The results of elections, as many candidates in the European and local contests will no doubt discover, are almost invariably unpredictable, writes Wesley Boyd
One man who tasted the sour grapes of unexpected defeat at the polls was the warrior bulldog, Winston Churchill. "On the night of the tenth of May, 1940, at the outset of this mighty battle," he wrote, "I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs."
In the general election of 1945 the voters in Britain rejected their wartime leader and his Tory party and chose the unpretentious Clement Attlee and his untried Labour colleagues, many of whom were ex-servicemen just returned from the battlefields of Europe and Asia, to lead them into the peace. It was a quiet election, unlike some that I was later to witness in Ireland.
My first election experience - as a youthful bystander - was in North Belfast. The only candidate I can remember was Montgomery Hyde, who was defending his Unionist seat at Westminster. I learned later that he was regarded by the Unionist establishment as a bit of a "leftie" because he supported the abolition of capital punishment. His liberalism was not in evidence as I joined his bandwagon in Alliance Parade. He stood on the back of a lorry with an Orange collarette around his neck, rousing the crowd with a rendition of the familiar Ulster ditty: "We'll buy a penny rope/ And hang the f---ing Pope/ On the Twelfth of July/ In the morning." He won.
In the Republic in the 1960s the main parties held their final election rallies outside the GPO in Dublin. I covered the Fianna Fáil meeting a night or two before polling day for this newspaper. The principal speaker was the Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, who was flanked by his Cabinet Ministers. A young Sinn Féin activist in the crowd started to heckle Lemass about Partition. Without a word to anyone, the Minister for Local Government, Kevin Boland, jumped down from the platform and levelled the heckler with a forceful right hook. He climbed back to the platform and Lemass finished his speech without further interruption. A few years later, as the troubles ignited in the North, the same Mr Boland resigned from the Fianna Fáil government of Jack Lynch because he believed it was not doing enough to support the Republican cause.
For a political reporter the Labour Party could always be relied on for a bit of crack to enliven a boring campaign. In the 1969 election I was having a drink in the Pearl Bar with Frank Cluskey, who was standing for the party in a Dublin constituency. One of the bright young radicals who had joined Labour at the time joined us. He was standing in another Dublin constituency. (He was elected and later rose to ministerial rank.)
After a couple of pints he announced that he had donated £10 to the campaign funds of Michael O'Riordan, the doughty champion of the Communist Party, who happened to be standing in the same constituency as Cluskey. "I admire his guts," he explained. "Guts my arse," Cluskey retorted. "If you don't give me twenty quid for my f---ing campaign fund you'll be up before the national executive."
Of course, before running in an election an aspiring candidate must get a nomination. Harold Wilson, the rising star of the British Labour Party, had a choice of safe seats. He decided to contest the Merseyside constituency of Huyton. His research revealed that Huyton had a large proportion of Roman Catholic voters of Irish descent. When he travelled to the nomination meeting he took along with him Hugh Delargy, a left-wing Labour MP who had been a member of the Dominican order before entering politics. Delargy came from the Glens of Antrim and had no illusions about his role. "Harold wanted me there," Delargy told me later, "in case he got questions about Ireland or Catholic ethics, two subjects he knew nothing about." Wilson secured the nomination and later used to boast to Jack Lynch that he had more Irish voters in Liverpool than the Taoiseach had in Cork.
The wily Wilson also had a fine sense of timing. John Cole, the former political correspondent of the BBC, tells in his memoirs, As It Seemed To Me, how Wilson discovered from the Radio Times just before the 1964 election that the popular programme on television, Steptoe and Son, was scheduled to appear an hour before the polls closed - the time when most Labour voters traditionally came out. He immediately rang the director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene, to point out that the programme would reduce the turnout of Conservative as well as Labour voters. Sir Hugh took the point and wryly asked what programme the Prime Minister would suggest as an alternative. "Greek drama, preferably in the original," growled Wilson.
He retained power by only four seats, so the change in schedule probably saved him his job.