464. Modern British Elections (Part 2)

The Rest Is History

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 18.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

From the turn of the 20th century, election campaigns - though still replete with politicians behaving badly - have evolved. They have become less mass-participation events or festivals, and receded, with the majority of the population growing increasingly indifferent. Though, following Nixon and Kennedy’s presidential campaigns in the 1960’s, there seeped across the Atlantic a sense that elections were a “race”, which could actively alter the outcome of an election rather than merely acting as a summoning call to predetermined voters. However, the gaffs endured. For instance, Winston Churchill’s famously controversial speech in 1945, during the election that he later lost to the politically adept Clement Attlee; Harold Wilson’s large crowd of hecklers during his 1964 campaign, and John Major's infamous soap-box orations. Then, with the landmark election of 1983, Margaret Thatcher revolutionised campaigning strategy by capitalising on television. This trend has endured through the various campaigns of her successors, many in their way just as dysfunctional, derisory, and even comical as those of their early predecessors. Join Dominic and Tom as, with a week to go until Britain enters the polls, they discuss the evolution of campaigning from the 20th century through to the present day. They reveal in glorious technicolour who have been the most effective campaigners of British politics; who the worst, and why. With a cast of characters including Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Davey; they reveal some of the funniest, and most shocking election gaffs of all time.... EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to the Rest is History.
0:02.2	For bonus episodes, early access,
0:04.4	add free listening and access to our chat community,
0:07.7	sign up at rest is History pod.com.
0:10.7	That's rest is History Pod.com. Almost a century and a half ago, one of Sir Ed Davies predecessors, a chap called William
0:28.8	Gladstone invented modern political campaigning. Before the general election of 1880
0:33.9	Gladstone gave a series of set-piece speeches, many of them five hours long, which
0:39.0	audiences flock to in their tens of thousands. He spoke righteous moral indignation about the various
0:44.7	abominations of the incumbent government, led by his great rival, Benjamin Disraeli.
0:50.1	Eyewitness accounts speak of audience members becoming so in raptured that they fainted and had to be carried out over the heads of the gathered masses like plague corpses.
0:58.0	A few weeks later, through little more than the soaring power of his oratory,
1:03.1	Gladstone returned once again to 10 Downing Street
1:06.3	and ended Disraeli's career.
1:09.4	144 years later, it's hard to tell if the hand of history weighs heavy on Ed Davies shoulders.
1:17.1	One of the many reasons that it's hard to tell is because you only get to glimpse his face
1:20.8	for precisely 1.8 seconds at a time as it zooms passed at 68 miles an hour
1:26.0	into the undercarriage of the Colossus roller coaster at Thoreauke Park.
1:30.3	Liberal values are under threat all over the world. Democracy is dying in the darkness.
1:35.0	Davey, meanwhile, is now approaching the quadruple barrel section,
1:39.0	and his face is cracked open into the kind of open-mouth grin that could easily have got him work as an extra
1:44.9	in one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
1:47.1	Gladstone, it hardly needs to be said, did not seek to turn the tides of history by Pratt
	...

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