THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY
Roy Jenkins turns from the present election to
the time when no one knew who would win, and the countly took a fortnight to vote
IT IS a grateful thought that in three weeks the election will at last be over. Hardly ever has a British election cast such a long shadow before it, so subordinated the process of government to party point- scoring, and so strained the nerves and tempers of the majority of politicians. In 1964, Alec Douglas-Home went almost exactly as close to the legal limit for the length of a parliament, but my recollection produces no equivalent months of preced- ing political hysteria. The last time within my memory when a forthcoming election so long overhung the scene was in 1951. The difference then was that Attlee, who in a 50-year perception of judgment had presided over a notable and formative administration, had a decent and modest feeling that 61/4 years (almost exactly the same, as it happens, as Mr Major's term so far) was enough, and made no effort to cling to power, fixing the date of the elec- tion (only 20 months into the parliament) more to suit the convenience of the slowly dying king than to benefit the Labour party. Autres temps, autres moeurs.
However, my remit is not to compare 20th-century prime ministers but to con- trast 19th-century elections with those of today. But the 19th century is a wide span, particularly as it encompassed the move- ment from an oligarchic electorate of under half a million (with a few haphazard semi-democratic patches as in Westmin- ster and Yorkshire, which contributed con- siderably to the numbers) to over five million (out of a total adult male popula- tion of c.14 million) by the end of the cen- tury. In addition, the Ballot Act of 1872 greatly changed the nature of contested elections. Hitherto, they were all conduct- ed on open hustings with the tally moving up during the day as on a billiard-marker. Secret, or maybe semi-secret voting, there- fore marked a great change, and I think it best to confine the comparison to the post- ballot, pre-first world war 42 years — that is to the general elections of 1874, 1880, 1885, 1886, 1892, 1895, 1900, 1906 and the two in 1910. These embraced much of the classical period of British parliamentary institutions, when abroad the Empire reached its peak of power and at home the House of Commons was at its peak of prestige, far higher than today.
The frequency of these elections was at once high and irregular. The maximum statutory interval between elections until the Parliament Act of 1911 was seven years. Yet the average length of the ten parliaments of the period was no more than three years and seven months, and only one of them ran slightly in excess of six years. None came near to the legal limit in the way that both the 1959 and the 1992 parliaments have done. All this was despite the fact that elections were unpop- ular with MPs, not merely because they might result in defeat, but because they were often so wretchedly expensive, even (or perhaps particularly) if the result was victory. When Gladstone's eldest son was elected at Chester in 1865, for instance, it cost his father £2,000, the equivalent of /100,000 today. (For himself, Gladstone was skilful at getting others to pay, mostly those who were clamouring for him to stand in a particular constituency. His son did not have that pulling power.) The way in which money was saved was more by unopposed returns in safe seats than by infrequent elections. In the 1886 election, which followed only eight months after the 1885 one, there were no less than 152 uncontested seats, although that was exceptional. Nevertheless, a solid chunk of unopposed returns (which upset the national pattern of party voting figures) was a strong if declining feature of general elections up to the second world war. One of the most bizarre returns in recent elec- toral history was in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1931, an election which reduced the Labour party to a rump of 46 MPs. But for that Potteries borough, the result read 'Typical, I backed it on Saturday. It came in on Monday!' simply: 'Colonel Josiah Wedgwood (Lab) unopposed', thereby suggesting that the most formidable winning formula was still to be a local patrician on the side of the people.
Another feature of the ten elections was the roughly equal balance of rewards which they provided for the two major parties. The Liberals won six of them (although only two of the six were for one reason or another resonant victories), but these only yielded 17112 years of office, whereas the Conserva- tives got 24 years out of their four wins, which were all decisive, and in each case yielded more than a quinquennium of gov- ernment. The Liberal Home Rule split of 1886 produced 20 years of Conservative dominance, but not continuous office. The Liberal dawn of 1906, although soon fading into the cloudier midday of the dependence on other parties which was the result of the two 1910 elections, produced 16 years with- out a Conservative prime minister. Despite the sweep of these long tides, there was nonetheless a lively and realistic hope on the part of the opposition at the beginning of each election that they might win. The only possible exceptions to this were in 1900 and at the second 1910 dissolution.
This expectation without certainty of victo- ry and a change of government did not, how- ever, produce very frenzied campaigning by party leaders. Prime ministers were much less limpet-like in those days. After a parlia- ment of power, they were mostly ready for relative repose. Gladstone's rampaging Mid- lothian campaign for the 1880 election, on the first leg of which (actually in 1879) he addressed 85,840 words to 86,930 people in 30 speeches, was wholly exceptional. Even he, in the three subsequent elections which he fought in Midlothian, did not attempt to emulate these feats, and after his last day of campaigning, which was in 1892, at the age of 82 in the now Edinburgh suburban town of Penycuik, he wrote: 'Thank God all this is over.' Whether he meant for life (as it was) is not clear, but it at least showed signs of sati- ety with crowds.
At the next election, that of 1895, both the party leaders, Rosebery the outgoing prime minister and Salisbury the incoming one, were peers. And there was a prevail- ing convention that peers, even if of this degree of political prominence, should not interfere by campaigning in elections to the House of Commons. They should confine themselves, if even to that, to the exercise of influence on their tenants and on shop- keepers in the local market town (see the classic description of the Duke of Omni- urn's scruples over the Silverbridge election in Trollope's The Prime Minister, published in 1876). This suited both Rosebery and Salisbury very well. The former, regarding the burdens of converse with his Chancel- lor and leader of the House of Commons Sir William Harcourt as well outweighing the pleasures of office, was eager for defeat. He expressed his detachment by hiring a yacht and sailing round the north of Scotland, occasionally calling in at remote fishing ports to receive news of his party's mounting disasters, which to his considerable pleasure included the defeat of Harcourt at Derby. Salisbury behaved more circumspectly. He spent several elec- tions at one of his two French villas.
The ban on peers campaigning was in no way statutory, and Disraeli appears to have broken it when, in September 1876, he spoke at Aylesbury in the by-election resulting from his own elevation to the earldom of Beaconsfield (which he pro- nounced Beeconsfield) and produced one of his most memorable and typical anti- Gladstone mordancies. Of all the Bulgarian atrocities, he said, Gladstone's pamphlet denouncing them was the greatest. It was at once flippant and deadly and as such Offended the earnest as much as it pleased those who liked mocking wit. But it was certainly not compatible with lordly non- intervention. Maybe he could have pleaded that he had only just become a peer, or that he was entitled to special dispensation for saying goodbye to his constituents, or that by-elections did not count.
When Rosebery was out of the way (as a party leader in 1896, although he lived until 1929), and Salisbury, with vastly greater achievements, followed him from leader- ship in 1902 (and died in 1903), that was the end of peer premierships, although not of the thought of them, as Curzon's false hopes showed in 1923, as did the flicker towards Halifax in 1940. Subsequent lead- ers campaigned more actively, although vigour was not exactly the right word either for Balfour's languid elegance or for Campbell-Bannerman's more rotund indo- lence. But at least they started with a large London meeting, generally in the Albert Hall, before retiring to their own con- stituencies, from which they made a few, but only a few, forays to other centres. Bal- four's seat was in Manchester (where he lost) and Campbell-Bannerman's in the Stirling Burghs, where he was secure even on an ebb tide like that of 1900, let alone in the great Liberal flood of 1906.
Apart from any other differences, all those pre-1914 general elections, instead of being concentrated on a single national Polling day, were spread over about a fort- night. Thus in 1905/6, the election strad- dled Christmas, which would be unthinkable today. Campbell-Bannerman delivered his Albert Hall launching address on 21 December, there was then a brief holiday respite before the campaign resumed, and the first results came on 12 January. Everything was complete, with the exception of Orkney and Shetland and tile Scottish universities, by the end of the !lionth. The pattern broadly was that the Ooroughs voted first and the counties fol- lowed in a leisurely way. This, like the brst-past-the-post voting system itself, seemed almost hand-designed to exagger- a.te the extent of the swings. Thus Balfour's aefeat, which came on the second day, obviously had a bad effect on Conservative morale during the remaining dozen days of polling.
The first of the two 1910 elections fol- lowed almost exactly the seasonal pattern of the 1906 one, with, this time round, Asquith as Campbell-Bannerman's more powerful successor holding his opening Albert Hall rally before Christmas and polling begin- ning on 15 January. But this election, unlike that of 1906, produced a very evenly bal- anced result, the Liberals emerging with only two seats more than the Conservatives. The Liberal grip on government was at once made inevitable and more difficult to man- age by the Irish Nationalists and the Labour party, who between them controlled 122 seats, being impossible allies of the Conser- vatives but difficult allies (particularly the Irish) of the Liberals. It was also a more strenuously fought election. This was partly because of the injection of Lloyd George and Churchill dynamism into the campaign. Both of them were minor figures in 1906 who by 1910 had become major ministers and controversialists who attracted and loved attention. They also enjoyed rushing about the country infusing their activities with the drama of movement. In the first 1910 election, Lloyd George went to Grimsby (a highly marginal seat), held a great meeting there on polling day itself, which was thought rather bad form, and was rewarded with a Liberal gain. In the second election of that year, Churchill, who had spoken in Cheshire in the early evening of a day when Balfour had addreSsed 10,000 people in the Grimsby fish docks, hired a special train, stopping on the way to have instalments of Balfour's speech handed to him, and replied in another Grimsby mass meeting at mid- night. His Liberal eloquence was rewarded by the seat reverting to the Conservatives.
Not even this febrile atmosphere, howev- er, could prevent the second election within 11 months being an anticlimax. The political situation was too tense for a reversion to the 1886 safety valve of a large tranche of uncon- tested seats. Instead, the same feeling expressed itself through a decline of nearly 20 per cent in the turnout. The result was an almost exact repeat of the first election of that year. The Liberals lost three seats and the Conservatives one to the minor parties. But within the stalemate no less than 60 seats changed hands between the major par- ties, thereby suggesting that there was much more room for local initiative and for candi- date influence than in the two mass plebiscites of 1950 and 1951, when national campaigns, even before the television age, imposed like a great die-stamping machine almost uniform swings from John O'Groats to Land's End.
Lord Jenkins's most recent book is a biogra- phy of Gladstone.
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