Daniel Webster, organising secretary of the Young Conservatives, was jubilant. The Labour Party, he taunted, was now the “old man’s party” — and he had a point. Webster was speaking exactly 70 years ago, in May 1955, when the incumbent Tory government was returned to office on nearly 50% of the vote, their highest-ever share in the age of universal suffrage. Labour, on the other hand, slumped further, losing seats for the third election in a row. And, like Webster, even the normally loyal Daily Mirror was clear where the blame lay. An opinion piece in the paper opened: “Labour lost the general election because its leaders are too old.”
It was hard to disagree. At 72, Clement Attlee had been Labour leader for 20 years, with 1955 his fifth general election. His own analysis of the defeat implicitly agreed with the Mirror. “The old folk did not let us down,” he reflected. The Conservatives had no time for such nostalgia. They were led by the dashing Sir Anthony Eden, who, at 57, was positively youthful compared to his exhausted socialist rival — even as the Tories swept to power on the enthusiasm of the young. And if that’s one hint at how much Britain has changed since 1955, there are many other examples too, from a fractured electoral map to the slow death of social engagement.
In 1955, Labour fought the battles of the past, clear enough in which voters the party managed to retain. While workers in the industrial heartlands, recalling the traumatic Twenties and the hungry Thirties, stayed loyal, most of the country had little wish to look back. The times were changing. Identity cards and rationing had been abolished, and the talk was of prosperity not austerity.
This, after all, was the year that the young designer Mary Quant opened her first boutique in Chelsea, before going on to revolutionise international fashion, and the year that rock ’n’ roll arrived in the shape of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”. While the politicians were out on the campaign trail, an actor named John Osborne was sat on Morecambe Pier, writing Look Back in Anger, the play that would introduce the public to a generation of Angry Young Men.
Most obviously, there was the imminent arrival of ITV to break the BBC’s monopoly on television. The legislation had been passed, and broadcasting was due to start later in 1955, with a promise to give viewers what they wanted, not just what was considered good for them. Attlee disapproved of the whole thing. “They will have to reduce their programmes to the lowest common denominator so they become cheaper and more and more vulgar,” he said, and Labour went into the election committed to cancelling ITV if they won. But they didn’t, and the upstart service proved so wildly popular that the Tories boasted about it in the next election campaign. “BBC or ITV?” read a poster in 1959. “You’ve a choice — thanks to the Conservatives, because Conservatives believe in opportunity.”
Attlee finally stepped down after the 1955 defeat, replaced by 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, the youngest leader of a major party for 60 years and the first born in the 20th century. He struck a very different note. “We are glad to see people better-off,” he admitted, “and have no patience with those who are comfortably-off themselves yet seem to resent the prosperity of others.”
But as the party’s 60-seat majority in 1955 so vividly implies, the Conservatives had already made this generational break. The election came after the octogenarian Winston Churchill finally returned to the back benches, making way for his nephew-by-marriage Eden. An unmistakably modern man, the polyglot ex-Foreign Secretary was as elegant as a film star. He had recently been named “the best dressed politician in the world” by Tailor & Cutter, and was, said the Sunday Pictorial, “admired” by millions of women (“or is that too weak a word?”).
More important than Sir Anthony himself, though, was the party organisation outside Parliament. For these were the days of mass parties, where one in nine people on the electoral register was a member of one of the two big parties. Membership figures are notoriously untrustworthy, but in the mid-Fifties Labour claimed a million members. Remarkably, the Conservatives could boast some three million, making the organisation as much a social group as a political party. Members weren’t expected to debate policy, and unlike Labour the annual conference was not a place for activists to argue over the party’s programme. Instead they put on dances and whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings, part of the fabric of community life.
“They put on dances and whist drives, garden parties and coffee mornings”
Within that, a key role was played by the Young Conservatives, numbering around half a million. There were weekend conferences, and meetings addressed by MPs, but mostly the local branches were again less interested in ideological pursuits than in staging barbecues and beauty pageants. In 1955, the reigning Miss Young Conservative in Leeds was 19-year-old Jacqueline Pishorn, judged at an annual ball attended by 500 people to have “the best dress sense and the greatest poise, charm and personality”. For those under 18, not yet old enough to join the YCs, there was another group, the Young Britons, and there were 8,000 of them. (Their slogan: “Learning to serve.”)
At the time, the apolitical nature of the YCs was the subject of gentle ridicule. Consider a 1961 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. Here, the sitcom’s eponymous star hoped to do “something for the benefit of the country as a whole” — and is torn between becoming a blood donor or joining the Young Conservatives. He decides on the former, because “I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis”. (Also, he was 37 at the time, and the cut-off point was 30.) Despite the mockery, it was an appealing image, drawing in not just the established middle-class, but those with social aspirations. And beneath the fun, it did much to entrench the basic tenets of Toryism: nation, church, monarchy. Other parties looked on in envy; in 1955 even the Young Communist League admitted that they could learn from the “colourful and attractive methods of the Young Conservatives”.
Much of this was down to Lord Woolton, appointed Tory chairman in 1946 and tasked with rebuilding a demoralised party after Labour’s shock landslide the previous year. Uncle Fred, as he was known in YC circles, sought an infusion of new blood, recruiting particularly in universities, and designated 1955 as “youth year”, targeting the nine million voters under the age of 30. The campaign worked. The number of under 30s who voted Conservative reached a post-war peak, with first-time voters reported to be breaking three-to-two in favour of the Tories — a reversal of where young people had been a decade earlier.
All this, of course, has long since passed into history. At last year’s election, according to YouGov’s survey, only 8% of under-30s voted Tory, less than a fifth of those supporting Labour. The universities have been comprehensively lost, so that the Conservatives now do better among those with the lowest educational qualifications: securing the support of 31% of those with no more than GCSEs, but just 18% of university graduates. Party memberships have collapsed too. In the last Tory leadership election, when Kemi Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, 95,000 members cast a vote out of a total of 130,000.
The Labour Party has held up a little better. When Keir Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, nearly half a million votes were cast, even as political activists still knock on doors. Yet taken together, 1955 looks like a lost world, especially now that vast hinterland of social interaction with everyday apolitical life has vanished. In retrospect, the turning-point was likely that controversial introduction of ITV, which turned television into the country’s dominant cultural pursuit, all while squeezing out other forms of recreation. Cinema admissions fell from 1,400 million a year in 1950 to 500 million by the end of the decade, and that was just with two channels.
Since then, the story has been of an increasingly atomised, homebound society. The desire for shared experience, for active engagement, remains — but has proved no match for the ever-growing power of technology. These cultural changes have inevitably influenced politics, with falling membership rolls reshaping the electoral map more broadly. Between them, Tories and Labour got 96% of the vote in 1955. Last year, they managed 57%. Turnout was also considerably higher back then: the government of Anthony Eden attracted the support of 38% of registered voters, as opposed to the 20% that voted for Keir Starmer’s Labour. As for the Tories in 2024, just one in seven of those who could have voted for them did so. It was only the old folk who didn’t let them down: a third of those in their 60s, and nearly half of over-70s, voted Conservative. Now that’s an old man’s party.
