The 1964 general election which ended “13 wasted years” of Tory rule and which brought Harold Wilson to Downing Street, was the first election I covered for the Press Association. It was one of the most fascinating elections of the 20th century and was unusual – if not unique – in producing a result which elected MPs from the three major parties, and none at all from any other party. The Ulster Unionists were regarded as Conservatives.
After a ferocious contest, it left Labour (317 seats) with an overall majority of four. The Tories claimed 304 seats and the Liberals nine. And although Wilson said the narrowness of the majority would not prevent Labour from governing effectively, he was forced to call another election less than two years later. The Tories had, in the previous year, endured the hugely damaging Profumo scandal, the resignation, on health grounds of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and the arrival at Downing Street of Alec Douglas-Home.
Home, the aristocrat, was no match for Wilson, who, politically, ‘slaughtered’ him at every touch and turn. Home’s admission that he used matches to work out economic problems made a bad situation that much worse.
The Tories were seen as “tired, embattled and increasingly out of step with the public mood”, a situation brilliantly exploited by Wilson, who also made huge political capital out of the Profumo scandal. At one point, during the campaign, an enraged Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham) told a heckler: “If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party, you can talk to me about Profumo.”
This caused some anxiety in Labour circles, but Lord Attlee, the former prime minister, accused Hogg of “acting like a schoolboy”. For his part Hogg, unwisely many thought, said that people who voted Labour were “stark, staring bonkers”. Hogg also publicly attacked a Harold Wilson poster with his walking stick. He was certainly the star of the show.
Meanwhile, Home was making what was regarded as a serious error of judgment by stumping the country on a soapbox tour rather than using TV. But whether it was a mistake or not is debatable: Home was as bad on television as he was at dealing with hecklers. His principal contribution to an uninspired campaign was to describe Labour’s manifesto as “a menu without prices”.
Labour set the agenda with a campaign covering economic planning, growth and scientific change, promising new ministries for Wales, overseas development, technology and economic affairs. This election brought about a shock result in Smethwick, where the Labour candidate, Patrick Gordon Walker, was ousted by the Conservatives in what was an openly racist campaign. Harold Wilson nevertheless made Gordon Walker foreign secretary, despite the fact that he was not an MP. An allegedly ‘safe’ seat was found for him in Leyton, east London.
But the voters there were so cross that Labour dumped their popular MP, Reginald Sorensen, to ‘parachute’ Gordon Walker in, that they actually voted in the Tory candidate. Gordon Walker’s brief stint as foreign secretary was over.
Later, Harold Wilson was to denounce Smethwick’s successful Conservative candidate as “a parliamentary leper” – a remark which afterwards forced the prime minister to apologise abjectly to the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association.
Only a month or so before polling day, on October 15, the Tories were actually marginally in the lead, according to the polls. But that was quickly wiped out as the campaign progressed, and it was astonishing, given the way the battle was conducted, that Labour managed only to squeeze home.
Meanwhile, then, as now, all the talk was about a hung Parliament, with the Liberals holding the balance of power. The party leader, the statesmanlike Jo Grimond, and many other people, including disinterested ones, firmly believed that the Liberals would make strong headway at this election. But despite what the pundits predicted, the Liberals could muster only a meagre nine seats – just short of enough to create a hung Parliament. Grimond was bitterly disappointed at this outcome.
It was my task to follow Grimond around the country. Throughout that campaign he was in ebullient and optimistic mood – at least outwardly. At one point he declared: “Let us march towards the sound of gunfire”, a splendid battle-cry, vaingloriously emulated some years later with David Steel’s “return to your constituencies and prepare for government”.
It was an exciting business following Grimond around in all those fringe areas of the country where Liberalism flourished, including Devon and Cornwall, East Anglia, the north of Scotland and Mid-Wales. It was, in many ways, like a holiday tour around some of the most attractive parts of the United Kingdom.
I particularly remember one occasion when taking off in a small aircraft from an airstrip on the outskirts of Dundee. The plane, in which Mr Grimond was also travelling, was almost certainly overloaded. The pilot got us off the ground, but we suddenly sank and found ourselves skimming across ‘the silvery Tay’. We thought our number was up, but heroically the pilot somehow managed to gain height again, and we ultimately landed safely. But for future flights, the pilot was strict about the numbers (and weight of) people he would allow on board.
Among senior figures who lost their seats at this election were Anthony Barber (minister of health) who was later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Bevins (postmaster general) who, unfairly many people thought, got most of the blame for the Great Train Robbery the previous year, and father of the late lobby correspondent Tony Bevins, and Maurice Macmillan (Economic Secretary to the Treasury), who was to predecease his father, Harold Macmillan.
Perhaps the best-known new arrival at the 1964 general election was Roy Hattersley (Birmingham, Sparkbrook) who as a Foreign Office minister, was to play a key role in the ‘cod war’ with Iceland. Mr Hattersley, now of course in the House of Lords and a prolific writer and broadcaster, was also to become deputy leader of the Labour Party when Neil Kinnock was at the helm.
