Michael Brown, now a columnist for The Independent, reflects on the election which took place thirty years ago this very day and launched his eighteen-year career in Parliament.
I was the Parliamentary Conservative candidate for the old constituency of Brigg and Scunthorpe that had returned a Labour MP for the previous half century. I had been selected for this safe Labour seat on 16th March 1976 - the day Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister.
Throughout the late 1970s there was always a prospect of an election at any time. Labour had lost its overall majority and was propped up by David Steel’s Liberals until 1978. The nation waited expectantly for Jim Callaghan to call an election at the TUC conference in September of that year. But his bizarre burst of song - “there she was waiting at the church” - signalled that we would have to wait until the following year.
If he had called the election in the autumn of 1978, I would have lost; so the winter of discontent which occurred subsequently provided the ideal backdrop for my campaign and transformed my prospects.
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