Mosley was very internationalist, he doesn't really fit the "Gaullist" profile.
Mosley was very internationalist after the war. Before the war he was actually pretty isolationist and very much an Empire-uber-alles man.
Mosley was very internationalist, he doesn't really fit the "Gaullist" profile.
Mosley was very internationalist after the war. Before the war he was actually pretty isolationist and very much an Empire-uber-alles man.
Funny enough I was thinking the other the similarities between Powell and Paul, both libertarians with isolationist foreign policies, although Powell's economic policies were probably more coherent. Also they had the ability to inspire fanatical loyalty from some people while causing others to regard them as dangerous lunatics, no one was ever ambivalent about Powell or Paul!
Personally I don't think Powell would ever have made PM as he was too impersonal and inflexible in his views to build the sort of personal alliances you need in the British system. He was the closest thing Britain ever had to a De Gaulle but in order to make him more electable you would need to do almost a complete personality transplant on him and change the majority of events in his life.
BTW Powell was my local MP for the first 11 years of my life.![]()
Well, you know, Powells an odd one. I read Simon Heffer's biography of him some time back an it's apperant that after 1945 his personal views were very much sensitive to the radical changes of the day such as the process of decolonisation and general end of empire, the Cold War, and so on. Alternate development in an Alt TL could play a very significant view on shaping his political policies.
Russell
Pretty much everything Powell believed seems contradictory when you try to force it into normal categories, he was very much his own man on everything. The same is true of his great friend Michael Foot (and the fact that they were friends is itself an example of this). There are few politicians who can pull that off. From my recent reading I've learned that Lord Palmerston was another: ardent opponent of reform at home, but adamant that the UK should support radical revolutionaries in Europe, popular with young liberals even though he was an old conservative (see Ron Paul?), practiced a practically psychotic foreign policy that scared the shit out of every other politician and the Queen, yet the public were convinced he was the only person who could run the Foreign Office competently.
True but that ATL is going to need major POD's during the interwar era to happen, even a Tory government wouldn't have been able to hold on to India unless the War had gone significantly better for Britain.
Well, changes post war could also affect him. He apparently remained ardently pro CANZ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) for quite some time after Indian independence. He initially thought of them as part of the larger "British" Patria until the mid 50's when it became apparent that Britain was moving more towards Europe and in response, CANZ were starting to look elsewhere. You could maybe butterfly that and give him dreams of a stronger Commonwealth as core to his foreign policy.
Personally though, I think the big issue for any 1960's Powell government would be his handling of Northern Ireland. He obviously, in OTL became an Ulster Unionist but he did have strong stance on civil rights. For instance, during the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950's he accused the British government (his own government) of racism in their apathy towards the Kenyans. He also spoke favorably of NI PM Terence O'Neill in his efforts to broker better relations between the Catholic and Protestant communities. He ultimately only became the ardent Ulster Unionists after both sides started blowing each other up.
In line with the above, you may also be able to butterfly his new found religion. He was a pretty firm Atheist until around the late 40's early 50's until his romanticism got the better of him (or so I recon).
However, I honestly think that Powell would have made a poor PM. He was too inflexible to be a good politician. Unless he has a strong cabinet to support him (unlikely, given how he pissed folk off) and moderate some of his policies then he's just going to fail. he was a far better academic than a politician.
Russell
Powell was a very good constituency MP I believe. One thing often forgotten now is that he received support even from the ethnic minorities in his constituency: one thing he was trying to get across in "Rivers of Blood" was the whole thing about how if a new set of immigrants misbehave, the white vigilante response isn't going to discriminate between the new set and the old set, they'll just lynch any brown person they can find. Hence why nobody is more hostile to immigration than the last set of immigrants.I wasn't around to have him as my MP but I find it a bit surprising that, considering how controversial Powell is in the rest of the UK, that no one ever seems to have a bad word to say about him here. I for one have a certain fondness for his response upon being asked to explain his defeat to Eddie McGrady ("My opponent polled more votes than me")
Yeah, but the thing was, on paper he should not have got away with that. Britain wasn't a superpower at the time, the army was small and outdated, we were very vulnerable to invasion from France, and it seemed like a real possibility at one point. I think the 1848 revolutions distracting Europe helped. Basically if you read the government communications from the time, Palmerston was saying "Fuck the world, Britain pwns all" at a time when Britain had pretty much the same global power level as it does nowadays! (Which makes me wonder what would happen if someone tried it now...)Considering that it could be summed up as 'Fuck the world, Britain pwns all' I can see how that might be popular.
Yeah, but the thing was, on paper he should not have got away with that. Britain wasn't a superpower at the time, the army was small and outdated, we were very vulnerable to invasion from France, and it seemed like a real possibility at one point. I think the 1848 revolutions distracting Europe helped. Basically if you read the government communications from the time, Palmerston was saying "Fuck the world, Britain pwns all" at a time when Britain had pretty much the same global power level as it does nowadays! (Which makes me wonder what would happen if someone tried it now...)
Wait, what? When did France have the capacity to invade when Palmerston was PM?
Well, he was still influenced by European ideas before the war (such as, erm, fascism).
You still have a point though, Mosley had a Mr Toad-ish capacity for jumping on bandwagons almost at random and seeming to believe wholeheartedly in them for a brief time before moving onto something else.
You still have a point though, Mosley had a Mr Toad-ish capacity for jumping on bandwagons almost at random and seeming to believe wholeheartedly in them for a brief time before moving onto something else.