by Gareth Rubin
Had they stopped for a minute, they might have heard Bradlaugh shouting that it was OK – he had made his protest and he was now prepared to swear on the Bible so long as he could take his seat. After all, everyone inside and outside Parliament knew he thought the Bible was a fairy tale.
But, instead of that happening, Brand made another error: he allowed a debate to take place, at the end of which a spurious and possibly illegal vote was passed, which debarred Bradlaugh, whether or not he swore on the Bible. The issue was seized up and exploited by a group of young Conservative MPs led by Randolph Churchill, who saw that it could be used to embarrass the Liberal government led by William Gladstone, who was in favour of letting Bradlaugh take his seat.
Something like a comedy sketch followed as Bradlaugh attempted to take his seat anyway, only to be chased away, arrested and locked up in the Commons clock tower. Since he was not being allowed to take it, his seat technically fell vacant and there was a by-election. He won it. There was another one. He won it again. And another one – yes, he won that one too.
The issue snowballed in the national conscience, with Bradlaugh, Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, the electors of Northampton and hundreds of thousands of people who had signed a petition ranged on one side. On the other were Churchill, the Archbishop of Canterbury and an assortment of religious oddballs.
None of this deterred Bradlaugh, who was determined to take the seat he had been elected to three times. On at least one occasion he had to be removed from the Commons by policemen, and in 1883 he managed to take his seat and vote three times before he was fined £1,500 for voting. In support, his friends brought a bill before the House allowing members – i.e. him – to affirm their oath without recourse to the Bible. They lost. But in 1886 there was a new Speaker, Arthur Peel, who ruled (as Brand should have done) that no member would be allowed to prevent another from taking the oath, and Bradlaugh was finally allowed to take his seat six years after being elected.
Two years later, in 1888, a new bill was passed, which allowed Parliamentarians to affirm, rather than swear on the Bible, meaning that non-Christians could, for the first time, represent their constituencies without lying from the very beginning.
THE LOST LETTER – PEEL SAVES DISRAELI, 1846
Benjamin Disraeli: novelist, wit, politician, lover. But his parliamentary career came within a whisker of being cut short. As a young, loyal and brilliant Tory MP in 1841, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, asking for a position in the government. He was rejected – and he wasn’t happy about it.
So he went to plan B: make Peel’s life hell. For the next five years, Disraeli did everything but knock on Peel’s front door and then run away when someone answered. The real showdown came in 1847 in a debate over the Corn Laws; once again, the PM heard that familiar voice rise from the back benches, where Disraeli had become a hero, to mock and humiliate him. But Peel had a secret weapon up his sleeve. He asked Disraeli, if, as he claimed, he so despised his government, why had he once written, begging to be a part of it?
Disraeli had a choice: he could claim he had changed his mind, or that his letter had been misunderstood. Instead, he went for the third option and lied, saying he had never written such a letter. But Peel had him on that for he had kept the letter and had brought it with him to the debate.
He just couldn’t find it.
Had he done so and presented it to the assembled MPs, Disraeli might even have been forced to resign his seat for lying to the House. But it remained unseen.
Disraeli kept his seat and ended up one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers.
A VIRILE MAN – LORD PALMERSTON SHOWS HE’S STILL GOT IT, 1863
Palmerston became Prime Minister at the age of 71 – a ripe old age for such high office. By this time, his numerous affairs had already gained him the nickname Lord Cupid, and he proved he still had the energy to hold it by accidentally fathering a bastard when he was 79. The lady in question was one Mrs O’Kane, who claimed she and the Prime Minister had consummated their adulterous love in the Palace of Westminster.
It all came out when her husband, Timothy, a journalist, sued for divorce, naming the Prime Minister as co-respondent and claiming £200,000 in damages. Marvelling at the energy of the man, the newspapers of the day asked: ‘She was certainly Kane, but was he Abel?’ The story substantially increased Palmerston’s public popularity and strength in government. He died in office two years later, the last British PM to do so.
BAD TIMING – EMILY DAVISON FALLS UNDER THE KING’S HORSE, 1913
It was an incredible act of self-sacrifice. The suffragette Emily Davison killed herself in spectacular fashion, throwing her frail body under the fascist hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, forcing her cause onto the front pages for weeks.
Only she probably never meant it at all.
In 1986 Davison’s personal effects, which had been kept by her family solicitor, came to light. They included a return train ticket from the race. Even at the time the jockey who ended up on top of her, Herbert Jones, said he thought it was an accident. He often told how he was haunted by the look of surprise on her face when she saw the horse approaching. It seems she had run onto the track under the impression that all the horses had passed, but the King’s horse was a straggler and its approach had been hidden by a hump in the course. She had expected to run on, shout a bit, wave the flag she was carrying, and catch the train back home to London where she had also bought a ticket for a dance that evening. Instead, she was trodden to death and earned her place in the political hall of fame. There is a road named after her, Emily Davison Drive, which is next to Tattenham Corner railway station on the outskirts of Epsom.
Davison was once arrested for violently assaulting a man she mistakenly took for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. She later bombed Lloyd George’s house but he was out of the country at the time.
A FOND OLD MAN – ASQUITH GETS DISTRACTED, 1915
During the First World War, H.H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, often failed to pay attention during Cabinet meetings because he was writing love letters. Although in his early sixties, he had become obsessed with his daughter’s 28-year-old friend Venetia Stanley. The 35-year difference in their ages was nothing more than a blink of the eye to a strange old man in love. Over the course of just three months in 1915, he wrote her 151 letters, they weren’t just about lambs and all that stuff – he asked her advice on how to conduct the war. So the Tommies in the trenches were partly following the war plan of an unemployed socialite.
Still, Asquith might well have been drunk half the time – during the reading of the Parliament Bill of 1911, which made Britain a democracy by giving the elected Commons primacy over the unelected Lords, he was so smashed he was unable to speak.
SUFFRAGETTE PITY – ENFRANCHISING WOMEN ON A WHIM, 1925
According to Winston Churchill, it was a dull Friday afternoon in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks – known as ‘Jix’ – was speaking during a debate on female suffrage and outlining the government’s opposition to a private member’s bill which would reduce the age at which women would be allowed to vote from 30 to 21.*
When Lady Astor, the first female MP, interrupted his speech to ask if the government ever planned to lower the age, he promised to do so in the next parliament. No one knows why he did this. It wasn’t government policy – it was quite explicitly not so – and he had no authority to do it. But he did. And from then on, having promised it in Parliament, the government had no choice but to deliver on the promise.
‘Never was so great a change in our electorate achieved so incontinently,’ Churchill wrote later.
RULING HIMSELF OUT AS PRIME MINISTER – HERBERT MORRISON LEAVES THE ROOM, 1945
The General Election of 25 July 1945 produced a shock result. Churchill, the man who had won the war, was thrown out of Number 10 by an electorate that gave the Labour Party just under 50 per cent of the vote t
o the Conservatives’ 36 per cent. Labour took 393 seats, meaning a huge majority of 147.
Labour’s chances had been substantially boosted by a single radio address made by Churchill. He had led the country for four years, and almost to a man the people had been behind him. They had seen their friends, their siblings, their parents, their sons and daughters all killed by the Nazis. Then, during the electioneering, Churchill had gone on the radio to rail against Socialism in a fashion not a million miles from Hitler’s and, adding insult to injury, telling the public: ‘I declare to you from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist government can be established without some form of Gestapo.’
It was seen as being in shockingly poor taste – especially to the families of those who had died at the hands of the Gestapo, such as many of the intelligence agents of the Special Operations Executive who had parachuted into occupied Europe to destroy the German war machine from within.
Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who had served with Churchill in the wartime coalition government, dryly commented: ‘I see that Mr Churchill wishes you to realise that if you vote Conservative you will be voting for the leader of that party, not for the Mr Churchill who led us during the war.’
In all areas, the Tories seemed out of touch with the mood of the nation. Their manifesto, Mr Churchill’s Address to the Electors, sounded like something from the nineteenth century. In Kensington, their candidate had election posters depicting him in officer’s dress, with the simple slogan ‘Vote for Captain Duncan’. His Labour opponent capitalised on this political naivety and produced near-identical posters with ‘Vote for Corporal Woodford’. The Corporal won the seat.
Despite all this, no one was more surprised by Labour’s victory than the party’s MPs. Previously, they had been a lonely bunch wandering the corridors of power, occasionally catching a glimpse through closing doors of the nice warm offices that ministers occupied. Suddenly, the Labour benches were stuffed full of new boys and girls. And their very first thought was of treachery.
Attlee had led the party through the lean times, but had been chosen as party leader by the small number of Labour MPs who had been in the Commons during the previous Parliament. There were mutterings that the new members should have their say because perhaps they wanted someone else in charge – especially since that person would be the Prime Minister.
Thus it was that Attlee and senior MPs Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin sat in Attlee’s office just after the election results were announced silently plotting for their own ends. As they did so, a phone call came through. It was George VI inviting the party leader to attend him at Buckingham Palace to become Prime Minister. Morrison was insisting on a vote by the full crop of MPs as to whom it should be. And if anyone were to suggest it should be him … well, who was he to argue with public opinion?
Attlee was considering the proposition when Morrison was called away to take a private phone call. The moment he left the room, Bevin said: ‘Clem, go to the Palace straight away.’ Attlee thought this a very good idea. As Attlee was working his way across London to the Palace, Morrison was almost certainly under the impression that a leadership election was in the bag and he might be collecting the keys to Number 10 that evening. Instead, the only thing he got was an evening paper, informing him that Attlee had sneaked out and made himself Prime Minister.
Attlee’s meeting with the King was a stilted affair. The new PM wasn’t known for his gregarious nature, and George VI had a terrible stutter and preferred not to speak to anyone. After the two had stood staring at each other for a few minutes, Attlee informed him: ‘I’ve won the election.’
The King replied: ‘I know – I heard it on the Six O’Clock News.’
A FALSE POSITIVE – HAROLD MACMILLAN RESIGNS, 1963
Despite the terrible handicap of having gone to Eton and Oxford, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan struggled up through the Conservative party ranks to become Prime Minister. He is perhaps most famous for having informed the British public that they ‘never had it so good’ a few months after coming to power in January 1957 – possibly factually correct in the late 1950s so long as you weren’t in need of an abortion. But his time in Number 10 came to an abrupt end six years later when his doctor informed him that he had prostate cancer. We can only guess how Macmillan, who had planned to lead his party against Harold Wilson in the 1964 General Election, felt while he wrote out his resignation letter, which was to be read to the faithful at the party conference. His misgivings were unlikely to have been substantially mitigated as he watched Alec Douglas-Home, who was to succeed him as party leader, sprint to the conference and make it public before anyone could stop him.
Macmillan must therefore have had mixed feelings when he was informed by his doctors that they had made a mistake and there was nothing wrong with him. Rather than dying in a matter of months, he lived until 1986. In the General Election, Wilson gained the most wafery of wafer-thin majorities – just four MPs.
Had his doctors not misdiagnosed his condition, it would have been the trusted incumbent Macmillan fighting Wilson rather than the untried Douglas-Home, and the election result might well have delivered another Conservative government.
‘THIS IS OFF THE RECORD, ISN’T IT?’ – MICHAEL FOOT’S WIFE STABS HIM IN THE BACK, 1983
As the choice to lead the Labour Party, Michael Foot should have been slightly less popular than Mussolini. Coming across as a befuddled academic with misty-eyed views of Soviet politics, he contrasted sharply with Margaret Thatcher, who could orate in language understood by one and all, and seemed to quite like Britain, instead of wanting to phase it out. That even his own party didn’t want to be members if he was in charge was proved when six Labour MPs broke away to form the Social Democratic Party, led by David Owen.
In the run-up to the 1983 General Election, Foot wasn’t going down well with the electorate. Having just won the Falklands War, Britain was in no mood for a pacifist who wanted to voluntarily give up the nation’s nuclear deterrent – a policy then a central plank of the election manifesto that was famously described by one of the Labour Party’s MPs as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
In addition, Labour had a much more plausible potential leader in the form of Denis Healey. He was witty, as deputy leader he was already halfway there, and he could perform on television without coming across as some sort of biological experiment. The dark mutterings against Foot led to an extraordinary announcement during the election campaign when Labour’s campaign manager held a press briefing to announce: ‘At the campaign committee this morning we were all insistent that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party and speaks for the party. The unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader.’ He might as well have come out and said: ‘Michael Foot? Yeah, I suppose so.’
And all that was before Foot’s wife got involved.
Just as the British public were about to go to the polls, Jill Foot was speaking to a group of people she didn’t really know. Not for one moment imagining that they might tell anyone, she informed them that her husband would resign if Labour lost, but, even if they won, he wouldn’t stay very long: he would resign to make room for a younger man.
She believed that she was talking exclusively to loyal party members but one was a reporter for the local newspaper, who broke the news that even Foot’s own wife thought he was too old and frail to be Prime Minister.
On 9 June the Tories were elected with a majority substantially increased from their last. It led to soul-searching and a repositioning of the Labour Party – from then on, the left wing was on the run and the centrists under Neil Kinnock, then John Smith, were on the rise – culminating in Tony Blair’s descent upon the party to lead it to the promised land of Downing Street.
ALWAYS CHECK YOUR MIKE – GORDON BROWN AND BIGOTGATE, 2010
In 2010 one of the least charismatic men ever to hold the office of Prime Minister left Number 10 Downing Street. Had Gordon Brown remembered to take his radio mi
crophone off after an interview during the election campaign, he might just have remained there for another five years.
According to people who have met him, Brown can be charming, witty and good company. If this is true, he has always managed to hide it brilliantly from newspaper and broadcast interviewers alike.
His people skills were on particular display during the 2010 General Election when Brown, a man not noted for his common touch, was on a painful-to-watch walkabout in Greater Manchester to ‘connect’ with ordinary voters. One of those to whom he was presented was Gillian Duffy, a harmless, grey-haired grandmother and widow from Rochdale, whom Brown called ‘a bigoted woman’ live on national television without meaning to, or even realising it.
Mrs Duffy, a Labour voter, had asked the PM about state benefits not being available to those who needed them because they were going to people who weren’t in real need. She added: ‘You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they all flocking from?’
In front of the cameras, Brown replied with his trademark uncomfortable smile and a few bland words designed to sound like an answer without actually being one. He then waved goodbye and got into his car. As he drove away, he failed to notice that he hadn’t removed the radio mike that Sky News had placed on him earlier. It picked up the conversation in the car with his aide, Justin Forsyth, and faithfully relayed it back to the Sky newsroom. It ran thus:
Brown: That was a disaster. Sue [Brown’s adviser] should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?