How far were Conservative scandals the most important reason for the defeat in the 1964 election?

Another factor was that after a series of unpopular deflationary measures introduced in 1961 by Selwyn Lloyd, and the fast decolonisation of Africa, a sense of unease was created in the British society. This was reflected by poor by-election results in Orpington, Kent, which had been a Conservative safe seat, but a swing of 27% to the Liberal party meant that alarm bells began to ring at Number 10. In response to this, Macmillan abruptly announced radical changes to the government, which involved changing 39 out of 101 ministerial posts, known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. One of his colleagues protested that his cook would have been given more notice. This was meant to inject a new air of freshness into the party with had become old and stale, however this lowered the party morale even more and the public could see that Macmillan was not acting from a position of strength, but out of political desperation. The Conservatives failed to recover from this reshuffle sufficiently to win the 1964 election, but it can be argued that the defeat in 1964 could have been even worse had this radical action not been taken.

In 1963, just before the Conservative party conference Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister due to being incorrectly diagnosed with an illness that was believed would soon result in his death, he actually went on to a ripe old age. This resulted in the Conservative party conference being a fight to get the leadership of the party, and two front runners soon emerged, they were Lord Hailsham and R. A. Butler. But it was to be Lord Home that Macmillan recommended to the Queen to form a government, to the surprise of everyone. Home renounced his peerage and became Alec-Douglas Home. On the 16th October 1963 Home became prime minister, but the way in which he was selected as leader appeared undemocratic to many of the electorate and they felt that the decision had been made by a group of old Etonians at the heart of the establishment.  Home was a poor leader who wasn’t good on television and couldn’t handle hecklers well. In comparison to the Labour leader, Wilson, Home seemed old and out of touch with the electorate. Home ran a very poor election campaign, and as a result he lost the middle and lower class votes to Labour.

After the death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963 Harold Wilson emerged as the new leader of the Labour party. He was young and brought ‘a breath of fresh air’ to politics after the 13 years of the establishment.  He was able to connect well with the electorate, promoting himself as an ‘ordinary chap’ who preferred tinned salmon to smoked salmon and a point to a glass of champagne. Under Wilson the grey years of Gaitskell were over and he pressed forward on a modernising agenda. His aristocratic views and his ‘white heat of technology’ approach gave the electorate another option to the Conservatives which they had lacked for a long time. Wilson famously called the period of Conservative rule ’13 wasted years’.

It is very easy to over credit Wilson and the Labour party for the election victory in 1964, but in the end they only won by 4 seats (this has led to some Conservatives believing that if Butler had been leader they may have won). It was more that the Conservatives lost the election rather than Labour winning it, unemployment was now over 800,000, which dented Macmillan's claim of ‘never had it so good’ and the 1959 election slogan ‘life is better under the Conservatives. Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Poor growth rates along with unpopular taxes, and the harmful political scandals as well as the fact that the Conservatives were a constants target for satirists all played into Labour’s hands, and they therefore won on a very small majority.