The “Prospect of the Promised Land”
March 14, 1962, is the day the Liberal Party survived.
It might be odd to think about a specific date as connoting survival, yet the story of the Liberal Party is such that it was on this day that its continued survival was assured.
A last-minute candidate to fight a seat held open for the better part of half a year won the constituency for the Liberals on a fantastic swing of nearly 23,000 votes. Evaporated was a 15,000 vote Conservative majority. In its place, a majority of about 8,000 for the Liberals.
One of the Liberal Party’s most famous campaign posters proudly and boldly requests that voters “Swing to the Liberals.” If there was ever any place that heeded the request made on that poster, it was the seat that etched itself into the lore of British politics and history sixty years ago today.
Orpington was a “true blue commuter suburb,” as Chris Cook put it in his A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900–1984. Perhaps that was true in 1955, or even in 1957 when the first Liberals saw themselves elected to the local council. It was not correct by 1963.
The Liberals controlled the council in Orpington in that year, as they had for several years prior. One of the issues the Conservatives lost the Orpington campaign on was a perceived interference in the popular will as to their local council, something detailed at length in Chris Cook and John Ramsden’s By-Elections in British Politics.
However, it is not the story of Orpington itself, as dramatic and utterly triumphant as it is, that one ought to think about today. Perhaps it’s best that liberals of all stripes not commemorate the victory itself even as they should to rejoice in it.
When we think about March 14, the first thing we liberals ought to think about is that most quintessential of liberal values: hope.
Hope was the primary intangible factor in winning the by-election for the Liberals. Without the self-belief that liberals continue to present, believing they are more than capable of worst-to-firsts, the campaign might have had a much different and more devastating outcome.
As an intangible, hope prevents us from falling on our laurels. Hope allows us to strive while recognizing that the impossible may be just that. Hope allows us to seize opportunities when they arise. It also gives us the drive to make the most of them.
Hope allows a constituency party that placed third at the previous general election to think their local control can translate to a national-level result. That same trait gets outside observers to believe in what may be and may lead them to campaign with the candidate in the back of a car on polling day.
Hope may also be hubristic. It may blind one to the negative possibilities that exist. The hope of holding Orpington at the by-election, something not thought in doubt at the beginning of the campaign, blinded the Conservatives to the possibility that a challenger could arise in the constituency. Notably, however, arrogance has never been much a liberal thing.
There was another factor at play some sixty years ago too, a factor beyond merely the knowledge of a possibility but rather the determination to achieve it: heart.
Heart allows a candidate to regroup after contentious selection battles. It grants them the courage to utilize the strategies employed by local campaigners, to suffer a devastating setback in campaign headquarters burning to the ground, and to still put in maximal effort to achieve the desired result.
Heart fills in the gaps that hope does not because determination and passion are not requirements of striving, but they are requirements of realizing a dream.
In the future, liberals should commemorate this day for many reasons.
They ought to take the time to remember Baron Avebury. He was a man of many interests, Eric Lubbock, and regardless of the who, the story of a local councillor brought in at the last moment to contest a seat, and his winning, should be something we cherish.
They ought to take the time to remember the hard work that Orpington Liberals did in the days, weeks, months, and years leading up to Orpington. The hyperlocal approach to politics that has become the calling card of liberal campaigns the world over, and especially in the United Kingdom, can trace its proof of concept back to the ward-level organization tactics that the Orpington Liberals employed. Combined with aggressive campaigning in the selection phase and the carryover of local elections tactics, Chris Cook and John Ramsden make a compelling case for the ground game and community politics winning the day in Orpington.
Most important though, we ought to remember that late tonight sixty years ago, raucous cheers were a confirmation that Orpington saved the Liberal Party. The cheers ringing out in the counting hall, and Peter Goldman’s face showing “…the misery of unexpected defeat…” in Eric Lubbock’s words, were the sign of a party gifted not a second wind but rather a new lease on life. The victory at Orpington was a herald that a grand ideology with few adherents and negligible presence but an enduring belief in its tenets and its necessity would survive. The hope and heart displayed by Orpington Liberals ensured the Liberals, both big and small l, would survive.
While the Tories had indeed, in the words of Harold MacMillan in his diary, been “…swept off [their] feet by a Liberal revival,” it was more than just a revival, as Dutton notes in his A History of the Liberal Party since 1900. The hope and heart displayed in Orpington were evidence of more than just a revival. It was, to borrow the words of The Times on March 15, 1962, “a prospect of the promised land…” indeed.
The same grit displayed in Orpington is what created, and continues to create, the promised land of liberalism triumphant. It is this promised land we liberals create with our hope and our hearts, and it is the promised land that we should remember every March 14.
