The Great Cat Massacre (25 page)

There was a problem, though. Commons procedure stipulated that new members had to swear allegiance to the Crown and Parliament and this was done on the Bible. Bradlaugh, not wishing to be a hypocrite, asked to make a solemn oath without the holy book. The other MPs knew of his atheism, but this was a new development and no one was sure what happened in such circumstances.

There was no law requiring an MP to be a Christian, but the parliamentary procedures simply presumed that they all would be. In fact, neither was there any actual rule that the oath must be taken on the Bible, as far as anyone could see – Britain’s government had evolved over 1,000 years, so many of the supposed rules were little more than custom.

But there was Bradlaugh, literally waiting at the House of Commons bar to see if he would be allowed to take his seat. The man who had the power to rule one way or another was the Speaker, Sir Henry Brand. As arbiter of Commons procedure, Brand could have ruled that Bradlaugh could swear an oath without a Bible – he could probably have ruled that Bradlaugh could take his seat swearing that he was a Chinaman or a 12-year-old girl –
but he instead referred the question to the House. This mistake was to cost Parliament dearly. Because the House referred it to a select committee and the select committee decided by a majority of one that Bradlaugh had to swear on the Bible.

Had they stopped for a minute, they might have heard Bradlaugh shouting that it was OK – he had made his protest and he was now prepared to swear on the Bible so long as he could take his seat. After all, everyone inside and outside Parliament knew he thought the Bible was a fairy tale.

But, instead of that happening, Brand made another error: he allowed a debate to take place, at the end of which a spurious and possibly illegal vote was passed, which debarred Bradlaugh, whether or not he swore on the Bible. The issue was seized up and exploited by a group of young Conservative MPs led by Randolph Churchill, who saw that it could be used to embarrass the Liberal government led by William Gladstone, who was in favour of letting Bradlaugh take his seat.

Something like a comedy sketch followed as Bradlaugh attempted to take his seat anyway, only to be chased away, arrested and locked up in the Commons clock tower. Since he was not being allowed to take it, his seat technically fell vacant and there was a by-election. He won it. There was another one. He won it again. And another one – yes, he won that one too.

The issue snowballed in the national conscience, with Bradlaugh, Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, the electors of Northampton and hundreds of thousands of people who
had signed a petition ranged on one side. On the other were Churchill, the Archbishop of Canterbury and an assortment of religious oddballs.

None of this deterred Bradlaugh, who was determined to take the seat he had been elected to three times. On at least one occasion he had to be removed from the Commons by policemen, and in 1883 he managed to take his seat and vote three times before he was fined £1,500 for voting. In support, his friends brought a bill before the House allowing members – i.e. him – to affirm their oath without recourse to the Bible. They lost. But in 1886 there was a new Speaker, Arthur Peel, who ruled (as Brand should have done) that no member would be allowed to prevent another from taking the oath, and Bradlaugh was finally allowed to take his seat six years after being elected.

Two years later, in 1888, a new bill was passed, which allowed Parliamentarians to affirm, rather than swear on the Bible, meaning that non-Christians could, for the first time, represent their constituencies without lying from the very beginning.

Benjamin Disraeli: novelist, wit, politician, lover. But his parliamentary career came within a whisker of being cut short. As a young, loyal and brilliant Tory MP in 1841, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, asking for a position in the government. He was rejected – and he wasn’t happy about it.

So he went to plan B: make Peel’s life hell. For the next five years, Disraeli did everything but knock on Peel’s front door and then run away when someone answered. The real showdown came in 1847 in a debate over the Corn Laws; once again, the PM heard that familiar voice rise from the back benches, where Disraeli had become a hero, to mock and humiliate him. But Peel had a secret weapon up his sleeve. He asked Disraeli, if, as he claimed, he so despised his government, why had he once written, begging to be a part of it?

Disraeli had a choice: he could claim he had changed his mind, or that his letter had been misunderstood. Instead, he went for the third option and lied, saying he had never written such a letter. But Peel had him on that for he had kept the letter and had brought it with him to the debate.

He just couldn’t find it.

Had he done so and presented it to the assembled MPs, Disraeli might even have been forced to resign his seat for lying to the House. But it remained unseen.

Disraeli kept his seat and ended up one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers.

Palmerston became Prime Minister at the age of 71 – a ripe old age for such high office. By this time, his numerous affairs had already gained him the nickname Lord Cupid, and he proved he still had the energy to hold it by accidentally fathering a bastard when he was 79. The lady in question was one Mrs O’Kane, who claimed she
and the Prime Minister had consummated their adulterous love in the Palace of Westminster.

It all came out when her husband, Timothy, a journalist, sued for divorce, naming the Prime Minister as
co-respondent
and claiming £200,000 in damages. Marvelling at the energy of the man, the newspapers of the day asked: ‘She was certainly Kane, but was he Abel?’ The story substantially increased Palmerston’s public popularity and strength in government. He died in office two years later, the last British PM to do so.

It was an incredible act of self-sacrifice. The suffragette Emily Davison killed herself in spectacular fashion, throwing her frail body under the fascist hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, forcing her cause onto the front pages for weeks.

Only she probably never meant it at all.

In 1986 Davison’s personal effects, which had been kept by her family solicitor, came to light. They included a return train ticket from the race. Even at the time the jockey who ended up on top of her, Herbert Jones, said he thought it was an accident. He often told how he was haunted by the look of surprise on her face when she saw the horse approaching. It seems she had run onto the track under the impression that all the horses had passed, but the King’s horse was a straggler and its approach had been hidden by a hump in the course. She had expected to run on, shout a bit, wave the flag she was carrying, and catch
the train back home to London where she had also bought a ticket for a dance that evening. Instead, she was trodden to death and earned her place in the political hall of fame. There is a road named after her, Emily Davison Drive, which is next to Tattenham Corner railway station on the outskirts of Epsom.

Davison was once arrested for violently assaulting a man she mistakenly took for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. She later bombed Lloyd George’s house but he was out of the country at the time.

During the First World War, H.H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, often failed to pay attention during Cabinet meetings because he was writing love letters. Although in his early sixties, he had become obsessed with his daughter’s 28-year-old friend Venetia Stanley. The 35-year difference in their ages was nothing more than a blink of the eye to a strange old man in love. Over the course of just three months in 1915, he wrote her 151 letters, they weren’t just about lambs and all that stuff – he asked her advice on how to conduct the war. So the Tommies in the trenches were partly following the war plan of an unemployed socialite.

Still, Asquith might well have been drunk half the time – during the reading of the Parliament Bill of 1911, which made Britain a democracy by giving the elected Commons primacy over the unelected Lords, he was so smashed he was unable to speak.

According to Winston Churchill, it was a dull Friday afternoon in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks – known as ‘Jix’ – was speaking during a debate on female suffrage and outlining the government’s opposition to a private member’s bill which would reduce the age at which women would be allowed to vote from 30 to 21.
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When Lady Astor, the first female MP, interrupted his speech to ask if the government ever planned to lower the age, he promised to do so in the next parliament. No one knows why he did this. It wasn’t government policy – it was quite explicitly
not
so – and he had no authority to do it. But he did. And from then on, having promised it in Parliament, the government had no choice but to deliver on the promise.

‘Never was so great a change in our electorate achieved so incontinently,’ Churchill wrote later.

The General Election of 25 July 1945 produced a shock result. Churchill, the man who had won the war, was thrown out of Number 10 by an electorate that gave the Labour Party just under 50 per cent of the vote to the
Conservatives’ 36 per cent. Labour took 393 seats, meaning a huge majority of 147.

Labour’s chances had been substantially boosted by a single radio address made by Churchill. He had led the country for four years, and almost to a man the people had been behind him. They had seen their friends, their siblings, their parents, their sons and daughters all killed by the Nazis. Then, during the electioneering, Churchill had gone on the radio to rail against Socialism in a fashion not a million miles from Hitler’s and, adding insult to injury, telling the public: ‘I declare to you from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist government can be established without some form of Gestapo.’

It was seen as being in shockingly poor taste – especially to the families of those who had died at the hands of the Gestapo, such as many of the intelligence agents of the Special Operations Executive who had parachuted into occupied Europe to destroy the German war machine from within.

Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who had served with Churchill in the wartime coalition government, dryly commented: ‘I see that Mr Churchill wishes you to realise that if you vote Conservative you will be voting for the leader of that party, not for the Mr Churchill who led us during the war.’

In all areas, the Tories seemed out of touch with the mood of the nation. Their manifesto,
Mr Churchill’s Address to the Electors,
sounded like something from the nineteenth century. In Kensington, their candidate had election posters depicting him in officer’s dress, with the simple
slogan ‘Vote for Captain Duncan’. His Labour opponent capitalised on this political naivety and produced
near-identical
posters with ‘Vote for Corporal Woodford’. The Corporal won the seat.

Despite all this, no one was more surprised by Labour’s victory than the party’s MPs. Previously, they had been a lonely bunch wandering the corridors of power, occasionally catching a glimpse through closing doors of the nice warm offices that ministers occupied. Suddenly, the Labour benches were stuffed full of new boys and girls. And their very first thought was of treachery.

Attlee had led the party through the lean times, but had been chosen as party leader by the small number of Labour MPs who had been in the Commons during the previous Parliament. There were mutterings that the new members should have their say because perhaps they wanted someone else in charge – especially since that person would be the Prime Minister.

Thus it was that Attlee and senior MPs Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin sat in Attlee’s office just after the election results were announced silently plotting for their own ends. As they did so, a phone call came through. It was George VI inviting the party leader to attend him at Buckingham Palace to become Prime Minister. Morrison was insisting on a vote by the full crop of MPs as to whom it should be. And if anyone were to suggest it should be him … well, who was he to argue with public opinion?

Attlee was considering the proposition when Morrison was called away to take a private phone call. The moment he left the room, Bevin said: ‘Clem, go to the Palace straight
away.’ Attlee thought this a very good idea. As Attlee was working his way across London to the Palace, Morrison was almost certainly under the impression that a leadership election was in the bag and he might be collecting the keys to Number 10 that evening. Instead, the only thing he got was an evening paper, informing him that Attlee had sneaked out and made himself Prime Minister.

Attlee’s meeting with the King was a stilted affair. The new PM wasn’t known for his gregarious nature, and George VI had a terrible stutter and preferred not to speak to anyone. After the two had stood staring at each other for a few minutes, Attlee informed him: ‘I’ve won the election.’

The King replied: ‘I know – I heard it on the
Six O’Clock News.’

Despite the terrible handicap of having gone to Eton and Oxford, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan struggled up through the Conservative party ranks to become Prime Minister. He is perhaps most famous for having informed the British public that they ‘never had it so good’ a few months after coming to power in January 1957 – possibly factually correct in the late 1950s so long as you weren’t in need of an abortion. But his time in Number 10 came to an abrupt end six years later when his doctor informed him that he had prostate cancer. We can only guess how Macmillan, who had planned to lead his party against Harold Wilson in the 1964 General Election, felt while he wrote out his resignation letter, which was to be read to the
faithful at the party conference. His misgivings were unlikely to have been substantially mitigated as he watched Alec Douglas-Home, who was to succeed him as party leader, sprint to the conference and make it public before anyone could stop him.