920s, when he first stood for Parliament, until his death, as a member of the House of Lords, in 1995) Major injected some humour into his remarks when he said:

During one election, he abandoned the election campaign for a day playing cricket, which I think is a perfectly proper sense of priorities for an Englishman - and a very enlightened sense of priorities for a Scottish man.

The prime minister then touched upon Douglas-Home’s precocious political rise which saw him serve as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Neville Chamberlain as both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister. It was whilst supporting Chamberlain in the latter role that Douglas-Home accompanied the premier to Munich to meet Adolf Hitler, a landmark moment in Britain’s attempts to appease the Nazi dictator. Major spoke accurately when he said of Douglas-Home that he was:

… not, of course, personally responsible for the agreements reached, but, with a loyalty that was characteristic of the man, he would never subsequently criticise Chamberlain's actions.

From there, Major’s tribute was principally a catalogue of Douglas-Home’s political posts - Commonwealth Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister, and then Foreign Secretary all over again - peppered with anecdotes picked up from those who knew and recalled his long political life. One such tale concerned the day Douglas-Home’s father, the thirteenth Earl of Home, died:

He heard the news in the Chamber. He immediately rushed away, only to discover outside the Chamber that he had forgotten his spectacles. In keeping with the tradition of the House, his return was barred now that he was a part of the other place.

Sir Edward Heath, who would speak later to offer his tribute (see below) added some further colour to Douglas-Home’s transition from commoner to peer - and Heath’s own role in it:

When the news of his father's death came through, it fell to me, as a whip, to rush into the “No” Lobby where I knew that he was voting, grab him by the arm and rush him out, trying at the same time to explain to him quietly and clearly that his father had died and that if he went through the Lobby, having inherited his title, he would be liable to a financial penalty, which I thought thoroughly undesirable. I just managed to get him out in time so he did not commit the grave offence of voting in this House when he had already become a peer.

Although he went to the House of Lords in 1951, Harold Macmillan still appointed him Foreign Secretary just under a decade later. The then prime minister, like so many before and after, came to rely on Douglas-Home - especially his decency and his judgement. Although, as Major recalled, Macmillan didn’t think his foreign minister represented the best of Britain abroad in every respect:

The sight of a British Foreign Secretary climbing from an aeroplane in a rumpled tweed suit amused many foreign dignitaries. As Macmillan later said, "The Foreign Secretary has been accused of many things but never of being the best dressed man in the Cabinet."

Major then wrapped up his remarks, ending with the brilliantly touching words:

Some have said that Alec Home was a politician of another age. The greatest tribute that I can pay him today is simply this: I profoundly hope not.

Tony Blair, who had never met Douglas-Home, was up next to pay tribute on behalf of the Labour Party. He began by praising him as a ‘straight man’ who was ‘genuine, liked and trusted by political foes and friends.’ As an example of how his opponents could grow to like him, Blair recalled the words of Clydeside Labour MP Jimmy Maxton who once said to Douglas-Home in the Tea Room:

Alec, I have been thinking that, come the revolution, I'll have you strung up on a lamp post, but on reflection I'll offer you a cup of tea instead.

Few remember Douglas-Home as a master of political communication (unlike Blair who, regardless of what one thinks of him, excelled in this area above all others). But Blair recognised one of his predecessor’s lines of genius, recalling how he made:

… no attempt to conceal his [aristocratic] background, and by allying it to a self-deprecating sense of humour, Lord Home turned political attacks against those making them… when Harold Wilson mocked him for being the 14th Earl, he remarked that he supposed that Mr. Wilson, when one came to think of it, was the 14th Mr. Wilson.

Blair even found a way of bringing the house out in laughter and needling his opposite number, Major. Recalling how Douglas-Home conducted himself after his narrow defeat in the 1964 election, when he went from prime minister to Leader of the Opposition, Blair said:

… he behaved with his usual dignity. He changed the rules for electing the Tory party leader - a precedent that I understand the present Prime Minister is looking to follow. He supported his successor completely - a precedent that the Prime Minister no doubt wishes was followed. He served under his successor as Foreign Secretary - a precedent that the Prime Minister is perhaps unlikely to follow.

With Blair’s tribute over, next up was David Steel to speak on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. He was not its leader - Paddy Ashdown was - but Steel was a man of the Scottish borders, too, and so he was chosen to speak for his party. He focused on Douglas-Home’s achievements on the world stage, recalling how:

… he pursued Harold Macmillan's wind of change policy towards South Africa. As Foreign Secretary, he could easily have done a deal with Ian Smith in Rhodesia that would have been popular with sections of his party and the press but would have surrendered African majority rights. He steadfastly refused to do that.

The suggestion was that he might have been a tweed-wearing, shotgun shooting aristocratic Tory, somewhat stuck in his old-fashioned ways, but he wasn’t backwards in his views.

Steel went on recalled a time when the pair travelled together from Scotland to London:

One cold winter night, Sir Alec and I were driving together after a dinner in the borders to catch the Edinburgh-London sleeper at Berwick-upon-Tweed where it passed through at about half-past midnight. For those who do not know it, that station consists of one long windswept platform. As we drove along the banks of the Tweed and were about to pass the gates of the Hirsel, he looked at his watch and said, "We will be 20 minutes early at Berwick. Why don't we stop for a drink?"

We drove up the long drive to his stately home and I must admit that I had visions of roaring log fires and butlers with silver trays. Not so. Elizabeth was in London and the place was deserted. We went in by a side door and he blundered about the rambling basement corridor searching for the light switches. He produced a jug of beer and we went upstairs to his high-ceilinged study. The central heating was off and the grate was empty. We sat huddled in our overcoats and he raised his glass in welcome and said, "I suppose you're thinking that we would have been warmer on the station platform."

Image: The Hirsel, Douglas-Home’s home. Source: Wikipedia.

Next up was the Father of the House, former prime minister Sir Edward Heath. Heath’s connection to Douglas-Home went back a long way: the two had served at the Foreign Office together in the 1960s, and when Heath became prime minister in 1970 he invited Douglas-Home to return as Foreign Secretary. Addressing their first innings batting for Britain on the world stage, Heath said:

When Harold Macmillan summoned us and told us that we were both going to the Foreign Office, it was late July. As we left, Sir Alec - or Lord Home, as he then was - said that we should go to his office and that the first thing to do was to settle our priorities. I said, "Of course," and, when we got there, I asked what the priorities were. He said that the first priority was to fix the date of our holidays. I asked what he proposed and he said, "I think you ought to take yours first - you're in more need of them than I." I said, "Thank you very much. I shall go to Venice."

From the foreign office Douglas-Home became prime minister, then Leader of the Opposition, before resigning as Tory chief in 1965. Heath took his place at the helm of the party, but showed regret about the way events had unfolded:

In some ways, I wish he had continued, but it was obvious that he was tired of it all and he firmly resolved that he would not continue because it was better that he should not.

Heath, presumably, wished it had been Douglas-Home who had suffered the shellacking of the 1966 election and that he had come in, fresh faced and unbruised, afterwards, but it wasn’t to be. He concluded by praising Douglas-Home as:

… notable for his modesty, for his genuine nature, for the fact that one could trust him and for the fact that he got his priorities right on every occasion. This country, and Scotland in particular, owes him a great deal.

Tony Benn spoke next. He had played a unique role in Douglas-Home’s life, albeit without intending to. In 1960, when Benn’s father died, he inherited his viscountcy and was evicted from the House of Commons. He spent the next three years fighting for the right to disclaim his peerage and return to the Commons. He was successful in doing so, and the 1963 Peerage Act which enabled him to hand back his title also enabled other peers, including Douglas-Home, to do likewise. That was exactly what Douglas-Home did in October 1963 in order to become prime minister.

Image: Douglas-Home as prime minister. Source: Wikipedia.

Benn acknowledged his role - ‘I was responsible for bringing Lord Home back to be a commoner, which he may not have liked, and to be Prime Minister, which he did like’ - and praised the man he helped, albeit with a caveat:

I cannot think of any major question on which I agreed with him, but his great quality, as has already been said, was that people trusted him - a phrase not often used in political comment nowadays. He was a signpost, not a weathercock.

Benn drew upon his own knowledge of the media and political communications and praised Douglas-Home’s unique style - the sort of approach to politics no spin doctor would ever encourage a prime minister to adopt:

In the media-orientated world in which we live, it is supposed that to succeed people have to have a good image, charisma, sound bites and a spin doctor. But like Clem Attlee before him, Alec Home had an absolute contempt for such gimmicks. He was absolutely content to be himself. I pay my respects to him because he argued his case always with great knowledge, great courtesy, great sincerity, but without ever indulging in abuse. The House might do well to follow that example.

David Trimble, speaking for the Ulster Unionist Party, focused on Douglas-Home’s commitment to the union of nations that is the United Kingdom:

…as a Scotsman Lord Home knew that this diverse United Kingdom is held together by a series of understandings about the relative weights of the parts of the kingdom and about the concern that should exist for the various parts of the kingdom... It is for that sense of balance, which he displayed throughout his life, that he will be most keenly remembered.

Margaret Ewing, for the SNP, took the constitutional point further still to make the case that ‘progress should be made towards the recognition of the aspirations of the Scottish people’ - an issue on which Douglas-Home did not agree with her - before Bill Walker, who represented Tayside North, which covered part of Douglas-Home’s former constituency in Perthshire, shared two bits of wisdom Douglas-Home had offered him:

"There are some very remote parts [of the constituency], some very difficult roads and you will find that in the winter months when you are required to go somewhere for a meeting you will wish that you were not in fact representing that part of Scotland. But when you get there, you will find that the people there make it all worthwhile, and you forget the journey, you forget the difficult roads and you forget all the problems." That was so typical of the man.

The other advice that Sir Alec Douglas-Home gave me, which I have never forgotten, was, "Bill, if you have thought something through carefully and you believe that it is right, stand by it because in time, you will find that you will be shown to be right." I believe that that guide that he had for himself was a guide that all politicians could well follow.

The House of Lords also met to pay its tributes. Such was Douglas-Home’s age that few of the legendary figures of post-war British politics with whom he had served were left. But the icons of the next generation, including Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, praised Douglas-Home, including his contribution to the Lords:

He was a frequent attender in your Lordships' House until fairly recently. I find it peculiarly easy to summon up a picture of that sparse figure and cranial yet benevolent head sitting somewhere between the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, and the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter.

Adopting a literary turn of phrase, as Jenkins could rarely resist, he described Douglas-Home as, ‘the final station of a railway line which may not survive the harsh commercialism of privatisation’ before adding, partly wearing his hat as Chancellor of the University of Oxford:

He was the last, thus far, of Eton's 18 Prime Ministers and the last thus far of Christ Church's 13. But who knows, Fettes and St. John's College are thrusting in the wind. Whatever the future holds, we should cherish the memory of Alec Home, the more so perhaps for we may not, alas, see his like again.

The final word in this tribute piece goes to the Lord Bishop of Norwich who recalled:

My Lords, many years ago I was privileged to spend an evening with Lord and Lady Home at the home of one of my parishioners… even after 25 years the impression upon a young rector remains vivid - a kind of wonder that this man of eminence should be such easy and delightful company. Before my hostess had a chance, he introduced himself as though he expected I would have no idea who he was. That simple and humble courtesy was of course characteristic.

The Bishop then quoted Douglas-Home’s own words on faith - ‘I am glad that I was brought up in the Christian faith and provided with the hope of a God who is a Redeemer’ - before saying, as Douglas-Home, a devoted Christian, would no doubt have appreciated: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’

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My 2024 Christmas Reading List

by Lee David Evans

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The Christmas break. It’s the perfect time to lie on the sofa, toss chocolates into your mouth, and read a good book. I’ve collated some of my favourite books that I read in the past year - some old, some new, but all worthy of a place on your bookshelf.

Unleashed by Boris Johnson

Love him or loathe him (and, more than two years after he left office, there’s still little sign anybody is in between those poles), Boris Johnson has written a highly readable and engrossing memoir. Open it for the inside accounts of what it was like in those final few days holed up in Downing Street; but stay for the compelling account of why Johnson believes ‘levelling up’ is so important to the future of the country. No matter what one thinks of him, this book is a reminder that he can still sell a vision like few other politicians.

Buy from Amazon UK | Buy from Blackwell’s

British General Election Campaigns 1830–2019 edited by Iain Dale

Until March of this year, most of us wanting to learn about a general election campaign might have rushed to Wikipedia. No more. Iain Dale has produced an edited collection to tell the story of every British general election since 1830 (declaration of interest: I’ve written for his upcoming by-election collection, to be published in 2025, but not for this book). Highlights include Nigel Fletcher on 1852, Robert Saunders on 1886, Vernon Bogdanor on 1951, Simon Heffer on 1979 and (which can’t have been the happiest chapter to write) Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Theresa May’s former Political Secretary, on 2017. A great book to have on the shelf and for dipping in and out of.

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Kingmaker by Graham Brady

Who was Chairman of the 1922 Committee when Margaret Thatcher was felled?* Few people remember. The office has often been of significance within the Palace of Westminster but rarely beyond it. Graham Brady is the chief exception. As the leadership of the Conservative Party became the undeliverable charge of British politics, Graham Brady was the man who knew what everyone wanted to know: how many letters of no confidence disgruntled Tory MPs had submitted against their leader. In this book, Westminster’s tightest-lipped man spills the beans. I liked it so much I read it in a single day. (Separately, you can read my review of it for Literary Review here).

*It was the superbly named Cranley Onslow. His name was a hybrid of hereditary titles: he was related to the Earldom of Onslow, and his first name was one of its subsidiary titles: Viscount Cranley, of Cranley in the County of Surrey.

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On the Back of an Envelope by Peter Hennessy

I’ve often found that if you love politics, you love Peter Hennessy. He’s been one of the most engaging political analysts over decades, straddling the horses of academia, commentary and legislating (Hennessy was made a peer in 2010). In this collection, he casts his mind back over his long life observing politics and distils a career’s worth of wisdom into one book.

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Great Britain? by Torsten Bell

A cynic might wonder what happened to the author of this book, and if he is the same Torsten Bell who is now Labour MP for Swansea West. After reading Bell’s forceful arguments against the two child benefit cap in Great Britain? and studying his subsequent voting record as MP, you’d be forgiven for thinking he isn’t. But if the grubby reality of party politics knocks some of the shine off of a person, it doesn’t necessarily diminish their case - and lots of Bell’s arguments in this book for a greater and fairer Britain are compelling.

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Keeping the Red Flag Flying by Mark Garnett, Gavin Hyman & Richard Johnson

In modern Britain, Labour has been the natural party of opposition. The trials of trying to hold a government to account, keep a party together, and engineer an election victory has dominated the party’s thinking over the past century. Garnett, Hyman and Johnson have produced a timely account of the party's efforts, published shortly before this year’s election, which deftly covers the history of Labour’s attempts to get into government - and how well it prepares for what it might do when it gets there.

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Years Of Hope: Diaries, Letters and Papers 1940-1962 by Tony Benn

As mentioned above, I recently authored a chapter for Iain Dale on the 1963 Bristol South-East by-election, when Tony Benn returned to the Commons after three years following the death of his father, the first Viscount Stansgate, and the inheritance of his peerage. Benn, ‘the reluctant peer’ (or, as he preferred to be known, ‘the persistent commoner’, but there was nothing common about him), fought vigorously to disclaim his father’s title. It was a saga in which the crown, the government, the major parties, and the voters of Bristol all played their part and these diaries, typically less celebrated than the next volume which sees Labour enter government and Benn become a minister, finish with a lengthy interview with legendary psephologist David Butler of Nuffield College, Oxford, about the early stages of the disclaimer campaign. They provide a gripping account of a unique period in history.

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Back from the Brink by Peter Snowdon

What almost everybody predicted has come to pass: the Conservatives, after fourteen years, are back in Opposition. Snowdon’s account of the last time it happened - after the 1997 election, what then seemed a grim election without parallel for the Tories but which has since been well-and-truly eclipsed - is a must-read. What went wrong for Hague? Why did the party fail to recover in 2001 and 2005? And what finally went right in 2010? If people in the party pay attention to some of the lessons of this book, the Tories may not find themselves in opposition for so long.

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Truss at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Jonathan Meakin

Seldon’s book on Britain’s shortest-lived prime minister is structured around an article he authored about ten ways to be a good prime minister. When applied to Truss and her 49 day rule, it becomes not a ‘how to’ but a ‘what not to do.’ Truss’ name has become synonymous with the idea of Tory misrule and until the party can find a way to break with this period in its past it will struggle to recover. Understanding what went wrong, why, and how never to repeat it would be a good place to start - and for that, Seldon’s book is brilliant.

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Blue Jerusalem by Kit Kowol

Plenty of people have written books about conservatism, but few make such original observations as Kowol. In this book he focuses on the bold thinking that went on in some conservative circles during the Second World War about Britain in the post-war age. In the end it was, of course, Labour rather than the Conservatives who became the vehicle for remaking Britain after 1945. But that these ideas never really came to fruition does little to diminish this book’s quality. If you’re looking for a weightier but still very engaging Christmas read, I recommend it.

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Uproar! By Alice Loxton

This book won’t be for everyone. As history books go, it’s almost gossipy. Throughout, Loxton drops in modern day references (an 18th century mini scandal is afforded the suffix -gate, for example) and even concocts scenes for which there is little evidence. But whilst these literary quirks may appear to cheapen a history book, they in fact make this one brilliantly readable, whilst its regular footnotes remind you how well-researched and authoritative it is. You’ll learn a huge amount about the world of Georgian printmaking and the satirical boom Rowlandson, Gillray and others created - and have fun along the way.

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All In It Together by Alwyn Turner

I listened to the audiobook of this book earlier this year. I used to be a bit sceptical of audiobooks, but having spent a lot of June delivering leaflets in the election campaign, the belief that I was working my way through a good book, rather than merely stuffing leaflets through letterboxes to minimal effect, made me think my time wasn’t totally wasted. All In It Together was one of those I listened to. I’ve come to think of Turner as one of the great chroniclers of modern England, and this book is no exception. He has the knack of focusing on events which are easily forgotten about but prove either highly consequential or revealing about what was to come. (The section on the rise of UKIP, and Robert Kilroy Silk’s role in it, is one great example from this volume). A must read - or listen.

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(If you’re interested in trying out audiobooks, click here for a free trial of Audible.)

OUT by Tim Shipman

Personally, I found ‘No Way Out’ quite a dense read. There were lots of technical details about backstops, transition arrangements, political declarations and so on, all of which seemed crucial at the time they were being debated but now feel like weeds in the Brexit forest. I’m not criticising Shipman for including them in the third volume of his Brexit quarter - they’re a key part of the story, and much of the drama was found in how the government, MPs and the European Union responded at each stage. But I’m currently reading OUT, the fourth and final instalment, and enjoying it much more - even if the topic, the rise and fall of three prime ministers, is a gloomy read not just for Tories, but for the country they governed.

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The Wager by David Grann

If you don’t want to spend your Christmas period reading or thinking about politics, try The Wager instead. Through every twist and turn, this true narrative of an 18th century ship is totally gripping. There’s jaw-dropping accounts of peril, deceit, division and even redemption. Perhaps it’s rather like politics, after all…

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And finally, here are the books I haven’t read yet, but that I’m looking forward to reading this Christmas:

• Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party by Anushka Asthana

• Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman

• Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns by Kerry Hudson

Happy reading!

Like this post? Click the ‘heart’ below to help other people find it on Substack. Please also feel free to share this post with anyone you think may be interested.

• The first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here.

• The 1975 battle for the Tory crown, which elevated Margaret Thatcher to the leadership, here.

• The first contest in 14 years, Sir Anthony Meyer’s ‘stalking horse’ challenge to Thatcher, here.

• And the downfall of Margaret Thatcher here.

Image: John Major. Source: Wikipedia.

‘Put up or shut up’ - The 1995 Conservative Leadership Contest

by Lee David Evans

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By the mid-1990s, a lot of things were going well for Britain. Curses which had blighted its economic fortunes in the previous decades - not least intolerable unemployment, runaway inflation and stubbornly high interest rates - seemed to be under control. But the good news wasn’t rubbing off on John Major, prime minister since the fall of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. His party was behind in the polls, often finding only half of the support of Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour Party. Major and the Conservatives looked certain to be defeated at the next election.

Whenever Major thought he had an opportunity to recover the initiative, internal Tory party issues would drag him backwards. Some involved scandal - ‘sleaze’, as it became known - whilst others focused on the party’s splits over Europe. Three flashes lit the touchpaper of Europe in the 1990s: the Maastricht Treaty, which some Conservative MPs felt took European integration too far; Black Wednesday, when Britain was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, entry into which Major had advocated for as Chancellor in Thatcher’s government; and, arguably the biggest divide of all, the single currency.

Some Conservatives, including Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine in the Cabinet, were pro-Europe and believed there would be benefits to being part of a single currency. Others, not least former Maastricht rebels Bill Cash and Iain Duncan Smith, were fiercely opposed. Major took a ‘wait and see’ approach; he didn’t favour entry, but recognised it might be economically advantageous (even necessary) to join in the future. To add a bit of weight to his fudged response, he said there must be a referendum before any decision was taken. With this position he held the centre of his party, but not without significant dissent from the Eurosceptics. They undertook, as Major would later recall, an ‘organised party campaign to change our European policy… and in this cause I was disposable.’ Graham Bright, Major’s former PPS, warned him that the Eurosceptics will ‘unseat you if they can.’

Major resigns

One of the features of the old Conservative leadership election rules (1965-98) which make them so different to today is the role of the incumbent, with a leader vulnerable to challenge once per year. That’s what happened in 1975, 1989 and 1990. It also seemed likely to happen in 1995, too, with the window for a leadership challenge following the Queen’s Speech in November. Worn down by the backbiting of his own MPs, by the summer Major came to believe ‘if we delayed a leadership contest until the normal time… it would simply wipe out four months of the diminishing time we had left to put the government back on the rails.’ The situation, he judged, was ‘intolerable.’

Major had three options: either he could resign and leave office; he could fight on but face the likely leadership challenge in the Autumn (that seemed inevitable; on 19th June the Daily Telegraph reported seventy MPs favoured a contest); or he could call the challenge himself and fight it now. It was to the third option that he was increasingly inclined. And so Major began to put together his argument: either his party should put him out of his misery, or they should back him - and offer him their loyalty.

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Image: Harold Macmillan. Source: Wikipedia.

An unlikely political friendship: Harold Macmillan & Tam Dalyell

by Lee David Evans

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‘Dalyell, come here!’

The young Tam Dalyell, among the most junior of MPs, turned around to see who wanted his attention. He was amazed to see it was the prime minister, Harold Macmillan.

The year was 1963. Dalyell had entered parliament just a year earlier when he won the West Lothian by-election. The contest had been a bleak one for Macmillan, with the Unionist candidate dropping 28 percentage points, slumping to third place and losing their deposit. (The threshold for keeping a deposit was 12.5 percent from the end of the First World War until 1985 so it wasn’t quite as humiliating as the 5 percent threshold today, but still bruising). It was one of several by-election blows for the Tories in 1962, including the more famous loss of Orpington to the Liberals - a formerly safe seat which neighboured Macmillan’s own.

Macmillan’s woes continued into the following year. In January, French President Charles de Gaulle ended British hopes of joining the European Economic Community with his three letter rebuke: “non”. Within weeks, rumours began swirling about the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and his relations with a showgirl. The ensuing scandal would be a permanent stain on this period of Macmillan’s leadership. Things were not looking good for ‘Supermac’.

Yet even as Macmillan began to look as if he would succumb to the pressures of politics at the top, he wanted to do a service for a relatively new MP. A week before the prime minister beckoned the junior MP, Dalyell, a fellow old Etonian, had asked Macmillan a question in the Commons, specifically: will he ‘ensure that legislation presented to this House is not drafted in obscure language?’

Macmillan replied briefly by citing the need for precision about complex and technical issues. But Dalyell, a little unsatisfied with the response, pushed back and asked, ‘is it not also important that we laity should understand legislation?’

Macmillan gave an answer which was as typically him as any you could find:

I know that this is a difficult problem. I would remind the House of the very wise words of Sir James Stephen, one of our greatest authorities, who pointed out that since legislation is often the subject of litigation it is absolutely necessary not only that it should appear to be simple to those who read it in good faith, but actually precise. That is a very difficult art. Many things are simple. Let us take the sentence: “When John met his uncle in the street he took off his hat.” That is a clear sentence, but it is capable of at least six different meanings. The point about legislation is that the courts have to interpret it in litigation based upon it, and it is therefore essential that it should be not so much simple as precise.

Many prime ministers might have thought that the end of the matter - a question asked, and answered, so time to move on. But a week later Dalyell was walking through a corridor in Parliament when Macmillan shouted to him. ‘I was not unsympathetic towards your question,’ the prime minister said, ‘so I shall arrange for the chief parliamentary draftsman to show you exactly why I gave the answer that I did.’ Macmillan then did exactly that. Sir Noel Hutton met with Dalyell the following day. Dalyell recalled:

… He was an extremely distinguished QC and he came armed with endless volumes. I have not been taken apart like that since I was a first-year student - in the nicest way. 

Dalyell saw it as a testament to the sort of prime minister, MP and man that Macmillan was:

… that the Prime Minister should go to such trouble for a young opponent to whom he owed absolutely nothing and who had been an embarrassment to him in the West Lothian by-election… was an act of generosity that is not forgotten.

Their political friendship, such as it was, was brief. Macmillan resigned later that year. The direct cause of his departure from office was ill health, but had his political fortunes been better he may well have sought to withstand the challenges of the surgeon’s knife in office (contrary to many reports, he did not think he was dying when he made the decision to resign). Macmillan left Parliament the following year and waited almost twenty years before joining the House of Lords as Earl of Stockton. He died in 1986.

As Macmillan departed the Commons, Dalyell’s long parliamentary career was only just beginning. He remained in the Commons until 2005, spending his last term as Father of the House (a role he inherited from Sir Edward Heath). Throughout his parliamentary career, he was often remarkable for his eccentric views: opposing Britain’s efforts to recapture the Falklands War, which put him in a minority of all MPs, and opposing Scottish devolution, which made him a minority in his own party - even if, on that occasion, he found more support on the other side of politics. He never joined the House of Lords but did enjoy the status of a baronet. Sir Tam Dalyell died in 2017.

Image: A bust of Tam Dalyell. Source: Wikipedia.

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Image: Statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London. Source: Tim Buss.

Parliamentary tributes to… Winston Churchill

by Lee David Evans

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In 2002, the BBC asked the British people who was the greatest among them - of all time. After whittling it down to the top ten, advocates were nominated to make the case for each of the heroes - or anti-heroes, in some cases (Oliver Cromwell ranked in tenth place).

The top ten is generally a testament to the sound judgement of the British people. Nelson (argued for by Lucy Moore, the historian) came ninth, Newton (Tristram Hunt, historian and future MP) was in sixth, Shakespeare (Fiona Shaw, actress and director) fifth and Darwin (Andrew Marr, journalist) was fourth. Few would deny any of them their place among the greatest Britons. In a list dominated by men, two women made the top ten: Elizabeth I (who found an advocate in Michael Portillo) in seventh place and Diana, Princess of Wales (Rosie Boycott, journalist and future peer) in third - a status which signals how long the high sentiments which followed her death in 1997 lingered.

Just one place ahead of Diana, in part because of the advocacy of Jeremy Clarkson, was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, titan of the industrial revolution and the man behind the Great Western Railway, Clifton Suspension Bridge and SS Great Britain. But at the top of the list, the pinnacle of all these islands has produced, was Sir Winston Churchill. That a Labour MP, Mo Mowlam, made the case for him demonstrated how much he had become a politician of general renown, not merely a hero of any single party. 

Churchill had died less than forty years before the poll, on 24th January 1965. The new Labour government under Harold Wilson was just a few months old. As Parliament gathered to offer its tributes, it was the new prime minister’s job to stand at the bar of the House and read a letter signed by the Queen’s own hand:

I know that it will be the wish of all my people that the loss which we have sustained by the death of the Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill, K.G., should be met in the most fitting manner and that they should have an opportunity of expressing their sorrow at the loss and their veneration of the memory of that outstanding man who in war and peace served his country unfailingly for more than fifty years and in the hours of our greatest danger was the inspiring leader who strengthened and supported us all. 

Confident that I can rely upon the support of my faithful Commons and upon their liberality in making suitable provision for the proper discharge of our debt of gratitude and tribute of national sorrow, I have directed that Sir Winston's body shall lie in state in Westminster Hall and that thereafter the Funeral Service shall be held in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. 

ELIZABETH REGINA.

That task fulfilled, Wilson then moved a motion that the Queen’s message be considered and began his own tribute to ‘a great statesman, a great Parliamentarian, a great leader of this country.’ Wilson spoke in an almost Churchillian tone as he described the reaction to Churchill’s death:

The world today is ringing with tributes to a man who, in those fateful years, bestrode the life of nations… the legend Winston Churchill had become long before his death and which now lives on [is] the possession not of England, or Britain, but of the world, not of our time only but of the ages.

After much recounting of Churchill’s career and wartime service Wilson, who had only entered the Commons at the end of the war but had sat opposite Churchill on the green benches for 19 years, focused on the contribution that Churchill had made to Parliament. He had first been elected for Oldham in 1900 and had represented Manchester North West, Dundee, Epping and Woodford at different periods of his life. His electoral record was not perfect, with rejection by the voters in a 1908 by-election and at the 1922 general election. But so much of his life was spent in the Commons that his return to Parliament in 1924 earned him the title Father of the House in 1959. Of his years as an MP, Wilson said:

But we, Sir, in this House, have a special reason for the tribute for which Her Majesty has asked in her Gracious Message. For today we honour not a world statesman only, but a great Parliamentarian, one of ourselves… 

Each of us has [our] own memory [of him], for in the tumultuous diapason of a world's tributes, all of us here at least know the epitaph he would have chosen for himself: ‘He was a good House of Commons man.’

Image: Harold Wilson. Source: Wikipedia

Given that Churchill had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was perhaps unsurprising that Wilson injected some literary references into his tribute, highlighting how the great man was steeped in the both British history and literature: 

… he drew on all that was greatest in our national heritage. He turned to Byron - ‘blood, tears and sweat.’ The words which he immortalised from Tennyson's ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ might well be a nation's epitaph on Sir Winston himself:

Not once or twice in our rough island-story,

The path of duty was the way to glory;

He that walks it, only thirsting

For the right, and learns to deaden

Love of Self, before his journey closes,

He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting

Into glossy purples, which outredden

All voluptuous garden-roses.

The greatest biographer of Abraham Lincoln said in one of his concluding chapters, ‘A tree is best measured when it is down.’ So it will prove of Winston Churchill, and there can be no doubt of the massive, oaken stature that history will accord to him.

Only four MPs spoke in the Commons that day; tributes were not yet the long and almost exhaustive spectacle we have come to know in the years since. Next up was the Leader of the Opposition Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Unlike his predecessor as Conservative leader Harold Macmillan, Douglas-Home had never been especially close to Churchill. (In fact, he had served as PPS to Neville Chamberlain as prime minister before missing two years in Parliament after his diagnosis with tuberculosis in 1940.) Whilst he was appointed as a junior minister in Churchill’s post-war government, it is said that Douglas-Home’s appointment to the Scotland office owed more to his Secretary of State’s mutual closeness to Churchill and Douglas-Home than any enthusiasm on the premier’s part.

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Douglas-Home, whom Churchill had apparently nicknamed ‘Home sweet Home’, told the Commons that ‘it did not seem possible that a man could have achieved so much within a mortal span,’ before turning his attention to the:

the rich, full-blooded life which was his… the boyish, infectious zest for living of a man for whom life was an endless adventure; the deep humanity and simplicity, of which the Prime Minister has spoken, of a man with a large heart and an open countenance.

He finished his tribute with a few words to Churchill’s widow, Clementine Churchill, who would soon be granted a place in the House of Lords and would live until 1977:

As we take leave of him, I would like to recall to the House the very last words of the book which he himself called, ‘My Early Life’. In the last few lines, he had been talking of the worries and the struggles of politics and the challenges which he would have to face, and then he wrote this simple line:

‘… until September, 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.’

To Lady Churchill, who has stood by him all his life and who was with him at the end, we would like to join with the Prime Minister in sending our admiration and our affection, and we stand in homage with the nation.

Image: Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Source: Wikipedia.

All of the party leaders who spoke that day were born and died in the twentieth century. Their task was to pay homage to a man who was first elected to the Commons as a Victorian and served as a prime minister in the second Elizabethan age. In his effort for the Liberals, Jo Grimond sought to highlight the richness of Churchill’s character - warts and all:

From where we stand today it seems as if Sir Winston had been moulded and preserved by fate to lead Britain in her crisis. That was not always the view of his contemporaries. Several times he seemed to have failed. Many people felt that he lacked just those qualities which are said to be essential to the highest office. But it was his supposed defects as much as his acknowledged virtues which entitled him to be called ‘great’.

The sitting was concluded by the backbencher with the longest continuous service, Robert Hugh Turton, MP for the Yorkshire constituency of Thirsk and Malton. He was not yet the father of the house (that title, for a few weeks longer at least, belonged to Rab Butler). But he would soon take on the role and hold it for longer than almost any other MP in the twentieth century (1965-74). On behalf of backbenchers, he spoke of the chamber they sat in and Churchill’s legendary role in its reconstruction after it was bombed in the Second World War:  

As this afternoon we sadly leave this Chamber and pass under the Churchill Arch, we will recollect that that arch was left by him untouched and unrepaired to remind Parliament of the fury the Nazis unleashed against this nation and this Parliament. To many of us in future that battered and chipped relic of the former Chamber will be a permanent memorial to the man who loved democratic freedom, who revered our Parliamentary procedure and who in the judgement of all was the greatest Member that Parliament, in all its 700 years, has ever known.

The House closed its sitting by unanimously resolving that a message of reply be sent to the Queen agreeing to the lying in state and the service in St Paul’s.

On the other side of Central Lobby, the same form of tributes took place in the Lords with the Earl of Longford (Labour’s leader of the House) moving the motion as the prime minister did in the Commons. He began with a modest note which often characterised the tone of what at first appears, but in practice rarely is, the grander of the two chambers:

My Lords, only one thing is certain about the tributes that will be paid this afternoon to Sir Winston Churchill: they will be felt, and rightly felt, by their authors to be inadequate to the occasion and to the man.

The peers were conscious that Churchill never sat in their house. He had twice been offered a Dukedom - in what would have been the only non-royal Dukedom of the twentieth century - but declined on both occasions. He appeared to come closest in 1955 when he told Jock Colville that the Queen had made such an offer when he resigned as prime minister:

I very nearly accepted, I was so moved by her beauty and her charm and the kindness with which she made this offer, that for a moment I thought of accepting. But finally I remembered that I must die as I have always been — Winston Churchill.

He omitted, of course, that he would die somewhat more embellished as the Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill KG OM CH TD DL FRS RA. Despite never joining them, the Lords were fulsome in their praise. Of Churchill’s appointment as prime minister in 1940 and his leadership over the following five years, Longford said:

… gravely, but also gaily, he took our burdens on his shoulders and, to adapt one of his favourite phrases, we all went forward together. It might be asked: How much of the heroic effort that followed was his and how much was ours? Who can say? Who would wish to say? Sir Winston has again and again insisted that all he did was to find a means of liberating and giving full expression to our best and most patriotic impulses, and no doubt, in a sense, that is so. He himself has said: ‘It was the nation who had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.’

Viscount Dilhorne speaking for the Conservative benches appealed to Edmund Burke to help in his tribute, recalling the words Burke offered upon the death of William Pitt the Younger:

No man was ever better fitted to be the Minister of a great and powerful nation, or better qualified to carry that power and greatness to their utmost limits.

Lord Rea, the leader of the Liberals in the Lords, appeared almost overwhelmed by the occasion. Fearing he had little to add, his tribute was the shortest of any peer - but no less powerful for it: 

I rise with a heavy heart and with abysmal sorrow to try to say the unsayable: to echo inadequately the grief, and also the pride, of thousands of men and women throughout the world who now give heartfelt thanks that our forbears produced such a man as Winston Churchill, that our descendants can look back upon such a mighty figure in our history, and, perhaps a little selfishly, that we of this generation had the honour to live with him. I think there is no more for me to say.

For the Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised God for giving the world Churchill, and spoke of his commitment to Christendom: 

There were two aspects of Christianity that Sir Winston made especially his own. One was the idea of Christendom, a civilisation of charity, justice, and the care for persons — a Christian civilisation. The other was the law of forgiveness, as applied to nations. He could hate and despise a State or a system, but he could feel the bond of humanity with its people and so seek reconciliation after conflict.

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Image: Clement Attlee. Source: Wikipedia.

But for this piece, the final word goes to the Earl Attlee, who served alongside Churchill in the wartime government and fought against him in three general elections. (Attlee, despite his own advanced age and frailty, would serve as a pallbearer at Churchill’s funeral). He began by recalling Churchill’s switching of political allegiances with his defection to, and then from, the Liberals:

You might say of Sir Winston that to whatever Party he belonged he did not really change his ideas: he was always Winston.

Attlee then did what people surely wished him to do: spoke of the Churchill he had known so well during the war, of the aspects of his character that others did not see but which Attlee, almost alone among politicians at that time, did. He chose to focus on the compassion Churchill could show:

I do not think everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy — and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic! Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.

Before remarking that his old ‘friend’ Churchill was, quite simply, ‘the greatest Englishman of our time — I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time.’

The voters in the BBC’s poll were right.

Like this post? Click the ‘heart’ below to help other people find it on Substack. Please also feel free to share this post with anyone you think may be interested.

• The first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here.

• The 1975 battle for the Tory crown, which elevated Margaret Thatcher to the leadership, here.

• The first contest in 14 years, Sir Anthony Meyer’s ‘stalking horse’ challenge to Thatcher, here.

Image: Margaret Thatcher inspecting troops in Bermuda. Source: The Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

‘The cruellest thing’: the downfall of Margaret Thatcher

by Lee David Evans

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In Autumn 1990, the prospect of the next general election was on the mind of many Tory MPs. If the Parliament ran for four years, as Margaret Thatcher’s previous terms as prime minister had, then voters would be going to the polls in little over six months. Yet the Conservatives’ opinion polling was dire, there had been riots over the poll tax, and Thatcher’s ministers, as well as many backbenchers, were increasingly unhappy with the direction of the government. Having declined to remove her in 1989, when Sir Anthony Meyer challenged Thatcher as a ‘stalking horse’, some MPs began to wonder whether they should seize the next opportunity for change at the top.

Wielding the knife

The annual window to strike against an incumbent Conservative leader came in the weeks following the Queen’s Speech, which in 1990 would be delivered on 7th November. Under Tory rules any contest would have to take place within 28 days. Thatcher and Cranley Onslow, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, agreed that the leadership election should take place as soon as possible. Nominations would be required by 15th November and should there be a challenge, the first ballot would take place five days later. For a while it seemed as if their discussion was academic. Former Cabinet minister Michael Heseltine, widely seen as the king-across-the-water and the favoured candidate of her staunchest critics, did not plan to challenge in 1990. 

One man’s actions would change Heseltine’s mind. Geoffrey Howe had been in Thatcher’s Cabinet since 1979, serving in two of the great offices of state - Chancellor and Foreign Secretary - before being given the title of deputy prime minister. If at first it seems that his latest role was a promotion, it wasn’t. Thatcher had wanted to relegate Howe from Foreign Secretary to Leader of the Commons; when he threatened to resign, the bauble of the deputy premiership was offered to assuage him. But a year on, their souring relationship was even worse. In Thatcher’s own words the pair ‘found each other’s company almost intolerable.’

Worse than their personal relationship was their diverging views on what was emerging as the great fissure in Tory politics: Europe. Long forgotten were the days when Thatcher donned a jumper with the flags of Europe on it and campaigned for Britain's place at the heart of the European Community. Instead, as European integration accelerated, the once enthusiastic Thatcher (who as recently as 1986 had played a key role in delivering the Single European Act) was becoming sceptical. Her Cabinet was mostly committed Europeans and managed to keep the official government position aligned with their own. Among them, Thatcher was a minority and was often having to say things she did not really believe for the sake of Cabinet unity.

Thatcher stopped toeing of her own government’s line after European leaders met in Rome to discuss progress on the future of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). She returned to London and, after reading out the prepared statement on the conference (which followed the agreed position) she felt unleashed and spoke for herself. Most famously, she told MPs:

The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No! No! No!

Howe, sat at her side, fumed. He began to conclude that his presence in the government, even as deputy prime minister, was ‘no longer restraining her dangerous anti-Europeanism.’ Despondent, on 1st November he saw Thatcher and tendered his resignation. Could anything make him stay, she asked. He said no, and she didn’t try to change his mind. ‘In a sense it was a relief,’ she later wrote. The last man standing from her original Cabinet was gone.

Howe’s departure energised rumours of a leadership challenge. At first people wondered if Howe would stand himself, but he readily accepted that others were better placed to challenge her. Attention soon focused on Heseltine. His de facto campaign manager, Michael Mates, reported that 143 MPs were lined up to back him. Whilst that might be enough to bring down Thatcher, it wasn’t enough to guarantee he would replace her - and Heseltine knew it. He feared even the support of so many MPs might consign him to the role of stalking horse and wanted, if at all possible, someone else to wield the knife before he entered on the second ballot.

Did Thatcher consider Howe’s departure a threat to her leadership? It doesn’t seem so. On 12th November she addressed the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and deployed a cricketing metaphor to demonstrate how she planned to continue to dominate her party into the future: 

I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking the bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground! That’s my style!

The following day, everything changed. Almost a fortnight after he resigned Howe exercised his right to make a resignation statement in the Commons. He took his place on the backbenches with Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s former Chancellor who had resigned a year earlier, by his side. When he spoke his style was understated, as it always was, but nobody doubted the substance. Howe borrowed Thatcher’s own cricketing metaphor (something much more in his lexicon than hers) and slammed her approach to Europe as:

… rather like sending our opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find that before the first ball is bowled, their bats have been broken by the team captain.

And concluded with a call to arms to his colleagues: 

The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long. 

Howe was clearly pleased with the impact of his remarks; half a decade later he named his memoirs, ‘Conflict of Loyalties.’ Thatcher, sitting on the Treasury bench, kept a stony expression. ‘The skill of Howe’s speech,’ Charles Moore, Thatcher’s official biographer, later wrote, ‘lay in the sense it gave of a question long meditated, of revealing previously hidden truths and of a big argument about national destiny threatened by the character of the person in charge.’ 

It is not obvious that Howe intended, or expected, his speech to bring down Thatcher. His aide Anthony Teasdale has said that he hoped to ‘get the Cabinet to rein in Mrs Thatcher’ on Europe. But Howe had let off a bomb the consequences of which he could not control. Heseltine immediately realised that for him not to stand now would be to have chickened out of the fight - probably for good. (There had been no conspiracy between Howe and Heseltine and the young pretender did not know of Howe’s resignation in advance. However, this didn’t stop the rumours: many MPs suspected they were in cahoots and their common Welsh ancestry led to the pair being dubbed the ‘Taffia’.) At 10:30am the next morning, Heseltine stood outside of his grand Belgravia home and, claiming the support of more than 100 MPs, announced his candidacy for leader of the Conservative Party. 

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Image: Gerald R. Ford Library

Parliamentary tributes to… Harold Wilson

by Lee David Evans

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On 24th May 1995, almost two decades after he left Downing Street, Harold Wilson, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, died. He was only the third person to serve as a Labour prime minister and unique among his socialist peers in having won four general elections (albeit three by the tightest of margins). He had been out of the public eye for a long time suffering from dementia, but his legacy loomed large in British politics and on the very day he died both the Commons and the Lords met to offer their tributes.

Conservative Prime Minister John Major led the mourning. His speech was largely biographical and somewhat pedestrian, but it included effusive praise:

I do not believe that it is too generous to describe Harold Wilson as one of the most brilliant men of his generation.

And ended with a very human description of his predecessor-but-two:

What was Harold Wilson really like? I have formed my judgement. He was a complex man, certainly, a clever man, a sensitive man, a man who could be bruised and hurt and who never wore the armadillo skin of the fictional politician. He was a man of many achievements and, perhaps above all, a very human man who served his country well and honourably and who has earned, by that, a secure place in its history. In the ledger of life, his credit balance is very high. It is a privilege for me, as one, nominally, of his political opponents, to pay him this tribute and I do so unreservedly.

Next up was Tony Blair, the man hoping to follow in Wilson’s footsteps and enter Number 10 wearing a red rosette. Blair used his remarks to highlight how he was of a different political era - ‘I was barely 11 years old when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister’ - before focusing on the ways Wilson had dominated British politics in his time:

[He] was to politics what the Beatles were to popular culture. He simply dominated the nation's political landscape, and he personified the new era, not stuffy or hidebound but classless, forward-looking, modern. Even his enemies and detractors, and there were a few, could not deny his brilliance…

Part of Wilson’s brilliance was his quick wit, in evidence throughout the 1960s even if it began to fade in the 1970s. (If you haven’t seen the BBC documentary The Hecklers, based on the people who shout at politicians and our leaders’ response to them, it’s a must-watch and available here). Blair highlighted some of those moments in his tribute:

When a young boy hit him in the eye with a stink bomb at an open-air meeting and was marched off by the police, Harold, whose eye was none the less smarting, looked up and said, "Don't lock him up. With an arm like that he should be bowling for England.” 

At the height of the 1964 election campaign, when a lady got up to carry out a crying child, Harold Wilson turned to her and said, "Let him stay, madam. This is all about his future." 

He did not always get the best of his tormentors, and one of the good things about him were the stories that he would tell against himself. The best, I believe, was when he was at a vast public meeting. Speaking about the Navy, "I will always defend the Navy," he said, "and why do I say that?" "Because you're in Chatham,” [home of the historic Chatham dockyard,] shouted a voice from the crowd. Knowing that he was beaten, he joined in the laughter and moved on.

At times, Blair’s tribute sounded a little bit like when Boris Johnson speaks about Winston Churchill: intended to flatter himself as well as the object of the praise. Two years before Blair brought Labour back to office in a landslide victory, he praised Wilson for symbolising:

… the new mood of change. There had been 13 years of unbroken Conservative rule… technology and science were revolutionising people's lives, and a cultural transformation in popular arts was waiting to happen. It was an age for… sweeping away the old and ringing in the new, and Harold Wilson captured it.

But he ended on a moving note, quoting perhaps Wilson’s most famous line on the party they both led:

To many, he is defined as a clever politician — and he was. Yet it would be most unfair to let that eclipse his real character and his deep commitment. He had, in the end, a very simple belief in the virtues of social justice and equality and, by and large, throughout his time in politics, he applied them. He once said: "The Labour party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing." That should be his real epitaph and long may it remain so.

Image: Statue of Wilson in his hometown of Huddersfield by Tony Hisgett

For the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown gave a kind speech, marking the ‘sad day for the House… [and] sad day for our country’ but by this stage it was surely the next speaker, Sir Edward Heath, former Conservative prime minister and now the father of the House, who people wanted to hear from. Heath and Wilson were born in the same year - 1916 - and raised in similar backgrounds. Grammar schools, Oxford and prodigious political talent defined their early lives. They both rose to lead their respective parties and faced each other across the despatch box for a decade (1965-75), fighting four elections against each other. 

Sir Edward praised Wilson as a ‘true House of Commons man’ - the words which Wilson, as prime minister, used to describe Churchill upon his death - before adding that Wilson:

… never hesitated to tackle problems and he saw them very clearly. He saw the problem of sterling in the late 1960s. He saw the problem of Rhodesia and tried to resolve it. He not only kept us out of Vietnam, but he saw the problems there and tried to bring peace. He saw the problems of joining the European Community. My greatest regret was that we were never able to come to an agreement about that key policy issue.

When someone dies, memories are often distorted - but, happily, in a cheerier direction than might be the actual truth. And so it was for Sir Edward:

We were together for 35 years—in confrontation, some would say, for more than 10 years as leaders of our respective parties. I would not say that it was confrontation during that time. It was facing each other and arguing about the problems. I like to think that we were constrained. We were not abusing each other and we were not trying to get cheap results quickly from each other.

Heath concluded by assuring Wilson’s widow (who was in the gallery to hear the tributes) that his achievements would be ‘recognised in due course by the country and by the rest of the world’ before adding:

This country owes a great deal to him. We are grateful and we would like Mary and the family to know that today.

The rest of the Commons tributes were similarly generous, often including anecdotes about the Wilson they knew. James Molyneaux, Ulster Unionist MP for Lagan Valley, recalled their time queueing in the café of the House of Commons:

I had ordered a rather exotic dish of scrambled eggs on toast and Harold had picked up a salad from the other cabinet. He said to me, "Jim, would you mind if I bypassed you up to the cash desk?" I took my empty tray from the rails, did a military two steps back, bowed and said, "Prime Minister, I am delighted to yield to an expert in the art of bypassing." Harold was vastly amused at that, took it as a compliment and invited me to share his table when my scrambled eggs eventually arrived.

But Labour’s Edward O’Hara, his successor representing much of the Huyton constituency, was keeping quiet:

I remember much badinage in private in the bar of Huyton Labour club, but I fear that, if I repeated it in the House, it might not pass your rules on parliamentary language, Madam Speaker.

Tony Benn, the former Labour MP for Bristol South East who now represented Chesterfield, had first joined the House of Commons in 1950 when Wilson was President of the Board of Trade. He said (and I have no cause to doubt him) that only he and Heath would have been there to hear Wilson resign from Clement Attlee’s Cabinet over the introduction of NHS charges in 1951. Benn then turned to a recurring theme of the tributes: Wilson’s great skill at party management.

Harold Wilson worked with all wings of the party. Every Prime Minister must think that his Cabinet is difficult, but think of Harold's Cabinet. Two of its members were former members of the Communist party—Lord Healey and Edmund Dell. Two deputy leaders left the party—Roy Jenkins and George Brown. His Minister of Transport, Dick Marsh, joined the Tory party; Christopher Mayhew joined the Liberal party. He stuck it out.

Almost every speech offered a unique angle on the iconic Labour leader. Benn ended by reflecting on Wilson’s political paranoia:

Like all Prime Ministers, Harold Wilson worried about plots. That is not uncommon. I asked him once, when the plot stories were thickening, "Harold, what shall we do if you are knocked down by a bus?" and Harold said, "Find out who was driving the bus."

And Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, who worked for Wilson for five years in Downing Street, recalled Wilson’s approach to speech-writing:

Unlike many politicians who have followed him, Harold wrote his own speeches. He used to stride up and down the study in No. 10 Downing street, dictating to a succession of secretaries. When the transcript was brought in to him, he would correct it with the green ink that he had always used ever since he was first in the Cabinet. Harold prepared his speeches with meticulous care, and was always extremely careful about the effect that he could create with them.

Image: Wilson’s grave at St Mary's, Isles of Scilly by Bob Embleton

David Harris, Conservative MP for St. Ives, paid tribute on behalf of his constituents on the Isles of Scilly, where the Wilsons had a home, before recalling his pre-Parliamentary experience as a journalist covering the 1964 election campaign:

At the end of the campaign, when the results were coming through, we were in the Adelphi hotel. One can see how times have changed, because the few of us who had followed Harold Wilson around were in his bedroom. He was stretched out on the bed, and I think that he was puffing on his pipe. He turned to me and said, "David, you have followed me all around the country, and you are still a damned Tory!" In that, as in some other things, he was right.

The final person to speak in the Commons was the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, who singled out her own connection to one of Wilson’s most lasting achievements:

In my view, one of Harold Wilson's lasting achievements was to bring into being the Open university, of which I have the honour to be the current chancellor.

The Commons then adjourned.

Over on the other side of Central Lobby, the House of Lords met the same day to pay its own tribute. Their speeches were fewer in number. Labour’s leader in the Lords, Lord Richard, who had first been elected to the Commons as Wilson became prime minister, echoed a recurring theme from the Commons and reflected on Wilson’s desire to keep the Labour Party united, recalling the time Wilson said:

"This Party is a bit like an old stage coach. If you drive it along at a rapid rate everyone aboard is either so exhilarated or seasick that you do not have a lot of difficulty.” He devoted much time and effort to ensuring that no one fell off.

Lord Richard then read out a message from Wilson’s successor as prime minister, Lord Callaghan, who was in Tokyo when Wilson died. The chamber was robbed of the more fulsome tribute Callaghan would have surely offered in person, but nevertheless he praised Wilson as, ‘the most successful leader that Labour has ever had.’ 

The next to speak was Lord Jenkins, a Home Secretary and Chancellor in Wilson’s governments, but who now sat as a Liberal Democrat peer having co-founded the SDP and ultimately made his way into the Lib Dems. As one might expect, given Jenkins was one of the best political writers of his or any generation, his was the most literary of contributions - and a suitable place to end:

My Lords, I had a long working relationship with Lord Wilson which at times was very close. It was not without its ups and downs. He and I came from different strands in the sometimes somewhat conflicting fabric of the Labour Party. It was therefore a sign of his tolerance and his generosity that he gave me the great opportunities which led to my working so closely with him. I found, well before his death, that it was the ups rather than the downs which came to dominate my memory…

He was one of the very few Prime Ministers voluntarily to surrender office, to go without the intervention either of debilitating illness or the withdrawal of confidence by Parliament or country. In this century, he and Baldwin stand alone in that respect…

Our sympathy goes out to his family, and in particular to his wife whose devotion in a long twilight has been visible to all of us.

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Image: The Conservative Party

Tory MPs voting tactically? It’s nothing new.

by Lee David Evans

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Conservative Party politics has had more than its fair share of jaw-dropping moments, but few could match the fourth and final MPs’ ballot on Wednesday. In the previous round James Cleverly, the former Foreign and Home Secretary, had secured 39 votes from his colleagues. Just one more would guarantee him a place in the final. With the 20 votes previously committed to Tom Tugendhat up for grabs, Cleverly’s place in the final two was as close to a safe bet as it was possible to imagine.

And then: shock. When Bob Blackman, the new Chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced the results the unthinkable had happened. Not only had Cleverly failed to gain the single extra vote needed, he had lost two. In some circumstances, 37 MPs would still have been enough to make the final. If, for example, the leading candidate had attracted 50 votes, then with 120 MPs voting 37 for Cleverly would have left just 33 for the other rival. But neither Kemi Badenoch nor Robert Jenrick did so well as to save Cleverly; with 42 and 41 votes respectively, they knocked him out of the contest. Badenoch and Jenrick will now go forward to the ballot of Conservative Party members.

So what happened? The finger of blame has been pointed in several directions, but the common accusation is tactical voting gone wrong. Whilst some accuse the Cleverly campaign of lending votes to try and set up a preferred run-off against Jenrick, freelancing among Cleverly supporters, rather than the coordinated lending of votes, is the most likely culprit. (A coordinated effort backfiring so badly would, to put it politely, require too much incompetence to be believable). If it was a case of individual Cleverly-supporting MPs being ‘too clever by half’, we may never know what happened for sure. After all, who would want to confess to denying their candidate a place in the final?

Tactical voting has a long history in Conservative leadership contests. In fact, it’s hard to find a contest without it. Back in 1975, when Margaret Thatcher challenged Edward Heath for the premiership, the Thatcher campaign needed all the support it could get. As I’ve written elsewhere, Airey Neave, Thatcher’s campaign manager:

… needed to unite two camps of people: those who wanted Thatcher as leader, which before the first ballot represented less than a majority of Tory MPs, and those who wanted Heath out but did not want Thatcher in. His strategy was to use a vote for Thatcher in round one as a means of removing Heath and little more. Vote for her, he said, and there would be a second round in which other candidates could enter the fray. But if you want round two, you have to vote for her in round one.

It was an explicit appeal for tactical votes - and it worked. It’s estimated that as many as 40 MPs voted for Thatcher in spite of wanting an alternative leader. Having done so, and forced out Heath, they found that they had given her such success in the first ballot that the Thatcher juggernaut was unstoppable. She went on to lead the party for over fifteen years.

The circumstances of Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 saw the tables turned. This time, Conservative MPs who wanted rid of her were encouraged to vote for Michael Heseltine, whether they wanted him or not, to force her out. The thinking was identical: if they backed Heseltine, they could then support another candidate in the second round; but if they didn’t, she may do so well that there wouldn’t be another vote. It was a finely balanced judgement for Tory MPs but one, in this case, that MPs who were both anti-Thatcher and anti-Heseltine got right. The result was wounding enough to remove her from office, but not so good for Heseltine that it put him in. Instead, former Foreign Secretary and Chancellor John Major took the helm. Their tactical voting proved astute.

Removing the incumbent leader under the old Tory rules has been one motivation for tactical voting. But it isn’t the only one. On other occasions, MPs have tried to influence who has been the flag carrier for each wing of the party. In 1997, the last contest solely decided by MPs, it was alleged that some Ken Clarke supporters voted for John Redwood in the belief he was the least plausible candidate of the right. Up against him, they supposed, even Eurosceptic Tory MPs would vote for avid Europhile Clarke. If that accusation is right, it could explain why Redwood did better than expected in the first round of voting, coming third. But it wasn’t enough to generate the Clarke vs Redwood contest they hoped for. Instead, Clarke faced William Hague - and lost.

Since 1998, the dynamics of Conservative leadership contests have changed: MPs now whittle down the candidates to just two before members vote. The chief consideration for tactical voters is the possible head-to-head finals, with the supposed (and often polled) preferences of the members influencing who candidates want to face in the run-off. Depending on how sure they are of making the final two, the frontrunner among MPs may feel they can lend votes to the person they wish to be pitted against.

Allegations of such underhandedness peaked in 2019 when Boris Johnson, the overwhelming choice of Conservative MPs to lead the party after Theresa May, was accused of lending votes to Jeremy Hunt (a former Remainer) to keep Michael Gove (a Leaver) out of the battle to ‘get Brexit done.’ The rumours have been denied, but few doubt that going up against Hunt helped Johnson to win. As he says in his own recently published memoirs:

Jeremy had many things going for him: decent, very able, son of an admiral. But he has voted to remain in the EU, and it was obvious, after three years of stasis, that the government should be led by someone who actually believed in the [Brexit] project.

Tory members agreed.

Tactical voting, coordinated or otherwise, is nothing new in Conservative leadership contests. But, if it is what imploded Cleverly’s campaign last week, it has rarely had such dramatic - and, for the then frontrunner, catastrophic - consequences. Aspiring leaders in the future would be well-advised to always try to maximise their momentum and get as many votes as they can. It would probably do them more good - and at least keep them in the fight.

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