What If Harold Wilson Had Lost on this day in 1964?

So Harold Wilson Day comes round again, now the fiftieth anniversary of Mr Wilson’s appointment by Her Majesty as Prime Minister. I can remember the day, and this is odd because 16th October 1964 is as distant in time from me (as I now am) as 16th October 1914 was from me (as I then was).  Even then, the first year of the Great War seemed impossibly distant, a separate age in which men and customs were hardly recognizable. Half a century was far wider than the widest ocean.   I could not have begun, as a 12-year-old boy at a boarding prep school on the edge of Dartmoor, to imagine my present self, the country and the world I live in or the things I would have done and seen. The distance is vast in both directions. Life is not short at all. It is astonishingly long.

 

On that wet and rather puzzling day, we lived otherwise, thought otherwise, spoke otherwise. We had different hopes and fears, we dressed and looked differently and saw the world in completely different way. Many of those changes began when Mr Wilson took office. 

 

A rather good BBC Radio 4 programme, transmitted last Saturday, explored that odd election, and for the moment you may listen to it here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kzz6g

 

I seem to recall that the early morning broke without a clear result, and it was some hours before we knew for certain that Labour had won.

What if they hadn’t?

As readers here ought to know, the Tory party has never been a  great defender of tradition, despite its pretence to be such a thing. But before Mr Wilson’s six years in office, the Tory party did not feel as anxious as it now does to fit in with the times, to assist and accelerate radical change.

 

Nor was its leader of 1964, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a particularly left-wing figure as Tories go.  

 

I don’t think a Douglas-Home government would have allowed, let alone encouraged, the raft of largely ‘private’ Bills which lunched the British Cultural Revolution . I wonder how the BBC and the rest of the ‘satirical’ new establishment would have reacted to yet another Tory government. Would grammar schools have been reprieved for a while, or saved for good? Would the railways have been butchered more or less (Probably more, though Labour, in the end, cut them pretty savagely) ? Would the death penalty have survived into the 1970s? Would the Wootton Report have ever been published,  let alone implemented. Would British troops have been sent to Vietnam?

 

Actually I suspect Labour would have been in power by 1967 anyway. If Sir Alec had won, he could only have done so narrowly, and would probably have needed ( as Wilson did) to call a new election fairly soon. There was, alas, a ‘mood for change’ which wasn’t rational and which would have had its way.

 

And yet some things in history do depend on very narrow decisions. As the event was so close, I’m surprised that I, for one, have never seen any serious attempt to write a counter-factual speculation on the possibilities.