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Alternative Alternate Leaders of the Labour Party

Time Enough

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So recently I was thinking about the Labour Party and it's various leaders and how even the alternate ones often seem to repeat themselves (Clynes, Cripps, Bevan, Morrison, Benn, Harman etc.) so I was wondering what could be some interesting/odd choices for Labour Leader. Here's a couple of ideas:

Oliver Baldwin, Son of Stanley Baldwin, Journalist, Armenian Freedom Fighter, Labour MP, brief Lord and Govenor of a Caribbean Island he was a Socialist and also a Homosexual who was in a long term relationship with his partner Jack Parker Boyle. Having him become leader is hard but not impossible, have him win his seat in 1935, becomes part of the War Government, gets Minister of Defence in 45, and becomes the leader in the early 50s after Attlee leaves with Baldwin being sold as a compromise canidate from there well I can see him having some problems (what with being a prominent politician whose gay during a time when it was illegal so that couldn't be great).

Shirley Williams, MP and Cabinet Minister she would let join the Gang of Four in forming the SDP, however I could see if she stays around for a bit longer and doesn't lose her seat in 1979 I could see her becoming a candidate in the leadership competition of 1984 against the Labour left. Where things go from there, who knows.

Bernie Grant, this one is hard but not impossible,in 87 he becomes Deputy Leader and maybe after Neil Kinnock's loss in 92 during the following leadership election John Smith has heart problems and in the ensuing chaos Bernie Grant manages to sneak in promoted by the Socialist Campaign Group to get a canidate in, of course this would have some repercussions.

Micheal Gove...wait don't leave. He was briefly a Labour member but left in 1983, if he stays on and becomes part of the Blairite team I can see him somehow stumbling into the leadership role after Brown crashes. Of course his personality would have to be different I guess.

Other suggestions are always fun to hear.
 
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Michael Portillo in a timeline where Maurice Cowling doesn’t influence him to become a Conservative and remains a Labour supporter could see the possibility of him being a possible successor to Smith or Blair.

John Major is also one that always comes up,but no one really does anything with him in Labour besides a few lists.

Ted Heath could be really interesting as one and I’m actually thinking of doing something with him as Labour Prime Minister in the late Seventies and Early Eighties.
 
So recently I was thinking about the Labour Party and it's various leaders and how even the alternate ones often seem to repeat themselves (Clynes, Cripps, Bevan, Morrison, Benn, Harman etc.) so I was wondering what could be some interesting/odd choices for Labour Leader. Here's a couple of ideas:

Interesting. I always though Cripps, Bevan and Morrison were too divisive to win the leadership. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Attlee being PM in 1945.

I've always fancied Leslie Haden Guest as an alternate leader, or Charles Dukes
 
John Major is also one that always comes up,but no one really does anything with him in Labour besides a few lists.
It's kind of amusing since one of the reasons he got into politics was a chance meeting with Clement Attlee, if Attlee managed to convince him of Labour's policies being good then I could see Major being a Labour MP, I could see him becoming a John Smith like figure, if lacking the jovial nature of Smith.
Ted Heath could be really interesting as one and I’m actually thinking of doing something with him as Labour Prime Minister in the late Seventies and Early Eighties.
Ooh, I could see someone like David Owen being his understudy or something.
Interesting. I always though Cripps, Bevan and Morrison were too divisive to win the leadership. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Attlee being PM in 1945.

I've always fancied Leslie Haden Guest as an alternate leader, or Charles Dukes
Yeah, Morrison is always an odd choice for me because he's just too abrasive to be the leader in my opinion. Bevan has the personality to be popular (being a witty and good speaker, I can see where Harold Wilson took his inspiration from in terms of style) but his politics would definitely alienate large numbers of the electorate. Similar reason with Cripps (I could see Cripps being the Michael Foot of the 1940s if he got in).

Leslie Haden Guest and Charles Duke seem like good choices since they have that calm middle of the road attitude. That's generally the best way of becoming leader of the Labour Party it seems.

Another interesting choice could be Malcolm MacDonald if he doesn't go National Labour, he seems like he could be a Blair of the 40s/50s if he stuck around and decided to lead and went with a Social Democratic style party.
 
I'll lob out another, Stephen Twigg, MP who helped create the infamous Portillo Moment and Tony Slattery lookalike would be good as either a post Brown/Miliband leader particularly if Andy Burnham's campaign crashes into a wall. I could expect a Milibandesque leadership if less awkward and maybe some more Co-Op stuff in there.
 
I'd be really interesting to do John Major as a centre-left Labour PM. Imagine too the ad campaign, playing him up as Local Council Estate Lad Made Good.
I could see that, I could see him considered as the Attlee of the late 80s/early 90s, balancing the two sides of the Labour Party to bring about a successful Labour Government. Also I could imagine a mixture of the slick Kinnock campaign mixed in with his whole soapbox schtick.
 
And then who would topple him? What';s the Tory equivalent of a Blair New Labour?

oh no it's be Johnson wouldn't it
Probably not, too new. Since Major would likely be Pro-Europe I would think a staunch Right winger with Anti-European Union tendencies, so maybe William Hauge or...John Bercow.

I don't see them lasting long, leading a former Majorite (I don't know Harriet Harman or Ed Balls or someone similar, taking over in the early 2010s).
 
Always happy to entertain, that's a list in itself; Thatcher, Major, Bercow, Harman/Balls, ? (Clarke or Hammond depending on how Bercow does)...

Anyway here's another alternate leader, I'm surprised we haven't gotten more from the Hoyle clan, both being prominent Labour folks in different ways (also a Labour leader from Lancashire).

Also Labour leader Angela Eagle is one I haven't seen much off, a 2015 Angela Eagle leadership would be odd.
 
There’s also Oswald Mosley from A Greater Britain and Margaret Thatcher from Thaxted, if we’re going down that road.

Incidentally, I once started an AH with the premise of H.G. Wells as Labour Party leader and first Labour PM, butterflying away with his writing career, having him stand as one of the Lab-Lib Pact candidates in 1906, getting some attention in the 1910s and leading the party by the time of the 1926 General Strike. (IOTL he ran in 1922 in some extremely Tory seats)

Going by people who were actually Labour IRL, there’s Philip Snowden, who’d make for a quite different party were he to lead it.
 
Incidentally, I once started an AH with the premise of H.G. Wells as Labour Party leader and first Labour PM, butterflying away with his writing career, having him stand as one of the Lab-Lib Pact candidates in 1906, getting some attention in the 1910s and leading the party by the time of the 1926 General Strike. (IOTL he ran in 1922 in some extremely Tory seats)
I can see Wells toppling MacDonald in a coup of sorts in the mid 20s and becoming a Wilson style leader in promoting the idea of new technological Labour under him (with a dash of the Webbs Nationalisation ideas). Whether he would be successful would depend although I could see it working for him.
Going by people who were actually Labour IRL, there’s Philip Snowden
Depends on which Philip Snowden we get, if he becomes leader in the 10s we're getting Radical Socialist and Trade Unionist Snowden who will bring about a "evolutionary" form of Socialism. Classic Early Labour essentially.

If it's the 20s then we're getting Glastonian Liberalism/Social Democratic ideals which could work but it could lead to a bizarre situation in which the Liberals end up being more Radical than the Labour Party during the late 20s.
 
Jonathan Edelstein used Wells as Britain's first Socialist Labour PM in Male Rising, albeit in a party system that was already radically different.

Barbara Castle is an interesting one, though I keep having to remind myself it's happened in two SLP works so far (she becomes leader in Agent Lavender and PM in Walking Back To Happiness).

One that intrigues me is the prospect of David Lloyd George as Labour leader. I know Jared/EdT did it in Decades of Darkness, but it's interesting enough to merit exploration on its own.
 
Barbara Castle is an interesting one, though I keep having to remind myself it's happened in two SLP works so far (she becomes leader in Agent Lavender and PM in Walking Back To Happiness).
Whilst Castle has been used before I do think she would be an interesting alternate Labour leader. She's probably one of the few people beside Wilson in the 60s who could have steered the Labour Party. George Brown comes off as a Morrison figure to me, abrasive and probably would have pissed off the Left if he took power.
One that intrigues me is the prospect of David Lloyd George as Labour leader. I know Jared/EdT did it in Decades of Darkness, but it's interesting enough to merit exploration on its own.
That is a good one, a good POD would be the 1880s Home Rule debacle causing the Liberal's to shatter leading to a Reform party popping up based upon Social Liberalism which Lloyd George joins, the Reform party eventually joins up with various other elements that made the Labour Party in 1900 which pursues a Social Democratic path and Lloyd George steers the party to electability eventually winning a small majority in an early 20s election. Then you have the ILP which sticks around as the more hard left option having a few more seats than reality.

Another idea that popped in my head was Ralph Miliband, per say he manages to reluctantly stick around with the Bevanites and eventually throws his hat into the ring in the 55/59 election in a safe Labour seat or something.

Of course over the next several decades he becomes a New Left critic of the party, occupying a Micheal Foot style position (if a more Marxist influenced one) and during the chaos of the early 80s he's voted in as a Left Wing candidate for leader. Of course he probably wouldn't last long if elected as leader given how he's a Marxist and all that but I could see him handling things a little better than Foot (I'm not sure what his opinion was on Nuclear Weapons so things could be intresting there).
 
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Jack Dormand was a Labour MP from coal country, described as a “old-style centre-right socialist.” He was a Eurosceptic, a republican, and an atheist. He never received ministerial office, though he was an effective party administrator. If the old Labour tendencies continued, he could be a top pick for Prime Minister in the late 1970s or 1980s.
 
Here are a couple that I have toyed with in the past:

A.V. Alexander played a fairly prominent role in the 1940-45 National Government and subsequent Attlee Ministry as Minister of Defence and First Lord of the Admiralty, but at one stage he was apparently thought of as a future leader of the party, before he lost his seat in 1931 and found himself knocked down the pecking order. If he had retained his seat or that landslide defeat had never happened for whatever reason, he might well have become leader and then PM in place of Attlee. He had a long history in the Co-operative movement and was probably the Co-op party's most prominent figure at this time, so an Alexander Premiership might well see a much stronger syndicalist tradition develop within the welfare state.

David Lewis was the leader of the NDP in Canada in the seventies, but before that, he studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and was commended as a strong debater by his contemporaries. He was offered a safe seat by Labour in 1935, and Cripps was apparently grooming him to become Prime Minister one day, but he opted to return to Canada instead. Had he remained, he could have replaced Gaitskell or Wilson as Labour leader in 1950s/1960s, and possibly leave the UK in a strange situation of having a Canadian Prime Minister (not for the first time).

Besides that, I would also say a scenario with no Gang of Four breakaway could mean that many future SDP and Lib Dem figures ultimately end up as prominent Labour politicians. Charles Kennedy, Vince Cable, and Chris Huhne all spring to mind. Paddy Ashdown was also a Labour member too, though he may have left before the Gang of Four.

There are also a number of hard left figures who did not make it into parliament, but may have found themselves running in Corbyn's place had they done so. Mark Seddon, Tommy Sheppard, Richard Leonard, and Neil Findlay all come to mind.
 
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