We debated that ourselves, and came down on the side of 'it's a TLIAD'. There's also another side to all this, one that should become clear with the next update (coming very shortly), that also answers the 'wtf truman?11' debate currently raging above us.
TLIAD: Shuffling The Deck
- Thread starter Meadow
- Start date
We debated that ourselves, and came down on the side of 'it's a TLIAD'. There's also another side to all this, one that should become clear with the next update (coming very shortly), that also answers the 'wtf truman?11' debate currently raging above us.
Butler is the obvious choice. That of course makes me wonder whether our authors have gone a different way.
A very interesting timeline--am following avidly 
Well, so did Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home, Callaghan, Major...
Well, so did Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home, Callaghan, Major...
1947-1955 Alec Douglas-Home (Unionist)
The Ace of Clubs
The Young Buck Who Inadvertently Defined Postwar Toryism
The result of the Magic Circle’s deliberations in 1947 were very surprising to some. One explanation, accepted by some historians today, is that the presence of a still-popular and highly lucid outgoing leader - Eden - convinced them to back his chosen man. The ‘colleagues’ who had knifed him over the Manchester Canal Crisis were not fit to lead the nation, in the eyes of the soon-to-be-enobled statesman. What the country needed was a radical change.
In contrast with the two elder statesmen who had taken Britain through the Second World War and into the post-war World, Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass was a young, largely inexperienced scion of the Scottish Gentry. This charming Old Etonian and former first class cricketer had cut his teeth first as Eden’s wartime Scottish Secretary, and had been the young, acceptable face of the post-war budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Having narrowly held his seat in the face of a strong, Communist-backed Labour candidate and with the precarious health of his father threatening to send him from the Animals to the Vegetables, the heir to the Earldom of Home entered office to low expectations - a number of senior Cabinet members, led by the Defence Secretary, Harold Macmillan, refused to serve under a man they considered to be somewhat of an “upstart” - leaving the Manchester Guardian to rather nonsensically editorialise that “the man who used to be in the First XI may find himself bowled out before the innings is even over!”
However, Douglas-Home’s relative youth and professed economic radicalism endeared him to the 1945 intake - with both Enoch Powell and Peter Thorneycroft receiving their first Cabinet positions during his second Ministry. His ‘image’, too, was that of an athletic former sportsman and lover of the outdoors. He was proud to be Scottish - he regularly referred to himself as the leader of the Scottish Unionist Party - and yet his love of cricket (the last PM to be listed in Wisden) made him identifiably English in his habits.
From such low expectations, Douglas-Home did not have to achieve much to surprise his detractors. The short lived late-40s boom saw him become the face of ‘New Britannia’ as the country picked itself up after the war and wrapped itself in a union jack. Preparations for the 1951 Festival of Britain and Douglas-Home’s aspiration to put ‘a television in every home’ proved a great source of hope but both turned out to be rather damp squibs (quite literally in the case of the former, when the Skylon fell into the Thames).
Personal tragedy and political disruption for Douglas-Home loomed in the autumn of 1950. His father, an old man and not in good health, fell seriously ill. Personal feelings aside, Douglas-Home had to face up to the fact that he would soon become the 14th Earl of Home. This would bar him from sitting in the Commons. “While a trip to Lords is normally a treat,” he wrote to a friend in December, “to be exiled to another institution bearing its name would not be pleasant.”
Aware that the spectacle of a sitting PM being forced out of office by a clash between antiquity and modernity was the last thing the Conservative Party needed, certain backbenchers began lobbying for a swift legislative response to this problem before it occurred. ‘Save Dunglass’ became the informal cry of the movement, and it became difficult for the Opposition not to support the move, particularly as the fiery Iain MacLeod reminded the House over and over that the Prime Minister had led the government to win a clear plurality of the public vote in the 1950 General Election.
The aftermath of the campaign was the 1952 House of Lords Reform Act, which gave Hereditary Peers the right to disclaim their titles, and formalised the oft-proposed idea of ‘exempted Peers’ (first seriously considered twelve years earlier, when Lord Halifax might have become Prime Minister). It also allowed for a set number of Life Peerages to be created by the Prime Minister, and set a maximum size for the House based around a similar provision for that which accommodated the Bishops of the Church of England - sitting in the Upper Chamber was no longer an automatic right, but rather one that was dictated according to seniority, self-selection and the occasional use of Writs of Acceleration to promote talented sons holding subsidiary titles from their fathers.
Douglas-Home, cunningly enough, chose not to accept this position when his father eventually died in the following year, and he continued to sit in the Commons as an exempted Peer. He is therefore the last Prime Minister to date to have served as a Peer while in office - though for propriety’s sake, he did not set foot in the House of Lords until he was no longer Prime Minister.
There is a sense among historians that Douglas-Home was really cut out to be a Prime Minister in a period of easy prosperity, not one of austerity and ‘building a land fit for heroes’. The 1953 announcement that rationing of meat and sugar would have to continue for a further two years - rather than ending at Christmas of that year - was at total odds with the ‘gentleman sportsman’ image maintained by the PM, who soon took the unusual step of inviting the press to photograph one of his monthly rounds of golf with the King.
But Douglas-Home’s government was effective in the task of building the ‘welfare state’ (Douglas-Home preferred ‘Assistive State’). Enoch Powell’s tenure as Minister for Health revolutionised doctor-patient relationships, and laid the foundations for what we now consider modern mental health care. British Railways was incorporated during his first month in office, and proved a success. The Regional Coal Boards Act 1949 faced a fight on its way through Parliament, but remains of the most radical and effective pieces of Conservative legislation in the post-war period.
Furthermore, Douglas-Home proved a capable grandstander, stepping into the void created by a humiliated Harry Truman as the American President found his domestic credibility falling to pieces. ‘Who is this man?’ Middle America cried. Britain was able to flex some international muscle within Europe, though Douglas-Home remained conservative on the Empire - a blot on his reputation to this day.
And while there were successes, there were failures where a man of more experience might have succeeded. The Dominion of India Act had done little to decide the future of subcontinent - at least in any long-term sense of the word. By 1950, ethnic strife - not just between Muslim and Hindu, but pertaining to religious minorities within India Proper - such as the Sikh and Parsi communities, not to mention the various disputes between the Princely States - had left a quagmire of constitutional quibbling and socio-economic strife that was to plague the Dominion for many years to come. Home's reputation as a moderniser had done much to improve the domestic organisation of the territory, but his lack of expertise on foreign affairs, coupled with the lack of enthusiasm that President Eisenhower held for European colonialism (Ike singled out the troubles within India during his 1949 Inaugural Address) - meant that the future of India was still not settled by the time Douglas-Home left office.
Despite going into the 1955 election as a clear favourite, a generation of conservative dominance of one form or another had sapped public support for Toryism of any colour, and a late-swing against the government allowed Labour to win their first majority in history, although it was with a tiny buffer of barely a dozen seats. Douglas-Home left office, but not the Conservative leadership, expecting he would be back. While he remained popular with most of the party, he would be proved wrong at the next election. A consensus emerged that new blood would be needed, but still he refused to budge. His eventual departure was forced when Iain Macleod, once an ally and friend, gave a measured and witty condemnation of his refusal to go. Beginning with “I hope there is not a monopoly on cricket metaphors”, Macleod painted a picture of a well-meaning but underperforming batsman unwilling to run, leaving a stronger player unable to face the ball. Douglas-Home, who knew when he was beaten, resigned from the leadership the following week.
Many expected Douglas-Home to remain in Parliament, which of course he did, as a member of the Lords. As the 14th Earl of Home, however, he kept out of contemporary politics and threw himself into reading and occasional charity work. He briefly returned to the headlines when rumours circulated that he had been privately approached by ‘influential newspaper barons’ to lead a National Government after the toppling of the government of the day in 1973. He always denied these suggestions - including the allegation he gave a four-letter-reply - with a smile on his face.
The Dunglass Group, an influential grouping within the Conservative Party that traditionally attracts young MPs, was established in 1977 and continues to this day to act as a force for what it calls ‘dynamic Toryism’.
Ah! Is the quirk of this TL going to be that all the PMs are OTL PMs in a different order, hence the title?
If so, it pretty much has to be Callaghan now, unless we've got a Labour Heath.
(And judging from Truman in '44, Ike in '48, the same thing is happening to U.S. presidents)
If so, it pretty much has to be Callaghan now, unless we've got a Labour Heath.
(And judging from Truman in '44, Ike in '48, the same thing is happening to U.S. presidents)
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Oh I get it now. Very good indeed. I take it Wilson is toppled in 1973?
Ah, that might be an unclear sentence - the barons wanted to topple the government and were planning for that eventuality. They did not succeed.
Hope people liked alt-Sir-Alec.
I certainly did. So, that's three Conservative leaders in a row unwillingly removed from their position. Does this continue, migrate to the Labour leader now he has become PM, or suddenly cease. I doubt it's the latter outcome.
It's always interesting to see how a TL is similar and yet different to OTL. That certainly applies here.
Fascinating. Would Attlee still manage to grasp the flowery nettle of the premiership in 1955? I really like this alt-Douglas-Home. Is this Dunglass Group, kind of One Nation-ish Tory like their namesake, or are they 'dynamic Tories' in the sense they are young and want things to change even if they are conservative?
I just realized that Attlee would be pretty old by this stage and could he realistically stay on as leader after losing so many elections?
"Go bugger yourself, Herbert. You'll take the leadership from my cold, dead hands." - Clement Attlee, 1950
With Meadow & Lord Roem we are in the hands of masters of brilliantly written alternate history.
1955-1957 Clement Attlee (Labour)
The 2 of Spades
The Old Man Who Was Not In Enough Of A Hurry
Herbert Morrison described Clement Attlee as ‘a greyhound ready for the race at ’45 but not let through the gate until 1957.’
This is probably not entirely fair. Labour won the 1955 election with a mandate to govern - a clear one, for the first time in the party’s history. However, Attlee had never quite come to terms with Labour’s defeat ten years earlier. The plans for the 1945 government had been - if not exactly met - at least pencilled in, but whilst Labour could claim some credit for ‘forcing the most socialist government in history’, the majority of the PLP felt minded to turn around and ask where their kudos for the war effort was coming from.
The historical view of Attlee as ‘the Labour Douglas-Home’ is, frankly, bunkum. The detractors forget that he stood down after the total disappointment of the 1950 election (though it took him eighteen months to do it). Hugh Gaitskell seemed to be taking Labour in an electable direction when he was knocked down and killed by a tram in 1954. With the election almost upon them, the party looked at the ferocious scrap breaking out between Nye Bevan and Herbert Morrison and decided to bring back their Grand Old Man for one last ineffectual heave - with Douglas-Home still personally popular, they expected to lose.
But they did not. Attlee found himself in Downing Street, not at the head of a radical Labour government with a huge majority, but a confused and tired Labour Party with a workable majority.
After three successive defeats as “the Quiet Man, With Much to be Quiet About”, Attlee decided to frame the 1955 General Election as Gaitskell had planned to: an election in the ‘People Vs The Peer’ tradition of several decades ago. When the campaign got underway, Attlee and Labour were astonished to find that it was working. Regardless of what people thought about Douglas-Home on a personal level, the concept of an Earl - serving as an MP or not - as head of government was not the image that a nation struggling for post-war acceptance was keen to promote.
Once Attlee was in office, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (who had kept his role in the party organisation that Gaitskell had given them) suggested that the idea of a monthly television address under the working title of “Attlee Speaks” was the best way of bringing Whitehall to the people. It failed miserably.
Regardless of what historians have said about Clement Attlee’s personal attributes (and it is clear that he had many of them), few would say that he represented the zeitgeist. A privately-educated veteran of the First - rather than the Second - World War, with a father who had been a colonial administrator was far removed from the public face that the Labour Party had wished to project. The perils of running a campaign designed for a younger, fresher face are that when one gets into power, one finds one isn’t actually like what one has pretended to be. Despite their best efforts, the cream of the 1945 intake could not shake off the impression that the Labour Party was little more than a gentleman’s club for do-gooders. This was exacerbated by a series of policy failures, and a failed ‘restructuring’ of the NHS from the National Hospital Service into the National ‘Health’ Service.
The outbreak of the Indochinese Civil War brought the government’s oh-so-brief honeymoon period to a close. Since President Eisenhower had narrowly won re-election against a resurgent Democratic Party under then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, and the idea of western intervention in the region proved to be an attractive one for the governments of Western Europe. However, even as France, Canada and the Nordic Union sent their troops to support the Federal Republic of Annam, Attlee hesitated, in a manner that was typical for Prime Minister, who was fundamentally a man who could do little right.
The escalation of the war prompted a reaction from the American people that was one of fear and kneejerk isolationism. However, Honest Ike was forthright and bullish on the matter, nearing the end of his second term and facing no chance of running again (courtesy of the 22nd Amendment) and continued to press for foreign intervention. An international army was going to go in, and it was going to fight to save the people of Annam. Attlee listened to the mood of the British people, which was similar to their American cousins. Many had lost loved ones to the yellow men in the east. Let them have their own squabble. Britain declined to join the UN taskforce.
When the first Pathé reels of the Hue Ghetto came back to Britain, the atmosphere changed overnight. Something about the footage reminded people of what they had seen in grim, flickering black and white film brought back from Warsaw and Bergen-Belsen. Attlee was harangued in Parliament and on the street for his inaction, and calls for Britain to ‘go east at once’ reached a cacophony in the press, a matter made worse when someone in the cabinet leaked that Attlee had framed much of the case against joining the war in financial terms. "Will the Prime Minister apologise to the House, and to civilisation, for endangering human lives for the sake of a few pence off the cost of false teeth?" shouted one fiery Conservative from the backbenches. Realising his moral authority had been utterly compromised, Attlee briefly considered doing a total u-turn and sending troops east, but decided it would be simpler to just resign.
Clement Attlee was the man who came up with many of the foundations of the welfare state, but once he got into office, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He was an opponent of Appeasement, and a brilliant wartime administrator on the home front, but when faced with a chance to save lives abroad, he chose instead to keep Britain out of a war in the Far East, allegedly for the sake of the Exchequer. As the Parliamentary Labour Party met to elect a new Prime Minister for the first time, many cursed ‘that bloody tram’.
Attlee’s reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years. Many biographers are frustrated by his obvious brilliance, and his failure to live up to his potential. The Viet Nam Decision which ended his premiership (though admittedly he was also an old man by the time he left Downing Street) is seen today as a Hobson’s Choice, and Attlee as a man crucified by a fickle British public. Nevertheless, there is no denying that he and his government were broadly ineffective, especially when compared with what his successor would do with the same party and the same majority.
Clement Attlee is usually ranked by historians somewhere in the bottom three of 20th century Prime Ministers.
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Excellent stuff! I particularly like the 'Manchester Canal Crisis' turn of phrase; I may have to steal that for a little project I'm working on.
EDIT: Oh, poor Clem - I suspected Eden's glory-hogging would have an effect on his reputation, but...
EDIT: Oh, poor Clem - I suspected Eden's glory-hogging would have an effect on his reputation, but...
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