Over the centuries, one party has adapted to survive like no other. But on the cusp, potentially, of its greatest modern triumph, is that all-important flexibility still there?
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft / May 12, 2017 / Leave a commentPublished in June 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine
Conservative Prime Ministers. From left to right starting top left: Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Arthur Balfour, Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May ©Andy Rain/REX/Shutterstock/Office of the PM, Allstar picture library/Alamy stock photo/Foreign and Commonwealth Office, David Gordon, Alamy stock photo, Iandagnall computing/Alamy stock photo, GL Archive/Alamy stock photo, Wikimedia Commons, Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy stock photo
One of the curiosities of our political history is that both of the largest parties might well bear different names from their present ones. From time to time there has been talk of renaming Labour, most recently when Tony Blair’s cabal wondered if it could be improved on, although as someone noted at the time, “Centrica” had already been taken. That cabal was perhaps unaware that in the early 1920s, a previous leader had thought of re-branding Labour as the People’s Party: if they had heard of Arthur Henderson’s idea, it might have fitted in with their babble about “a people’s Wimbledon” and “the people’s princess.”
Although Winston Churchill was brought up as a Conservative, he was never much blessed with the quality Polish Communists used to call “partyness,” or any very lively sense of loyalty, as he demonstrated by deserting to the Liberals in 1904 shortly before that party won a landslide, and then awkwardly returning to the Tory fold 20 years later. He became prime minister in the supreme crisis of 1940, and five months later—when Neville Chamberlain was mortally ill—he became To…
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Peter F.