McGoverning

I've always been fascinated at how much stuff there is in the UK, all the actors and banks and industrial concerns and rail transit systems and political associations and overbearing police state infrastructures that have been rearing their condescendingly carnivorous heads since Peterloo. It's an intriguing place, although all I can truly say for certain is that you can get excellent cookies at Ben's in London.

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It is a wonderful microcosm, and especially in those days when there were even more of same because, for example, British-owned industry still existed. I can also recommend a succession of bakeries in Bristol (my old haunt at uni), and in London there's the Maids of Honour tea room out in Kew where it's still 1962 but only in the very, very best sort of ways.

Actual Ace Icon Ted Heath.
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Ted Heath to any LGBTQIA+ readers who follow along, nodding: "I am not a role model. No, really."

Reform? In the Home Office? Funny.
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Bless their hearts, the Libs mean well. Mostly.

*stares in Bethlehem Steel*
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This. This is a true thing that you have said and observed here. This.

A bit of proxy warfare that might deserve more discourse in due time.
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One might think, certainly...

You can't see it, but I'm presently sporting a grin wider than the M25. The only queen I'd kneel to.
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Oor Bahbruh was quite a lady. Quite a lady.


And so, a Second Great Heathen Army descends upon England from the shores of the far north. This time, not of reavers and settlers fit to transform Northumbria, but of responsible long-term policy planning fit to transform incomes from old Wessex to Wolverhampton. I'd also be curious to see how this scheme might ripple out long-term. One would imagine that a certain RT host's arguments would fall flatter than they otherwise did if the North Sea was managed in a different fashion.
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It's really quite a decent-sized stone to chuck in the stream and see how it ripples. Yes re: that RT host. All sorts of potential ripples here, if they can pull it off.

There are only two classes of strikers whom I'll likely never sympathize with: cops and doctors. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, with their pay scales. Mouths stuffed with gold indeed.
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Certainly not the most telegenic examples of economic disadvantage. Barbara proceeded to lay about her with a political axe handle.

An encapsulation of Benn's career if ever there was one.
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One certainly could make that argument.

Holy shit, is this actually going to happen?
To quote one of the high water marks of British political drama, "you might think that; I couldn't possibly comment."

I would though like to point out that no dogs were harmed in the making of ... this chapter. And that we reach its end with the first Official McGoverning Cliffhanger! Interesting times. Or, rather, "interesting."
 
So what date is this attack on Scott happening TTL? Because FWIG of OTL, the attempted murder was late 1975, and it definitely seems to happening earlier here.

Also, can't wait to see what kind of ripples Foreign Secretary Thorpe is making on the world stage (especially in the southern third of Africa).

All good points and questions. As it happens, ITTL, that last scene goes down late in February of '75. Thorpe's increased opportunity cost in the event of exposure has indeed sped things up a bit.
 
It is a wonderful microcosm, and especially in those days when there were even more of same because, for example, British-owned industry still existed. I can also recommend a succession of bakeries in Bristol (my old haunt at uni), and in London there's the Maids of Honour tea room out in Kew where it's still 1962 but only in the very, very best sort of ways.

Oh, you went to college in the UK? That's awesome.
 

John Farson

Banned
All good points and questions. As it happens, ITTL, that last scene goes down late in February of '75. Thorpe's increased opportunity cost in the event of exposure has indeed sped things up a bit.

With Thorpe becoming Foreign Secretary, I feel like his chronic bugaboo with Scott has yielded a ticking time bomb for Wilson and his government. Regardless of how things turn out with Scott - i.e., whether he lives or dies - if and when this all blows up it might result in a royal shitshow for Wilson (or his successor) and the government as a whole - if Labour is still in government by that time, that is.
 
Oh, you went to college in the UK? That's awesome.

In part. I get to count two alma maters, UNC and University of Bristol (Up Brizzie! Now if City could just literally ever figure out how to make it to the Premiership...)

With Thorpe becoming Foreign Secretary, I feel like his chronic bugaboo with Scott has yielded a ticking time bomb for Wilson and his government. Regardless of how things turn out with Scott - i.e., whether he lives or dies - if and when this all blows up it might result in a royal shitshow for Wilson (or his successor) and the government as a whole - if Labour is still in government by that time, that is.

It does seem quite possible that Mister Thorpe's Closet is in the process of going
pacific_nuke.jpg

... as we speak, or rather read along. We'll see how it all turns out.

@Llamastrangler,

You're very kind. I spent only a few, but some of the best, years of my life in the UK, this is material for which I have both great interest and great affection, really. Very glad to hear it comes across well.
 
In the spirit of CRUNCHY CRUNCHY GRANULARITY from the chapter just past, a small treat for the eyes. By way of illustration, some of the automotive goals laid out in the chapter just past that have to do with various component entities of the BL homunculus and the plans expressed for them in the chapter just past.

What TTL's British Leyland intends to turn out - if George Turnbull can pull off the turnaround he intends - starts over in what BL called the Specialist Division which, by the early Seventies, really meant the Rover and Triumph marques produced at that point out of Solihull. Turnbull intends to hang on to a cut-down, second generation version of the Triumph Dolomite turned into a smaller, perkier compact sedan on the Michelotti design:
Triumph-SD2-Michelotti-1.jpg


While Specialist Division mostly concentrates on two vehicles designated SD1 and SD2. SD2 would be the bigger Triumph sedan, not fully saloon-sized but in the "sporty five-door sedan" style popular in Europe in the period notably with makers like Saab and BMW.
img


Of course the SD1, Rover's principal vehicle in the period, did go into production IOTL even winning a European Car of the Year gong early in its run.
1606090526078.jpeg


Then of course we have the ADO88 project, the supermini intended to fight the Ford Fiesta and VW Golf in time, before too much ground had been ceded already as IOTL (hi, Austin Metro!) So really probably something on the lines of this from among the half-dozen different, distinctive, and competing (because British Fucking Leyland) prototype designs ginned up around 1974-75:
superado88_03.jpg


You might recall in there intimations of something extra, that George Turnbull Has An Idea and he's not quite ready to put it into detail for Shore. Well. IOTL, of course, around 1975 Turnbull was hired on in far-off South Korea where one of the Miracle-on-the-Han chaebols wanted to go from knock-down knockoffs to production of its own, indigenous vehicle. Because the story of indigenous postwar British auto manufacture IOTL is only an overlong veil of tears, Turnbull headhunted four or five of the brightest men involved in British car design and engineering plus an Italian stylist he liked, grabbed a couple Morris Marinas to monkey with for prototypes, struck a deal with Mitsubishi on engine parts, and within not much more than twelve months turned out a vehicle that launched what is now one of the world's major mid-market auto powers... the Hyundai Pony.

Well: folks, here IMyTL, meet the Morris Metropolitan...
JeeqRhGuR9CiTG5mgENdXg

Because if calling the Hyundai Pony a thoroughly British car is wrong, I don't want to be right

ITTL what that adds up to is earlier outreach to Honda, with whom BL would partner on vehicles starting with the OTL!Triumph Acclaim and then a long series of Rovers, in order to soup things up under the hood. But, working from Marinas for prototyping, it's very likely that with the same or similar bods involved in project development a BL!Pony would look pretty much like OTL's.

Just in case it seems like only the car-makers under the BL umbrella have things to do, Mr. Crosland has made some space for Alvis - BL's vast armo(u)red vehicles division, once an independent outfit but kitbashed into BL like so many other bits Frankenstein-style - to get up to stuff. For example
0iO4dRf.jpg


The FV4211, known colloquially in the British Army and defense-R&D establishment as the "Aluminum Chieftain." Which is to say it was a Chieftain tank - Britain's main battle tank of the Sixties through much of the Eighties - modified, constructed with lightweight aluminum framing to which was added, on the first tank body so designed, the then-bleeding-edge Chobham layered-ceramic composite armo(u)r that the M1 Abrams and Britain's own Challenger-series tanks would make famous. (In early days it was codenamed Burlington, Chobham was the name of the town where the Brits' armored-warfare R&D outfit was located, but several transatlantic confusions in paperwork led to the name change.) Mister Crosland's Army may be a bit smaller than OTL's, but will contain production versions of this well-known prototype, with a Rolls-Royce Condor V12 diesel added under the hood (to replace the... problematic Leyland engine) in the name of some baseline commonality with West German and American V12 diesels.



So there you are. A panoply of automotive preturbation, aka Sunday Afternoon Car Porn.
 
All good points and questions. As it happens, ITTL, that last scene goes down late in February of '75. Thorpe's increased opportunity cost in the event of exposure has indeed sped things up a bit.
Which means airline pilot Andrew Newton isn't involved like OTL. Are you using "A Very English Scandal" for guidance?
 
Let's just take a moment to look at the leaders of the Western Democracies at the end of 1974 TTL; notable changes (as in, office being held by the opposing political party) are in bold, while different office holders of the same party are italicized:
  • United States: President George McGovern (Democrat)
  • Canada: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Liberal)
  • United Kingdom: Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Labour)
  • France: President Francois Mitternand (Socialist)
  • West Germany: Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SDP)
  • Australia: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (Labour)
  • New Zealand: Prime Minister Norman Kirk (Labour)
  • Israel: Prime Minister Yigal Allon (Alignment)
  • and for what it's worth -- Sweden, Norway, and Finland, each has a Social Democrat Prime Minister; while the Netherlands has a Labour PM, and Austria has an SPO Chancellor.
So at this moment, the world's democracies are not only roughly aligned, but are specifically moved to the left compared with OTL; even leaders who are the same, like Trudeau and Wilson, are nudged leftward in some respective fashions (Trudeau in how he went after the NDP, Wilson in giving the Foreign Office to the idealistic Liberals), and Allon of course is going to hold the line against militarizing Israel's centre-left and against the rise of the right in Israel more generally, at least in the short term.

Knowing @Yes, this serendipitous moment -- and it surely is a moment, as even before McGovern is fully humbled at home, this liberal coalition abroad is surely going to fray, as the madness of "events" inevitably, come into play -- this moment will not go to waste. To speculators -- what might they be more likely to agree on?

Sanctions on South Africa seem, to me anyway, to be a good possibility -- even OTL Sen William Roth, a Republican, had been introducing legislation to that effect as early as 1972, and the Democratic Platform pretty much called for the same; and with these people leading their nations and directing their foreign policy, it looks like there will plenty of enthusiasm to support the Americans in this, especially if their the ones leading the way. Though I suppose we'll be finding out soon enough.
 
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Which means airline pilot Andrew Newton isn't involved like OTL. Are you using "A Very English Scandal" for guidance?

Newton's not involved, you're correct about that. David Holmes has taken a much more "close-hold" approach to this as they say in the spy game, really for two reasons:

  • One speaks to his own personality, and a streak of "if you want it done right do it yourself, or at most also involve the person over whom you have the most leverage," which in l'affaire Thorpe was always going to be poor Peter
  • From Holmes' perspective the data point on the risk/necessity axis has inflected way up from where it was IOTL, because IMyTL Jeremy's not just a party leader of great ambition, he actually holds one of the Great Ministries of State in a potentially fragile coalition government so the combination of danger and demand for a ... definitive solution have both escalated wildly
  • I'll bring in a third thing here that goes through Holmes' mind at least: since a number of actors in and around the generalized Establishment and especially the security-state apparatus have already, in past cases, played a part to suppress and generally hush up Jeremy's situation, he hopes that if they can make a clean job of it and stash the body, once it's eventually found they might benefit from that same institutionalized desire to keep secrets from coming out
As for sources, oh, a bunch of things. On this I'm actually fond of Barrie Penrose's stuff, both the "Pencourt" materials and his work with Freeman, just because they were there at the time and capture the flavor of the moment nicely. But there's a whole bunch of sources to examine or bring up that relate to the Thorpe case.
 
Let's just take a moment to look at the leaders of the Western Democracies at the end of 1974 TTL; notable changes (as in, office being held by the opposing political party) are in bold, while different office holders of the same party are italicized:
  • United States: President George McGovern (Democrat)
  • Canada: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Liberal)
  • United Kingdom: Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Labour)
  • France: President Francois Mitternand (Socialist)
  • West Germany: Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SDP)
  • Australia: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (Labour)
  • New Zealand: Prime Minister Norman Kirk (Labour)
  • Israel: Prime Minister Yigal Allon (Alignment)
  • and for what it's worth -- Sweden, Norway, and Finland, each has a Social Democrat Prime Minister; while the Netherlands has a Labour PM, and Austria has an SPO Chancellor.
So at this moment, the world's democracies are not only roughly aligned, but are specifically moved to the left compared with OTL; even leaders who are the same, like Trudeau and Wilson, are nudged leftward in some respective fashions (Trudeau in how he went after the NDP, Wilson in giving the Foreign Office to the idealistic Liberals), and Allon of course is going to hold the line against militarizing Israel's centre-left and against the rise of the right in Israel more generally, at least in the short term.

Knowing @Yes, this serendipitous moment -- and it surely is a moment, as even before McGovern is fully humbled at home, this liberal coalition abroad is surely going to fray, as the madness of "events" inevitably, come into play -- this moment will not go to waste. To speculators -- what might they be more likely to agree on?

Sanctions on South Africa seem, to me anyway, to be a good possibility -- even OTL Sen William Roth, a Republican, had been introducing legislation to that effect as early as 1972, and the Democratic Platform pretty much called for the same; and with these people leading their nations and directing their foreign policy, it looks like there will plenty of enthusiasm to support the Americans in this, especially if their the ones leading the way. Though I suppose we'll be finding out soon enough.
One erratum in there (it's fine, it's been a while since I brought up the subject): Mitterand doesn't win his election IMyTL until the spring of '75. Pompidou hangs on grimly through just about the whole winter of '74-'75 buoyed by sheer will, the desire to have his stamp firmly set as host and patron of CART, and to see off any grousing about his grudging decision to name Chaban-Delmas as the Gaullist heir. That does indeed turn out to be not so great for the Gaullists as it's (1) just enough for Chaban-Delmas to see off challengers on the right like Giscard and (2) not enough for him in the second round, with so many enemies willing to let the Left have their day and hopefully (from the Gaullist POV) disintegrate under the stress in order to get a better candidate next go round. After that, though, you do have potential for this rather remarkable general-social-democratic alignment among leaders of the West. Relations with Southern Africa in general are one place to look. So is macroeconomic policy, there are stressors even in this case but it's possible for Ken Galbraith to align and coordinate a collaborative float of the Cambridge Group's currency basket, coordinated protection of reserves, policy to tackle inflation without preference for austerity, common ground on state controls and labor relations, etc.
 
After that, though, you do have potential for this rather remarkable general-social-democratic alignment among leaders of the West... So is macroeconomic policy, there are stressors even in this case but it's possible for Ken Galbraith to align and coordinate a collaborative float of the Cambridge Group's currency basket, coordinated protection of reserves, policy to tackle inflation without preference for austerity, common ground on state controls and labor relations, etc.
I imagine a lot of this is going to be covered in future updates, with a focus on the domestic front, when the TL returns to the States.
 
Newton's not involved, you're correct about that. David Holmes has taken a much more "close-hold" approach to this as they say in the spy game, really for two reasons:

  • One speaks to his own personality, and a streak of "if you want it done right do it yourself, or at most also involve the person over whom you have the most leverage," which in l'affaire Thorpe was always going to be poor Peter
  • From Holmes' perspective the data point on the risk/necessity axis has inflected way up from where it was IOTL, because IMyTL Jeremy's not just a party leader of great ambition, he actually holds one of the Great Ministries of State in a potentially fragile coalition government so the combination of danger and demand for a ... definitive solution have both escalated wildly
  • I'll bring in a third thing here that goes through Holmes' mind at least: since a number of actors in and around the generalized Establishment and especially the security-state apparatus have already, in past cases, played a part to suppress and generally hush up Jeremy's situation, he hopes that if they can make a clean job of it and stash the body, once it's eventually found they might benefit from that same institutionalized desire to keep secrets from coming out
As for sources, oh, a bunch of things. On this I'm actually fond of Barrie Penrose's stuff, both the "Pencourt" materials and his work with Freeman, just because they were there at the time and capture the flavor of the moment nicely. But there's a whole bunch of sources to examine or bring up that relate to the Thorpe case.

Judging by what you've posted on the test thread, TTL's Thorpe Affair is going to backfire significantly on Wilson, and his gambit to win a full majority for Labor will fall under "Hoist by His Own Petard" (Or "Didn't Think This Through") on TV Tropes.

The tropes page for this TL needs some TLC. What are some new trope categories that can be added to the page and what are some TTL events that can be added to the existing trope categories on there?
 
Having read about Thorpe at length plus having watched A Very British Scandal, I find the lack of discipline he showed in his personal life while shooting like a meteor in his political one to be much like John Edwards, complete with the pretty boy looks and everything. Great ideology and personal political convictions, terrible personal morals.
 
One erratum in there (it's fine, it's been a while since I brought up the subject): Mitterand doesn't win his election IMyTL until the spring of '75... After that, though, you do have potential for this rather remarkable general-social-democratic alignment among leaders of the West.
Considering that Australia and New Zealand will be having scheduled elections in the final months of 1975, while West Germany has them in 1976 (to say nothing of McGovern's re-election campaign -- or any other elections that could happen as a result of, ahem, "events"), I do wonder if how long this level of alignment will actually last -- it'd look at least a little "off" if literally no parties on the right of any democratic nation's spectrum had any electoral success for five years straight. But I suppose we'll see either way.
 
Having read about Thorpe at length plus having watched A Very British Scandal, I find the lack of discipline he showed in his personal life while shooting like a meteor in his political one to be much like John Edwards, complete with the pretty boy looks and everything. Great ideology and personal political convictions, terrible personal morals.
Turning attention to the upcoming trial, will George Carman still be conducting the defense of Thorpe? Or will there be a different barrister? More importantly, will this letter be brought to light? If so, it will make TTL's Thorpe Affair more explosive: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43631718

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