Part IX
PART IX
Divided and Conquered;

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Maudling and Heath on the Opposition Frontbench shortly before Douglas-Home's resignation, 1965
The 1965 General Election had seen the Conservative Party utterly routed, having been thrown out of government after fourteen long, and seemingly affluent, years in power. Now, with Douglas-Home unwilling to serve any longer and his continued leadership untenable, the battle for control of the party was about to begin. He announced his resignation on the 30th May, just over a month after his defeat and introduced a reformed electoral system in which the Parliamentary Conservative Party would elect a new leader, but vowed to stay on at least until the first round of voting on the 1st of July. From the very beginning the Shadow Chancellor Reginald Maudling and former Secretary of State for Industry and Trade (now provisionally holding the position of Shadow Home Secretary) Edward Heath declared their candidacy, as had been expected since even before the General Election. Maudling was clearly of the One Nation, moderate, centre of the party whilst Heath was seen as more of a reformer, advocating rolling back some of the social democratic, interventionist, measures implemented by successive "Consensus" governments.

With a One Nation and centre right candidate both in the running there was still a gaping vacuum on the right of the party for a candidate willing to take more radical positions. Quintin Hogg, the Viscount Halisham, had been seen as a future candidate since Harold Macmillan's resignation but his overenthusiastic conference speech had scuppered his leadership bid. The 1965 Leadership Election seemed ideal for Hogg, but his antiquated manner and his aggressive campaigning style had alienated many on the right. Instead there was a desire for something more modern, for a leader who embraced the monetarist ideals of the New Right - vowing to run himself if he could find no one more senior, Enoch Powell announced he would back any candidate on the right of the party and organise their campaign.

Enter Peter Thornyecroft. The man who Macmillan had all but forced to resign as Chancellor of the Exchequer, alongside whom Powell himself had resigned as a Junior Treasury Minister, had also brought monetarism to the party mainstream and was now emerging as the champion of the right of the party. Nominated by Powell and seconded - to many people's surprise - by Julian Amery after a stirring anti-Vietnam speech, Thorneycroft had a considerable amount of early media interest and a strong, if very small, core support base with a strict ideological dedication to advancing not only his interests, but the interest of a new kind of Conservatism.

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Thorneycroft in a profile by The Times, 1965

As the race for the leadership grew more intense, however, Heath began to pivot to the right and suck support away from Thorneycroft with promises of tax cuts, decreased regulation, and the denationalisation of some key "lame duck" industries as well as a less conciliatory approach towards the Trade Unions. Thorneycroft had other issues too - for one at nearly sixty he was far older than his too rivals, although Douglas-Home himself had proved advanced age was hardly a problem when it came to running the country, having become Prime Minister in the year of his sixtieth birthday. Further, the zeal of some of his supporters was, to quote Douglas-Home himself, "utterly terrifying - they would put ideology before country" and made a number of MPs who might have supported Thorneycroft far more reticent.

In the end, however, Heath's very successful attempt to steal support form his rival to the right proved to bis downfall. The right of the party did not have the influence it would later gain, and appealing to it would harm Heath in the eyes of more moderate MPs with whom he was more personally popular than Maudling. He had squandered an advantage in order to attract the right of the party - this strategy was in fact a late decision, and when Powell had been the assumed candidate of the right, Heath had assumed the right to be too fanatical to be worth wooing now, with a more respected figurehead, he had wasted time and lost votes trying to lure the right in. Maudling, painting himself as the moderate candidate and a "firm hand on the tiller" with experience of government, Maudling would secure a slim majority of votes with a secure lead of almost five points over his closest rival.

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Thorneycroft, and the right wing clique he represented, were crushed although one young, quiet, supporter Margaret Thatcher would quickly flit into the sphere of Edward Heath and from there advance the right's agenda from within the moderate bubble... For now, however, such concerns were forgotten as the jubilant Maudling supporters began drawing up their plans for opposition. Heath, for his part, was awarded with the position of Shadow Chancellor, and a small Shadow Cabinet was drawn up to coordinate opposition to the Crosland government.

  • Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party: Reginald Maudling
  • Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer: Edward Heath
  • Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs: Selwyn Lloyd
  • Shadow Secretary of State for the Home Department: Ian Macleod
  • Shadow Secretary of State for Defence: Duncan Sandys
  • Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Science: Margaret Thatcher
  • Shadow Commonwealth Secretary: Christopher Soames
  • Chairman of the Conservative Party: Anthony Barber
  • Opposition Chief Whip: William Whitelaw
  • Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords: Lord Carrington
 
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noooooooooooooooooooo

needs more duncan sandys

Someone (ahem) should do an Alternate Presidents/PMs list for the postwar UK based solely on who was most man-pretty on the front bench at the time. Not Just a Pretty Face: Well, Maybe... Sandys and Crosland both make the cut although, God help us, we would probably be stuck with David Owen at some point...

ETA: Healey always had Owen pegged best: "the good fairies gave the young doctor everything. Matinee-idol good looks, a lightning intelligence ... unfortunately, the bad fairy also made him a shit."
 
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@Cevolian,

I've been enjoying this quite a lot and shamefully failed to say so. Very good stuff. Crosland's one of those people whose prospects for full leadership were always marginal but not impossible and I'm very glad you found a smart way to get him in there. He'd have made a perfect Anglophone trifecta with Kennedy and Trudeau: tall, handsome, deeply intelligent and effortlessly arrogant about being so (so very like Trudeau), downright dashing, with a swashbuckling youth (like Kennedy and more than Trudeau that way, as a captain in the Paras; there are stories, some self-promulgated but some not, that he was denied a Military Cross over his socialist views), a beautiful socialite wife, and seemed to capture the very essence of the go-go, swinging, pre-hippie Sixties. And him and Woy... If Jim Prideaux had been a weedy cryptologist with a cavernous intellectual's mind instead of a burly ex-commando field operative, they could have walked right in out of Le Carre (yes that makes Crosland Bill Haydon, Ian Richardson version please not Colin Firth, and no that does not mean you now need to follow on with an Agent Lavender tribute...)
 
I've been enjoying this quite a lot and shamefully failed to say so. Very good stuff. Crosland's one of those people whose prospects for full leadership were always marginal but not impossible and I'm very glad you found a smart way to get him in there. He'd have made a perfect Anglophone trifecta with Kennedy and Trudeau: tall, handsome, deeply intelligent and effortlessly arrogant about being so (so very like Trudeau), downright dashing, with a swashbuckling youth (like Kennedy and more than Trudeau that way, as a captain in the Paras; there are stories, some self-promulgated but some not, that he was denied a Military Cross over his socialist views), a beautiful socialite wife, and seemed to capture the very essence of the go-go, swinging, pre-hippie Sixties. And him and Woy...

Thank you very much :) I must admit when I was writing out the barebones of this TL it was certainly very heavy on using Crosland as a pseudo-Trudea, because the two men are so very, very similar. I haven't quite utilised Crosland's arrogance yet partly because I think, for now at least, he would be focused mainly on making sure he can stay in power and maintain party unity (for an OTL example of this see how he handled Europe). He's certainly the perfect man for the premiership, as you say he's smart, handsome, charismatic in his own way and a perfect 60s PM (he embodies the liberalism of the day more than anyone except perhaps Woy himself). As for him and Woy well... it will play a role, but I can't quite say how big of one yet...

If Jim Prideaux had been a weedy cryptologist with a cavernous intellectual's mind instead of a burly ex-commando field operative, they could have walked right in out of Le Carre (yes that makes Crosland Bill Haydon, Ian Richardson version please not Colin Firth, and no that does not mean you now need to follow on with an Agent Lavender tribute...)

Oh but it would be so perfect! You could even keep the name Agent Lavendar for it and Crosland would make such a perfect spy... then again so would Woy (serial adulter and secretly bisexual so easily blackmailed) or Healey for that matter (ex Communist who made a mysterious post-war volte face) as would Heath as Roem and Meadow pointed out (officer responsible for executing Nazis who met a number of Soviet officials in the war to whom a young man, still unsure of his political views and potentially homosexual).
 
Part X
PART X
The Civillised Society;

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Home Secretary Michael Stewart at the Labour Party Conference, 1965
One area in which the majority of the Labour Party was united, but in which they faced the most opposition both in parliament and from the public, was the need for the reform of the British legal system in order to liberalise (or as the PM and his inner circle preferred "civillise") a society whose social and legal mores were still very much Victorian. In order to do this the firm Gaitskellite Michael Stewart had been appointed Home Secretary by Crosland, who wished to see a vast swathe of reforms made. Whilst Stewart was more reserved about some of the practices which Crosland sought to legalise, he was not an opponent of their legalisation itself, and went about the task with determination.

Some measures were quickly implemented, with the vast majority of the PLP and even some Conservative MPs supporting them. One such measure was the Sexual Offences Act, 1965 which decriminlaised homosexuality between men over 21, although did also commit the government to oppose any form of homosexual matrimony or promotion of homsexuality (as a sop to figures like Bob Mellish and to a far lesser extent Wilson and Callaghan who were personally reticent about homosexuality but more amenable to its legalisation). Another success was the Race Relations Act (1965) which established the First Race Relations Commission (later known colloquially as the Greenwood Commission) to deal with issues such as pay disparity between whites and other racial groups as well as discrimination in the workplace.

Stewart fully intended to carry out further reforms, and had in fact begun preparations to lobby support for an Anti Capital Punishment Private Members Bill from Sydney Silverman. It came as a shock to Stewart when, in 1966, he was made Chancellor after James Callaghan's resignation and was replaced as Home Secretary by George Brown. Having served a remarkably short tenure as Home Secretary, those who do remember Stewart remember him for his small successes, and as the man who kick started the process of liberalisation.

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"The Man of the Hour" New Home Secretary George Brown, 1966
George Brown, talented as he was as a political operator, did not have the skills necessary to act as a great liberaliser. An alcoholic who would fly into fits of rage and who was widely seen as abrasive and uncooperative, Brown was a terrible choice for a position which required deal making and palm greasing to function. Appointed for the sake of political expediency (and because his desired choice was seen as too cronyistic by other cabinet members), Brown simply did not have the necessary qualities to be an effective Home Secretary, something which would become more and more evident over time.

The first of Brown's failures was the attempt to pass Sydney Silverman's reforms to the system of Capital Punishment, a process which Brown strangled in the cradle by trying to effectively force Labour MPs to vote for it. Rather than persuading and cajoling as his predecessor had done and successor would do, Brown attempted to force the issue in a manner which made many MPs who were supportive of the bill but opposed to Brown vote against it. It did not get past the First Reading, and the relationship between Silverman and the Brown Home Office deteriorated past the point where cooperation would be possible. Crosland, who had ostensibly remained neutral in the whole affair but was privately supportive, began to have doubts about Brown but would not voice them.

Following this Brown was presented with another Private Members' Bill in 1967 by a cooperative MP, though this time it was the Liberal David Steel, who proposed a bill which would loosen the restrictions on abortion in place in Britain at the time. This bill was supported by the government (with The President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Sir John Peel, appointed to a commission which ultimately produced a favourable review on the matter). Put to a free vote in Parliament, Brown's blundering meant that the controversial bill, whilst passed, was only passed by an extraordinarily slim margin of five votes with many supportive MPs abstaining. Crosland, who had threatened to sack Brown if it did not pass, was once again alerted to Brown's weaknesses as a cabinet member.

From there Brown would effectively remain a "Lame Duck" Home Secretary, and although plans were made to attempt to pass Divorce Reform, Brown's inability led to the government scrapping the plan for fear any vote would settle the issue for a generation and prevent reform if it failed. In 1968 Brown would be made Foreign Secretary in the reshuffle of that year, the final post he would hold in the Crosland Ministry, and was replaced with a far more competent and committed new Home Secretary...​
 
Would that Home Secretary be a Welsh Radical-Liberal-out-of-time prone to slip mash notes to the Prime Minister during Cabinet meetings? As Sally Field once almost said, "they like me, they weally, weally like me..."
 
Would that Home Secretary be a Welsh Radical-Liberal-out-of-time prone to slip mash notes to the Prime Minister during Cabinet meetings? As Sally Field once almost said, "they like me, they weally, weally like me..."
Now you know I can't tell you that, can I ;)
 
I know it hardly counts as usual programming, but I'm considering doing a mini update on the US after my next update on Britain. Thoughts? Will it be a good addition (since this TLs Britain's back and forth on Vietnam has already caused significant changes in the US) or a pointless distraction?
 
I know it hardly counts as usual programming, but I'm considering doing a mini update on the US after my next update on Britain. Thoughts? Will it be a good addition (since this TLs Britain's back and forth on Vietnam has already caused significant changes in the US) or a pointless distraction?

Go for it. I really appreciate it when USian TLs exhibit their reach and keep you updated on the rest of the world as well, and you're quite correct about sorting through the twists and turns of the Special Relationship given the UK is in Vietnam.
 
Go for it. I really appreciate it when USian TLs exhibit their reach and keep you updated on the rest of the world as well, and you're quite correct about sorting through the twists and turns of the Special Relationship given the UK is in Vietnam.
Ok :) especially with the foreign policy update that will be coming soon the Special Relationship will be taking a few twists and turns...
 
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