WI PM Foot?

In the real life Callaghan government, Roy Hattersley was Prices Secretary.

Foot post Guadaloupe would have said something rather bland and consensual like"

"we have been working hard to find consensus and I am now going to continue the job of aiding out country"

I don't think Foot would have committed such a huge faux pas as Callaghan did. In all honesty I think he (foot) would have wanted to get home as soon as possible.
 
The SDP did save Labour from themselves. Count your lucky stars for the Falklands War, because without it, the Alliance could possibly have won in 1983 or at the very least, killed Labour in the House. You may also send up a prayer if you like for FPTP electoral system.

Old time Labour members who despise the SDP and blame them for setting their party adrift for the entirety of Thatcher's term should remember that if they hadn't started to moderate themselves, they wouldn't even exist anymore. Their place would have been lost to the Alliance. It is well that Foot lost. Replacing Foot with two much more moderate men such as Kinnock and Smith (Blair was not so bad until Iraq, really) was the Labour Party's godsend.

Revisionist nonsense. I'm not sure how the Falklands helped Labour do better than the Alliance, and the idea that the SDP moderated the Labour Party more by breaking away than they would have by remaining inside and helping forces like Kinnock do what was needed in 1985 is laughable, to say the least.

By all means sing the praises of the Alliance - they gave a lot of voters who wanted a real third party that choice while they existed - and in the form of their successor party, the Liberal Democrats, continued to do so until 2010. A respectable impact on an ancient system built to withstand attempts to break two party hegemony. Only Labour itself, 70 years earlier, had previously managed it. But to say they somehow helped Labour is very wide of the mark.
 
I don't think Foot would have committed such a huge faux pas as Callaghan did. In all honesty I think he (foot) would have wanted to get home as soon as possible.
Getting home early and not buggering up the first interview would obviously be an improvement, but I'd say the whole affair only damaged Callaghan because there was a crisis and he didn't have a reaction to it.

The big question is though, could Foot cock things up so much that the Alliance actually replace Labour? If the response to the Winter of Discontent is basically an earlier longest suicide note in history (Supply problems at the refineries? Nationalise the oil companies! No money to nationalise the oil companies? Scrap Polaris with effect today! That sort of thing) how bad could things go for Labour?
 
Ok. Lets suppose the following theory:

Foot loses the vote of no confidence in 1979. The following election results in a massacre, far worse then '83. Foot quits.

Who takes over?

It can't be Williams because she's lost her seat as she did in the OTL.

In theory what could happen is Healey, Owen or possibly Jenkins could become leader and start a shift towards the centre ground and maybe start enticing the liberals into a anti-tory alliance

Something would need to be done as The tories would have no opposition of merit.

Result-Labour would be more social democratic a lot earlier than in the OTL and maybe be a more effective force in '83.
 
The SDP did save Labour from themselves. Count your lucky stars for the Falklands War, because without it, the Alliance could possibly have won in 1983 or at the very least, killed Labour in the House. You may also send up a prayer if you like for FPTP electoral system.

Your analysis of this presumes that where you come in terms of vote is where you come in terms of seats. However in FPTP national share of the vote really is meaningless, arguably misleading. The Alliance would have had to have won by a huge margin to even come second in terms of seats in 1983 and even then it would be largely at the Conservatives expense, not Labour.
 
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