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"Selsdon Man": Heath Sticks to the Manifesto

Well, the 1963 events are rather opaque at the best of times, so an easy mistake to make. Macleod was amazingly liberal though, it's no surprise that Rivers of Blood collapsed his relationship with Powell. ('Enoch has gone mad and hates the blacks')
IIRC, he was one of the few Tory MPs who either abstained or voted against the Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

I know we disagree on the extent of Macmillan's knowledge of events, but I find it intriguing that the story of Douglas-Home really being everyone's second-choice is the one that's survived alongside the term 'Magic Circle', in spite of the latter coming as proof that the former was engineered.

I think it's interesting how distant Macleod was from traditional grassroots opinion on all sorts of subjects, but how he was still capable of getting standing ovations at conference because there was that thread of tribalism on stuff like the BBC and the like.

I agree on Shepherd's biography being strong and perceptive.
IMO, it likely comes from his ability to show that he was on the home-team and ready to take back the cup from those other bastards. The modern comparison would probably be Gove during the Coalition years and beyond. Decolonisation hurt his chances-and I don't know how it'd have changed had it been someone like Maudling instead-but I think the real kiss of death was how 1963 turned out. Had Butler pulled the trigger and then won 1964, Macleod probably would have been in Number 10 by 1966.

Still, had he been given something other than the Colonial Office, he might have actually won office in 1963.
 
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