Nigel Jones is a writer, historian and journalist.
Despite talk of a deal between the eager rivals in the coming battle for the Labour leadership and the Premiership, it seems more likely that a savage struggle for power will be waged as Rayner, Streeting and possibly Burnham and Miliband duke it out. Given the old adage that your opponents are in other parties but your real enemies are in your own, such brutal intra party warfare is the norm rather than the exception in modern British political history. Here I highlight seven such clashes .
1) H.H.Asquith v David Lloyd George. 1916.
Asquith and Lloyd George were the leading figures in the great reforming Liberal government of the Edwardian era. Asquith presided over such far reaching events as the battle for womens’ suffrage, the threat of civil war in Ulster, the naval race with a rising Germany, and crippling strikes, with complacent calm, while his radical Welsh Chancellor drove through the foundations of the welfare state in his ‘ peoples’ budgets’. But the Great War tested the idle, lecherous and alcoholic Asquith to destruction, and as the flower of the nation bled away in the Somme mud, ( including Asquith’s eldest son) demands grew for a more determined hand on the tiller. Forgetting their past suspicion of untrustworthy Lloyd George, the Tory half of the wartime coalition recognised his dynamism and ruthless drive to win the war at any cost and conspired with him to bring the unwarlike ‘Squiffy’ down. Asquith remained Liberal leader but refused to serve under Lloyd George, and his stubborn arrogance spelt the postwar replacement of their party by Labour.
2) George Curzon v Stanley Baldwin, 1923.
When terminal throat cancer ended the short lived Tory Premiership of Andrew Bonar Law in 1923, Foreign Secretary Viscount Curzon assumed that the job would be his. A grandee’s grandee, the immensely wealthy Curzon, who had married an American heiress, was a former Viceroy of India and embodied all the assumptions of empire in his own person. He was at Montacute in Somerset, one of his several stately homes, when summoned by telegram to London by Lord Stamfordham, the King’s private secretary. Out of touch because he refused to have a telephone in the house, Curzon travelled to town by train, composing his cabinet list with his wife as he did so. But he had overlooked the existence of Stanley Baldwin, a Worcestershire ironmaster who had masterminded the downfall of Lloyd George the previous year. The 20th century was the age of the common man and Curzon sat in the Lords. Stamfordham broke the crushing news that King George V had chosen Baldwin, largely on the advice of another former PM and Foreign Secretary , Arthur Balfour, who hated Curzon. “ And will dear George be chosen?” fluted a society hostess when Balfour returned from the Palace. “No, dear George will not “ Balfour replied. Bitterly disappointed, Curzon was dead within the year.
3) Lord Halifax v Winston Churchill. 1940.
Although both aristocrats, Edward Halifax and Winston Churchill were as different in character as they were in physique. As Foreign Secretary, Halifax had backed PM Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and his aloof nature could not comprehend the vulgarity of a common cad like the Fuhrer. Devoted to hunting, Anglicanism, and his Yorkshire country house, and like Curzon a former Indian Viceroy, ‘the Holy Fox’s’ physical disability ( a disabled arm) precluded military service, and because he also sat in the Lords, he ruled himself out as a war leader when Chamberlain quit after the fiasco of the Norway campaign (which had largely been Churchill’s fault) even though Chamberlain, King George VI and most Tories favoured him for the job. So power fell into Winston’s lap, but Halifax’s old appeasing instincts died hard, and he recommended seeking peace with Hitler after the fall of France. A belligerent Churchill decided that he would be safer out of the country, and made him ambassador to the USA. The rest, as they say, is history.
4) Aneurin Bevan v Hugh Gaitskell, 1955.
No two Labour politicians could have been less alike than ‘Nye’ Bevan, the passionate working class Welsh socialist and Hugh Gaitskell, a middle class Winchester and Oxford educated economist. Bevan cruelly dubbed his rival “ a desiccated calculating machine”but this unfairly dissed Gaitskell,whose warm nature was usually hidden from all but his family and his mistress Lady Rothermere ( later the wife of Ian Fleming). A keen ballroom dancer, Gaitskell was one of those social democrats who sought a new moderate direction for Labour away from the socialist simplicities espoused by the father of the NHS. After Churchill exacted sweet revenge for Labour’s 1945 Landslide by winning power back for the Tories, Gaitskell decisively defeated Bevan for the party leadership when Clem Attlee finally retired in 1955. ‘Nye’ never forgave the man he saw as a pampered public schoolboy, and therefore not a ‘Proper ‘ socialist. But death brought an end to the feud for both in the early 60s before they could continue it in government.
5) Harold Macmillan v ‘Rab’ Butler, 1957.
Although both Harold Macmillan and ‘Rab’ Butler stood for similar sorts of centreist Conservatism, their political personalities were radically different. Macmillan was a wounded WW1 veteran and fierce anti- appeaser, scarred by marital unhappiness and early political failure. Butler had married into money and his ‘pragmatic’ brand of Toryism had seen him flirt with a dishonourable peace in 1940. Butler lacked Macmillan’s driven ambition which was why when elder statesman Lord Salisbury went round the Cabinet table asking
“ Wab or Hawold”? after Anthony Eden’s resignation in the wake of the Suez disaster, all but a couple of ministers plumped for “Hawold”. Butler took his defeat philosophically and continued to serve Macmillan loyally. He had another chance for the Premiership after ‘Supermac’ stepped down in 1963 but failed again.
6) Margaret Thatcher v Edward Heath. 1975.
In retrospect, the Tories put up with the grumpy disaster that was Heath for far longer than they should. He lost three out of the four elections he fought as leader, and his brief stint as PM was one long crisis largely caused by his own pig headed pursuit of industrial failure and Euro fanaticism. When Margaret Thatcher ran out of patience and challenged for the leadership in 1975 he patronised her by telling her she would lose, but after a cunning campaign run by former spook Airey Neave ( a fellow victim of Heathian arrogance) she triumphed. Heath still refused to admit reality and spent the next 15 years in the longest sulk in British history.
7) Tony Blair v Gordon Brown. 1994.
Considering the earth shattering changes that Blairism wrought in Britain, it is sobering to think that only the accident of the premature death of Labour leader John Smith in May 1994 had brought it about. In the subsequent leadership race between Blair and Brown, the latter reluctantly recognised Blair’s popular appeal, but lived to regret ceding first place to the one time friend he would come to despise. Brown, steeped in the rancid hatreds of Scottish Labour politics, made Blair’s life a misery for the next decade until he finally wrested the tarnished crown from his frenemy. He would not wear it for long.
1) H.H.Asquith v David Lloyd George. 1916.
2) George Curzon v Stanley Baldwin, 1923.
3) Lord Halifax v Winston Churchill. 1940.
4) Aneurin Bevan v Hugh Gaitskell, 1955.
5) Harold Macmillan v ‘Rab’ Butler, 1957.
6) Margaret Thatcher v Edward Heath. 1975.
7) Tony Blair v Gordon Brown. 1994.