The Parliament elected in 1959 would sit for its full five-year term, the first one since the war to do so (the 1950 election having been held about five months earlier than necessary). The strong Conservative majority meant that the Government was safe in its position, but that's not to say its term was uneventful - on the contrary. When Macmillan was interviewed later in life and asked what the greatest challenge in politics was, he's alleged to have responded
"Events, dear boy, events", and while this quote is poorly attested, it's not hard to see where the sentiment would've come from.
As discussed in the previous part, Macmillan took power in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis, and one of his main priorities as Prime Minister was to retreat from the staunch imperialism of his predecessors and embrace Britain's new role in the post-war world order. While military reforms such as the acquisition of Polaris and the end of National Service formed part of this strategy, its most famous expression is without a doubt decolonisation. Steps in this direction had already been taken under Eden, with the Gold Coast becoming the independent Commonwealth realm (later republic) of Ghana in March 1957, and Macmillan was insistent on continuing the process. Along with Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, Macmillan set out to prepare Britain's African colonies for independence, and in early 1960, the two men embarked on a tour of the continent. On 4 February, Macmillan addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town, and gave what is probably the most famous speech of his career.
"The wind of change," he said,
"is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." Macmillan had in fact given the same speech in Accra three weeks earlier, but it failed to garner attention then because it was seen as uncontroversial in overwhelmingly-black Ghana. In South Africa, however, the white political elite didn't take kindly to the idea of Britain embracing majority rule, and the speech gave additional fuel to already-growing calls for a break with the British Empire.
Shortly after the Wind of Change speech, Macleod and the Colonial Office announced that the original, very gradual timetable for African decolonisation, which had called for the British presence to be ended by the mid-1970s, would be sped up by a full decade. The goal was now independence for the African territories as soon as practically possible, and Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somaliland and Tanganyika were all given independence within a year of the speech. By the time of the 1964 election, only the Gambia, Mauritius, the Seychelles, the High Commissioner's territories surrounding South Africa, and of course, Southern Rhodesia, remained in British hands.
The end of direct colonial rule in Africa was, of course, an unambiguously good thing for the continent, but it is very important to note that the process was not without its dark sides, both for the former colonies and for Britain itself. In most cases, natural resources in the newly-independent states remained under the control of British (or otherwise European) companies, making it difficult for the new governments to establish a stable revenue stream, and while the idea of colonising powers "drawing random lines on a map" is somewhat exaggerated, there were a number of cases where new national borders cut across ancient ethnic divisions or left rival ethnic groups vying for the same territory. The most famous of these conflicts in former British colonial territory is probably the Biafra War, which lasted two and a half years and led to a famine that killed over a million people. In addition, part of Macleod's approach to decolonisation was a policy of systematically hiding and destroying records relating to British colonial administration, in part to protect natives who had collaborated with the British from reprisals but mainly to protest the British state from future embarrassment. Due to this, the abuses committed by British authorities in the later stages of its colonial empire remained obscured from history for decades, although investigation has resumed since the Foreign and Commonwealth Office admitted to the existence of tens of thousands of "migrated" records in 2011.
At home, the winding down of the British Empire led to a strong backlash from the political right. Macmillan's Wind of Change speech didn't just ruffle feathers in South Africa, it also enraged sections of his own party and led a group of young Conservatives with strong anti-communist and pro-imperialist views to found the Conservative Monday Club in January 1961. The Monday Club would continue to dog Conservative Prime Ministers for decades, and although its direct influence was limited outside of right-wing circles, its formation was undoubtedly part of a wider political shift in the country. As mentioned before, the British Nationality Act 1948 had given full British citizenship to nearly every resident of the British Empire, and over the 1950s this combined with general poverty in the colonies led to a surge in immigration to Britain, mainly by people of colour. By 1962, although Britain remained very ethnically homogenous (the 1961 census gives the foreign-born population as 4.9%), tensions were high enough that the Conservatives felt the need to introduce new restrictions on migration. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, while not altering the overall nationality framework put in place in 1948, repealed the free-movement clause and imposed strict immigration controls on all Commonwealth citizens (including citizens of British colonies) who didn't have a "relevant connection" to the UK, defined as either having been born there, holding a UK passport or being an immediate family member of someone who did. This law was hugely controversial when it was passed, with Hugh Gaitskell calling it "cruel and brutal" in Parliament, but Labour did nothing to undo it during their time in Government, in part due to the role that race relations played in the 1964 general election.
Of course, decolonisation and immigration weren't the only issues facing Macmillan's government. There was also a minor recession in 1960-61 that hurt the Conservatives' image as good stewards of the economy, and ongoing popularity issues caused Macmillan to sack a third of his Cabinet at a go in July 1962, an event dubbed the "Night of the Long Knives" by critics. The Government was also discredited in its rural heartland by the Beeching Report (formally titled
The Reshaping of British Railways) of March 1963, which recommended "modernisations" to British Rail that would cut around half of all railway stations in the country and thirty percent of all lines. Macmillan himself was also starting to look more and more like a man out of time, and there were serious questions raised about whether a man approaching his seventieth birthday was fit to lead a country that wanted nothing more than to reject tradition and embrace modernity.
None of these things were what undid Macmillan, however. What undid him were a series of scandals that began in late 1962 with the unmasking of John Vassall as a Soviet spy, continued with the unmasking of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, and culminated in the summer of 1963 with the Profumo Affair. This was a very complicated scandal with a very simple core: John Profumo, Macmillan's War Secretary, had had an affair with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old showgirl who was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov. There's an incredible amount of ephemera surrounding Keeler, her various partners and her alleged pimp, the osteopath and society figure Stephen Ward, but the meat of the scandal was the possibility that Keeler had obtained British military secrets from Profumo and then passed them along to Ivanov. An inquiry conducted by Lord Alfred Denning exonerated Keeler and Profumo in September 1963, but by then, Profumo had been out of office for three months after admitting he'd misled Parliament about the affair, Ward had taken his own life to avoid conviction, and Keeler's life had been upended by the publicity. The impression given was that the establishment had closed ranks to protect Profumo and the Government, and that Ward (and to a lesser extent Keeler) had been made an example of. None of this reflected well on Macmillan, who had survived a confidence vote in June (just after Profumo's resignation) by far too narrow a margin given the Government's majority, and after a cancer scare, he announced his resignation in October.
To everyone's surprise, the choice to succeed Macmillan fell not on Rab Butler, the man who had been Britain's next Prime Minister for at least six years by this point, but on Macmillan's Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, the 14th Earl of Home. An Old Etonian descended from an ancient Scottish noble family, Home cut a strange figure given the strong anti-establishment trends of the time, amplified by the Profumo Affair, and questions were immediately raised by his sudden ascension. Iain Macleod left Cabinet in response to Home's appointment, and took up a new job editing the Spectator, which at this time was a centrist publication largely aligned with Butler's faction of the party. In January 1964, he published a scathing review of a book about the leadership race written by Randolph Churchill, in which he (Macleod) blamed Home's selection on a "magic circle" of Old Etonians, including Macmillan as well as Home himself, who held absolute control over the Conservative Party's arcane leadership selection process. As a result of this controversy, the party would reform its election procedure to a straightforward ballot of the parliamentary party for the election after Home's resignation.
In any case, Home himself was certainly aware of his image, and very quickly decided leading a Government from the House of Lords was neither a good look nor a practical way to do politics. He was helped in this by the years-long struggle of Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, briefly the 2nd Viscount Stansgate and later a very significant figure on the Labour Left, for the right to renounce his peerage and continue to sit in the House of Commons. Benn had succeeded to the viscountcy in 1960, at which point he was automatically removed from the seat he’d represented in Parliament for ten years. At a by-election in May 1961, Benn stood again, knowing full well that his candidacy was invalid and that this would be a clear enough miscarriage of democracy to force a change in the law. He was proven right by this, winning his election by an almost 40-point margin, promptly being disqualified by an Election Court and seeing the seat handed to his Conservative opponent. In addition, a number of figures in the Government (including Home as well as Lord President Quintin Hogg, the 2nd Viscount Hailsham) were similarly interested in returning to the Commons, and this was enough of a confluence of interest to secure the passage of the Peerages Act 1963. Benn immediately disclaimed his peerage and was returned to the House of Commons with no Conservative opposition, and in November 1963, Home won election to the safe Scottish Unionist seat of Kinross and Western Perthshire.
By this point, the five-year term of the 1959 Parliament approached its end, and Labour were widely tipped to win the upcoming general election. Hugh Gaitskell, however, would not get the chance to win the premiership, as he died in January 1963 following a sudden bout of lupus. There were immediate conspiracy theories about this, especially given that he was succeeded by Harold Wilson, a former Bevanite stalwart who had resigned from Government alongside Bevan over the NHS prescription charge controversy. According to these theories (which have never been backed by any convincing evidence), the KGB had arranged to have Gaitskell poisoned so that Wilson, who was either to have been a KGB agent himself or simply Moscow’s preferred man, could attain the leadership and eventually 10 Downing Street. Once again, these were wild conspiracy theories with very little to back them up, but given this was immediately after the Vassall and Philby affairs, notions of Soviet infiltration at the top of government seemed more plausible than ever.
Nevertheless, Wilson would soon prove himself a skilled politician and an energetic campaigner, promising that a Labour Government would bring about a
“white heat of revolution” that would propel Britain out of its post-war slump and into a new age of greatness through technological advancement. Having spent the past five years fighting internally over whether to abolish Clause IV (the commitment to nationalisation of industry), Labour under Wilson sidestepped the argument by promising greater state coordination of the economy without taking outright nationalisations any further than Attlee’s administration had. This seemed to work as a compromise position, or maybe it was just Labour’s tendency to come together whenever they smell blood in the water, because the party went into the 1964 general election in better shape than it had been at any point since 1950.
However, when polling day came on 15 October, Labour only gained enough seats for a threadbare majority, and hardly gained any votes compared to 1959. Instead, the big winner of the election in voteshare terms were the Liberals, who had begun to capitalise on discontent with the Conservatives in rural areas as well as middle-class suburbs. Notably, the party’s candidate Eric Lubbock won the March 1962 by-election in Orpington, a former Conservative safe seat in London’s southern suburbs. This was the first urban seat gained by the Liberals in a long time, and is commonly seen as marking the beginning of the slow Liberal revival that would continue over the following decades. Lubbock held his seat in the general election, and the Liberals gained another several seats on the “Celtic Fringe” to bring its total to 9, the first election since 1929 in which the party had made overall gains.
Another very notable constituency result was that of Smethwick in the West Midlands, where Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat against the national trend to Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths. Smethwick was a working-class industrial town which had had some rough years leading up to 1964, with factories closing and social housing not keeping up with demand, in addition to which a large number of Commonwealth migrants (mainly Sikhs) had settled in the town. Griffiths capitalised on white working-class discontent by running an openly racist campaign that blamed Smethwick’s misfortunes on mass immigration, and argued Gordon Walker would champion further immigration as Foreign Secretary. His supporters were alleged to have used the slogan
“if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour”, and while Griffiths never claimed the slogan as his own, he also made no real effort to distance himself from it. Although the seat was marginal and Gordon Walker’s voteshare had dropped at every election since 1950, the election of Griffiths nevertheless made ripples: racially-motivated threats and violence increased sharply, and in 1965, Malcolm X made a visit to Smethwick to show solidarity with local ethnic minority communities.
Labour’s overall majority following the election was just four, but that was enough for Wilson to be appointed the first Labour Prime Minister in thirteen years. The 1959 Parliament had lasted the full five years, but its successor was all but guaranteed not to.