by Phil Mason
It came to a head in 1846 when Peel had to repeal the Corn Laws. Disraeli spoke bitingly against him in the House of Commons debate. Peel’s riposte was to question why, if Disraeli was so opposed to him, he had asked for a ministerial job under his leadership. Here Disraeli came within an ace of a public disgrace that would have curtailed his meteoric rise.
Disraeli, caught by surprise, lied by denying to the House that he had ever written asking for a job. He took a risk that Peel had not kept the letter. Unknown to him, Peel had kept it and some sources suggest he even had it on him that evening but could not find it amongst his papers in time. Another suggests that Peel’s own hyper-sense of honour made him feel it would be unfair to read out a personal communication.
Had he produced it, Disraeli’s chances of future glory would have been in tatters. As it was, Peel resigned after the Corn Laws debacle, the Conservative Party split for a generation and when it came together again in the late 1860s, it was Disraeli who was at the helm. He remained Conservative leader until his death in 1881.
One of the most far-reaching political reforms of the 20th century in Britain – the extension of the vote to all adult women – came about entirely by accident through a single incautious and unplanned remark by the Conservative Home Secretary in the House of Commons during a dull Friday afternoon debate on the subject.
William Joynson-Hicks, one of the most unorthodox home secretaries there has ever been, was speaking for the Government on 20 February 1925, opposing a private member’s Bill to give women the vote at 21. (Since 1918, only women aged 30 and over had had the vote.) Startlingly, when interrupted by Lady Astor, an ardent supporter of the reform, he responded with a firm commitment to introduce the measure at the next election.
He had no Cabinet authority to make the pledge, had not discussed it with colleagues and, worse, employed a quotation by the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in support, making it almost impossible to backtrack. There is no evidence either that he had planned to say what he did.
Having made the pledge, and used the Prime Minister’s name, the Cabinet felt obliged to see it through. The law was changed in 1928 and the following year’s General Election was the first universal suffrage election in Britain’s history.
Without his off-the-cuff remark, there is little reason to think that the tranquillity-seeking Baldwin, one of the most cautious of all Conservative premiers, would have found it a government priority to grant the ‘flapper’ vote. Winston Churchill was to write of the episode several years later, ‘Never was so great a change in our electorate achieved so incontinently. For good or ill, [Joynson-Hicks] should always be remembered for that.’
‘Jix’, as he was known, did not stand again for election, was elevated to the House of Lords as Lord Brentford and died three years later. He never explained what had possessed him to be so forward that Friday afternoon.
A fleeting encounter with a journalist cost Hugh Dalton, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the leading politicians of his generation, his post in November 1947 and, it turned out, his career. The incident was one of the most bizarre in modern British politics, abounding with twists of misfortune.
As Dalton made his way through the Palace of Westminster to the Commons to deliver the Budget speech, he bumped into John Carvel, political correspondent of the London evening paper, the Star. The newsman tried his arm and asked what was in the Budget. He could hardly have expected to be told as Budget decisions were naturally the closest of secrets until they had been announced publicly in parliament.
Dalton assumed that Carvel was likewise on the way to the press gallery to listen to the Budget. In a succinct summary of his plans, he told Carvel, ‘No more on tobacco; a penny on beer; something on dogs and [football] pools but not on horses; increase in purchase tax, but only on articles now taxable; profits tax doubled.’
Instead of proceeding to the House, Carvel telephoned his editor and editions of the Star were on sale 20 minutes before Dalton reached that part of his speech. Although there was no practical damage done, Dalton tendered his resignation the next day. He was brought back to the Cabinet the following year, but he never regained his former standing.
Other factors combined to create the disaster. That he ran into the journalist in the first place was highly unlucky. The Commons were still using the House of Lords chamber while their own bomb-damaged home was under repair. Had that not been so, Dalton would not have entered through the route that exposed him to the casual presence of journalists. Had his deputy, Douglas Jay, who would have been alongside him at the fateful moment, not been sent off to ensure that there was water at the despatch box for the speech, he might well have been able to discourage Dalton from stopping to chat.
And it later turned out that Carvel himself had not planned the ambush. He was dared by a colleague on the spur of the moment.
A would-be minister, who has remained unidentified, ruined his career when he mishandled a meeting with Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who was offering him a senior post in the Cabinet. Attlee was one of the most taciturn leaders ever. As the aspirant went into fawning mode expressing how inadequate he felt he was for such an important position, Attlee cut him short with an ‘all right then’ and withdrew the job offer.
Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, two of Labour’s most influential prime ministers in Britain, were both accidental leaders. They achieved elevation unexpectedly after the early deaths of leaders who were cast for lengthy tenures at the top. Wilson succeeded after the sudden death in January 1963 of Hugh Gaitskell from a rare autoimmune disease at the early age of 56. Blair succeeded in July 1994 following the sudden death from a heart attack of John Smith, aged just 55. Smith had been party leader for less than two years.
Wilson would go on to be prime minister for nearly eight years in all, and Blair for just over ten.
The rescheduling of BBC’s most popular television sitcom may have settled the outcome of the 1964 General Election. With opinion polls showing the leading parties neck and neck, Labour’s Harold Wilson, who was trying to oust the Conservatives after 13 years in office, was deeply worried by the fact that Steptoe and Son was due to be shown at 8 o’clock on election night, just an hour before the polls closed. He felt this would adversely affect Labour’s turnout as the majority of the show’s audience was likely to be their supporters. He protested to the Corporation’s Director-General, Sir Hugh Greene, who eventually agreed to postpone the show until nine. Wilson thanked Greene saying, ‘That will be worth a dozen or more seats to me.’ Labour won by just four. Greene later said that he had always wondered ‘whether I should have a bad conscience.’
Conservative Prime Minister of Britain Harold Macmillan would have fought the 1964 General Election against Labour new boy Harold Wilson had he not falsely believed he had cancer.
He had decided in the autumn of 1963 to retire in early 1964 and not contest the election, but on 7 October he changed his mind and decided he would lead the government into the election after all. The next day, however, he was unexpectedly hospitalised for surgery on his prostate, which was initially diagnosed as cancerous. He wrote out a resignation statement to be read at the party conference. One account has suggested that the conference chairman, Lord Home, who (perhaps not so) coincidentally would succeed Macmillan as prime minister, rushed the statement to the conference and read it out before Macmillan could change his mind again. It later turned out that he did not have cancer. He made a respectable recovery and did not die until 1986 at the ripe old age of 92.
It was left for the (de-titled) Alec Douglas-Home, famously chastised by Wilson as ‘the 14th Earl of Home’ (the title he had disclaimed) to fight against the youthful Labour leader. Wilson, as we have seen, squeaked home by a narrow majority of four.
In light of the startling social cleavage presented by the two adversaries, it is an intriguing thought whether in such a tight battle the more experienced and in touch Macmillan might just have held the Conservatives in office had
he been at the helm.
Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s decision in September 1978 not to call a General Election that autumn but to continue into a fifth and final year of office turned out to be a disastrous decision that, eight months later, ushered in his Conservative opponent, Margaret Thatcher, and ejected the Labour Party from government for nearly a generation.
The decision astonished every political observer as the weeks before had built up an almost unstoppable momentum for calling an election. The Government was struggling to keep a parliamentary majority, and a pact with the small Liberal Party had just ended. The Government was, however, only 2 per cent behind the Conservatives in the most recent opinion polls.
Even as Callaghan broadcast to the nation on the evening of 7 September, everyone expected it to be because he was going to announce the date for an October election. Instead, he baulked. He would not, he told the expectant electorate, ‘seek your votes because there is some blue sky overhead today.’
He ploughed on. He encountered the ‘Winter of Discontent’, a series of strikes by public sector workers that left rubbish uncollected in the streets and bodies unburied in morgues. His government was eventually defeated – by one vote – in a confidence debate in March 1979, and in May, Mrs Thatcher inflicted the heaviest defeat on an incumbent government since the war.
Ironically, in the previous October, when the election could have been held, Gallup opinion polls showed the Government enjoying a five-point lead over the Conservatives. They would have won the election handsomely. They maintained the lead until December when the strikes began to bite, and never recovered.
Had Labour won in 1978, and with the next election not then due until 1983, it becomes an intriguing question whether Mrs Thatcher would have lasted as Conservative leader. She would have been at the party’s helm in Opposition for seven years. No Conservative leader – before or since – has spent so long as leader without having brought the party a place in government.
Harold Wilson became famous for always having his pipe with him. He started the practice entirely as a television prop. During his first television broadcast after becoming leader, his trusted adviser, Marcia Williams, warned him that his habit of raising his fist to emphasise a point looked threatening to the viewer. They decided that he should carry his pipe in one of his hands to stop himself. It worked, and became a fixture of his image. He actually preferred large cigars and would usually smoke one after lunch. It was a sight he carefully kept from the screen in favour of the classless pipe.
Williams encouraged him in another habit too. He tended to rest his left hand on his face during interviews. She told him to carry on as it showed off his wedding ring. ‘You had this comfortable picture of the dependable young family man – it gave the image of reassurance,’ Williams confided, according to Michael Cockerell’s ‘Live from No. 10’, his chronicle of early political television.
Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which lays out the principles of Communism, was so convolutedly written that the official censor allowed it for translation into Russian on the grounds that it was a ‘difficult and hardly comprehensible’ work that ‘few would read and still fewer understand. It is unlikely to find many readers among the general public.’
The film of John Steinbeck’s biting, Depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was passed by the Soviet censors because it portrayed an unattractive picture of life for the working classes in the capitalist United States. It was later banned when the authorities discovered that audiences were enormously impressed by the fact that the poor, itinerant farming family of the story, meant to represent America’s dispossessed, owned their own car.
Ignorance also worked in the opposite direction. During the notorious McCarthy anti-Communist witch-hunt in the United States in the 1950s, popular hysteria could be whipped up with amazing ease. To illustrate the public’s dangerous suspension of common sense, William Evjue, editor of the Capital Times, a newspaper in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin, who had launched a campaign to expose McCarthyism, had a reporter stand on a street corner in the state capital, Madison, asking passers-by to sign a petition. It was in fact the American Declaration of Independence. Of 112 people approached to sign it, 111 thought it subversive and refused.
It is one of the ironies of Marx’s life that had he not forged his close friendship with Friedrich Engels, the wealthy son of a cotton factory capitalist who continually sent him money to keep the family out of destitution, Marx would never have been able to support himself, and might literally have starved to death.
The two key leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Lenin and Trotsky, both found their way into the country through foreign help, one deliberate and one accidental. Without these fortuitous actions, neither would have played the central roles they did which were crucial to the eventual Communist success.
In February 1917, at the height of the First World War, the smaller Menshevik faction had overthrown the Tsar in the first of the two revolutions that year. Lenin, the leader of the larger Bolsheviks, was in exile in Switzerland. The Germans calculated that Lenin’s presence back in St Petersburg could add to the general disruption and reduce Russia’s ability to carry on the war against them. They arranged for Lenin to be transported by sealed train across German territory, in Churchill’s celebrated words, ‘like a plague bacillus into Russia.’ Lenin would spearhead the opposition to the Menshevik regime, culminating in the October Revolution and the ushering in of 75 years of the Soviet Union.
MI5 documents, only released in 2001, revealed that Lenin’s right-hand man, Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, was under surveillance by the agency after the outbreak of the February Revolution. He was in exile in New York and trying to return to Russia to challenge the new government. MI5 tracked him as he left America on a ship bound for St Petersburg and in March arrested him in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
He would have remained there, out of touch with the Communists’ struggle, had it not been for the intervention of MI5’s sister agency, MI6, the overseas intelligence service. MI6 believed that the information about Trotsky used by MI5 had been planted by an agent provocateur, and persuaded the Canadian authorities to release him. Within a month of his arrest, Trotsky was back on a ship heading for Russia and his role as leading war maker in the civil war that guaranteed the Bolsheviks’ victory.
Lenin miraculously survived an assassination attempt in 1918, less than a year after the launch of the Russian revolution. The country was embroiled in civil war, the outcome of which was far from clear. His death then might have led to any number of eventualities for Russia.
He was leaving a Moscow factory, where he had given a speech on 30 August, when a woman, Fanya Kaplan, apparently complaining about food shortages, fired three shots that hit Lenin in the neck, shoulder and chest. Remarkably, he lived.
Had he died, in the midst of war, he would probably have been succeeded by his powerful Red Army head, Leon Trotsky, averting the catastrophe that was to follow under Stalin. He lived, though, for another five years, by which time a period of peace had reduced Trotsky’s significance and allowed Stalin to build a power base.
When Lenin eventually died in January 1924, Stalin was the more effective in manoeuvring himself into pole position.
How close Lenin came to dying that day only emerged later. It was four years before he was strong enough to undergo surgery. When doctors recovered the bullets, one was found to be a dumdum bullet designed to explode on impact. It had failed to do so. Even more strange, it was discovered that the casing had been smeared with curare, a deadly poison. Quite how Lenin survived remains an astonishing mystery.
As a 16-year-old, all Adolf Hitler dreamed of wanting to do with his life was to become an artist or an architect. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna twice but the examiners rejected him because of the poor quality of his test drawings. The Academy’s Dean thought he showed a talent for architecture, but the architectural school refused to relax its rule re
quiring a high school diploma, which Hitler did not possess.
On such decisions the fate of generations would turn.
Hitler’s family doctor was so worried about the disturbed state and frequent nightmares of the six-year-old Adolf that he recommended to his mother that the boy should be sent for treatment to a children’s mental hospital in Vienna. Evidence suggests it was likely to have been the institution run by Sigmund Freud.
It did not happen. Hitler’s mother is believed to have rejected the advice since it was likely it would reveal the often brutal treatment Hitler received at his stern father’s hands.
Who knows what effect the analysis might have had on the young personality?
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he was the fourth to hold the office in just nine months. His appointment was the result of a complicated power-sharing deal to end a period of political chaos that had seen governments fall after just months, and no fewer than three general elections in two years.
The Nazi Party held only two other seats in the 11-man Cabinet, both minor posts, Interior and a Minister without Portfolio. Hitler had been appointed as a compromise. At the most recent election in November, the Nazis had seen their share of the vote fall for the first time since 1928 and the more moderate leaders had agreed to the appointment, believing that Hitler’s power was on the wane and they would be keeping him under their control.
Franz von Papen, a former Chancellor and now Vice Chancellor, was quietly satisfied that the Nazi firebrand had been neutered: ‘We have him framed in.’ He would learn differently within months.
The United States might have been a monarchy had a German prince made up his mind more quickly. In 1786, as the Constitutional Convention was being planned, a group of senior members of the Continental Congress, Alexander Hamilton, Nathaniel Gortham, the presiding officer of the Congress and James Monroe, who would become a future president, wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of King Frederick the Great, inviting him to become King of the United States.
