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Almost a century and a half ago, one of Sir Ed Davey's predecessors, a chap called William Gladstone, invented modern political campaigning.
Before the general election of 1880, Gladstone gave a series of set-piece speeches, many of them five hours long, which audiences flocked to in their tens of thousands. He spoke righteous moral indignation about the various abominations of the incumbent government, led by his great rival, Benjamin Disraeli. Eyewitness accounts speak of audience members becoming so enraptured that they fainted and had to be carried out over the heads of the gathered masses like plague corpses.
A few weeks later, through little more than the soaring power of his oratory, Gladstone returned once again to 10 Downing Street and ended Disraeli's career. 144 years later, it's hard to tell if the hand of history weighs heavy on Ed Davies' shoulders.
One of the many reasons that it's hard to tell is because you only get to glimpse his face for precisely 1.8 seconds at a time as it zooms past at 68 miles an hour into the undercarriage of the colossus roller coaster at Thorpe Park.
Liberal values are under threat all over the world. Democracy is dying in the darkness. Davey, meanwhile, is now approaching the quadruple barrel roll section and his face is cracked open into the kind of open mouth grin that could easily have got him work as an extra in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Gladstone, it hardly needs to be said, did not seek to turn the tides of history by pratfalling off a paddleboard on Lake Windermere 18 times in a row. The Afghan and Zulu wars were not denounced with the assistance of a giant inflatable log flume. But that was then. This is now.
So that was Tom Peck writing in The Times about the breakout star, really, of the general election campaign that is currently going on in Britain. We in Britain, Dominic, will be going to the polls this time next week. So very exciting. Yeah.
And I think it's fair to say it's an election campaign that seems simultaneously kind of seismic in the implications because it seems pretty clear the Conservatives are going to lose catastrophically and Labour are going to score an absolutely massive victory. So seismic, but also boring. Yeah. Which is quite, quite
Quite an odd combination. I mean, these things do happen occasionally in history. But Sir Ed Davey, who for the benefit of non-British listeners, leads the Liberal Democrats, the heirs of the party of Gladstone and Asquith, but which are really a kind of shadow of their great 19th century self. He's been trying to attract attention by staging a succession of stunts. So he's been on roller coasters. He's kind of basically fallen into late Windermere over...
over and over again. He's ridden down a hill on a bicycle with his legs stuck out. Great fun. And we thought that today, having looked in our last episode at 18th century, 19th century political campaigning, we'd look at kind of more recent history because, Dominic, this is your mastermind subject really, isn't it? Oh, that's very kind of you, Tom. People behaving badly on election campaign trails. Yeah. So the one thing I'd say about Ed Davey, he's just simply carrying to the extreme what
politicians have done for decades. So as we go through the more recent elections, you know, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, they all did little stunts of one kind or another and never had it so good, which was my first book on British history. I think there's a photograph of Harold Macmillan sitting on a kind of model train,
chucking around like a train for toddlers. So, you know, a very incongruous image. Yeah, because this is a man who read Aeschylus in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Exactly. Yeah, and this will be very familiar from Australian, Canadian, American politics as well. Yeah. So in the last episode, we talked about elections when they were genuine mass participation, public civic events in which
There was a lot of drinking, rowdyism, roughs, people being shot in the mouth, you know, great larks. And subsequently, what has happened is that basically elections have moved indoors and specifically indoors to radio and TV studios. So they've ceased to become mass participation events. And the question, I think, that hangs over election campaigns, because that's what we're really talking about, campaigns rather than election results, is
It's actually, do they matter? Are they ever not boring? Just on the issue of boring. So one of the things that Tom Peck picks up in that passage that I read is the contrast between the kind of the heightened rhetoric of Gladstone and the Pratt falling of Ed Davey. But
But one of the reasons for that, it's not just that the liberals are less likely to become a party of government. Doesn't it also reflect the fact that British politics has shrunk, that its horizons have diminished, that what Gladstone is talking about has global impact? What Ed Davey talks about, or even what Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer talk about, has very little global resonance at all. Well, here's the interesting thing, Tom. So what Gladstone was talking about in his most famous campaign, which was the Midlothian campaign, late 19th century,
And he's giving speeches to gigantic rallies. He's talking about the Balkans, about the so-called Bulgarian atrocities. So Ottoman repression of Bulgarian nationalism in southeastern Europe. And he's talking about a subject you say the horizons have narrowed, but I would guess that a large proportion of Gladstone's listeners had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, not only that, by the way, an enormous proportion of Gladstone's listeners probably couldn't hear him.
What I'm saying is it's not just that the horizons have shrunk. They obviously have shrunk. But it's also that the context is so different. So when people turned out to those Gladstonian rallies, there would have been kind of barkers. There would have been almost like street food.
It would have been a huge event, an exciting event, you know, or festival to some degree. Yeah. You know, you would be in Scotland or whatever, and you would get a chance to glimpse a great man of history. And that was tremendously exciting. Which had Davy with all credit to him isn't. No. But even if the prime minister were coming to your town, a lot of people wouldn't bother to turn up because the context has changed. So they've got better things to do. They've got other things to do, which people didn't in the 19th century. I suppose the equivalent would be Gaza. Yeah.
to the Bulgarian atrocities. Yes, I guess it might be. And what British political leaders, I mean, let alone someone like Ed Davey, says about
about Gaza. I mean, it doesn't matter. Whereas what Gladstone had to say about it did matter. And I just wonder whether that kind of diminishes the sense of excitement, the sense of occasion, the sense that great issues are at play. Possibly. Although that said, I don't believe that foreign policy has ever really mattered to the British people or that it's had a massive impact on domestic elections. And if you want the prime example of that, look at the 2005 election, two years after Tony Blair invaded Iraq,
and he wins a big majority. And there's a sense that even though people vaguely talk about it in that campaign, that ultimately a large number of the British population just simply don't care one way or the other. Yeah. I mean, I suppose you could say the classic example of that actually would be 1945. Right. Which is obviously coming off the victory in the Second World War, in which Churchill obviously had been the war leader. And he loses spectacularly. So let's start with 1945, because I think that's the first really canonical national election. It's almost like 1945 is when most people's electoral memory starts. Yeah.
So the way that election worked was that the national governments that had taken to the war broke up at the end of May. There's an election on the 5th of July. But then because so many people are abroad, obviously, in the army, it takes a long time to cancel the vote. So the result doesn't come through until weeks later. And actually, if you look at that campaign, there's really only one incident from the campaign worthy of any comment, which is they made radio speeches, Churchill and the Labour leader Clement Attlee. Churchill made what's often regarded as one of the sort of landmark gaffes
in an election campaign where he said if there was a Labour government, a socialist government in Britain, they would need, and I quote, some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And a lot of people said, this is incredibly tasteless. Like, you're talking about the people who've been sitting around you fighting the Gestapo.
And to say that Labour would, you know, the National Health Service or Better Pensions would necessarily involve a secret police organisation is obviously ludicrous. But the thing is, it's very hard to measure that. We know from people's diaries and stuff that they thought this was a bit much. But opinion polling in 1945 is really in its infancy. Right. And you need opinion polls, don't you? Because it's kind of the equivalent of tracking the score in a test match or something. Exactly. Exactly.
So our sense of election campaigns as narratives, as stories, or as roller coasters, which really comes from America, was imported into Britain in the 1960s after Kennedy beat Nixon in a televised election that did arouse some interest in Britain. Probably the first American election that most people in Britain actually ever noticed.
And from that point, you get the sense of the horse race. You know, it's a race. Between two leaders. Yeah. Now, people never really talked of it as a race in Britain before that. They talked about campaigns as a chance to mobilize your voters. But I think there was a general assumption that the result was probably determined before you started the campaign. And the campaign was just a sort of jamboree in which you got your voters excited and made sure they would go to the polls.
But most people have probably made up their minds, which actually, I think, is a better way of thinking about it than the horse race idea in Britain. So if you look at 1945, the mystique, the myth of it is that because it's a landmark election that sees Labour win, that therefore people must have been really enthused and excited that maybe this is a lost golden age of elections where people really cared. And yet, if you read the
the best book on this, which is David Kynaston's Austerity Britain. He has some wonderful examples in that of people just saying, no one cares. George Orwell, who's obviously really into his politics, says that when he was in London, he never heard a single person remark about it. He said that he saw election posters, but people walked past them as though they weren't there.
And Kynaston has this wonderful sort of very 1940s quotes of people saying, I don't take any interest in the election. Not a scrap. To me, it's an awful lot of Tommy rot with each party running the other one down. I don't know who I'll vote for. I don't like politicians anyway. They're all crooks. You can imagine them, can't you? Absolutely. Kind of lovable types from Ealing comedies. Exactly. In their demob suits. So people who listened to our previous episode will know that the people of Coventry had a history of behaving poorly in elections.
because it was in Coventry that they had turned out with howl birds. Great days. And I think, I see the 1698 to 1705, and they'd seized the Guildhall and they said they would eat the wigs. Yeah. But in Coventry in 1945...
Our sources say basically no one has any interest at all. And the crowds only turn out when Churchill comes to visit. But the interesting thing here is many of these people are Labour voters. And they've turned out because they want to see the big man, like your Gladstone thing, Tom. A big celebrity has come to town. So like your comparison to a festival? Yeah. You know, you go to a festival because there's a massive act headlining or something. Exactly. Now, Labour win a very big majority in 1945, a majority of 146.
And it's generally accepted that they win this because they have a much more positive plan for building the peace. The Tories don't really have anything terribly constructive to offer. The longstanding middle class fear of Labour, which is they're unpatriotic, they won't spend money on defence, all these kinds of things, that's been completely diffused.
Because, of course, Labour have been in the national government that's won the war. Major Attlee. Major Attlee. People are very used to Attlee and his comrades. So Labour win a big majority. But you can argue, and I think this sets the tone for what follows, that A, for most people, even if they're pleased with the result, they actually didn't really like having politics in the newspapers. They found the whole thing very boring. They're not anything like as enthusiastic as later mythology suggests. And
And number two, had they never bothered to campaign but just all gone on a massive holiday to Butlins or something, a kind of Westminster outing, instead, basically done an Ed Davey,
If they hadn't campaigned, the result would probably have been exactly the same. So this is the question, isn't it? How many election campaigns does the campaigning make a difference to? Are there any? I would say generally it doesn't matter unless it does. This is the top punditry we want from Britain's leading historian of modern Britain. Yeah. So if you go through all the 50s and 60s elections, for example, those election campaigns, you know, I've written about them. I've spent, you know, unhealthily large quantities of my life, of my time on this planet, and
about the 1966 election or 1964 or 1959. But they're non-events actually, Tom. And they're partly non-events because until the 60s, obviously, most people don't have television. So they're experiencing it only through the radio or their newspapers. And they're experiencing it very much at one remove. Most people don't go to rallies. They don't go to meetings. They have at best...
kind of mild interest, but all the coverage generally says what a terribly boring and underwhelming campaign this is, and that most people are completely apathetic and unenthused by it. And it's a stereotype of how the media cover it, that it's kind of, "Prime Minister, would you care to list any more of your achievements?" Yeah. Is that a stereotype or not? I think that's pretty fair. I think interviewers, they won't give anything like the same number of interviews as they do today. They'd give one or two.
And the tone is not let's catch them out. There's no sense of that. Yeah. Why are these lying bastards lying to me? Yeah, exactly. That I think dates from the 60s, that phrase. But actually...
Really, the tone is very deferential. The politicians, if you watch those interviews, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, whoever, they give quite long answers, quite thoughtful answers, reflective. There's no sense of them being on their guard particularly or much less of a sense. They're not worried about being tripped up unless they say something really stupid. They can change their mind during an answer. And actually, they have a message.
about themselves and about their opponents that they want to project, but there's no sense of them having rehearsed lines. And actually that, it's an American campaign technique. It was really pioneered by Nixon in 1968. There's a brilliant book by Joe McGuinness. I think it's called The Selling of the President or something about how Nixon used Californian ad men to hone his campaign, to hammer a particular message again and again and particular lines. And this is the first time it happens? Yeah, I mean, people have done it kind of accidentally, but never in such a kind of...
systematic, ruthless, cold-blooded way. And British politics is very, very slow to catch up with that and probably only catches up with that really in the 1980s, I would say. There's great banter, isn't there, in the 1964 election where Harold Wilson laughs at the Conservative leader who is the 13th Lord Home and makes great play with this. And he's casting himself as meritocratic and go ahead and everything. And Alec Douglas Holmes says, well, I suppose that Mr. Wilson is the 13th Mr. Wilson. And
That's tremendous cut and thrust. Great repartee. Yeah. Well, to be fair to Harold Wilson. So Harold Wilson made a previous appearance in our podcast when we did Britain in 1974. And he came over very... Shabby. Yeah, he came over in a shabby manner. Shopworn. Shopworn. But in 1964, he wasn't shopworn at all. And actually, when you look at that campaign, it's quite tight, the result.
Labour get in, but by much smaller margin than they had anticipated. Go on, Tom. Because this was kind of the model for what the Conservatives were hoping would happen this time, that they were way behind and then under Alec Douglas' home they claw it back, don't they? Yeah. Which has significantly failed to happen this time. Exactly. But actually look at that campaign. So they have mass rallies still. Sir Wilson would go and address a big meeting in a town hall. And what is totally different from today is
It's that in the 1960s, the crowd would be very mixed. You know, he's speaking. There are people shouting, rubbish. You're going to put up our taxes, Mr. Wilson, or something like this. And he, Wilson, was brilliant at dealing with hecklers. Now, that's something that most modern politicians are totally incapable of doing because they've never had to do it. They've always been in a manicured environment.
But in those Labour campaigns, there could be people throwing things. There could be people making jokes. And Wilson is really good. He's always got a nice little line. He's never phased on the platform. He's relaxed. He's funny.
But again, I don't think the campaign massively changes people's minds. Okay. So on the thing of Wilson against Heath, who then follows out of his home to become a conservative leader. Yeah. And they just keep kind of endlessly fighting elections against each other. The one that people say there is a difference is in 1970, where Wilson and Labour are expected to win. And then England crash out of the World Cup. Yeah.
I love this. Unexpectedly, having been 2-0 up with, what, kind of 10 minutes to go or something. Yeah, I think maybe a quarter of the match left. So, Alf Ramsey, the manager, took off Bobby Charlton. England had a better team in 1970 than they did in 1966. The World Cup is in Mexico. England are defending the World Cup. They're generally expected to win. They're 2-0 up against the Germans.
And then the Germans end up winning 3-2. And that is four days before polling day. So in that campaign, Wilson had been in power since 64. He'd had a very, very rocky time in government, had to devalue the pound, all kinds of things. You know, great sense of sort of disappointment and frustration about his government. And yet Heath is regarded as so dreadful
as such a poor performer that everyone thinks Wilson is going to win really easily. And actually Wilson does something that had not been done before. So Wilson goes on walkabouts. I mean, we're very familiar with that now. It's this lovely summer in 1970. So he's in his kind of shirt sleeves walking.
And he walks around town centres like shaking hands with random people. How do you do? Lovely to see you. I'm Howard Wilson. Please vote for the Labour Party. And no one had done that before? Not really. So American politicians had done it. And the Queen did it on a Commonwealth tour, I think, of Australia a year or so earlier. I love to think the Queen is blazing a path. That's it. The Queen is a great innovator. I mean, Wilson and the Queen got on like house on fire, didn't they? Wilson loved the Queen. He was her favourite Prime Minister. Bye.
by all accounts. So Wilson copies the Queen. He basically wants to take politics out of it and run a kind of smiling presidential campaign and coast to victory against Heath. And actually, when he loses unexpectedly, Heath won by 30 seats. Wilson said, oh, well, it was the football, of course, that cost us. There was a feel-bad factor. I think that's nonsense. There was a bad set of trade figures just before the election, which is much more important. And actually, I think what those bad trade figures did was
was they reminded people that Wilson had not been a terribly good steward of the economy
And they kind of reinforced existing anxieties. And he'd let the Beatles break out. So, yeah, all kinds of reasons. Yeah. You always say that about Harold Wilson. I think that's very harsh. I think you're attributing him with more power than he... He should have stepped in. Yeah. So Heath wins that one. And then people have listened to our 1974 series where we talk about the two elections of that year in which Heath manages to lose both of them. Yeah. He was a terrible performer, wasn't he? We had more liberal shenanigans with Jeremy Thorpe. So 1974, I know we can't go into it because...
because we did a whole series on that, but we have hovercraft. We have Jeremy Thorpe. Yeah. IRA bombs. Enoch Powell. If you listen to our series on 1974, which you can find on the rest is history sort of page. If you scroll down it, you will hear competing impersonations of Enoch Powell and discussions of Howard Wilson's staff trying to murder his secretary. So enjoy it. So, you know, if 1970s elections are your thing, the 1974 series, you'll be absolutely in clover. But,
Just moving on to the election after that, 1979, which sees Mrs. Thatcher come to power and defeat James Callaghan. There's a famous thing that James Callaghan is supposed to have said, and I'm sure you'll tell me he didn't say it, but Callaghan feels that the polls are against him, that the Tories seem to be closing in, and he's meant to have said to his aide,
is it Bernard Donoghue? Yeah. And they're kind of driving around Parliament Square. And he says that there are times kind of like every 30 years when there is a sea change in politics and that this sea change is now working to the benefit of Mrs. Thatcher. Yeah. Do you think that's accurate? Do you think there are kind of rhythms in politics? Because I know you're a great admirer of James Callaghan. He has no greater admirer, Tom. I know. I love this election because I actually like both party leaders. I can't lose. Brilliant. It's great. So first of all, did he say that?
And do you think that he's onto something when he says that? Well, first of all, he's definitely onto something. There are generational shifts. I mean, we could talk about this in great detail. My friend Phil Tinline has written a book called The Death of Consensus, which is all about this, which is all about how every 30 years or so there is a generational shift and there's a sense of the taboo shifting, the center ground shifting. The Overton window. The Overton window, as people call it. Exactly so. Callahan did say something like it, but he didn't say what everyone thinks he said. Right. Right.
So here's the interesting thing. And I think I'm the first person or the only person to have noticed this. Brilliant. So in Bernard Donoghue's memoir of that conversation, he absolutely says, Callaghan said to him, oh, we're not going to win. There's a sea change, Bernard, and you know, blah, blah, blah. Nothing you can say or do will make any difference. But actually, if you look at Bernard Donoghue's diary, which I did, which is also published, but nobody's bothered, as far as I'm aware, to compare the two. He doesn't say that. In the diary, which was compiled closer to the time, Callaghan says...
I'm actually feeling really good about the election. I think we actually might win this or do a lot better than people think, unless there has been a sea change. Right. So in other words, Callaghan was feeling much more optimistic. There's a couple of interesting things here. Number one is a lot of people say 79 is a great missed opportunity for Labour because Callaghan put that election off and had he held it earlier before the great wave of strikes of the winter discontent,
then he might have won and nobody would ever have heard of Margaret Thatcher. Because he goes to the party conference the previous autumn, doesn't he, in 1978, and sings. He does. Sings a song, There Was I Waiting at the Church. It's actually the TUC conference, the trade unions. It's just a musical song that no one knows what it means. Yeah, this is the age of the sex pistols. Yeah, he led everybody up the garden path thinking there'd be an election, then he put it off. I know why he put it off. He put it off because all the data showed him that he wouldn't win it. Yeah.
Or at least if he did win, it'd be so narrow that it would make his life a total misery. Gordon Brown did something similar, didn't he? Which also was then a shadow over him because there was a feeling that he'd bottled it. I don't think Callaghan bottled it. I think he just made a call that, you know, we're probably not going to win the 78. We'll go for broken 79 and he loses anyway. Because there was a feeling, when was it? In, um, so I guess 2009. Yeah. That Gordon Brown had bottled it, that he'd planned to have an election and then didn't. Well, he'd planned to have an election in 2007, Tom, after he'd just come in.
And that would have been the moment to have it before the financial crash. Oh, right. That's it. Yes, I'm misremembering. But by the time Callaghan does go to the country in '79, I think that election is a bit of a foregone conclusion. The winter of discontent has happened. There's a big shift to Thatcher among working class people, among young first-time voters. They break overwhelmingly for Thatcher in '79. There's a couple of really fun things about that election.
So in the public imagination, this is the great ideological showdown between Labour and conservatism, where Thatcherism arrives. And some people, to be fair, at the time did say this. So are you familiar with the satirist rhetoric?
Oberon Waugh. I am. Evelyn Waugh's son. Wrote a column in Private Eye. He did. I think it was in that column or was it in the Spectator? I'm not sure which. This reads like it's from his column in Private Eye because, I mean, he was a very kind of reactionary, crusty... Well, I mean, you know, he's the son of Evelyn Waugh. Yeah. But in this column that he wrote for Private Eye, he would exaggerate that to kind of comically grotesque... A gargantuan degree. Yeah. He said in Who's Who, I think, that his hobby was telling lies. Yeah. Oh, no.
So in this, he says, this is the showdown now. He says, this is the chance. This is the battle against the other sides. And I quote, and I apologize to our listeners, if any are going to be offended by this. He says, they're dwarves, they're ugly women, young men with squints and crooked minds, victims of broken homes or comprehensive education with impassive faces and staring eyes.
The other side's hunchbacks, sexual incompetence, militant feminists, baby bashers, trade unionists, teachers, lesbians, drunks, freaks, idlers, social workers, new statesmen journalists and Islington housewives. So presumably he's talking about Labour there, I'm guessing. He's talking about Labour.
And yet the thing is, the public actually didn't agree with him at all because they didn't think there was any difference between the two parties. I mean, that's the amazing irony. But wouldn't you argue that essentially there wasn't? Isn't that the Sandbrookian take? Yeah. That the Labour government has laid the foundations for Thatcherism? It has. Yeah, I do make that argument, Tom. With Dennis Healey and Callaghan? Tom, good knowledge. Good knowledge. I've read your books, Dominic. So actually five out of 10 people didn't think there were any important differences between the Conservatives and Labour.
In other words, people think they are closer together than pretty much any time since the Second World War, which is extraordinary. The other interesting thing is that Thatcher is a real novelty, of course, and Callaghan feels he can't really go at her because she's a woman and he doesn't want to look ungallant. It's the first time a woman has been in that position. And there's definitely a sense, I think, of...
Callaghan in particular, I would say pulling his punches. Because he's an old school gent. In the House of Commons he'd always patronised Mrs Thatcher. I think at one point he actually called her the little lady. But on the campaign trail he's been told don't condescend to her because that'll lose your support among women. So he basically is just a
avuncular and you know like she's a sort of amusing niece yes who's come back from university with unexpected opinions exactly exactly she's got her radical opinions I don't agree with them but I admire her enthusiasm but interestingly he's much more popular than she is the further than campaign goes on the more people like him and don't like her so his lead over her stretched from seven to
to 19% as the campaign went on. And amazingly, four out of 10 conservatives thought that he would be a better prime minister. So basically they want the conservatives, but with Callaghan as prime minister. Yeah, I think there's a degree of truth in that. So anyway, they don't get that because 1979 is a big break in British politics. Obviously it's the inauguration of Thatcherism because she does come in. She comes in with a 43 seat majority.
majority. And then of course, Tom, her popularity sinks to the greatest nadir, then the worst trough that any prime ministerial sort of rating had ever descended to. And everybody thinks that she'll be a one-term aberration. Right. So you said that it's a great break in British politics. I think it should be a break in this episode as well. And when we come back, let's look at the 1983 election and find out whether Mrs Thatcher wins it or not. Huge tension.
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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're a week away here in Britain from going to the polls. And to mark that, we are looking at earlier election campaigns, what they can tell us about their effectiveness, their function, their evolution. And Dominic, we've reached the 80s, the age of Thatcherism.
And you were saying before the break that during the first Thatcher government, she becomes spectacularly unpopular. It seems like the economy is in meltdown. Unemployment touches 3 million. But then, of course, as listeners to our episodes on the Falkland War will know, spectacular military success intervenes. Yeah. But you also say, if I remember your most recent book correctly, that she would have won probably anyway, even without the Falklands. Would definitely have won. Not probably. Probably.
We definitely have one. So that will appall some listeners who believe that the Falklands changed Mrs Thatcher's fortunes. I don't think it did. And actually, the British Journal of Political Science did a very detailed statistical analysis, which would fill most people with absolute trepidation because it's got a lot of graphs. You love a graph. And they showed, I think, pretty clearly that...
that the polls were moving back in Mrs Thatcher's direction even before the war happened, that all the economic indicators, all the things that contribute to a shift in the momentum, say interest rates, mortgage rates, the rate of inflation, property prices, a sense of consumer confidence, but not unemployment. They were moving in her direction throughout 1982. Basically what the Falklands War does is
is it accelerated a turn in Tory fortunes that was already underway. By 1983, the effect had kind of worn off, so the Tories were where they would always have been anyway. But doesn't that, I mean, the fact that Britain is kind of starting to boom in London, in the South, but that in other areas people are on the scrap heap, and towns are going into meltdown and decaying, the sense of a kind of polarised society, does that sharpen...
the debate not just in 1983 but throughout the 80s yes it does so i had to restrain myself this morning from just stuffing the notes full of quotations from my book or my notes for future books i know dominic i know so there are amazing rants by people like salman rushdie or the feminist novelist angela carter about britain has become fascist she's the most evil person who's ever existed i
editorial in the Guardian that says this is probably the last election in which we'll ever get to vote. So this is quite Churchill talking about the Gestapo. Oh, but on steroids, right? Churchill was doing a bit of pantomime. You know how it is with Churchill. Churchill would say something absolutely ridiculous and then he'd go and drink a pint of champagne afterwards or something and just forget all about it. Whereas this is what people are genuinely believing.
So the Guardian said this could well be the last election because either elections will be banned under the new prison camp fascist state or, more plausibly, Mrs Thatcher will have blown up the world with Ronald Reagan and we'll all be dead.
There was a sense of the rhetoric being really, really heightened among people who are interested in politics. But then the remaining 95% of the population are just watching breakfast TV and thinking about Bananarama or Bucks Fizz or something and are not invested in this to anything like the same degree, I would say.
But in terms of the parallels that this election holds up to the one that we're currently going through, there is a parallel, isn't there? Because in 1983, the vote on the left was divided. So you had a Labour Party that had swung quite sharply to the left.
That had generated a split with people leaving and forming the Social Democratic Party, the SDP, which then goes into alliance with the Liberals. Mrs. Thatcher just hoovers up all the boats on the right and storms to victory. The same thing is happening now but reversed because you have a united Labour Party and you have the Tories who are scrapping over votes with reform under Nigel Farage, who is to their right.
basically our parliamentary system first past the post system hates and punishes divisions brutally yeah it does absolutely right so here's another thing where some listeners will now at this point turn the podcast off and never listen to it again
It's commonly said Mrs. Thatcher only wins because she never won more than 50% of the vote. So it's commonly said she only wins because of the division of the opposition. And if only the opposition had been able to work together, then that dreadful woman would never have had the chance to destroy this country. That's what people say. I think that is wrong. In fact, I know that's wrong because studies of the election have shown, I think beyond any reasonable doubt, that if the SDP-Liberal Alliance had not existed...
a lot of their voters would have voted Conservative. Oh, that is interesting. And there is actually an argument that had they not existed... And by the way, it's impossible to imagine an alternative reality in which they don't exist. They always would have existed. I mean, don't forget the Liberals had won almost 20% of the vote in 1974. So even if there's no SDP, the Liberals are still there. But if they hadn't existed, there's an argument that Mrs Thatcher would actually have won an even bigger majority. Because...
At that point, a very, very bitterly divided Labour Party under Michael Foot, who's 140, he looks 300. Yeah, he does. In many ways, a great man. Wonderful books about Byron and Swift. Yeah. If you want an essay on Jonathan Swift, he's absolutely your man. Yeah. Not to be sniffed at, but there was a cover on Private Eye that showed a kind of very old woman huddled up beneath a blanket. I remember that. Clearly on the point of death. Yeah.
And the nurse kind of offering a glass and say, come on, Mr. Foot, you've got to do your election broadcast. I know. He's too old. His image was terrible. But also their campaign was so bitterly divided. Their manifesto, one of their own MPs, Gerald Kaufman, called it the longest suicide note in history because it was just, it was very Jeremy Corbyn, actually. It was a massive,
manifesto with loads of very extravagant promises, unilateral nuclear disarmament being one of them. But the other interesting dividing line in this election, which some listeners may enjoy hearing about,
is Europe, because in that campaign, Labour's proposal was to take us out of what became the EU without a referendum. Peter Shaw, who was the keenest Eurosceptic sort of frontbencher in the Labour Party... Mr Legxit. Mr Legxit, he said that entering Europe had been a rape of the British people and their constitution, and it would be a disgrace to have a referendum, because referendums were un-British, that we should just leave.
And actually, here's the really interesting thing. Mrs. Thatcher, in 1983, 1983 is a landmark in the history of elections. I'm just looking at this speech.
It's our biggest trading area and there are jobs in exports. And then so many companies choose to invest in Britain because they know there's a free market entrance to the whole of Europe. Yeah, well, there you go. So what's interesting about that is she launches her campaign on the radio, on Radio 2, the Jimmy Young Show, very populist program. So for our overseas listeners, it's like a fun campaign.
talk show, chat show, very, very accessible to the broadest possible audience. And that's typical Thatcher and that's something that people had not really done before. She goes for sort of down market opportunities
or mid-market media options. And unlike, let's say, Harold Wilson, she is not doing rallies with lots of opponents in town halls and things like that. It's a television campaign. It's the first real television campaign. If you want a really good example of this, Tom, somebody that you will know, Robert Harris, novelist, all his books and sister and stuff, he was then a political correspondent. And you can see it on YouTube, a very famous clip. He follows her around. I
a factory. Yeah. And he's saying everything is manicured for the television cameras. Everything is planned. This is British politics in 1983. He's doing all this very American style and he doesn't realize what he's talking to the camera. Yeah.
that she's stopped what she's doing and she's come up behind him and she's standing staring at him quizzically while he's doing the piece to camera. It's a really, really funny clip. Yeah, it is funny. But there is a rally that the Tories hold, isn't there? Where Kenny Everett, the zany disc jockey who had had an affair with Tommy Nutter. Wow. Savile Row Taylor. Of suit fame. Of suit fame. It's great when we link up all the different strands of... I know, it all connects. And he's wearing a pair of outsized foam hands. Yeah.
And he cries out, let's bomb Russia. It's actually, let's bomb Russia. Let's kick Michael Foote's stick away.
Yeah. So that has no impact. Yeah. It was a slight embarrassment for Mrs Thatcher, but not a massive one. I mean, the interesting thing there, right, is that the Tories in 1983, they had the zany DJs. That was a youth rally. And the Tories back then had a genuinely very strong, vibrant sort of youth support. I mean, all these people who thought Tories equals ambition, aspiration, a better life.
It's the future, modernity. I mean, nobody obviously said that for about the last 20 years. I mean, maybe they did when Cameron came in, but certainly they're not saying it now. And I think that's an aspect of Thatcher's appeal. She's not actually a reactionary politician. She's a forward-looking one. And it's her campaigns in the 80s that are much more modern, forward-looking, glitzier, slicker, all of these kinds of things, which actually now we don't really associate with the Tories. Although...
I mean, the most memorable speech from that campaign was a warning not to be young or indeed to be old. And that came from Neil Kinnock, who essentially, I mean, it's so powerful, this speech. Neil Kinnock is Welsh, and in Britain, great powers of oratory are kind of very much associated with the Welsh, although it can kind of veer into windbaggery. So he would be known as the Welsh windbag. Not something that would ever happen on this podcast, Tom. Windbaggery. No, of course not. That would never happen. But Kinnock...
on the back of this becomes leader of the Labour Party and fights two campaigns, both of which he loses. But when he catches fire, I mean, his speeches are probably the only ones that have any cut through really, as in the kind of Gladstonian sense of great soaring oratory. And the measure of that is in the 1987 one, he does a broadcast in which he talks about how he was the first Kinnock
you know, to go to university and all this kind of stuff. And it's so powerful that it encourages Biden basically to copy it. And that then terminates Biden's presidential ambitions for decades and decades, meaning that Biden can only become president when he's 210. Yeah, and everyone's forgotten. Everyone is dead who remembers it. Yeah, so Kinnock's oratory perhaps has affected the course of the American election this year. Why am I...
the first kinnikin a thousand generations to go to university was it because they were not clever these people who could work with their hands and make beautiful you know he goes on like this it's brilliant yeah it's brilliant biden didn't it wasn't so good because he's talking about pennsylvania not wales so it doesn't have the same emotional scranton yeah exactly it's not the same as like the welsh valleys but the election in 1992 mrs satcher has has gone john major has
has succeeded as Tory leader and is widely expected to lose. And Kinnock is still Labour leader and they hold a massive rally in Sheffield. And he gets so carried away and he starts shouting, all right, all right. And supposedly this loses him the election. I never understand it. I mean, I've kind of watched it and I thought it was all right. I remember it being on the news. You loved it, Tom. You loved it. Tom had tears in his eyes watching that rally. I didn't think, oh, that's terrible. He's going to lose the election. Do you know what? I saw that on the news, probably watching same news bulletin you did.
It was John Cole, the BBC political correspondent with a splendid Northern Irish voice. And he said it was the most amazing rally he'd seen in all his years covering British politics. It was held in Sheffield. The Labour people came on stage and they were introduced. Your next Home Secretary, Gerald Kaufman. Big it up. Whoa. And everyone kind of literally baying and sobbing. It was basically a throwback to the 18th century mobs. You know, people so excited.
And Kenneth comes out and he does that thing later when he lost unexpectedly. People said, oh, this tremendous hubris was what had undermined him, the American convention style campaign. I don't think that's true at all. I do, however, think that 92 is a challenge to my hypothesis that elections don't matter because I think this does matter.
I think when elections matter, when campaigns matter, it's because they accentuate, they amplify anxieties that were latent, that already existed. So in this election, the anxiety is about basically Labour will tax you and the Tories advertising hammered on.
on that relentlessly. Labour's tax bombshell. Now, the other thing about 92 that I think I would love to see return is John Major, who everybody had written off as basically Mr. Pooter, basically banal, suburban...
He, in this election, won what at the time, and I think possibly remains to this day, or at least remained for a long time, the largest number of votes ever won by a political party. And it was partly because he did a retro campaign, Tom. He did. He got on a soapbox. And you were saying how politicians today haven't been seasoned in the school of hard knocks. They haven't been out on the streets. But Major had. Major was a councillor here in Brixton, where I'm sitting right now, and not a naturally Tory-friendly place, it has to be said. Right.
But he'd come through that and he'd risen to become leader of the Tories. And he thought, well, I'll go on the stump, didn't he? He got out his soapbox and he took it round and he had a loudspeaker and people would gather and boo him and things. Yeah, the soapbox is a wooden crate. So basically you put this crate down and town centre, get up on the crate, get his loudspeaker. Oh,
or a loud hailer and he'd say you should vote conservative because of in this sort of tinny loud hailer voice and some people would say rubbish what about unemployment you know whatever it was a great scene it was
It was a throwback to an earlier age of politics. But it worked for him because he did have an unusual background for a Tory leader. The circus. Yeah, he's famously the only man to have run away from the circus to join an accountancy firm. But he actually, they did a party political broadcast in that campaign where he went back to Brixton and he kind of revisited all his old haunts. It's actually really well done because he's in the car. The car is going towards his old house. He's saying, is it there? Is it there? Is it there?
Look, it's still there. He's talking about his old house. And this sort of thing that he is so ordinary and the ordinariness is the point. Well, you say that. I mean, I agree. The ordinariness was the point and was his kind of USP, really. But-
The weird thing is, on television, he did come across very boring, and he's always portrayed as very grey and eating peas and tucking his shirt into his pants. But I've met him a couple of times in person. He's a very charismatic man. I mean, he's very kind of tall, good-looking, amusing, funny. And I just wonder whether...
But going out into the streets enabled that aspect of him. There was something about television that kind of bleached him of what made him an impressive figure in person. I agree with that. And Tom, I don't think we should turn this into the John Major fan cast, but all of that said, I once went to an event at the National Archives in my capacities on the board of their trust, whatever. And John Major came to give a speech about archives. And I thought, this is going to be the worst thing ever. A speech about archives, which is intrinsically quite boring. And I say that as a historian. And B, it's by John Major.
And he stood up and he gave his speech. And I thought, Jesus Christ, he's good. That was one of the best speeches I've ever heard. And then he went around shaking people's hands and introducing. He's very tall, isn't he? Yeah. He's like formidably physical. I say it's charismatic is the word. I know it sounds absolutely bonkers to say that of John Major. I thought, I mean, that election, both leaders were very charismatic. Yeah. And it
If you think about the people we've had in more recent elections, that sense of charisma and moral power combined, both of them had it in their different ways. Kinnock. So I've interviewed Kinnock and spent time with him.
He's an incredibly charismatic man. He's a great fun to be around. A joker, good humoured, again, a real presence to him. Goodness, could he articulate his ideals in a way that kind of made the hair on the back of your neck rise? Yeah, absolutely agreed. I remember that election campaign. It was the first time I was in London. I found it exciting. And, you know, you didn't quite know who was going to win. And I thought both the leaders were very impressive. As actually the Labour leader who campaigns in the next election in 1997, also, I think
I thought. Well, Tom, let me read you this and you tell me which election you think this is from. It's from American coverage. From Oxford's genteel debating scientists to tattooed punk rockers, Britain's youth seems to speak with the same voice about the May the 1st election. And that voice seems to be saying, who cares?
I don't think whatever happens is going to make any difference. See, it's 1945 again, Tom. I don't think whatever happens is going to make any difference, said a young woman in a jean jacket, a pair of fashionable sunglasses perched on her head. But will she vote? Never have done, never will do, she chirped. And her friend added simultaneously, no, sorry, I would vote if I knew more about it, said a dark-haired woman in carefully applied makeup. I would, but I don't, so I'm not going to vote. Now, which election is that? That's the 97, I guess. 97. So the supposed...
Everybody's very enthusiastic. Things can only get better. Blair landslide, cool Britannia. And yet the interesting thing about that, Tony Blair did not enthuse people.
as everybody says. Now, if you listen to Alistair Campbell on The Rest Is Politics, I'm sure he'll tell you something different. Dominic, you're wrong. He absolutely enthused me. But here's the thing. Turnout was fully 6% lower in 1997 than 1992. But that's because everyone knew Labour were going to win. People turn out when it's unclear who's going to win, surely. The Blair effect is not to fire people up with political enthusiasm. It's just to turn them off politics. Dominic, totally wrong. Let me continue.
I've got the facts and you don't. I've got anecdotal evidence, Dominic. Rubbish. In 2001, turnout fell even lower under Blair to 59%, its lowest level since 1918. So actually, Blair works as the ultimate political turnoff. The
The more people see of him, the less likely they are to vote on either side. But the reason for that, surely, is that people just assume he's going to win. Well, we'll see this time, won't we? Whether that is the same. I mean, everybody thought Boris was going to win in 2019, didn't they? I mean, ultimately, you can't deny that. Everyone thought Boris Johnson was going to win. And turnout then was almost 10% higher in 2019 than it was in 1997.
But 2019, there was lots at stake. And it wasn't in 97? People just thought, oh, you know, we're fed up. Tory's been around forever. Things are going to get better. I know Goldhanger Podcast is like a Tony Blair fan zone and they don't want to hear it. Listen, Dominic, you have your stats and your figures, but I have my anecdotal evidence, my memories. So what's your favourite? There's been four elections since 2010. So it's 2010, Cameron and Clegg.
hung parliament 2015 Miliband I did quite enjoy that Labour were terrible in that election and it was full of comic moments my favourite bit was when Ed Miliband went to see Russell Brand oh yeah the comedian and person who's been accused of all kinds of bad behaviour controversial star
And your old student, Owen Jones, wrote an article about it saying, Russell Brand has come out for Labour and the Tories should be worried. Yeah, I remember that. I still think that's the funniest headline about a general election campaign that I can think of. And it's obviously, in light of recent events, it's become even funnier. As the Tories ease to that overall majority. So then there's 2017. Now, 2017 is another one that basically...
punctures my thesis because 2017 the campaign did matter because if the election had been held and there'd been no campaign,
I think Theresa May would have won a handsome, handsome majority. But unfortunately, she insisted on campaigning. And she was just such a stilted and just not a natural campaigner. I mean, weirdly, for someone who got to the top of politics, she's not a huckster, not a salesman. And of course, Jeremy Corbyn was not really saying anything very substantive, I wouldn't say. I mean, I think they were both absolutely terrible. And if you compare Major and Kinnett or Callaghan and Thatcher, you just kind of weep. Yeah.
Really? Yeah. And I know that there's always the risk. It's a bit like music or sport.
That people who kind of live in your memory when you first get into something or you first become aware of something always seem more vivid. So there's always the risk, you know, I'm now in my 50s, that the political leaders of my youth seem more impressive. I don't think it is, though. I genuinely think that the leaders in the 80s and 90s were qualitatively better, both as campaigners and as leaders, than they have been recently. Let's end by just discussing this point. Has the standard declined in this period we've been talking about?
We started in 1945, right? Churchill and Attlee. When Churchill entered the House of Commons in the 1900s, he said of that House of Commons, there were still big personalities in it, though of course it had declined.
Since my father's day. And you look at that House of Commons, right, which has Churchill. It will go on to have like Keir Hardie, Attlee, all these great figures in the Labour Party. If I ask with Lloyd George, Richard Haldane, Joseph Chamberlain, you're like, what? I know. And I'm aware that people are always thinking that politics is in decline. But I've reached that stage where I genuinely think it is. So I can't help it. I'm middle-aged. Who cares? But just because people always say it doesn't mean it can't be true. And I think there is no doubt that...
the standard of the personnel and of the campaigns. And in other words, generally, the context, the ecosystem has changed and not for the better. And why do you think that is? So I think there's a couple of reasons. To be brutal, politicians pay much less than they were relative to other professions. So in other words, if you're a very ambitious, talented person, you may be inhibited from going into politics. The demands are much greater. It's a very peculiar lifestyle.
I think a lot of it is actually, we talked about how there'd been a transition from the mass rallies to the televised campaigns and stuff. And I think the ecosystem, the context, the environment makes it almost impossible for politicians to shine because they are interviewed on the BBC's, frankly,
terrible political shows for what, three minutes? They're given three answers. And if they say the slightest slip, people seize on it. I mean, here's a really good example. Churchill would be interviewed or Wilson or whoever, and they would give a long answer that would go on for five minutes. And they'd say all kinds of different things. No one would really notice. Rishi Sunak appears on the radio. He makes a joke about how he's been eating Haribos and Twixes.
like sweets to keep himself going in the campaign. It's just an offhand joke. And immediately someone rings up the station to complain.
and says how cruel and insensitive that at a time when we're battling with obesity, it says so much about the prime minister that he would make an offhand remark about eating sweets in this way. But doesn't that just reflect the fact that social media now means that people can be incredibly humorless in a loud way about everything that a politician says? It does, of course, but it basically means politicians, their room to breathe has been so restricted. So there was an age when maybe Sunak Starmer
When they could actually have grown as politicians and as people, we could have seen a reflective side. They must have reflective sides. I mean, I don't believe they're stupid people. Well, I actually think that both of them, relative to the leaders that we had in more recent times, are much more impressive. I could imagine them appearing in a 1979 political broadcast. Well, here's the thing. If you had to put your family finances in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, all his trusts,
I mean, there's two people there who are in a different league from all the others, right? Yeah, I think so. So I think that's quite a positive notion, Mr. Wendt. That's quintessential centrist daddery, isn't it? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it is. No. I think there'll be some people listening to this and saying, what absolute melts? Corbyn is the man. Or there'll be people who say, slagging off Boris again, that's such restless politics behaviour. No, because I think that Mrs. Thatcher was a very, very impressive person.
I think Atlee was. Oh, Atlee's brilliant. Yeah. You know, there are people who have led radical transformative governments. Yeah. Who are clearly very impressive in all kinds of ways. I know who you're ultimately talking about, Tom. You're talking about HH Asquith, aren't you? Yeah.
So he will be joining us for the First World War. Over the next few weeks. So we are about to embark on an epic account of the build-up to the First World War. So next week, we start a four-part series on the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Four episodes on that. And then we have a kind of sister series, six parts, looking at...
the road from Sarajevo to Britain's entry into the war on the 4th of August. And I hope you enjoy that. Well, Tom, they can't not enjoy it because it involves the best impressions you've ever done. I think you doing the Kaiser.
Will live in my memory till my dying day. And people say that, you know, you do impersonations and the impersonations takes you over. One of the really startling things I think about the series on the build up to the war is the fact that over the course of it, I discover that I am actually the Kaiser. Yeah. The similarities are uncanny. Uncanny.
Came as a surprise, but the more I contemplated it, the more I came to accept its force. I think we discovered, didn't we, that basically we've often talked about what the dynamic is at the heart of this podcast, and it actually is the relationship between Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser. Yeah.
Yeah. We love a hunting lodge. Let's be frank. So lots to look forward to, I hope. And for our British listeners, enjoy the last week of the election campaign. If you can. If you can. And we hope you enjoy the brutal murder in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. So until then, bye-bye. Bye-bye.
