Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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The Last Journey on a Remarkable Road
The Last Journey on a Remarkable Road
"...so I see this not as a resignation but a recognition, of my own age and longevity in public office, and an opportunity for exploring new avenues of public service, what I plan to be the last but perhaps greatest journey on this remarkable road..."
- James Callaghan resignation speech, February 1st, 1980
It had been considered an inevitability that Callaghan - despite pulling a rabbit out of a hat in the 1978 snap elections and returning Labour to a surpise majority against Margaret Thatcher's brief and polarizing leadership - would resign well in advance of the next elections, due no later than 1983, to give his preferred successor, Foreign Secretary and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, a chance to build his own base of support at Number 10. The Winter of Discontent that erupted shortly after the 1978 polls and the increasingly severe recession throughout 1979 propelled the newly popular Tories under Willie Whitelaw to a remarkable polling lead, at one point as much as 30% [1], and led to a number of questions swirling about whether Callaghan was capable of leading the deeply divided British left any longer. Callaghan was said to have realized that his time was at an end when he fumbled a counter against Whitelaw during the PMQs, earning jeers even from his own bench when he tepidly denounced the Conservative leader as "Thatcher, but in pants," and later famously took "a walk in the snow" [2] the next night in which determined that it was time to call it a career, as the only man to ever serve in all four Great Offices of State.
A leadership election was thus set for early March, and it erupted into chaos within days of Callaghan's announced retirement pending the election of his successor. It was, particularly, a media circus around candidates of the left. Michael Foot, the champion of the left wing of Labour in 1976, elected not to run, opening the door for an even more strident figure to seize the mantle - Tony Benn. "Benn's Hour?" asked the Guardian, as the left of the party rapidly consolidated around him. Enthusiasm for Healey even on the Labour Right seemed minimal, despite steady leadership at the Foreign Office since the last election; he reminded many too much of Callaghan, his patron. Such was the hesitancy that the Chancellor, David Owen, leapt into the fray, alongside EEC Chair Roy Jenkins, furthering splintering the anti-Bennite coalition. The day Jenkins announced he would again seek leadership, the London Stock Exchange declined by nearly 4%, one of its largest single-day declines in history, for it seemed like Benn was on the verge of waltzing to Number 10. So high were concerns around that possibility that some Labour MPs debated splitting off and entering a coalition government with Britain if for no reason than to make sure NATO was maintained (or, in more polemic language, "prevent us becoming the Soviet Union's largest naval and air base," as the Daily Mail infamously editorialized). The chances of "Commissar Benn," as Ted Heath had once nicknamed him, taking over the British government seemed not just live but likely.
Two factors complicated Benn's glide path to leadership and the political (and economic) earthquake it would have triggered. The first was a speech he gave which was viewed as his first major introduction to the British public as putative PM-in-waiting; despite presenting some popular ideas, such as diminishing the immediate power of the Prime Minister's office and introducing more bottom-up democracy to not just internal Labour elections but Britain generally, he soon pivoted to promising nationalizations of industry, the abolition of the Lords, the withdrawal from the EEC, unilateralism and the reunification of Ireland under Dublin. Even left-sympathetic tabloids joined Britain's conservative and centrist outlets in slamming the speech; while the Economist was measured in its supposition that "a Benn Premiership would immediately lead to economic catastrophe and diplomatic calamity, followed by Labour's internal divide becoming an impassable breach; one of Britain's two great postwar parties would effectively collapse, likely permanently," the Mail, meanwhile, more aggressively described the speech as "written for Andropov to deliver on May Day, but was lost by the same Royal Mail that Comrade Benn ran into the ground." The second event was related directly to the first: Owen waffled on whether he should continue to run as he prepared what he anticipated would be his final budget, and many "fence-sitters" moved to Healey, seen as still being the strongest institutionalist [3] and the likeliest man to defeat Benn head to head, and as some soft leftists panicked that Benn was so strident that the party was headed for electoral annihilation by the quietly competent Whitelaw, Michael Foot persuaded his idiosyncratic but charismatic friend, Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Shore, to make a bid for the ring himself...
[1] Because it wouldn't be British hypothetical election polls if the numbers weren't utterly absurd
[2] Lifted from the verbiage around Trudeau's decision to resign
[3] Owen being Chancellor during such a severe recession is a knock on him, rather than a boon
I have some North Korea-related things lined up, though it'll be less about KJI in the early 80s and more macro-level. It's hard to say what exactly is accurate and not accurate about his power consolidation considering how closed off the DPRK is, after all
NGL I almost typed "Pauly Shore" when I was writing that last bit originally
Sergeant Foley
Banned
Just found out former ROK President Chun Doo-hwan passed away from blood cancer at the age of 90.
Agreed, he’s going out on his own terms and had apparently always eyed spring of ‘80 as the time to do it
Sergeant Foley
Banned
Less than a month after Roh died. From what I've heard, Chun will NOT be given a State Funeral for obvious reasons (12.12.79 Coup against then-President Choi Kyu-hah & the 5.17-18.80 massacre in Gwangju).
Here's the hypocritical part of the ROK government's hypocrisy: they gave Roh a State Funeral (although it was a socially distanced restricted attendance at Olympic Park on October 30th with 50 people attending including family), but they won't give Chun the same courtesy.
Well, Argentina just got the snot kicked out of them by Chile and the dictatorship collapsed, so a 1982 Falklands is (at least for now) extremely unlikely
Ah, all righty! My apologies for missing that! Fascinating turn of events.
Yeah, Falklands was the junta's shot at deflection and it just backfired in their faces. I need to catch up on your work and I am enjoying it alot!
Haha no problem. TTL no JP2 means Soberanía during the Beagle Crisis fulfills the same role
Sergeant Foley
Banned
@KingSweden24 I hope Choi & Jeong watch their backs because Chun & Roh are getting crankier & crankier.
Thank you very much! Looking forward to seeing more of this and best of luck to the both of us ^_^