The 1970 British presidential election was the fifth election for the President of Britain, held on the 9th July 1970. It remains to date the closest British presidential election in history, the only one where the winner did not win an overall majority, and the last to be held before the two-round system was adopted under the British Presidential Elections Act 1971.
Despite some degree of opposition from within the Labour Party, incumbent President Barbara Castle was not put through a leadership contest but allowed to seek a second term; while Home Secretary James Callaghan was tempted to challenge her due to his fears that the In Place of Strife agreement had made her too unpopular with the trade unions, his pragmatic attitude to party disputes and discussions with Wilson and his fellow Cabinet members convinced him not to.
In stark contrast to the rather impotent challenge of Reginald Maudling in the 1965 presidential election, the Tories picked one of the most well-known and controversial figures in the party to be their candidate for President- Shadow Defence Secretary Enoch Powell. Powell had come to prominence after giving the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood speech’ in 1968, in which he condemned foreign immigration into Britain and the Race Relations Bill being pushed for by the Wilson government, as well as advocating for free market policies to cut taxes and foreign aid.
With such well-known and forceful personalities running for Labour and the Tories, most prominent Liberals were intimidated, and prominent figures in the party like its new leader Jeremy Thorpe, Mark Bonham Carter and Eric Lubbock decided not to run. Instead, the party’s conference in 1969 went to a dark horse candidate- Birmingham City Councillor and briefly MP for Birmingham Ladywood after a 1969 by-election (sitting for just over 2 months before losing the seat to Labour in the general election), Wallace Lawler. Lawler was the first member of a major party not to be a sitting MP to be nominated for President, and despite being largely ignored in favour of Castle and Powell at the time, his role in the election has been heavily analysed in hindsight- some suggest if one of the more popular figures had run, they would not have sapped votes from Powell, but from Castle. Lawler, as a figure opposed to immigrants settling in his native Birmingham, managed the surprising feat of sapping support from Powell.
Meanwhile, Powell put Labour in a very unusual position. Polls suggested 63% of Britons agreed with the sentiments Powell had expressed in the Rivers of Blood speech, down from the 74% recorded to agree in 1968 but still a very worrying figure for Labour. Nevertheless, Castle refused to bow to Powell’s sentiments, giving rallies where she advocated for solidarity between white and non-white voters and famously pointing to the advocacy for Powell by the National Front’s leading figures A.K. Chesterton and John Tyndall.
On top of this was the surprising endorsement of her campaign by the
Times and
Sunday Times, condemnation of Powell by a number of centre-right Tories such as Jim Prior and Francis Pym, and the advocacy for her re-election to stop the adamantly pro-Unionist Powell by Northern Irish Republican MP Bernadette Devlin, which helped deliver Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone on the island to Castle in what was the best performance for a Labour President in the province up to that point.
When the votes had finally been counted, Castle had narrowly won, taking 47.7% of the vote to 46.8% for Powell, with 4.5% of it going to Lawler. Incensed, Powell called for a recount, which the Electoral Commission agreed to, but the margin did not tighten.
The result helped prompt many Powell-supporting white Britons to riot in cities with large immigrant populations such as Birmingham, London and Powell’s native Wolverhampton, and at least 18 people were murdered in hate crimes, with numerous reports of the police not taking action to protect the people of colour being attacked or even joining in with the violence against them. Similar violence from the UVF towards Catholics was reported in Northern Ireland.
While Castle and Wilson sought to calm the nation, the public mood both from Powell’s supporters and his opponents was despondent, and the so-called ‘Powellite riots’ would live on in the memories of many Britons of colour; future Labour MP Bernie Grant, one of the first four black MPs, would recount being caught in riots of this kind in his native Tottenham to condemn public morning of Powell when he died in 1998.
For much of the remaining parliamentary term, Wilson was thought to be fighting a losing battle, particularly as the introduction of decimal coinage at the start of 1971, killings by and of members of the IRA in Northern Ireland in 1971 which culminated with the ‘Bloody Sunday’ murders in 1972, Idi Amin’s deportation of Asians in Uganda to Britain, the protracted Common Market membership negotiations that took until early 1974 to finally result in Britain joining, and the oil embargo by Arab states in late 1973, all seemed to many voters to prove Powell’s worldview right.
Unfortunately for the Tories, this backfired on them badly when the clock ran out and Wilson was forced to call a general election in 1974. Since 1969, the party’s leader in the Commons had been Sir Keith Joseph, an adamant right-winger who had only drifted rightward as the parliamentary term had gone on. However, at the launch of his party’s campaign for the general election in July of 1974, he gave a speech in which he declared poor mothers were ‘producing problem children’ that threatened ‘the balance of our human stock’. His language was widely regarded as eugenicist, and when Powell unexpectedly walked back his support for Joseph, it only undermined him further.
The 1974 general election saw a huge upset, as Labour scraped a third consecutive overall majority of three seats, the Tories’ progress being impeded by the Liberals and SNP as well as Joseph’s leadership. Instantly, Joseph’s position became untenable, and despite staying on until just before the end of the year, he was deposed as Tory leader for, as Tory MP Ian Gilmour would put it to the press, ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’.
Despite this shocking defeat, the Tories’ fortunes would turn around just as quickly as they had in the early 1960s. Less than a year later, with Castle not running for a third term, the first race for President with the new runoff system would occur, and would prove to be a striking contest…
(results by county close-up)
