Been himself would likely run. What are his chances with the PLP in ‘74?
Benn is never going to be elected with the franchise just confined to the PLP.
It'd be Callaghan if he wanted it, otherwise Healey most like.
Benn was not as radical in 1974 as he would be a few years later, though.
I doubt he would want to stay for long either so...Wilson is probably starting to show early signs of dementia by 1974. He may or may not have been having an affair with Marcia Falkender but she was (reading Donoghue) definitely covering up for/managing him. So I think Wilson would definitely have gone had he lost.
The interesting thing would be that Heath is liable to have held on until 1978/79 and would have had a much higher standing in the Conservative Party. This would have delayed Thatcher's advance and may have even delayed the spread of New Right attitudes even within the Conservative Party. Given he lived until 2005 (I had met him ten years earlier), there is a good chance he would have ended up as a long-term Prime Minister, perhaps well into the 1980s. As it was, Callaghan tacked towards the New Right even as a Labour Prime Minister from 1976, so it is unlikely with a continuing Heath government that these trends would be entirely absent from British politics. Still, I doubt Heath would have gone flat out, for example, to bring down the coal mining industry, despite the problems he had had with it.
Heath was much more of an internationalist than Thatcher and more pro-Europe rather than willing to become the USA's lapdog as Thatcher did in her relationship with Reagan. There would have been challenges, economically, with the winding down of old industries in Britain, but Heath is unlikely to have driven on with privatisation to the scale Thatcher did. He also tended to follow a policy of regional development/support. We are likely to have seen rifts in the Conservatives over Europe which were largely kept overshadowed under Thatcher but were to erupt under Major and beyond. Labour is likely to have followed a similar path with the radical vs. centrist divisions of the 1980s. However, without the seemingly very stark opponent in Thatcher, the more militant strands may not have received as much support as it did from dispirited members of our early 1980s.
I certainly think in that context it would have been Healey rather than Foot and there would have been a keener approach to Europe and certainly an avoidance of an advocating of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Though both major parties would have been sniped at from their extremes, it seems that the gap between Prime Minister Heath and Leader of the Opposition Healey would have been much narrower than between Thatcher and Foot/Kinnock and pro-Europeanism would have been the dominant tendency at the head of the parties, perhaps spawning Eurosceptic parties/pressure groups both from the right and the left.
Good post, but I don't think Heath would have lasted until the 80s. The Conservative government would have faced the same problems that the Labour one did in our timeline and Labour would probably have won in 1980 or earlier.
Also you probably won’t see a Healey premiership because if it’s just a PLP election, then Healey’s abrasive character will scupper his chances, and if it’s a Electoral College election then the party sense of direction in the late 70s/early 80s towards a more Left Wing direction indicates that the Party would vote for a member of the Soft Left.
There’s a reason why Foot nearly won in 76’ and actually won in 80’.
As an addendum to this: apparently Heath had been persuaded that calling an earlier Election would somehow be seen as "unfair" as it would have been fought on a much older Electoral Register for which the qualifying date was October of 1972.......I served as a Conservative Agent for one of the critical marginals in February of 1974. The very strong sentiment among my local volunteers (shared widely among the Party at large) was that Heath should not have dithered and should have called the Election three weeks earlier...
With the Tories in power 1974-8, the other Roy (Mason) is more likely than Healey to be the standard bearer of the Labour Right without a whiff of sulphur (mostly undeserved but he was seen as a stooge for the Security Forces which didn't go down well) from Norn Iron. I don't see Foot as quite managing it before the SDP bolt the Party.,,I doubt he would want to stay for long either so...
As for Labour leader it's a coin toss between Callaghan or Foot to be honest or maybe Roy if he gives a shit, since Benn is too Left, Healey too odd and Crosland too intellectual.
A final addendum to this. If Heath had gone earlier then it would have given the Conservatives one small but significant advantage: the older the register, the greater number of potential postal votes due to people qualifying because they had moved house. It's generally accepted that the Conservatives had the organisational 'edge' over Labour in this regard and, in some of the most marginal seats, it may just have made that vital difference.As an addendum to this: apparently Heath had been persuaded that calling an earlier Election would somehow be seen as "unfair" as it would have been fought on a much older Electoral Register for which the qualifying date was October of 1972.......
