PoD: The Speaker's Conference on Electoral Reform 1916-17 succeeds, and proportional representation is passed in time for the 1918 general election.
I.
As the morning sun rose over Portsmouth Harbour on May 5th, 2000 a great cheer went up from Portchester Castle, overlooking the harbour’s head as the first pleasure craft pootled out and the grey, angular shape of one of Her Majesty’s destroyers passed silently halfway to the horizon. Several thousand people from the cream of Hampshire society had packed themselves in to enjoy Château Lafite Rothschild and truffles. Many, claimed a journalist posing as the girlfriend of the Earl of Winchester’s son, visibly detested everything they put in their mouths but did it anyway for the status. More than one remarked on the irony of what they were celebrating. Twenty years previously, some of them had been whooping when the hated Roger Wedgwood government was obliterated by the right wing landslide. Now they were celebrating the demise of its replacement.
They were not alone. Crowding around the television at his Halifax home in Yorkshire, the team of Jack Tomlinson could barely believe what they were seeing. After four positively catastrophic election defeats since 1980 which had seemed set to guarantee one-party rule for the foreseeable future, everything had changed. 1997’s creation of Progress, amalgamating Labour and the Liberals into a single electoral force, had paid off. For the first time since 1906, a single party had won an absolute majority. The polls were rallying around one number – 62%. Someway, somehow, Progress had won 62% of the vote. The result was that they were winning seats nobody from Progress had ever visited. 955 parliamentary seats and 590, a majority of 102, were for Progress. “Until we scrap half the seats like we promised,” commented Tomlinson. Yet everywhere victories were coming. The ultra-safe Conservative seat of Windsor had gone, as had the Sinn Fein stronghold of Youghal and even in Valletta, where Tomlinson’s agnosticism proved so controversial, people were chanting his name as they marched along the edges of the Grand Harbour. In the old Labour heartland of South Wales, one mining constituency came out with 95% for Progress. How could it have happened?
Put simply, people were fed up to the back teeth of Conservative rule. The United Kingdom might have been on the verge of the Second Wave, regaining the prosperity unleashed between the Second World War and the chaos of the 1970s, but it didn’t feel like it yet. What had once been a ferocious and efficient government had lapsed into dithering and indirection. Arthur Voss’ last years were compared to Woodrow Wilson, secluded in Downing Street and proving an embarrassing symbol of the UK as a wearisome elder while his Cabinet of yes-men, busybodies, sycophants, and out-and-out racists and adulterers dashed from crisis to crisis. Progress offered everything new, dynamic, and exciting that the Conservatives were not. By the time of the election, even the Tory faithful were crossing the box next to the Progress candidate, desperate to be rid of Voss. No wonder the party in Portsmouth.
The Prime Minister who was within days of overtaking Robert Walpole to become the longest serving premier in British history watched in silence through the night as the results came in, wrapped in an afghan given to him by the Emir fifteen years prior, sipping brandy. Legend has it that at six in the morning Arthur Voss switched off the television, turned to his long-suffering wife Nancy, and said, “thank Christ for that.” Even he had had enough. After a much needed nap, the 78-year old leader waited patiently at his office desk as BBC technicians assembled the equipment for him to make the traditional broadcast to the nation. It was a dignified concession, as all his public statements had been before, and even the left-wing press were willing to assemble lists of some of his finer moments whether it be his acceptance of Angolan refugees in defiance of his party or tireless efforts to find peace in Ireland. With his personally carved walking stick and tweed jacket, as symbolic an object as Churchill’s cigar, he left Downing Street for the last time and clambered into the black vintage Bentley waiting for him and headed to Buckingham Palace. After a brief and emotional goodbye with Queen Anne II, whom Voss had guided through the beginnings of her reign, the old man left London and returned home to his cottage in Devon. Twenty years of Britain’s great statesman, who arguably saved the country after the chaos of the 1970s, came to an end.
As one left, another arrived. The motorcade of Jack Tomlinson swept into Downing Street, communicating a new vision of youth and energy even before the first feet exited the cars. In the place of vintage Bentleys instead came sleek, modern Aston Martins. Having left the Palace and travelled down the Mall before a huge crowd of union flag-waving Londoners, and plenty of fascinated tourists, already it seemed everything was changing. The British have never been the type to go crazy over an election result, but to many it seemed less like a change in government and more like a revolution. Street parties saw plenty of drunken revelry requiring police presence in Basildon, Liverpool, Tottenham, and Glasgow but by and large it was a peaceful affair. “Anyone younger than their mid-20s couldn’t remember another Prime Minister,” commented one new Progress MP. “It was like the whole country came together to celebrate.”
Tomlinson strode from the car to the cameras with a pace unseen from his predecessor for at least ten years, beaming. One Italian journalist had nicknamed him Cnut, on account of his Nordic good looks that made him not so much resemble a pop star as it did a particularly non-rugged Viking. “The people of our kingdom have spoken,” he said proudly, “and they want Progress. Our long wait is over. Now is the time for great things.” And with that he turned and with a hand on the shoulder of the country’s first black Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jamaica-born Ron Campbell, he entered Downing Street. A new age had begun.