ABSTRACT
Ramsay MacDonald in 1928 declared that ‘as long as he held any position in the Parliamentary party, they were not going to take their instructions from any outside body unless they agreed with them’. Relationships between leaders and led are rather different when the party is in Opposition. In the early 1950s ex-Ministers felt themselves bound to defend policies with which they had been associated, but such hang-over inhibitions are usually short-lived and were markedly absent after 1970. Hugh Gaitskell successfully challenged the right of party conference to lay down foreign policy. At Scarborough, in 1960, the nuclear disarmers triumphed with a hair’s breadth majority of 43,000. Harold Wilson, though not a unilateralist, stood against Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960, largely in protest over Gaitskell’s defiance of conference. When Wilson himself became leader he managed, by a combination of deftness and diplomacy, to heal the breach.
