What If... Oswald Mosley vs Neville Chamberlain

Brimingham, election night 1924. Even as the first Labour government is falling across the country, they have cause for hope here. One of their star candidates, a young Tory defector Sir Oswald Mosley, is trying to unseat the former Conservative Health Minister Neville Chamberlain. As the votes come in it is clear that it is going to be close. Then the result; Mosley had beaten Chamberlain by 7 votes. His triumphal victory salute was a ray of sunshine for Labour on what was otherwise a bad night for the party.

Given the trajectories of the two mens' careers, it is hard to forget that Chamberlain was widely expected to go far. The son of political legend Joseph Chamberlain, he was widely touted as a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, maybe even Prime Minister. Instead, by defeating the Chamberlain tradition in its home of Birmingham, Mosley propelled his own career to new heights. During Labour's years in opposition in the 1920s, he quickly established his credentials as one of the brightest and best of the new intake of Labour MPs. This was to be crucial to his survival after his resignation from the Cabinet in 1931 over its inability to solve the economic crisis engulfing the country. He apparently considered leaving Labour and starting a new party, but was perusaded by friends to stay and fight for the soul of his party. When Ramsay MacDonald split the Cabinet by joining the National Government and crushed Labour in the ensuing election, Mosley was one of the few survivors, and as one of the leading rebels against MacDonald was catapulted into a senior role as Shadow Chancellor. He used this position to advocate a vast programme of public works to drag the county out of depression. When Clemet Attlee became leader in 1935, Mosley was the obvious choice for his deputy.

But the shattering defeats of 1931 and 1935 might have left Mosley trapped in a party of opposition forever. It was the Second World War which transformed Labour's prospects. In May 1940, when Tory PM Viscount Halifax was replaced by Winston Churchill, Labour were invited into the War Cabinet. Mosley was made Home Secretary and Lord President of the Council, with almost total control over the domestic war effort. One of his first acts was to imprison Neville Chamberlain, who had veered right after his defeat and had led the British Union of Fascists through the 1930s. The contributions of Labour ministers to the war effort helped to sweep them into office in 1945 by a landslide.

Mosley's role in the war effort and his radical economic thinking had seen many tipping him to be Chancellor, so there was widespread shock when Attlee made him Minister of Labour. It seemed such an under-use of talent. But Mosley got the better of his critics again. He managed to position himself as a grand "Minister of Nationalisation", helping to drive through the Attlee welfare state. Under him, areas such as coal, steel, shipbuilding, gas, water, electricity, telecommunications, the railways, canals, road haulage, civil aviation and even the Bank of England were taken into public ownership, workers were given representation at the top levels of the organisations and huge amounts of money were pumped into them. In partnership with Nye Bevan, Mosley also managed to ram the National Health Service through the opposition of the Conservatives and the British Medical Association. Against these changes, the Tory opposition of Winston Churchill floundered, helping Attlee to win a landslide victory in 1950. Shortly after, he retired, and there was only one obvious alternative: so in 1950, at the age of 53, Sir Oswald Mosley became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Despite a rocky start at No 10, with the Korean War eating into public finances, Mosley went on to become one of the more successful Prime Ministers of the 20th Century. His major road building programme created the modern 'Speedway' network which connects all of our major cities, while the plans for high speed rail would later come to fruition in the 1970s. While there were no more nationalisations, the creation of the People's Bank (an arm of the Post Office) helped to create an enduring national institution, which came to the rescue of the Labour government in 2007-2009 when it was the springboard for the recapitalisaton of the banking sector. In foreign affairs, Mosley presided over the granting of self rule to many of Britain's colonies, later setting in motion the wheels of decolonisation. Rising prosperity on the back of economic recovery enabled the end of food rationing, contributing greatly to Mosley's landslide re-election in 1955.

But after 1955 he suffered his greatest setback. The Suez Crisis, when Mosley refused to use force to cajole President Nasser of Egypt into lifting tolls on the Suez Canal, saw him lambasted in the press. His foreign policy response, to join the nascent EEC, failed to excite the imagination of the public. On the domestic front, the lack of any new radical policies deprived him of the initiative, and new Conservative leader RAB Butler proved a formidable opponent in the House of Commons. The unexpected imposition of controls on immigration was also a shocking departure for a left wing government, and convinced many voters the time was right for a change. The end came in 1959 when it was revealed that his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, was sleeping with the wife of British novelist Ian Fleming. Mired in scandal, Mosley called a general election; the fact that Butler only won by three seats is a testament to the affection which many voters held Mosley and his Labour party in, despite all that had come to pass.

Mosley's rise to the top may look inevitable, but it could all have been so different. Had he lost to Chamberlain in 1924, he may have never entered politics again, or gone off on a different political trajectory altogether. Chamberlain would doubtless have not swung to the far right, and may have remained in the government, although his strident rhetoric and uncompromising attitude may not have survived the policy of appeasement. Aside from his achievements in government, Mosley had a long lasting impact on Britain by dragging its politics to the left, thus forcing all political life into a more left wing setup than anyone could have imagined. His family remains a significant player in British politics, although his son's chances of becoming PM himself were greatly harmed by tabloid accusations of a sex scandal involving; you guessed it, James Bond characters.