Wrong Side of History

Defeat left the Conservative Party divided and confused about their unpopularity. In the second general election of 1974 the Tory vote fell to just 36%, their lowest level in history – to date. Among voters in their twenties, they had half the Labour share.

As Dominic Sandbrook wrote in Seasons in the Sun: ‘Not only were Heath and his colleagues exhausted after four intensely gruelling years, but their unexpected repudiation seemed to have left them intellectually adrift, lost in the wilderness with no ideological compass.’

The Conservatives were at a loss to understand their failure, and caught between two competing explanations. Did they lose because they were too right-wing, or not right-wing enough?

A handful of mavericks felt that defeat was due to Heath abandoning his earlier free market rhetoric. The party’s private pollsters concluded in contrast that abrasiveness and ‘confrontation’ was the problem and they needed to win back millions of middle-class voters who had gone to the Liberals, and ‘to drop all talk of social or ideological conflict, and emphasise conciliation and consensus.’

Whether or not he was too confrontational or not enough, Edward Heath had certainly been inept and uninspiring. Asked during the campaign what his first move against inflation would be, he had replied ‘to see precisely what the situation is’: and then? ‘To take the appropriate action’.

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