Haven't done one of these in literally years, but it came to me in the shower.
Hi, how you doing, we're back and we're ready for it all over again.
1974-1975: Harold Wilson (Labour majority) [1]
1975-1976: Jim Callaghan (Labour majority)
1976: def. Enoch Powell (Conservative), Jeremy Thorpe (Liberal) [2]
1976-1978: Jim Callaghan (Labour minority with confidence and supply from SDLP) [3]
1978: Tony Benn (Labour minority) [4]
1978: def. Enoch Powell (Conservative), David Steel (Liberal), Francis Pym (Democracy GB) [5]
1978-1981: Tony Benn (Labour majority) [6]
1981-1981: Audrey Wise (Labour majority) [7]
1981-: Joel Barnett (Labour majority) [8]
[1] Resigned after 'No' victory in 1975 EEC referendum.
[2] Labour initially had record-breaking polling over Powell's Conservatives, themselves divided over racialism and their leader's refusal to campaign for 'Yes' in 1975. The Liberals quickly descended into disarray over their leader's refusal to comment on allegations he had engaged in gay sex, but the bigger surprise came when Callaghan lost Labour's majority after a campaign full of missteps including what the press called 'the D-Day Tax'. Powell was quick to capitalise, speaking energetically around the country and making inroads into places the Conservatives hadn't been seen in decades. Narrowly short of a working majority, a deal was done by Callaghan with Labour's sister party across the Irish Sea - but in a break with convention, it came at a price.
[3] Resigned after fourth failed attempt to pass the Common Market Bill.
[4] After three years of a 'Yes-man' (as they were nicknamed) leading Britain's attempts to extricate itself from the EEC, the Labour Party gave in to the inevitable and elected the populist who had probably delivered the 'No' vote in the first place. Within weeks, some of them regretted it - the party looked more divided than ever as Roy Jenkins and thirty other MPs had the whip removed after they once again declined to support the Common Market Bill (now rejigged to remove Gerry Fitt's various riders). With the government now miles from a majority, Labour's leadership captured by 'headbanging Outers' but surging in support around the country, the most polarised General Election since 1906 appeared inevitable.
[5] Liberals consider 1978 a colossal waste of time, with Steel accused of delusion after calling himself 'a real option for PM' and then being mercilessly targeted with false allegations that he, too, enjoyed shooting dogs. Meanwhile, Powellites to this day insist that if 'E-E-Enoch Powell' (as the chant went) had stuck to his guns and blocked the Conservative manifesto commitment to 'respect the provisional result of 1975 and go on to the next stage', the gains he made in Labour heartlands in 1976 would not have been reversed on the Conservatives' worst night in decades. The December election did little to calm a sense of national emergency, and Benn's fiercely choreographed populist campaign went off almost without a hitch. Swept into Downing Street with the biggest Labour majority since Attlee's, he promised from the steps of Number 10 to 'Get Britain Out' and get on with the vital work of building the economy of the future. The first case of Belgrade Flu was reported - in Belgrade, of course - forty-eight hours later.
[6] Resigned after mass resignations from his cabinet over allegations that he had appeared insufficiently jubilant at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Diana Spencer. While this was the official reason spouted in the media, Labour had been in turmoil for months after scandal after Bennite scandal: first news that Number 10 had banned alcohol, forcing aides and civil servants to breach Belgrade Flu legislation and work from Westminster pubs until well past close, after which backlash against the National Curfew turned into a shellacking in the 1981 local elections. Benn's refusal to demote controversial aides such as Jeremy Corbyn and Tariq Ali did not help matters, although Christopher Hitchens, the architect of much of his victory in 1978, had in 1980 removed himself from play after news emerged that he had illegally breached the curfew to "see if [his] car still worked". Resigning just before the summer recess, Benn's last act of enraging his own party came when his timing meant Labour MPs were forced to delay holidays to remain in Westminster to nominate candidates - during which Benn himself enjoyed a cockpit ride in his beloved Concorde.
[7] The Labour leadership election of 1981 would probably be remembered as the most significant drop of the ball by a political party since the war, were it not for how many other times the Labour government of 1974 to 1983 dropped the ball. In the frenetic chaos of the Benn years, few had paid attention to the Labour Party rules changes that Benn and his allies pushed through, using the referendum mandate as cover for changes that ensured a Bennite-Left candidate stood a real chance of winning thanks to membership votes. Seeking to make the decision easy for the members after so much disruption, Labour MPs nominated Joel Barnett, Benn's loyal Chancellor who had unexpectedly ascended to the role despite differing politics and supported the nation through Belgrade Flu with the National Wage. Internecine warfare among the Parliamentary left, combined with Benn's refusal to endorse, led to a surprise candidate emerging as standardbearer of the red flag. It was an unusually long leadership campaign, during which Barnett found the newly-empowered Labour membership unhappy with his claims that Belgrade Flu had changed the nation's financial situation to a degree that required probity and restraint. The membership, along with the left wing trade unions, had their say - and Audrey Wise was their choice.
The murder of Lord Mountbatten on her second day in office paralysed her government for a week, but in hindsight this only allowed the already brimming-with-ideas Wise to stuff her policy sack full to bursting. Having made headlines earlier in her career with fiery speeches - sometimes funny, always unusual - she had been promoted to the cabinet by Benn when he wanted more left-wing allies around the table, and at the time of his resignation she had been Secretary of State for Industry. Appointing Michael Meacher as Chancellor when she moved into Number 10, the two of them spent the week of official mourning piling policy after policy onto the Emergency Budget Meacher had pledged to give within a month of taking over. When the day came, the Labour benches were quiet, but the initial headlines - as is often forgotten - were broadly positive.
The markets, however, had a different view. Introducing a National Minimum Wage overnight while further empowering collective bargaining, along with a host of other ideas plucked straight from the pamphlets of the Institute for Workers' Control (Topham and Coates having practically moved into Number 10) led to the pound falling first to its lowest level since the war, and then to its lowest level in recorded history the following day when Meacher promised that "we have only just got started".
Sacking Meacher and replacing him with Denis Healey (of all people) only postponed the inevitable, and as her plans for a new 'worker's economy' were torn up live at the despatch box, Wise must have known she had days to limp on. She accepted her fate after a particularly unedifying vote in the House of Commons led to open jostling in the lobbies, with Tory MP Michael Heseltine seizing the Parliamentary mace and threatening to use it in the defence of Labour MPs he claimed were being frogmarched by heavy-handed whips. The allegations were later disproven but it was the straw that broke a very injured camel's back. Amid a still-flatlining pound and, after President Biden's condemnation, even rumours that Washington was considering an outright coup, Wise stepped down.
Wise deserves some credit for tackling the massive inflationary rises on fuel that were crippling millions of households as war drove up oil prices. Her cap cost the treasury hundreds of millions but likely avoided a winter of terrible consequences. But otherwise, it's hard to see her resignation after just 49 days as anything other than the inevitable consequence of a woman who stopped listening to anyone who disagreed with her months, perhaps years before she reached the top job.
[8] This time, the PLP declined to put more than one candidate on the ballot. Joel Barnett had warned that if Wise and Meacher's plans were attempted, chaos would result. Utterly vindicated, it fell to him to fix that very chaos. Such was the tumult surrounding his summary appointment that there was little comment on his groundbreaking status as the first Jewish Prime Minister (albeit the second Jew). Keeping Healey in place, he promised to steady the ship and show that Labour could still win the next election - something which Sir Ian Gilmour's lead in the polls suggested was little more than a fantasy.
Whatever Barnett tried to do, it didn't seem possible to pull Labour out of its nosedive in the polls. And while there was more than a hint of truly rotten bigotry in whispers he had stabbed Wise in the back, plenty of level-headed observers noted he did not really have the support of his party. To make matters worse, the man who made him Chancellor was on blatant manoeuvres, threatening to vote against Barnett's Common Market (Northern Ireland) Bill and clearly harbouring intentions of sweeping back into Number 10 in time for the 1983 general election.
