John Major secured more votes than any other Prime Minister in unpromising circumstances – but ‘stretching the elastic of democracy’ would cost the Party dearly.
Even more than party disagreements over what should replace it, the idea of a very powerful second chamber is out of constitutional fashion.
Reading back, it highlights how supposedly level-headed ‘realists’ were so slow to recognise the true nature of the National Socialist regime.
Does the Anglican character of Toryism explain why it’s avoided producing the long and fascinating list of breakaways sported by Labour and the Liberals?
None the less, the local Conservatives exploited the climate of prejudice, while Labour sometimes bent to accommodate it.
It has been where there is an air of panic and chaos, with a government forced to bow its knee to the markets, that there is real political damage.
They will be strange, edgy experiences: I can hardly wait.
They have gone either way in successive elections, but their recent results show up electoral trends that helping the Tories.
It was not entirely clear at the time that it had created a new political structure that would last for generations – with the Conservatives as the leading party of the state.
There was drought, I Claudius, soaring inflation, and the Prime Minister describing himself as a spider – but the year tops a national contentment index.
A further graft from the remnants of Labour and the LibDems might be the best way of preserving the Union and providing an alternative government to the SNP.
The Tory campaign in 1966 was not a success, but neither was it a complete failure. Heath’s warnings of economic troubles ahead were vindicated as early as July.
There may be a strange applicability for the future in the circumstances that led to the Liberals’ sweeping electoral triumph in 1906.