Election timing - an historical footnote

The able historian Lewis Baston writes an interesting post on Comment is Free this morning, arguing that Brown's election calculation is more difficult to make than it seems.

But, leaving aside Baston's thoughts on current affairs, I was struck by a story from the Callaghan era that I hadn't heard before:

Before Jim Callaghan decided against an October 1978 election, he took a copy of the Times guide to the House of Commons on holiday with him and tried, seat by seat, to work out what an election result would look like. The best he could do was a hung parliament with Labour narrowly the largest party.

This isn't a big point, but it always irritates me that Callaghan's decision not to call an election in 1978 is regarded as a terrible error because he lost in 1979.

I think he would have lost in 1978.

Comments

[Marc Bernstein]

That is an interesting point because when you take into account the Winter of Discontent combined with the terrible freezing winter and the fallout from the Devolution referendum results prompting the vote of confidence, the defeat was worse than it would have been in October. With it being a 44 Majority the inevitable Thatcher victory that October would have been much narrower.

[David Boothroyd]

There is another precedent which Gordon Brown may be thinking of. In the conference season in 1965 there was considerable speculation that Harold Wilson would dissolve immediately after a successful Labour conference. While the Conservatives were meeting, it was announced that the Prime Minister was making an unexpected emergency visit to Balmoral to see the Queen; this caused a great deal of panic in the Conservative Party who were not ready for an election.

In the end he postponed until the Spring, and won a landslide.

[Dave Bartlett]

I think Labour would lose in 2007.