• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

AHC/WI: Prime Minister John Redwood in 1995

Techdread

Somewhere between a Bevanite & a Bennite
I've tried looking around for any threads on this here & on The Other Place and there's a couple of short-lived ones there, but there's a distinct lack of info and most of them tend to die pretty quickly so I thought to have a crack at posing the question here.

How much would need to happen for John 'The Vulcan' Redwood to actually win his 1995 leadership challenge against incumbent leader & Prime Minister John Major? Most speculation would suggest the easiest way to do this would be for the Currie Affair to become public knowledge during the campaign; of course this is more likely to hurt Major rather than see gains for Redwood and a second ballot being called wouldn't feature Major should he drop below his personal threshold of 215 MPs supporting him.

Nevertheless, I'm also curious as to what thoughts might be on an actual Redwood government at this time - what would its policies be and who would Redwood appoint to his Cabinet?
 
Major's victory seems too big for even Currie to knock him out but then I see:

To win at the first ballot John Major needed 50% of all those eligible to vote as well as a further 15% more than John Redwood. This amounted to about 190 votes on the basis that there would be no abstentions. The lowest possible winning margin was 165 votes.

There was also a great deal of speculation surrounding a possible second ballot. Many wondered whether Major would resign if he did not score a resounding victory in the first ballot as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done in November 1990. It was widely believed that Michael Portillo and Michael Heseltine might stand as representatives of the right and left of the party respectively in the event of a second ballot. Telephone engineers were filmed installing new lines at Mr Portillo's London base.

And Major said in 2018 (see following link) that "I would have resigned, even though I had won the vote" if he'd only got 215 votes or less.

So any minor hit from a scandal could see him resign. For Redwood to win the inevitable next ballot, he needs a scandal that makes Major look more shaken than that, so he can bull through 'big beast' candidates by pointing out "I had the balls to go first and I made Major resign".

As for potential Cabinet people, a retrospective brings up Redwood boosters:

Some MPs came forward to support him, including Barry Field, who said: “He has the most able brain in Parliament and would make an exceptional Prime Minister”. Norman Tebbit, the former Conservative Party chairman, and sacked chancellor Norman Lamont also backed him.

(though Lamont won't be getting that old job back, if he gets a job)

and a guy who definitely is out afterwards:

transport secretary Brian Mawhinney had doubted that Redwood would stand. “He is an honourable man. He has indicated his support for the Prime Minister and I am prepared to take him at his word.”

Policies he bigged up:

The Daily Mail highlighted some of his policies, including accommodating homeless people in hostels, diverting funds to popular schools so they could expand, freezing management costs so that more medical staff could be recruited and he also favoured the death penalty.

His manifesto pledges included keeping the pound instead of joining the euro, looking to save money in public expenditure, and strengthening the armed forces.

He also wrote: “On a recent visit to a housing estate where I was told that more than half the families were single parent families, I asked what action if any was being taken to involve the menfolk in the community rather more in helping bring up the children they had fathered. I was told, ‘there aren’t many fathers around here.’ In that community there was no presumption in favour of two adults creating a loving family background for their children. It is that which we have to change.

“We should remember that that state does not make the best parents and the extended family wherever possible should be encouraged to provide care and support to its members.”
...

The leaflet also reminded MPs that he worked for Rothchilds and was chairman of Norcos PLC before entering the House of Commons. “He was a pioneer of the idea of privatisation on the seventies and head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the eighties”.

So I'd expect euroscepticism (though little different in practice in just two years), a lot of thundering about families, and the schools expansion. The homelessness one might help too, "look how Tories are helping people, NEW LABOUR NEW HOMELESS".
 
And a random thought: it's most likely New Labour steamrolls through all it surveys in '97 just as it did to Major, but what does it mean for Redwood's legacy, the chances of his Cabinet to become leader, the view of his faction et al if it's happened to him & people suspect Redwood's challenge is part of why Labour won so big?
 
And a random thought: it's most likely New Labour steamrolls through all it surveys in '97 just as it did to Major, but what does it mean for Redwood's legacy, the chances of his Cabinet to become leader, the view of his faction et al if it's happened to him & people suspect Redwood's challenge is part of why Labour won so big?
Would probably mean Hague's fucked in 1997, probably means a Ken Clarke victory since the Tories would probably blame anyone with views like Redwood for the failure if anything. Though a Ken Clarke victory means a different 2001 (probably a Labour landslide but not as bad as it was with Hague).
 
If Clarke regains some seats for the Tories, he might be able to hang on for a bit after the election?
Probably, I could see Clarke lasting to 2005 election or so which means a less on fire Conservative party in general since it doesn't have the revolving door of the early 2000s occurring. Now 2005 probably won't be a blowout for Clarke but probably be a lot better than OTL 2005 for the Conservatives.

So 2010 may not be the 'Coalition of Doom' but a Tory Majority if things hold.
 
Probably, I could see Clarke lasting to 2005 election or so which means a less on fire Conservative party in general since it doesn't have the revolving door of the early 2000s occurring. Now 2005 probably won't be a blowout for Clarke but probably be a lot better than OTL 2005 for the Conservatives.

So 2010 may not be the 'Coalition of Doom' but a Tory Majority if things hold.
With Clarke in charge of the Tories, would you see Britain entering the Euro under Blair?
 
Miniscule and tiny butterfly effect compared to the UK joining the euro, of course, but with Redwood in '97 and Clarke succeeding him Labour almost certainly would have won my seat (South Dorset) in '97 but conceivably lost it in the later Blair era, rather than the other way round.

Obviously Redwood's own personal majority is less than it once was now because his seat voted Remain. In 1995, he had to invoke "low-income Glaswegians" as on his side because they didn't watch or listen to the BBC, run he said by an "Islington Blair-band", in the way that people in his own seat did, which I doubt went down well with low-income Glaswegians: clearly, the current attempts at the defenestration of the BBC are going to be helped by the "fall of the Red Wall" having been in historically weaker areas for the BBC (historically, the BBC was more supported by the Labour elite but en masse more by Tory voters, and most commercial broadcasting, with some exceptions like Classic FM, more by the Tory elite but en masse more by Labour voters).
 
Probably should have cited the Morse/Poirot/Wexford/Dalgliesh/Wycliffe axis above - the entire ITV "cerebral detective" subgenre was specifically designed to increase the network's appeal among the more affluent southern audience who disliked Corrie & Cilla and were highly attractive to advertisers, and they had considerable success in that, helped obviously by Thatcherism's attack on "middle England, Tory anti-capitalism" (as Jonathan Freedland, perhaps surprisingly positively for a Jewish writer considering the inferences of its views on the Grades & Bernsteins, has called it). ITV then seemed to forget that lesson, but relearnt it with D*wnt*n, without which they might not have won Royal Ascot and Cheltenham rights plus half of the Six Nations.

But this belongs in another thread, and I'm big on broadcasting counterfactuals ...
 
Back
Top