Hugh Gaitskell, 1955–63

Abstract

Shortly after the Labour Party lost office in 1979, the BBC Reputations series ran a documentary on the late Hugh Gaitskell, entitled The Lost Prime Minister. Presented by the acclaimed political journalist Anthony Howard, it assumed that had ill-health not struck Gaitskell down in January 1963, it would have been him and not Harold Wilson, who would have stood outside Downing Street in October 1964 (BBC, 1979). It is this assumption that permeates the academic literature on Gaitskell, with the personal and wider political tragedy for the Gaitskellite social democratic right a central theme of the biographical work on his political career (see McDermott, 1972; P. Williams, 1978; Brivati, 1996). In retrospect the timing of the documentary did seem tragically appropriate. As Labour entered Opposition under James Callaghan, after governing for eleven of the previous fifteen years and having won four elections out of five between October 1964 and October 1974, the social democratic right was seen as discredited and in decline. Their cohesion had eroded, most notably over the Common Market, and they had lost their main heirs to Gaitskell. Anthony Crosland, like Gaitskell, suffered a premature death in 1977, while Roy Jenkins had departed to the European Commission. Notwithstanding the differences over the Common Market, many of those who defected to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) within eighteen months of the BBC documentary saw themselves in the mould of Gaitskell (Marquand, 1999: 123–4).