Disappointment: June 1983

Abstract

Abstract Despite the forging of the Alliance, it was a chastened SOP that Roy Jenkins led into 1983. The seats negotiations with the Liberals had reached a largely satisfactory conclusion, but electorally the Alliance was in the doldrums. The by-elections in the latter half of 1982 had not gone well, and the first Gallup poll of 1983 showed that only 22.5 per cent of the electorate thought they would vote Liberal or SDP at an early general election, leaving the Alliance well behind Labour and even further behind the Conservatives. The Conservatives’ commanding lead in all the polls made it look increasingly as though the next general election would come within a few months and not in 1984 as had previously been supposed. Conscious of the need to try to attract new publicity and raise morale, the Alliance organized a big rally in Central Hall, Westminster, towards the end of January. The fact that the press insisted on dubbing the rally an Alliance ‘relaunch’ was a measure of how far the two parties’ fortunes had fallen. Predictably, the rally attracted little attention.