Along with “people under the age of 18, aliens, prisoners, and persons of unsound minds”, members of the House of Lords will be denied a vote in June’s general election. Frank Longford, who once led the House but never saw politics as a career, used to quip that peers had much in common with “lunatics and convicts”.
Conversations with Frank were never dull. He was born in 1905, on the eve of the 1906 Liberal landslide, when the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, along with all bar three of his Conservative cabinet colleagues, lost their seats – catapulting Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George into Campbell-Bannerman’s government.
By 1945 it was Labour’s turn to enjoy a landslide and, having served in Atlee’s post-war cabinet, Frank personally knew many of the principal players. Talking to him was the political equivalent of talking to the pharaohs.
Not long before his death, in 2001, we talked about the elections of the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise and fall of political parties. He had campaigned for Sandy Lindsay, the unsuccessful anti-appeasement “Independent Progressive” candidate in the 1938 Oxford City by-election. Labour and Liberal had agreed to stand down in Lindsay’s favour, making common cause against the Conservative, Quintin Hogg.
In the previous decade Frank had seen the implosion of the Liberal Party and the disastrous first Labour Government of 1923. In May of that year the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, replaced the ailing Prime Minister Bonar Law, who enjoyed a parliamentary majority of 74 over all the other parties.
Although Baldwin could have governed for a further four years, by the end of 1923 he said he needed to consolidate his grip on the Conservative Party leadership and establish his own mandate. He called an election on the principal issue of tariff reform. His gamble backfired and he lost. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party formed a government with the tacit support of Asquith’s Liberals.
But the story doesn’t end there. This de facto coalition was a chaotic mess and by 1924, at the third general election within two years, Baldwin returned to office with a majority of 210.
Without having to become an anorak psephologist, Theresa May might usefully reflect on the lessons of the 1923 election – but also those of 1974, 1979 and 1983, and on the risks and opportunities that a general election presents.
Fifty years after Bonar Law’s debacle, Ted Heath called his February 1974 crisis general election. As a 23-year-old, at Liverpool Edge Hill, I contested that and the subsequent October election.
After the disastrous three-day week, Heath had asked: “Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take decisions which will be needed?” His election slogan was “Who governs Britain?” And the electorate decided it wasn’t him.
But in 1974 the electorate faced a different question about parliamentary sovereignty. It was the first vote to be held after Britain’s accession to the European Community – a contested question that has shaped the contours of British politics ever since (and led a year later to our first referendum on Europe).
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By 1979 more industrial chaos and the Winter of Discontent cost the Labour government a vote of no confidence. A day later I won a by-election – with a 36 per cent swing and 64 per cent of the vote.
But one by-election does not make a summer and, although I was re-elected four weeks later (and despite a national tally of four million votes), the Liberals held just 11 seats, while Margaret Thatcher achieved an overall majority of 43 seats.
And so to 1983, when, in the aftermath of the Falklands war, Maggie went to the polls again. This time the Liberal/SDP Alliance polled 25 per cent, nearly eight million votes, just behind Michael Foot’s Labour with 26 per cent. Buoyed by the Falklands factor, faced with the failure of her opponents to find common ground and by the prospect of Michael Foot as prime minister, the country decided to “keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse”, and the Conservatives achieved the party’s best result since 1935.
Such are the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, and despite what the late Gerald Kaufman described as the “longest suicide note in history”, Labour held 209 seats to the Alliance’s 23. Forty-one of Labour’s seats were in Scotland, where the SNP won just two. Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and Tim Farron should each reflect on that as they now compete for the same ground.
In June, Scotland will stay largely unchanged. The Lib Dems will carefully target the Remain-belt around south-west London and the Home Counties while, to compensate for any losses, the Conservatives will target rust-belt Labour marginals in the north – it was no surprise to see Theresa May kicking off her campaign in Bolton.
If it’s 1983 all over again, the Conservatives might expect a majority of 60 to 70 seats. But if it’s more akin to 1923, and the gamble goes wrong, Jeremy Corbyn will be inviting Nicola Sturgeon and Tim Farron into what the PM has called “a coalition of chaos”.
What, I wonder, would Frank Longford have made of that?
Lord Alton of Liverpool is an independent crossbench peer. Visit davidalton.net
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