neilm
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Post by neilm on May 31, 2020 10:48:19 GMT
Watching the 1997 replay, I was struck by how many faces I recognised and had instant recall about, both losing Tories and winning Labour MPs. I find it quite hard to do that now. Maybe my interest has waned? I was 15 at the time and lapping up all the political news I could find and I don't do that now. Or perhaps there are so many forgettable bland types on each side of the house now?
Following on from this, I was struck by how few of the Labour MP intake made any sort of mark or have stuck in my mind for being anything other than, for example, MP for Romford for four years. With such a vast intake, and a essentially a front bench ready to go (and only 100 or so ministerial roles, some of which are in the Lords, as well as Labour's then rules on members of the shadow cabinet getting jobs in a new government), the new MPs were mostly not going to get a bite of the cherry until a second term but so few of them really seem to have made any sort of impact at all: watching David Evans lose, for example, although I knew Melanie Johnson had taken the seat I simply couldn't recall anything else about her and was astonished to find that she'd had two years as Economic Secretary to the Treasury in Blair's first term. She must have been fairly talented to get a junior ministerial role so soon (like David Lock) but she basically disappeared. Posting about Alfred Broughton in another thread today led me to read about Mike Wood, and it wasn't until I saw his photo that I remembered who he was. Even in the 2001-5 period absolutely loads of them have just faded to obscurity in my mind. Is this because there were so many of them, because most of them rigidly towed the line on everything (because Mandelson and Campbell were paging them all the time) and so few rebelled, because they were just really dull or a combination of those? Or maybe a lot of them, in seats they didn't expect to win, spent eight years shoring up the vote and managing the CLP and didn't have time to be a talking head?
And then, watching the 'morning after' bit, I was struck by not only how sprightly and sharp Jim Callaghan was (and how he looked exactly the same as when losing 18 years previously) but all the talk about Hague contesting the leadership. As I say above, I was a party member by this point and swallowing all the news I could get (as teenage political nerds are wont to do) and don't remember him being bigged-up in the media as a likely contender, at least at this stage. I thought that came at least a week later- after Heseltine's Italian heart attack, certainly.
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The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
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Post by The Bishop on May 31, 2020 10:55:49 GMT
Johnson got splatted by Grant Shapps in the 2005 GE, tried unsuccessfully for some other seats pre-2010 and seems to have disappeared since. Lock was of course the architect of his own downfall four years earlier, went back to doing legal stuff. Wood's obscurity was actually commented on at the time - though he was never a leadership loyalist but one of the relatively few Campaign Group people in the 1997 intake. Vaguely recall him standing for Hexham at the 1987 GE, managing a modest increase in the Labour vote. I can relate to your first comment a bit as well, knew every single 1997 MP's name and constituency off by heart  |
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timmullen1
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Post by timmullen1 on May 31, 2020 10:56:38 GMT
Watching the 1997 replay, I was struck by how many faces I recognised and had instant recall about, both losing Tories and winning Labour MPs. I find it quite hard to do that now. Maybe my interest has waned? I was 15 at the time and lapping up all the political news I could find and I don't do that now. Or perhaps there are so many forgettable bland types on each side of the house now? Following on from this, I was struck by how few of the Labour MP intake made any sort of mark or have stuck in my mind for being anything other than, for example, MP for Romford for four years. With such a vast intake, and a essentially a front bench ready to go (and only 100 or so ministerial roles, some of which are in the Lords, as well as Labour's then rules on members of the shadow cabinet getting jobs in a new government), the new MPs were mostly not going to get a bite of the cherry until a second term but so few of them really seem to have made any sort of impact at all: watching David Evans lose, for example, although I knew Melanie Johnson had taken the seat I simply couldn't recall anything else about her and was astonished to find that she'd had two years as Economic Secretary to the Treasury in Blair's first term. She must have been fairly talented to get a junior ministerial role so soon (like David Lock) but she basically disappeared. Posting about Alfred Broughton in another thread today led me to read about Mike Wood, and it wasn't until I saw his photo that I remembered who he was. Even in the 2001-5 period absolutely loads of them have just faded to obscurity in my mind. Is this because there were so many of them, because most of them rigidly towed the line on everything (because Mandelson and Campbell were paging them all the time) and so few rebelled, because they were just really dull or a combination of those? Or maybe a lot of them, in seats they didn't expect to win, spent eight years shoring up the vote and managing the CLP and didn't have time to be a talking head? And then, watching the 'morning after' bit, I was struck by not only how sprightly and sharp Jim Callaghan was (and how he looked exactly the same as when losing 18 years previously) but all the talk about Hague contesting the leadership. As I say above, I was a party member by this point and swallowing all the news I could get (as teenage political nerds are wont to do) and don't remember him being bigged-up in the media as a likely contender, at least at this stage. I thought that came at least a week later- after Heseltine's Italian heart attack, certainly. Melanie Johnson had a few junior ministerial positions, and was Public Health Minister at the time of her defeat in 2005. Her ministerial career may have stalled a little after she developed breast cancer. |
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neilm
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Post by neilm on May 31, 2020 11:12:25 GMT
I can relate to your first comment a bit as well, knew every single 1997 MP's name and constituency off by heart Interesting, isn't it. I've got incredible recall of minor trivia as well (like Clifford Forsythe playing for Linfield decades before) about candidates from the time but almost nothing after 2005. I didn't realise that Johnson had served as a health minister as well. |
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Harry Hayfield
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Post by Harry Hayfield on May 31, 2020 11:12:29 GMT
The thing that struck me about 1997 was not just the size of the Labour landslide, but how many members of the media (once the results started coming in) seemed to suddenly realise that there were other parties in the UK. The Lib Dems gaining (according to one forecast) 60 seats was treated as though they had discovered alchemy and the SNP gains in Scotland were "The who?" which is why I am glad we now have multi regional election broadcasts with reporters who know their neck of the woods very well indeed.
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Post by timrollpickering on May 31, 2020 11:13:53 GMT
Watching the 1997 replay, I was struck by how many faces I recognised and had instant recall about, both losing Tories and winning Labour MPs. I find it quite hard to do that now. Maybe my interest has waned? I was 15 at the time and lapping up all the political news I could find and I don't do that now. Or perhaps there are so many forgettable bland types on each side of the house now? Following on from this, I was struck by how few of the Labour MP intake made any sort of mark or have stuck in my mind for being anything other than, for example, MP for Romford for four years. With such a vast intake, and a essentially a front bench ready to go (and only 100 or so ministerial roles, some of which are in the Lords, as well as Labour's then rules on members of the shadow cabinet getting jobs in a new government), the new MPs were mostly not going to get a bite of the cherry until a second term but so few of them really seem to have made any sort of impact at all: watching David Evans lose, for example, although I knew Melanie Johnson had taken the seat I simply couldn't recall anything else about her and was astonished to find that she'd had two years as Economic Secretary to the Treasury in Blair's first term. She must have been fairly talented to get a junior ministerial role so soon (like David Lock) but she basically disappeared. Posting about Alfred Broughton in another thread today led me to read about Mike Wood, and it wasn't until I saw his photo that I remembered who he was. Even in the 2001-5 period absolutely loads of them have just faded to obscurity in my mind. Is this because there were so many of them, because most of them rigidly towed the line on everything (because Mandelson and Campbell were paging them all the time) and so few rebelled, because they were just really dull or a combination of those? Or maybe a lot of them, in seats they didn't expect to win, spent eight years shoring up the vote and managing the CLP and didn't have time to be a talking head? And then, watching the 'morning after' bit, I was struck by not only how sprightly and sharp Jim Callaghan was (and how he looked exactly the same as when losing 18 years previously) but all the talk about Hague contesting the leadership. As I say above, I was a party member by this point and swallowing all the news I could get (as teenage political nerds are wont to do) and don't remember him being bigged-up in the media as a likely contender, at least at this stage. I thought that came at least a week later- after Heseltine's Italian heart attack, certainly. Also notable that only one new Labour MP from that election went on to stand for the leadership - Yvette Cooper. Even the Lib Dem intake managed to produce two (Jackie "Who Cares" Ballard and Sir Vince Cable). During late 1996 and early 1997 the right leaning press ran a number of features on the expected leadership race and William Hague regularly appeared on the tables of potential contenders as the "Done nothing wrong, centrist, has a safe seat" candidate of which there was not much competition (Malcolm Rifkind had a marginal seat, Ian Lang looked vulnerable as well, Stephen Dorrell's blatant attempts to reposition himself as a Eurosceptic convinced nobody except maybe Stephen Dorrell). These features did acknowledge that Hague had also "done nothing" but would allow the party to skip a generation instead of refighting some student political society election. IIRC Hezza's heart Italian heart attack was in 1993. He had some chest pains in 1997 that took him out of the running but I don't think that was a second attack. |
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timmullen1
Labour
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Post by timmullen1 on May 31, 2020 11:27:14 GMT
I can relate to your first comment a bit as well, knew every single 1997 MP's name and constituency off by heart Interesting, isn't it. I've got incredible recall of minor trivia as well (like Clifford Forsythe playing for Linfield decades before) about candidates from the time but almost nothing after 2005. I didn't realise that Johnson had served as a health minister as well. I remember her as health minister only because she suggested children should drink fluoride as opposed to brushing their teeth, and my dentist cousin was apoplectic and kept emailing me telling me I should “do something about it”; I’ve still to figure out quite what I was supposed to do! |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on May 31, 2020 11:42:31 GMT
The unfortunate thing about Melanie Johnson is how much she looks like Rebecca Front playing Nicola Murray in 'The Thick of It'.
I was in the same union branch as Eileen Gordon's husband. I don't think she ever intended to be anything more than a good local MP for Romford, and such was the case with many of the other 1997 winners. It's not an ignoble ambition.
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neilm
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Post by neilm on Jun 3, 2020 21:11:55 GMT
On the 1959 coverage, within a minute- there was a 16000 Conservative majority declared in Liverpool Wavertree and a Labour hold in Romford. How times change! Was the Romford seat broadly the same Geographical area as today? As part of the run-up to the 2019 election, I looked at the electoral history of Liverpool (the area covered by the constituencies today with Liverpool in their title) and came to the conclusion that the Conservatives' death knell in Liverpool was sounded in 1987. I will try and find those figures and post them. Why 1987? They'd lost everything in Liverpool by 1983. |
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Post by greenhert on Jun 3, 2020 21:42:43 GMT
As part of the run-up to the 2019 election, I looked at the electoral history of Liverpool (the area covered by the constituencies today with Liverpool in their title) and came to the conclusion that the Conservatives' death knell in Liverpool was sounded in 1987. I will try and find those figures and post them. Why 1987? They'd lost everything in Liverpool by 1983. Because of how heavily the Conservative vote collapsed in Liverpool in 1987, especially in Liverpool Broadgreen and Liverpool Mossley Hill. |
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neilm
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Post by neilm on Jun 3, 2020 21:50:39 GMT
Why 1987? They'd lost everything in Liverpool by 1983. Because of how heavily the Conservative vote collapsed in Liverpool in 1987, especially in Liverpool Broadgreen and Liverpool Mossley Hill. It's a poor analysis even on those terms: the rot had set in years before. |
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Post by greenhert on Jun 3, 2020 23:10:40 GMT
Because of how heavily the Conservative vote collapsed in Liverpool in 1987, especially in Liverpool Broadgreen and Liverpool Mossley Hill. It's a poor analysis even on those terms: the rot had set in years before. Or rather a previous loyal demographic was fading or moving away; major boundary changes in 1983 did not help either. |
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Post by johnloony on Jun 4, 2020 0:49:54 GMT
As part of the run-up to the 2019 election, I looked at the electoral history of Liverpool (the area covered by the constituencies today with Liverpool in their title) and came to the conclusion that the Conservatives' death knell in Liverpool was sounded in 1987. I will try and find those figures and post them. Why 1987? They'd lost everything in Liverpool by 1983. Because in 1983, the Conservative Party was still in 2nd place in all the Liverpool constituencies, with three of them only about 4,000 votes behind the winning candidate. Different circumstances after 1983 might have made it viable for there to be a revival, and Conservative gains, in 1987 or 1992. The 1987 result were what put the decline beyond the point of no-return. |
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Post by Merseymike on Jun 4, 2020 7:00:50 GMT
Johnson got splatted by Grant Shapps in the 2005 GE, tried unsuccessfully for some other seats pre-2010 and seems to have disappeared since. Lock was of course the architect of his own downfall four years earlier, went back to doing legal stuff. Wood's obscurity was actually commented on at the time - though he was never a leadership loyalist but one of the relatively few Campaign Group people in the 1997 intake. Vaguely recall him standing for Hexham at the 1987 GE, managing a modest increase in the Labour vote. 0 I can relate to your first comment a bit as well, knew every single 1997 MP's name and constituency off by heart Mike Wood was very much an example of a local candidate who wanted to focus on being a constituency MP. In fact he had been a local councillor in the area, had then relocated, and was then selected as parliamentary candidate although by then he did not live in the constituency. He was definitely on the left of the party, from what I recall very anti-EU in the traditional left wing Bennite mould. Given that the sitting MP was Elizabeth Peacock he may have seemed that he would provide the same diligent constituency service without the suggestions of capital (or was it corporal? ) punishment on the National Lottery programme. I think he tried for the seat in 1992 but was beaten by Eunice Durkin who I knew quite well. She wasn't well thought of as a candidate in some quarters, I think her well-known anti-abortion views proved quite divisive but it was more a personal thing. |
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Post by Merseymike on Jun 4, 2020 7:41:22 GMT
Why 1987? They'd lost everything in Liverpool by 1983. Because in 1983, the Conservative Party was still in 2nd place in all the Liverpool constituencies, with three of them only about 4,000 votes behind the winning candidate. Different circumstances after 1983 might have made it viable for there to be a revival, and Conservative gains, in 1987 or 1992. The 1987 result were what put the decline beyond the point of no-return. Liverpool had experienced the first wave of Liberal activism which had certainly weakened the Tories on the ground, but certainly it was 1983-87 where they experienced the notable plunge in votes which they have never recovered from. It's more that even the sort of people who might vote Conservative elsewhere just don't and the entire absence of any Conservative presence is a very low base to start from. The last active Tory local campaign was in Allerton and Hunts Cross ward in 2008 when it was still a LibDem ward, the Tories managed to get Labour into third but have never managed it since. I sometimes say jokingly that it's more socially acceptable to be an axe murderer than a Conservative in Liverpool - they are viewed as being "against" the city and its very ingrained now. |
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Harry Hayfield
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Jun 5, 2020 8:28:46 GMT
Are we likely to get 1970 on June 20th (given that the 18th will be the 50th anniversary)?
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nodealbrexiteer
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Post by nodealbrexiteer on Jun 5, 2020 19:41:06 GMT
Are we likely to get 1970 on June 20th (given that the 18th will be the 50th anniversary)? we'll know in week or so I should think-I'd like to see it |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jun 12, 2020 8:01:36 GMT
Election '70 is getting a showing - starts 9 AM, Saturday 20 June.
I'm sure Harold will be fine for another five years.
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Jun 12, 2020 10:49:39 GMT
Well, five years on he would still be PM if that is what you mean  |
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Harry Hayfield
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Jun 13, 2020 8:04:15 GMT
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