The 1965 Leyton By-election: When Denis Healey Punched A Fascist
Colin Jordan gives Nazi salute (Chronicle/Alamy)
6 min read
Called to clear the return to Parliament of a high-profile Labour figure, the 1965 Leyton by-election prefigured the Makerfield contest, writes Lord Cryer. But, he asks, how would today’s voters react if a minister were involved in a punch-up?
We are now in the run-up to what promises to be a crucial by-election in Makerfield with the nation’s – and perhaps the world’s – media about to descend on the north-west of England.
We have no shortage of by-elections that appeared epoch-making at the time but are now footnotes. No shortage, either, of predictions based on their results that turned out to be not just wrong but laughably so.
The Fulham by-election of 1933 was said to signal that Britain was turning towards pacifism. Winston Churchill would like a word. The Darlington poll just before the 1983 general election was said to indicate that Labour was on course to regaining power. The landslide Tory victory was only a few months later.
Of course, sometimes they are important or revealing or both. In the early and mid-1990s, a series of huge swings from Conservative to Labour heralded Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street. Similarly, a string of Labour losses in the 1970s indicated that Mrs Margaret Thatcher would win in 1979.
Others that are footnotes ought to get more attention. An almost completely forgotten by-election in Kinross and West Perthshire in 1963 allowed the winning candidate, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to replace Harold MacMillan as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister. Ironically, Douglas-Home was afforded this opportunity by the great left-wing politician Tony Benn who had championed legislation allowing hereditary peers to renounce their titles, thus allowing first Benn and then Douglas-Home to sit in the House of Commons.
But when looking for parallels with today, one lesson from history is given by the patch I represented until recently and whose MP is now the admirable Calvin Bailey.
The 1965 Leyton and Wanstead poll came about in circumstances with something of an echo of Makerfield in that it offered the chance of a return to Westminster of a high-profile Labour figure. Labour had won the general election in 1964 by a slim majority. However, Patrick Gordon Walker, who was to be the new foreign secretary under prime minister Harold Wilson, had lost the constituency of Smethwick against all expectations. That particular result led to long and bitter arguments as Labour accused the Conservatives of running a racist campaign.
The accusations were vigorously denied by the Conservatives both locally and nationally.
What certainly did happen was that a deeply offensive slogan was found painted on various buildings across Smethwick but the culprits were never found.
As a result, Wilson had a foreign secretary without a constituency. The prime minister then persuaded the Labour MP for Leyton, Reg Sorensen, to accept a seat in the Lords, thus creating the by-election. Gordon Walker was the Labour candidate and polling day was set for 21 January 1965. The national and international media then descended on Leyton and, in the wake of the Smethwick contest, the far-right also arrived. The fascists were led by a particularly repellent individual named Colin Jordan. Unusually among the British far right, Jordan was not simply a fascist but an out-and-out Nazi. He styled himself ‘World-Fuhrer’ and was fond of dressing up in uniforms and performing Hitler salutes at any available opportunity.
The highlight of the campaign for the fascist interlopers was when they invaded a Labour-organised public meeting in what was then Leyton town hall. There was a huge fight, caught in part by a BBC Panorama team. Jordan managed at one point to climb onto the stage but, sadly for him, he was confronted by Denis Healey, a defence minister at the time, who hit Jordan so hard that he flew off the stage and landed back in the crowd.
“To put it bluntly, as a young man Healey was harder than a coffin nail”
According the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Jordan, “Healey landed a heavy punch, knocking Jordan off the stage and sending him crashing into a watching journalist, breaking the reporter’s spectacles.”
The Panorama narrator asserts that “when he tried to grab the microphones, the minister of defence and Mr Walker, using conventional weapons proved the ultimate deterrence”.
Sadly, perhaps, the footage shows only a melee and then a grinning Walker with Healey close by, as Jordon and his goons are bundled out screaming racist abuse as they go.
Healey, we should remember, was not always the avuncular and elderly man we tend to remember. During the Allied invasion of Anzio in 1944, when British and US forces were confronted by Nazi and Italian troops, he was the beachmaster and therefore to a large extent ran the landings. To put it bluntly, as a young man he was harder than a coffin nail. In later years as an MP, it was often noted that critics in the House of Commons were slightly more guarded in their comments than would be the case with a less physically formidable opponent.
In the 1970s, he was still sufficiently lively to see off another attack at a public meeting by members of the National Front.
Jordan had the finances which allowed him to engage in his fantasies of world domination because he had married Françoise Dior of the world-famous Dior brand. Quite what Ms Dior saw in him remains a matter of conjecture, although it may be the marriage was to stop her from being deported as an undesirable alien. It wasn’t for his looks – Jordon had the face of a blind cobbler’s thumb and never particularly displayed much in the way of intellect or charisma. The Telegraph obituary notes that he never recovered from being fined for stealing three pairs of red knickers from Tesco in Leamington Spa in 1975. He claimed to be the victim of a Jewish plot.
Labour might have won the battle of the town hall but they very narrowly lost the by-election to the Tories – although Walker comfortably regained the seat the following general election and rejoined the government. The constituency and its successor have continued to elect Labour MPs since then, as the battle of Leyton slowly fades from memory and into history.
I sometimes wonder if that confrontation between Healey and Jordan had occurred more recently what might have been the consequences. There would undoubtedly be calls for the minister’s sacking and removal as an MP. Is that to be regretted? The short answer is yes.
Healey’s generation understood that fascism sometimes must be confronted physically. That does not mean that they viewed violence in a cavalier way. But leading figures in all the major parties were then of a generation who had had to go off and fight – and they understood why.
