Bloody hell, that is the best end for a PM yet!
Sounds like a cross between Prince Frederick and Ariel Sharon.
TLIAW: The Curse of Maggie
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Sounds like a cross between Prince Frederick and Ariel Sharon.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone!
As Ares says, the idea is they keep that name officially just because the Continuity Liberals still have 'The Liberal Party' registered, but in practice it'll just be in the small print after a while.
(Also, I'm not sure what Discworld reference you mean--trouble is sometimes I make them without realising it...)
This is amazing. I love some of the stuff you've done here, especially the call-back to Blair's guitar heroics (I remember reading an article about ten years ago where he was described as 'having done almost as much damage to the Fender Stratocaster's timeless image as Jeremy Clarkson has to Levi's'!) and that pitch-perfect Discworld reference for Major.
And, of course, Alliance 2000: The Liberals
As Ares says, the idea is they keep that name officially just because the Continuity Liberals still have 'The Liberal Party' registered, but in practice it'll just be in the small print after a while.
(Also, I'm not sure what Discworld reference you mean--trouble is sometimes I make them without realising it...)
You know me too well, as you just described pretty much exactly how I came up with it
The one about 'running away from the circus to become an accountant' - though I realise on checking the TVTropes page that that was actually a reference to John Major OTL (that's really going to change rereading that book...).
Thande
Donor
Yeah, Wikiquote attributes the quote to Linda Smith but I think others made the joke before her.
It is a weird thing that both Tony Blair and John Major had some kind of showbiz parentage.
Thande
Donor
The Congdonesque Cognitive Dissonance strikes again.
My own personal manifestation of this is that, due to 03771's All Along the Watchtower, unless I force myself to think about it I always think Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential election.
Alex Richards
Donor
You know what, I can just imagine that Major's first words after emerging from his coma and seeing all the anxious, older faces around him would be:
'How many did I miss?'
'How many did I miss?'
You'll like my manifestation. While reading this and when it got to Ken Livingstone's 'As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...', I thought 'Who said that?' before going 'Oh yeah! It was William Wyndham after going back to Parliament after all those years of Joshua Churchill being all killy, ohnowait that isn't real'.
Thande
Donor
You'll like my manifestation. While reading this and when it got to Ken Livingstone's 'As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...', I thought 'Who said that?' before going 'Oh yeah! It was William Wyndham after going back to Parliament after all those years of Joshua Churchill being all killy, ohnowait that isn't real'.
A recursive example, as it was Ken who said it in OTL first (but in 2000) and inspired the Wyndham thing in LTTW.
Excellent stuff! Some very innovative ideas here, and not 'unusual for the hell of it'. The butterflies are actually quite sophisticated and can be traced through to a number of the little events. Robert Lewellyn's celebrity run against Ken and You-Wait-Till-I'm-Mayor was great.
I found the different Diana story to be very good. Major taking on the press barons - it seems he didn't finish up before he took a ball to the head - is a great image, and I found Major's speech very believable. Nikons, not Kalashnikovs.
I can see why you put Blair where you did, because it would indeed be tricky to bring him down if he had just won an election, and you don't want to overuse death. New Tory: Same Old Story was a bit hamfisted but I got the idea. I think a spoof of those posters has to appear in every 1990s TL by law...
Which brings me back to my main point: you're in very well-trodden ground with this TL, but you're managing to create a very new world here, in a manner that reminds me of Agent Boot's 'The Quiet Death of Liberal England'. A lot of key events are still there - hearing about things like the Kursk tragedy again after so many years (it was one of the first truly horrible - and it was horrible - things that I became aware of on the news) - but then we hear of President Nemtsov and Ann Richards' Vice Presidency. The Dome is obviously a fixed point.
I'm also starting to think that The Liberals Always Win needs to be accompanied by Spitting Image Always Survives...
Keep it up, Thande. This has kept me entertained on the first part of my journey to Leeds - and I will now discuss that further in Chat.
I found the different Diana story to be very good. Major taking on the press barons - it seems he didn't finish up before he took a ball to the head - is a great image, and I found Major's speech very believable. Nikons, not Kalashnikovs.
I can see why you put Blair where you did, because it would indeed be tricky to bring him down if he had just won an election, and you don't want to overuse death. New Tory: Same Old Story was a bit hamfisted but I got the idea. I think a spoof of those posters has to appear in every 1990s TL by law...
Which brings me back to my main point: you're in very well-trodden ground with this TL, but you're managing to create a very new world here, in a manner that reminds me of Agent Boot's 'The Quiet Death of Liberal England'. A lot of key events are still there - hearing about things like the Kursk tragedy again after so many years (it was one of the first truly horrible - and it was horrible - things that I became aware of on the news) - but then we hear of President Nemtsov and Ann Richards' Vice Presidency. The Dome is obviously a fixed point.
I'm also starting to think that The Liberals Always Win needs to be accompanied by Spitting Image Always Survives...
Keep it up, Thande. This has kept me entertained on the first part of my journey to Leeds - and I will now discuss that further in Chat.
There was also a myth that Jasmine Bligh used the line "As I was saying when we were so rudely interrupted..." when BBC TV resumed broadcasting in 1946. In reality she said "Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?". The "rudely interupted" line was used by the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra when his column restarted after WWII.
I liked your handling of Major's premiership - his turning up to challenge Blair to a debate was a nice touch. The alternative death of Princess of Diana was also well handled, with her getting caught in a Fergie-style incriminating photograph.
There's something ironic that Major's last memory before entering his coma was a cricket match.
Cheers,
Nigel.
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Thande
Donor
Thank you for the kind words. I had actually forgotten just how long ago the Kursk disaster was. And you may be right about Spitting Image. Of course, in OTL it has survived in France, so it's not that out-there...
Thande
Donor
SIR MALCOLM RIFKIND
(Conservative)
2000-2002
’Course you can, Malcolm!
Malcolm Rifkind had served in various Cabinet roles since his appointment as Secretary of State for Scotland by Mrs Thatcher in 1986, and had briefly served as Foreign Secretary under his ally Ken Clarke. Portillo had chosen not to appoint him to shadow the post after becoming Tory leader in 1992, and Rifkind chose to return to the backbenches rather than settle for a lesser position. Between this time and Portillo’s resignation of the leadership, Rifkind was active in campaigning for multilateral disarmament and was a patron of the anti-landmine charity set up by Princess Diana. He received a knighthood for his work just after the 1997 general election, at which point he had been reappointed to shadow the Foreign Office by Major when he became Leader of the Opposition and then had once again resumed the mantle of Foreign Secretary when the Tories won the election.
Rifkind was given the additional title of Deputy Prime Minister due to Major’s belief that the Foreign Secretary was generally the best-placed person to substitute for the Prime Minister in the event of their unavailability, as Foreign Secretaries often needed to act more independently and of their own initiative than other ministers. He was able to pursue his goal of disarmament while in office, helping oversee the implementation of START III between Presidents Gore and Nemtsov after negotiations had stalled under Cuomo and Yeltsin. He was also instrumental in putting pressure on President Balladur to abandon France’s nuclear testing programme and, after becoming Prime Minister, in negotiating between India and Pakistan after a war scare in 2001. His supporters often also attribute to him the foiling of a major terrorist attack aimed at the United States in that year, but recently declassified documents suggests that it was more the French and German governments who passed along the crucial data intercepts.
When Major fell into a coma, Rifkind took over and, as had become the constitutional convention, announced a leadership election which he pledged to contest. Unlike Margaret Beckett, he triumphed over his opponents, David Mellor chief among them. Rifkind reshuffled the Cabinet in a manner that happened to give more prominent positions to both his cousin Leon Brittan and also to Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, leading to the National Front staging a race riot about the ‘takeover of British politics by a Jewish cabal’. Outside the lunatic fringe, it was the complaint of a ‘Scottish Raj’ that was more often heard, as some of the more visible junior ministers in the government included Raymond Robertson and John Godfrey. Rifkind was determined to use his position to help rebuild the Conservative Party’s position in Scotland, and the 2002 devolved elections did see a substantial improvement for the party, overtaking the Liberals to regain second place in popular vote terms (though still—just—in third place in terms of number of seats). The Tories remained in the doldrums in Wales, however, where Plaid Cymru and the Liberals were discussing a limited electoral pact in an attempt to prevent a Labour ‘thousand-year-reich’ in the Senedd as one Welsh Liberal (and future party leader) incautiously put it.
Rifkind was responsible for implementing some of Major’s policies that had been gestating during his tenure, most famously House of Lords reform. Major’s lukewarm approach (though still controversial with many) was actually a watered-down version of a proposal discussed under the Blair government. It saw the House reformed to a reduced number of representatives composed of 250 hereditary peers and 250 life peers. Each group would represent those chosen from the broader ‘electorate’ of hereditary and life peers respectively, thus merely holding a peerage (traditional or appointed) was not a sufficient qualification for serving in the House. The move made Major (and Rifkind, who got the blame) an enemy of many traditional shire Tories, but he always said that some reform was necessary and this would prevent a future government indulging in ‘back of the envelope radicalism that would wreck the constitution’. Indeed, though Labour and the Liberals have pledged with every election since then to make the House of Lords a democratically elected body, Rifkin’s reform (preventing a permanent Tory majority in the Lords for an opposition in the Commons to push against) has ensured that the issue never seems urgent enough for them to actually do it.
He also presided over the creation of a National Lottery, but cancelled plans for the privatisation of the railways due to his conviction that it made no sense to separate stock from infrastructure and have them run by different companies. Rifkind did advocate a different form of privatisation, but this subtle distinction was lost by many annoyed Thatcherites. He worked hard on the Northern Ireland peace process, but much of the credit went to his successor (who in fairness was also deeply invested in it).
His anti-war views were put to the test when, after the Cuomo presidency had seen continuous Iraq bombing campaigns and failed counter-assassination attempts aimed at Saddam Hussein, President Gore wanted UN backing to formally go into Iraq and arrest its leader as a war criminal, unseating his government. Rifkind stood with President Balladur and Chancellor Schröder in stark opposition to this proposal, and Gore eventually backed down—though this perceived weakness was likely part of the reason he would go on to lose re-election in 2004.
Rifkind likely benefited from the fact that, shortly after he became leader, the Tories had a shock victory. Ken Livingstone, attempting to run for a third term as Mayor of London (against the wishes of many Labourites who wished he would make way for new blood, though he was still popular with ordinary Londoners) went down to a narrow defeat against the Tory candidate. With the relative success of the Green Party ‘celebrity’ run last time (by contrast their run in 2000 with a no-name councillor captured less than a third their vote in 1997), the Tories had learned. A certain tousle-haired, mumbling, beloved, incoherent classic legend entered the Middlesex Guildhall. But that would not be the pinnacle of his career.
Most commentators expected Rifkind and the Tories to win the 2002 general election (held two months after the promising Tory results in Scotland) and their defeat to Labour, albeit narrow, was a shock which made quite a bit for some punters at the bookie’s. While Labour’s leader was popular, the outcome was eventually attributed by psephologists to the Liberals having an under-the-table surge in England, helped both by their new English leader Vince Cable and a quiet buildup in campaigning capability in the wealthy suburbs driven by local election victories over complacent Tories. The Liberals captured an impressive 39 seats, the most the party had held since the 1920s, and spoiled a number of other Tory-held seats into Labour victories. Rifkind, having enjoyed an increased majority himself in his own seat of Edinburgh Pentlands, announced his resignation as party leader and it would fall to another to oppose the new Labour Prime Minister…
Alex Richards
Donor
I can't help but think that you've just made Jeremy Clarkson Mayor of London there
I'm pleased Sir Malcolm gets a decent write-up here: in another life, I think he could have been an excellent Tory leader and prime minister. Like a lot of the 1995 Cabinet, he got caught in the generational churn, coming to his prime just as the party was coming off the rails.
I nearly asked where he got his knighthood (I think in OTL it was in lieu of a peerage after 1997 because he wanted to try again for his seat), but I see you've addressed that.
I like the inversion of the Tory position in Wales and Scotland as well!
I nearly asked where he got his knighthood (I think in OTL it was in lieu of a peerage after 1997 because he wanted to try again for his seat), but I see you've addressed that.
I like the inversion of the Tory position in Wales and Scotland as well!
Christ this is subtle but powerful. This may be the best update yet. From my mediocre understanding Rifkind struck me as one of the potentially most competent PMs who never was. He got a lot done in under 3 years.
I can't help but think that you've just made Jeremy Clarkson Mayor of London there
Typically that language is reserved for the one and only BoJo but perhaps you are right. But the smiley face I'd use is
Alex Richards
Donor
Typically that language is reserved for the one and only BoJo but perhaps you are right. But the smiley face I'd use is
Well, the thing is that it would fit Boris, except for the fact that IIRC he was pretty much unknown to the general public before he became Mayor, and seeing as this is a celebrity candidate...
Boris was a well known celebrity before he became mayor - he was a regular guest on Have I got News for You for instance
Excellent.
Quibble - calling the Assembly building the Senedd was IIRC essentially a unilateral decision by the first Presiding Officer, Plaid's Dafydd Elis Thomas. As this Assembly seems to be elected by FPTP (as was the OTL Labour plan until circa 1995), with a Labour majority, there would presumably be a Labour Presiding Officer, who I doubt would do the same.
Quibble - calling the Assembly building the Senedd was IIRC essentially a unilateral decision by the first Presiding Officer, Plaid's Dafydd Elis Thomas. As this Assembly seems to be elected by FPTP (as was the OTL Labour plan until circa 1995), with a Labour majority, there would presumably be a Labour Presiding Officer, who I doubt would do the same.