Busy as a Bee
Leaders of the New Party
1930-1932:
Oswald Mosley
1932-1934: John Strachey
1934-1936: Frank Horrabin
1936-1948: Nye
Bevan
1948-xxxx: Harold Macmillan
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Seventeen Labour MPs Join "New Party" of Oswald Mosley!
Is This The End For MacDonald?
---Daily Sketch headline, 6 December 1930 (neglecting to mention the three Conservatives who also joined)
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...but while Mosely might have created the party, he was also in danger of destroying it. His autocratic tendencies, ranging up from the manifesto down to the party militia's uniform, were making him enemies within left and right. Perhaps this could have been forgiven if he was a good leader. He was not. With increasingly skewed priorities relative to the party base, seemingly believing that voters would prefer a flashy rally and 10,000 banner bearers to a well-formulated and comprehensible version of the party's key policy. Increasingly aggressive in conversational tone, egocentrically attributing every success from the Ashton-Under-Lyne by-election onwards to himself alone, and distracted by niche political panaceas--Mosely had to go so that the party could live.
With the general election approaching, it was necessary to push Mosley out as swiftly as possible. Luckily, Moseley had allowed other people to do the boring work of drafting a party charter while he got on with his stunts and speeches. After a swift vote of no confidence at the Party conference, Mosley was officially no longer leader, and expelled from the party by Strachey for good measure--another power Mosley had insisted be given to the leader. Here, many histories of the New Party take time to detail his subsequent biography. If the reader wishes to to know about the subject, they can read those books; for my part I will merely note that Mosley's campaigning on behalf of the Social Credit Party to try and unseat Strachey was the last time he was relevant to the party he founded. By the time he died in Italy, fighting his erstwhile comrades in the International Brigades on behalf of Mussolini, he bore little resemblance to the dashing young author of the memorandum. In turn, the party forgot about him as well.
Strachey was a perfect interim leader--vaguely personable, willing to work with others, good at organisation--with the one fault that he now had to fight an election. Many future historians have damned him for a fool, with the near-collapse of the National Government over the Conservatives' unwillingness to accept unorthodox measures being perfect ground for the party that had been promoting Keynesianism before now. However, this analysis is fundamentally rooted in the modern day, where the New Party is a political fixture. To Strachey, leader of a fragile new party which had just lost 2 MPs alongside its leader in a well-publicised split, and with much less money than the other well-established parties, retaining over half their seats was a victory in and of itself.
A year after the election, a dog-tired Strachey stepped down for the party's first actual leadership contest. Admittedly, "contest" is overselling it. While Nicolson performed admirably, his vision of a paternalistic Toryism-rooted Socialism was incoherent and off-putting to the members. Indeed, it is possible that if Horrabin had faced literally anyone else, he would have lost. While good at written propaganda (one satirical magazine joked that with Strachey the editorialist and Horrabin the cartoonist, the New Party was an ploy to boost the launch of the New Times as a paper) he was never a good public speaker, and his one attempt at grabbing headlines--an invitation for Trotsky to take exile in the UK--generated more bad press than good. Luckily for all involved, a nasty case of bronchitis caused Horrabin to step down, leaving the way open for the heir apparent...
It had been a long time coming. From a miner's lodge in Tredegar, to the frontlines of the General Strike, to a hundred aggressive speeches in Parliament, warring with Macdonald and with Mosely, always fighting for what he though was just, would help the common man. Now he was sitting in the driving seat, and, as the most popular MP in the Party, few wished to take it from him. The day was Nye's.
On the leadership of Bevan I will not dwell--it is far and away the most chronicled period of the party's history, as hundreds of historians try to capture the giddy joy of relevancy and movement forwards after years of slow stagnation. The conflicts between "Biff Boys" and "Bevan Boys", the Second Memorandum's thunderbolt-like impact, the dawn of the Popular Front--all these things have passed into political legend. The best was still to come. With the War Government forming up in opposition to the invasion of Poland, the New Party held the reins of power for the first time. Even if they were technically junior partners, the war's demands of total mobilisation against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant that measures that once looked ridiculous--self-sufficiency, public works, centralised technocratic power--were suddenly completely necessary. Many lament that Bevan never got into government; I contend that the War was when he got in, and we are all better off for it.
Even after returning to the opposition benches, Bevan could have fought on as leader forever. It was not to be. The challenge to his leadership after a dismal performance in the Wolverhampton West by-election was initially a surprise to the leadership, but was an inevitability in hindsight. While Bevan's socialist views still held cachet among the members, the new generation of hawkish Keynesians who saw the Memorandum as an end, not a means, were rising. These Young Bucks (admittedly not much younger than the rest of the party, but with the air of youth) were ready to make a new Britain from the New Party. No-one before them rose so high. No-one before them fell so low.
Where does their story begin? It begins at the Memorandum, but like any story of a party, this is bigger than Mosely or Bevan or any one leader. This story begins at Stockton, where a bright young MP decided to follow his hero and be a man of action. This story starts at 10 Downing Street, where that once-young man clasped hands with Douglas Jay and his party entered government of its own free will, not as part of a broader war. This story starts in a dirty flat in Hackney, where another one of the Young Bucks would become part of a sordid underbelly that would eventually roll over and knock down a government.
This story, however, is bigger than Macmillan and bigger than Boothby. It is the story of a party--a story we can learn from today. To know where to go next, we need to know where we started.
--Bryan Gould, A New Wind: The New Party in Government, 1958-1964