Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Watching this now, for the first time.

The twat left are visible. The SDP candidate in Slough is greeted with "You should be shot". An appalling racket greets Roy Jenkins after he wins in Hillhead. There's not much comment on this, but had it happened now it would be replayed endlessly to the immense embarrassment of the party. Mercifully we haven't had anyone tell us that the real lesson was Eric Heffer's majority going up (Roy Mason's did too, as it happens),

But mostly Labour just look amateurish. Peter Shore, the Shadow Chancellor, seems to have no sense that the economy had turned 18 months earlier. Of course, things were appalling in lot of the country, but what was the appeal to the rest of it? Doubtless Swindon, Nuneaton and Slough were in better shape than Liverpool, but would have been lots of struggling manufacturing. Labour couldn't hold any of those. And even if your area was doing relatively well, public services were probably not good. It ought to have been possible to build a coalition around improving services everywhere and rejuvenating the hardest hit areas.

The champ so far is Shirley Williams who claimed a "moral victory"- she lost by 3,000.

I can just about remember it. Those were the days when Labour traditionally held a big eve-of-poll rally in Birmingham Town Hall. I’d not long joined the party, so that rally is really my only abiding memory of that election. I remember Foot being introduced as “the next prime minister” and making his way to the platform whilst being cheered to the echo, but somehow detecting a feeling in the room that we all knew that wasn’t about to happen and in fact we were in for a dreadful hiding - and so it proved, of course.

Foot looked very old when he was filmed in his constituency. I'm sure he'd long ago realised the game was up. Probably when having to make the point to lots of his own party that no, it wasn't actually bad to recapture part of your territory that had been invaded by literal fascists.

Ken Livingstone's come on. "Every factory closure must be resisted" and "control capital". Criticizes Peter Shore for emphasizing borrowing too much. As opposed, presumably to telling "capital" where it should go.

Joan Lestor, after losing Slough, says it's only a temporary loss. Temporary as in 14 years.

I remember reading that one point Esther Rantzen interviewed the Downing Street Cat.

The longest suicide note in history...

Thor in a Thunderbird, it was depressing...

Meanwhile Tony Benn toured half empty halls claiming a civil service led conspiracy of the elites was responsible for his marvellous policies in office being thwarted.

1983 is the first election I can just about remember - I was 8 at the time. Thatcher had been PM since I was 4. And the only thing I really recall is that it was between a lady who was already in charge and someone who looked as old as my great grandad, who was 95.

I wouldn’t see a non-Tory PM until I was finishing university.