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Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State

Nice, I've been wanting to do a Sleeping Dogs list for ages, but can never quite make it Top.
As have I; finally found a copy of Smith's Dream at a second-hand shop over the weekend and got enough of a feel for the scenario to try and piece something together.

If nothing else, getting to put the words "Right Reverend", "Socialist Unity Party", and "Rob Muldoon" on the same side of one of these lists made it worth my while.
 
This is absolutely terrific.

Quick question: who is this Volkner bloke? DuckDuckGo isn't giving me anything on him, and I refuse to use Google out of principle.
Fascisty dictator from C. K. Stead's novella Smith's Dream, which later essentially kickstarted the NZ film industry when it was adapted as Sleeping Dogs, starring a pre-fame Sam Neill. Volkner was based on Stead's fears of a New Zealand run by Robert Muldoon, then one of only two politicians in the country with an actual personality. When Muldoon did become PM, he was - in fairness - slightly better than his fictional counterpart.
 
Fascisty dictator from C. K. Stead's novella Smith's Dream, which later essentially kickstarted the NZ film industry when it was adapted as Sleeping Dogs, starring a pre-fame Sam Neill. Volkner was based on Stead's fears of a New Zealand run by Robert Muldoon, then one of only two politicians in the country with an actual personality. When Muldoon did become PM, he was - in fairness - slightly better than his fictional counterpart.

Ah, I see. I suppose in hindsight that being called Volkner might have been a clue that he was a fictional fascist--it's a bit like having a fictional communist dictator called Michael Soviet.

Would you recommend the novel?
 
This was just meant to be a short list with a few footnotes and it kind of...grew.
Plausbility was not at the forefront of my mind, but I hope it still provides some enjoyment.

1. Clement Davies (Montgomeryshire) 1945
Who?
Clement Davies is a name mostly forgotten to history, and it is easy to see why. For three months in the summer of 1945, this unassuming Welshman led the Liberal party as it’s true leader, Archibald Sinclair, had fallen out of parliament. It’s hard to predict what would have happened if the Caithness and Sutherland by-election of 1945 had not been won by Sinclair, but counterfactualists generally agree that Davies would have been an unsuccessful leader, quite possibly leading to the Liberal party’s extinction, eventually folding into the Conservatives, although this view has been undergoing some revision in recent years. Fortunately for the party, and probably for Davies, who was an alcoholic who suffered from crippling periods of depression following the loss of three of his four children, he was able to resign in September of the same year and remained pootling around on the back benches until his death in 1967.

2. Sir Archibald Sinclair (Caithness and Sutherland) 1935-1945, 1945-1952
The Scotch Sorcerer
Archibald Sinclair’s loss by a few hundred votes at the 1945 general election was a great shock. He was lucky in that his opponent, airline proprietor Captain Eric Gandar Dower, was an honourable man. He had promised to resign following the defeat of Japan and stand in the ensuing by-election, expecting it to be some years hence, so the dropping of the atomic bomb on Kokura and subsequent Japanese surrender spelled the end of his political career, as Sinclair beat him by around a thousand votes.

If 1945 was Sinclair’s nadir, then 1950 was his zenith. Even as the Attlee government was returned with a respectable majority, Sinclair’s campaign, masterminded by Philip Fothergill, who would narrowly win Middlesbrough West thanks to a pact with the local Conservatives, with assistance from later-prominent figures like Robin Day, saw the Liberals make significant gains on the back of highly effective use of television and radio campaigning which left the other parties somewhat behind. Sinclair himself was not entirely comfortable with the television but did give a well-received speech focusing on his experience as Secretary of Air during the War. The campaign was enough to claw back a fair amount of ground, particularly in Scotland, where John MacCormick, head of the Scottish Covenant Association, ran a Home Rule focused campaign that saw the party sweep the far north and his own triumphant election by a few hundred votes in Inverness. Sinclair found himself at the head of a nineteen-strong group.

The issue for the Liberals was that there was little ideological consistency in those elected. A full quarter of the parliamentary group owed their position to Conservative abstention, and while they were not universally inclined to that party, MPs like Violet Bonham Carter, a personal friend of Churchill’s, and Rhys Hopkin Morris were strongly in favour of greater co-operation with the party, particularly the National Liberal wing. On the other hand, fiery radicals like Megan Lloyd George and Edgar Granville were determined to co-operate with the Labour government. Sinclair did his best to strike a moderate course between these two groups, but would struggle with this, and in 1952 suffered a debilitating stroke. Although he would eventually recover, and indeed ascend to the Lords in 1956, his leadership of the party came to an immediate end, and the battle for the party’s soul began.



3. Lady Megan Lloyd George (Anglesey) 1952-1963
Y Ddraig Aur
Megan Lloyd George had long been the standard-bearer of her father’s wing of the party, and following Sinclair’s stroke put herself immediately forward for the leadership. She was strongly supported in this by the other radicals and most of the Welsh MPs, with Morris being the exception. Defeating her opponent, Western Isles MP Huntly Sinclair, 11-8, she became the first female leader of a major party in the UK.

Lloyd George’s election spelled the end of the hopes that the Liberals and National Liberals would reconcile, despite the fact that her brother was a prominent NatLib, but it also imperilled the local pacts with Conservatives that had kept a fair chunk of the parliamentary party in place. Ultimately, of the agreements of the 1950 campaign, only the Huddersfield pact was not formally in place for 1954, but the Tories tended not to fight too strongly against those Liberal MPs who were inclined in their direction.

It was under Lloyd George, a central figure of the Parliament for Wales campaign, that the party begun to make ‘Home Rule All Round’ central to its politics again, focusing on consolidating their still-shaky strength in Scotland and Wales. This strategy would ultimately prove to be successful and is widely credited, along with the non-conformist vote, with the enduring Liberal strength in the ‘Celtic Fringe’ and the breakthroughs of the late sixties. Although she died before seeing her campaign’s success, the Welsh Parliament to this day awards an annual Megan Lloyd George essay prize in her memory.

1954 saw Attlee re-elected for his final two years as Prime Minister with an increased majority, and the Liberals also increased their seat numbers at the expense of the Conservatives. Their most remarkable success came in Torrington, where Elizabeth Rashleigh overturned a huge Conservative majority to win by a few hundred votes, but they also made gains in Aberdeenshire, the Scottish Borders and North Wales, leaving them with a parliamentary party of 24. However, their vote totals remained static at about 9% and they actually lost around fifteen more deposits than in 1950. This was in contrast to polling which had shown the Liberals winning up to 15% of the vote and around thirty seats. Nonetheless, Lloyd George would lead the party into two more elections, and begin to claw back ground. The 1958 election, called by Attlee’s successor, Aneurin Bevan, saw the party remain static in seats and vote-share, again despite polling showing them performing better. This was widely blamed on the party’s shortage of funds, which at this point was at its most acute.

However, this work took its toll on her, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1963. She planned to stand down immediately, but within days of her diagnosis, Richard Crossland called an election and she was forced to fight one last campaign. The results were, sadly, not a triumph, as the party lost three seats to the Conservatives even as their share of the popular vote increased to 12.5%. Lloyd George stood down within a month of the election, and would pass away in February, 1964.

4. Jo Grimond (Orkney and Shetland) 1963-1969
Everybody’s Second Choice
Nobody expected Jo Grimond to become leader. A rather patrician Scot from St Andrews, he was overshadowed on the moderate side by people like Violet Bonham Carter (his mother-in-law) and Frank Byers, and on the radical by fiery speakers like Dingle Foot and John MacCormick. Indeed, it is likely MacCormick’s death in 1961 that led to his being elected, as it left the party with a vacuum in the positions both of heir presumptive and prominent Scot, the latter of which was becoming increasingly important in the party. Grimond found himself in a crowded field, facing Bonham Carter, Foot, and Dr. Glyn Hughes, the MP for Denbigh. Ultimately, Foot was felt to be too radical, Bonham Carter too close to Iain Macleod and Hughes too much of a non-entity, and Grimond won by virtue of being ‘everybody’s second choice,’ as he was dismissed as by his opponent and mother-in-law, Bonham Carter.

This verdict on him and his leadership is rather unfair, although it is true that the one general election for which he led the party, 1968, saw the party receive endorsements for tactical voting from both the Times and the Guardian. Grimond was more radical than he is traditionally given credit for, seeing the party support the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, unilateral nuclear disarmament and a boycott of South Africa. He coupled this with an overall moderate and personable style, and ‘Uncle Jo’ became a popular figure on television.

His most lasting legacy, however, was his overhaul of the Liberal Party’s organisation alongside legendary organiser Pratap Chitnis, later MP for Twickenham. Although it had survived, and was even thriving in places like North Wales, the Highlands, and Cornwall, in much of the country it had been allowed to atrophy. Grimond was keen to reverse this, and he embarked upon a campaign of local rebuilding which would lead to a string of by-election successes throughout his leadership, beginning with the election of Honor Balfour at Richmond in 1965, and including such legendary results as Tavistock, Galloway and Nelson and Colne. 1968 saw the party gain seats for the first time since 1954, hitting thirty MPs, and hold on to all of their by-election gains even as the Conservatives swept Labour from government. The future looked bright for the party, and Grimond looked set to continue in the leadership. However, in summer, 1969, Grimond’s eldest son Andrew committed suicide. Grimond was devastated by this, and considered standing down from parliament altogether – although ultimately he did not, he did quit the leadership. This early end to his top-flight career saw him fade into obscurity, and he ultimately left parliament at the 1985 election.

Grimond is commonly overlooked and neglected by counter-historians today who prefer to focus on his more glamorous predecessor and successor, however his work in rejuvenating the party cannot be forgotten in assessing the party’s position under its next leader. A party where Grimond remained leader would probably be more Scottish- and Welsh-focused, and may not have managed the breakthrough of 1977, but would certainly be one where the moderate wing held more power, as it was Grimond’s radical successor who got the credit and led to her wing of the party controlling the leadership for the next three decades.

5. Honor Balfour (Richmond (Surrey)) 1969-1983
Live and in colour
Although only elected to parliament in 1965, Balfour had a distinguished history in the party dating back to the Second World War. She was an old-school radical Liberal and, like many of her prominent allies, had been a journalist before entering parliament. As such, she knew how to work the media at a time when both Labour and the Conservatives were struggling with disenchantment and negative coverage. The by-election success continued under her leadership, although the seats were frequently poor ground for the party and they didn’t perform as spectacularly as under Grimond. Balfour’s early years also saw the party adopt more radical positions on social issues whilst continuing to strike a middle-ground on economics thanks in no small party to the party’s growth amongst young radicals like Peter Hain, Ruth Addison and Gordon Lishman, all later prominent Liberal MPs. Activists like Allan Horsfall of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and Vera Houghton of the ALRA became regular sights at the Liberal Assembly, often alongside old-school non-conformist Liberal voters who were frequently staunchly opposed to the social policy. Balfour played a huge role in keeping the party together even as the debates frequently became acrimonious, but it was not enough to prevent matters coming to a head at the 1973 Assembly, when following particularly radical motions from the Young Liberals long-time Cardiganshire MP Roderic Bowen decided he had had enough and quit the party to sit as an Independent Liberal, taking a fair chunk of his constituency party with him.

For a while, there were fears this would be another split a la the Lloyd George/Asquith battles, but Balfour managed to keep most of the party together. Nonetheless, the party lost seats in Wales in the general election that October for the first time in decades, and they struggled to retain votes in their other traditional heartlands even as they became the main challengers in places like Cambridge and Oxford.

Fortunately for Balfour, the movement backwards was enough to scare the party into line, and both the radicals and the moderates became more conciliatory. A string of successful by-elections, most notably Claire Brooks’s victory in Skipton, restored confidence in Balfour and campaigning became more vigorous under party president and Truro MP David Penhaligon. By the time the 1977 election came around, Peter Thorneycroft’s government was looking increasingly tired and the Labour party was riven with internal debates of its own, and the Liberals were frequently polling up to twenty per cent. However, the shot in the arm the party needed came in the decision to hold two televised leaders’ debates for the election. With Thorneycroft on one side and Ted Short on the other, Balfour cut a very distinctive figure and her arguments that a change was needed resonated with the public. Perhaps predictably, a number of newspapers concentrated on her canary-yellow dress – which many viewers of the debates had been able to see in colour for the first time – but the increased publicity was leveraged into increased support, and suddenly the party was polling at almost a third of the votes, actually beating out the Conservatives in a few polls. Suddenly, a Liberal government seemed a possibility.

It was, of course, always overblown. Balfour’s performance at the second debate was not as impressive as the first, with a number of attacks coming her way from both sides. The party receded slightly in the polls, although were still consistently at around a quarter of the vote, and momentum seemed to be moving back towards Labour.

Ultimately, the results were a disappointment only for those who hoped Balfour would win a majority. Storming through suburban seats and traditional heartlands alike, the party won 49 seats, the most in nearly fifty years, and managed to force a hung parliament, with Labour significantly ahead of the Tories. Of note was also the victory of Alliance candidate Oliver Napier in Belfast East, who sat with the party in Westminster. Their price for support was high – devolution, at once, and that only for confidence and supply, no coalitions. Short acquiesced, over howls of protest from his own party. The Government of Scotland and Wales Bill was highly controversial, with much of Short’s own cabinet standing in opposition to it. Nonetheless, with just enough support from all three parties, it was enacted into law by a thirteen-vote margin, and the process of setting up the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments began.

This inauspicious majority proved itself fatal to Ted Short, who was forced out by his party and replaced by Peter Shore. With Thorneycroft also gone, replaced by Francis Pym, suddenly it was Balfour who looked like an older face, and when Shore went to the country in 1978 to win his majority, the Liberals were punished, losing twenty seats and most of the progress she had made in the so-called ‘Balfour Belt’ of wealthy suburbs. Amongst the casualties was her preferred successor, Eric Lubbock, who lost Orpington by around three thousand votes. Although there were some calls for her to resign, she refused to do so until someone else could be groomed to run. Nonetheless, the party struggled to find its way, and went backwards again in 1981, albeit only losing a net two seats and picking up a couple.

Among the gains was Orpington, and Balfour was preparing to step down when, once again, her plans were scuppered, this time by Lubbock inheriting a peerage and choosing to go to the Lords instead of disclaiming it. Balfour ended up holding onto the leadership for another two years but by this point she was tired of it and quit at 1983, leaving the next leader to be elected by the newly-introduced electoral college.

Balfour’s leadership is a fascinating period, and the near-breakthrough of 77 is one of the most-explored points of divergence. If Lubbock had held on in 78 it is also interesting to speculate on how he would have done as leader, but instead the next holder of the position was someone completely unexpected.

6. Iain MacCormick (Argyll) 1983-1989
Unfinished business
In many ways, Iain MacCormick was overshadowed by his father. John MacCormick had been a titan in the Scottish Liberal party, almost singlehandedly setting the party on the pro-devolution course that gave it such success in the country and one of the most important figures in the campaign that eventually led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1977, albeit far too late for him to witness following his untimely death in 1961. MacCormick had considered running for his father’s seat in Inverness in the 1961 by-election, but at only twenty-one was felt to be young and so instead went into teaching, accepting a position as a history master in Oban. Although he dallied with the SNP, as did his brother, Neil, he eventually stayed with his father’s party, albeit very much on the left claw. His entire career was to some extent defined by his father’s, but Iain lacked the easy charisma that had inspired such devotion in his father. He was also the first Leader to be elected as such by the electoral college system that was abandoned in 1992, narrowly edging out Home Affairs Spokesperson Penelope Jessell, and it was his position as the only Scottish candidate that saw him through, as the heavily-weighted Scottish constituencies voted overwhelmingly for one of their own.

Unfortunately for the party, MacCormick proved not to live up to his father’s legacy, and in the 1985 election the party lost a net of six seats, although they picked up two seats in Scotland. Discontent began to rumble immediately, and he was challenged in 1986 by the standard-bearer of the moderate wing, Harrow MP Hugh Dykes. Although he held on, it was not by much, and his desire to lead the party was rapidly waning. He stayed on but following poor results in the 1989 Welsh Parliament election stood down as leader, leaving the radicals and moderates to fight it out once again.

MacCormick is widely regarded as a disappointment as leader, failing to advance the party or to find a new policy that could animate the public as much as devolution had done, and without the charisma that gave Balfour such success. Overshadowed by his father, predecessor and successor, he is generally ignored in counter-histories from the period which mostly focus on the titanic battles between and within the Labour and Conservative parties. MacCormick left parliament in 1998, and became increasingly disenchanted with the Liberals, leaving the party in 2009 to resume his dalliance with the SNP, who currently hold three seats in the Scottish Parliament. He passed away in 2016.

7. Des Wilson (Brighton Pavilion) 1989-1994
The rub of the greens
Wilson was a child of Balfour, having narrowly won Brighton Pavilion in her glory year of 1977, and changing demographics coupled with heavy community politics had kept him in place since. Wilson defeated Hugh Dykes and Hereford MP Robin Day handily in the 1989 leadership election and was almost immediately thrown into a general election. Called by Shore’s successor, Donald Dewar, it was an attempt to take advantage of the disarray in both the Liberals and the Conservatives, who were undergoing their own internal battle between the wets and dries. Dewar’s gambit paid off, and he was returned with a majority of 17, with the Liberals picking up a couple of seats to put them on 26.

An inauspicious beginning, perhaps, but Wilson, helped by the meltdown at Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station in 1991, managed to tie in long-term party shibboleths like the Land Value Tax and electoral reform into his personal passion for green politics. He had found the new headline policy for the Liberals, and it took them to great success in the Welsh Parliamentary Election in 1992, narrowly becoming the largest party and unseating Ann Clwyd’s government. Wilson became a frequent presence on television, both on serious political shows and the burgeoning genre of satirical panel shows, and his willingness to make fun of himself whilst still having policy chops endeared him to the public even as his political opponents dismissed him as the ‘Limelight Liberal.’ His high profile coupled with Labour’s landslide defeat saw the party pick up seats in 1994, but Wilson had tired of leadership and found it limiting. He left the position after the election and instead became president of the Green Liberal grouping, until he stood down from parliament at the 2012 election. He currently lives on a farm in the Sussex Weald.

8. Claire Brooks (Skipton) 1994-2001
Over hill and down dale
Claire Brooks, similar to Wilson, was a Balfour baby, having been first elected to parliament at the famous 1975 Skipton by-election. Her green politics were far more focused on conservation and sustainable farming, representing as she did a large rural district in the Yorkshire Dales, and she was known to break from party policy on social issues on occasion, but she also held to the Liberal orthodoxy on issues like nuclear disarmament and LVT. Unlike jokey Wilson, Brooks was a very plain-speaking figure, and her Yorkshire accent and serious manner led to frequent comparisons to Margery Postlethwaite from the popular soap Callowdale, a comparison which she adopted as her own.

Brooks was never popular amongst the public in the same way Wilson was, but she was respected, and in 1998 the party broke forty seats for the first time since Balfour. The enduring image of her in the public consciousness, however, is of her speech following the Queen’s University bombing in 1999, in which her close friend and ally, Alliance MP John Cushnahan, amongst 42 others, was killed. In one of the rare occasions her composure broke, she gave a furious and passionate speech denouncing Unionist violence in Northern Ireland at a time when the Official Unionists still sat with the government. For the rest of her career, including after resigning from the leadership, she campaigned tirelessly for peace in Northern Ireland, and lived long enough to see the Gleneagles Agreement of 2010 and the end of open conflict in the province.

Brooks found leadership of the party tiring and unrewarding, especially given her age and the Rifkind government’s dominating majority. Nonetheless, she saw the party through a set of ‘hold-your-ground’ devolved elections before standing down aged 70 in 2001, giving the party a new leader for the new millennium. Brooks stood down as an MP in 2003 and retired to her hometown of Settle, after a term where her leadership was widely regarded as strong but not overbearing and in which she garnered respect if not love from across the political spectrum, demonstrated by the heavy turnout from all parties at her funeral in 2012.

9. Adrian Sanders (Paignton) 2001-2015
The riviera rebel
The post-Brooks battle was vicious. Pete Kennedy, a key ally of hers and leader of the Scottish party, ran and was widely regarded as the frontrunner, so much so that many other potential candidates refused to stand. It was left to Environment Spokesperson and Paignton MP Adrian Sanders to be the standard-bearer against him. Although it first he appeared not to have much of a chance, he fought a strong grassroots campaign and, coupled with rumours about Kennedy’s drinking problem which would later prove to be true and Sanders always denied spreading, he narrowly beat Kennedy with 51% of the vote. It was to be the beginning of a long and successful leadership.

Sanders, like Wilson, was heavily involved in the Green Liberals movement, and prior to his election to parliament at the 1993 by-election had been an active campaigner for green liberal parties in Europe as well as in the UK, becoming a close friend of the German Eco-Democratic Party leader Winfried Kretschmann. During his leadership, he controversially whipped in favour of a vote on the closure of the last deep coal mines in 2008, and rather less controversially managed to get the government to enshrine the Carbon Code into law in 2012. Under him, the Liberals begun to agitate seriously again for a move from the European Economic Area to the European Confederation, something finally achieved by Sam Miliband in 2011. The party also opposed the Rifkind government’s attempt to privatise British Rail, which narrowly failed to pass, and largely voted in favour of the first wave of co-operativezations undertaken by Miliband during her first term in office, although they mostly opposed the second wave undertaken after the 2013 election.

Under Sanders’ leadership, the party managed to increase its seat count consistently, culminating at 55 after his final election in 2013, even as the Miliband government increased its majority. He had perhaps the most successful term as leader since Honor Balfour, and the most consistently successful term since Asquith. He stood down in 2015, still with strong support in the party, and remains MP for Paignton and a party elder statesman.

10. Eleanor Bonham Carter (Tavistock) 2015-2016
The last of the Hayekans
Like her great-uncle, Eleanor Bonham Carter won the leadership by being everyone’s second choice. The Rural Affairs Spokesperson for the party, she represented a break with the long tradition of left-liberalism that had reigned since Grimond stepped down, and her election would have been impossible without the vicious feud between the standard-bearers of the dominant wing, Freddie Morgan and Sally Redzimski. With each directing their supporters not to preference the other, Bonham Carter was able to narrowly scrape enough second preferences following the elimination of a couple of no-hoper candidates to overtake Morgan, and following his elimination to pip Redzimski to the post. Bonham Carter had been an able spokesperson for rural affairs, but it transpired that she had some very strange economic views, the depths of which were not revealed until she became leader. Amongst other things, she called publicly for the privatisation of all state-owned utilities and companies, including the NHS, and denounced the Miliband government as attempting to enslave the British public. The party’s polling cratered almost immediately and both the parliamentary and voluntary party went into open revolt. Bonham Carter, in response, accused the media of attempting to sabotage her and her frontbench colleagues of being traitors.

Unfortunately, due to the rule change that accompanied the abolition of the electoral college in 1992, a vote of no confidence from the parliamentary party was no longer sufficient to remove her, but following a vote of the entire party membership, Bonham Carter was removed from office by a crushing 85-15 margin. After a bizarre press conference, for much of which she quoted directly from The Road to Serfdom, Bonham Carter retaliated by resigning from the party to sit as an Independent Liberal, even as her constituency party voted to deselect her. She stood again in 2017 and went down in flames, being beaten even by the fringe Soil Association candidate. Since leaving parliament, she has begun writing a column for the ‘Liberationist,’ the magazine of the Objectivist think-tank, the Freedom Association, and frequently polls as one of the least popular political figures in the country.

11. Sally Redzimski (Sudbury) 2016-
To opposition and beyond?
The question of Bonham Carter’s successor was a thorny one. For all that she had proven herself to be completely unsuited to the position, she had given the right of the party a taste of power for the first time in decades and with the left still riven they thought they might be in with a shot at holding the seat. Jimmy Sinclair, the young MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, was mooted, but the idea of electing another party dynast was felt to be chancy and he himself shot down the idea. They then tried Barnstaple MP Bart Harvey, but his views on Europe – he had voted against joining the Confederation – made him unpalatable to the vast majority of the rank and file. So they settled on Kim Healy of Holderness, a solid set of policies and a long history in the party gave him broader appeal than the other candidates.

For the left, at first it looked like both Morgan and Redzimski would run again, Morgan banking on his strength in Wales and Redzimski on her party experience. However, the choice of Healy perhaps doomed the party right, as it spooked both major left candidates into co-operating despite their personal animosity. Eventually, the decision on who would run was decided by a game of blackjack, which fell in Redzimski’s favour. She proceeded to win handily against Healy and Argyll MP Iain Reid.

The 2017 election was a difficult one for the party, with memories of the disastrous six months of Bonham Carter still in the voters’ minds, but even as Sam Miliband won a third term, the Liberals managed to scrape a handful of net gains, most happily winning the Tavistock seat back from Bonham Carter. Now holding 58 seats, they remain by some margin the third largest grouping in the Commons.

Redzimski continues to hold to the left-liberal orthodoxy on economics, being broadly supportive of the Miliband agenda whilst criticising it on specifics. The party also holds strongly social liberal views, being the primary supporters of the trans rights movement and normalisation of Northern Ireland’s laws on abortion and homosexuality. Redzimski, the daughter of a Polish RAF man and a Czech Jewish refugee, has also fought both for closer integration with Europe and for peace in the Middle East, being one of the primary supporters of British intervention in the ongoing Lebanese Civil War.

With the Miliband government beginning to look tired after 11 years in power, and the Conservatives having turned back to the right after their attempts at moderation failed to get them in, the Liberals look like they’ll be having a very successful time at the devolved, local and European elections this May, polling higher than they have since the glory days of Honor Balfour, and roughly equal with the Tories in national polls. It’s interesting to speculate, looking back, what would have happened had Sinclair’s opponent not been an honourable man, and the party been permanently decapitated at its most difficult time. Quite possibly, the party would have ceased to exist, or merged into the Tories, instead of being the thriving institution it is today. The Liberals have a lot to thank Eric Gandar Dower for.
 
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Ah, I see. I suppose in hindsight that being called Volkner might have been a clue that he was a fictional fascist--it's a bit like having a fictional communist dictator called Michael Soviet.

Would you recommend the novel?
Mostly for the novelty of the thing, tbh; Stead tends to rub me up the wrong way with the "aging white intellectual who knows better than you" vibe of his later works, but he does a decent job of capturing the feeling of a slowly accelerating slide into dictatorship and of managing a realistic (within standard suspension of disbelief) thought experiment as to what a fascist state and guerrilla war might have looked like in New Zealand.

The book is a bit of a different beast to the film, and it shows. While both draw heavily from the Vietnam War for inspiration on guerrilla warfare, the nature of the Volkner regime is noticeably different in both - while he's a Muldoon expy in the '77 film, his written iteration from 1971 has heavier shades of Sid Holland. It was written in the midst of a thirty-five year period in which elections were an exercise in "how big a majority will the Nats get this time?", and it shows - Stead's New Zealanders are timid, indifferent folks with limited horizons, and he is immensely cynical about the willingness of the people to stand up for themselves in the face of anyone willing to abuse the powers of government.

As a piece of writing, it's adequate for what it is; an NZ novella from the early Seventies. Terse, emotionally-repressed and awkward protagonist who just happens to have been a leftist free-thinker since school, who could have walked off a Speight's billboard. Marriage collapses (which sets up an interesting dynamic that I won't get into so as to avoid spoilers), so Smith goes all self-sufficient frontiersman-who-reads-philosophy on an island up the Coromandel before events conspire to drag him back into a changed society. It's a nice time capsule of its era, with the dusty-paisley-corduroy-décor-and-formica-everywhere zeitgeist colouring the margins of the world. Characters could be a little more well-developed but still credible; the book is political without being insufferable, short but just the right length.
 
This is superb. It makes me wish that The Boys in Blue had been finished on ah.com.

I'm also trying to work out how my family would have fared, and I suspect the answer is 'badly.'
Oh yeah, I remember that TL. @Maeglin, what ever happened to that one?

My family are the type of Otago farmers who would have tutted over the coup, dutifully voted 'no' to Volkner out of loyalty to the imprisoned Nats, then spent the next five years keeping well out of politics. Grandad might have frowned silently at Synod when discussion turned to the Bishop of Waiapu, but not more than that. Yes to a democracy in '79, no to a republic and proportional representation, maybe to the TRC. Definitely voted Winston in '89.

Among the whanau, I can imagine some big divides between pro- and anti-Volknerists which would continue to the present. Power of the Southern Grudge and all that.
 
My family are the type of Otago farmers who would have tutted over the coup, dutifully voted 'no' to Volkner out of loyalty to the imprisoned Nats, then spent the next five years keeping well out of politics.

Grandad was a newspaper editor whose socially conservative Catholicism didn't stop him pissing off both the Bishops and Robert Muldoon, to the point that in the early eighties he was fairly sure someone had tapped his phone. Between that and his love of MJ Savage, I suspect he'd have got himself locked up.
 
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