It is January 1963, and Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, is feeling unwell. Four days into the new year, he checks into the Middlesex hospital. The experts are baffled; he seems to have some kind of virus, but they cannot work out what it is. Then one young student doctor suggests that Gaitskell might have the rare disease lupus - and in that moment, he saves the Labour leader's life. The doctors race to install an artificial kidney; the news bulletins are gloomy; crowds gather outside the hospital. But the man who once vowed "to fight, and fight, and fight again" pulls through.
In an odd way, Gaitskell was lucky to have fallen ill when he did. He was still convalescing in the summer of 1963, when the Profumo scandal transformed the political landscape. If Gaitskell had been back on his feet, then the Tories might well have raised the little matter of his ongoing affair with Ian Fleming's wife, Ann. "If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party," Lord Hailsham snapped during one exchange, "you can talk to me about Profumo." But since the Labour leader was still in hospital, nobody wanted to add to his troubles - and he got away with it.
By October 1964, when the new prime minister, Reginald Maudling - the Tories' answer to the fun-loving, progressive Gaitskell - called a general election, the Labour leader was ready for the fray. His 24-seat majority was narrower than he had expected. But Labour supporters looked forward to a new era of reform and modernisation, spearheaded by Gaitskell's brilliant young protégés Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland and his indispensable sidekick "Wedgie" Benn: who one might call the Peter Mandelson of the Swinging Sixties.
And then it all went wrong. The Labour left had never forgiven Gaitskell's opposition to CND, while the unions had not forgotten his attack on Clause IV. By the mid-1960s, his modernising ambitions were wearing painfully thin. The economy ran into trouble; the dockers went on strike. Then, in 1967, came the final blow. Amid the hoopla surrounding You Only Live Twice, the new James Bond film, Private Eye dropped the bombshell that the prime minister had been sleeping with the wife of Bond's creator for the last decade.
It was the scandal of scandals, beside which even Profumo looked like a sideshow. Within weeks, not only had Gaitskell resigned but so had Maudling, discredited after revelations about his dodgy business dealings. The Labour Party was torn apart; the Tories turned to squeaky-clean Enoch Powell. And Gaitskell? He disappeared to Ian Fleming's Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, and a life of suntanned obscurity. As Tacitus wrote
of the Roman emperor Galba: "Everyone thought he was capable of being emperor, until he became it."
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