The big beneficiaries were the Liberals, who gained over 200 seats — who only rubbed it in the Tories’ faces by creating the welfare state with pensions and National Insurance, by curbing the power of the House of Lords, and by legislating for Irish Home Rule. And as though that were not bad enough, the 1906 election also saw 29 MPs elected for the Labour Representation Committee, a grouping that promptly reconstituted itself as the Labour Party.

These were early days, and the Labour vote was less than 5% of the national total, but behind the parliamentary party were two million members of the trade unions. The demand to extend the franchise, to allow votes for the working class and for women, was growing and would become irresistible. The Conservatives had more to fear than even the radicalism of the Liberals: the future was surely socialist.

That, at least, was the conclusion of John Dawson Mayne, a former advocate-general of Madras and sometime Conservative election candidate whose dystopian fears serve as something of a precursor to our own Tory tailspin. So concerned was he at the terrible prospect confronting the nation that — at the age of 79 — he turned to fiction and wrote his first novel, The Triumph of Socialism, and How It Succeeded, published in 1908. Its premise is a landslide election victory for Labour as early as 1912. The new government introduces a minimum wage and an eight-hour working day, and nationalises the railways; it abolishes the House of Lords, turns churches into places of entertainment and makes divorce much easier. The King is exiled, and the National Anthem replaced by a hurriedly written new song, “God Save Ourselves”. The result is misery and mass starvation.

Mayne wasn’t alone in his concern. There was also William Le Queux, a prolific writer whose big hit had been The Invasion of 1910, which predicted — with great inaccuracy — the forthcoming war with Germany. Unperturbed by that event not happening on schedule, Le Queux published a new scare-story, in 1910 itself, entitled The Unknown Tomorrow: How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor, Together with a Full Account of the Social Revolution in England. This was set at a more cautious distance, in 1935, and depicted a socialist revolution, under the slogan “Britain for the British”, that unleashes a Red Terror to rival Robespierre.

Then there was Ernest Bramah’s What Might Have Been (1907) — about a near-future when a Labour government has already been ousted by a more militant socialist regime — R.H. Benson’s epic Lord of the World (1907), set 100 years in the future but hinging on the election of a Labour government in 1917. Eclipsing all rival accounts, Benson’s ends with the rise of the Anti-Christ and the destruction of the Vatican in an air-raid, after which the only surviving cardinal flees to the Holy Land. “That place, father,” he asks a Syrian priest, gesturing towards a small settlement, “what is its name?” And the man replies: “That is Megiddo. Some call it Armageddon.”

No one else was quite that apocalyptic, but all these books had the same theme: the arrival of Labour in Parliament was a harbinger of national decline and disaster. The policies of the various fictional governments were much the same as well. Socialism means economic incompetence; the dismantling of defence; the abolition of the churches, the House of Lords and the monarchy. It was essentially unpatriotic, un-British.

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Were these concerns rooted in reality? Probably not. Labour wasn’t a revolutionary party even then, seeking reform through Parliament. Ramsay Macdonald, one of the new Labour MPs elected in 1906, could sound ominous when defining socialism — “The State is going to take over the means of production into its own hands, and private property will come to an end” — but he was also keen to soften the blow: “Suddenness and revolution are not the socialist ideal.” The role of Labour at this stage was to drag the Liberal government to the Left, securing, for example, legal rights for trade unions. In the great conflict between the Commons and Lords, Labour called for the abolition of the Upper Chamber, but that was as extreme as it cared to be.

And anyway, not everyone was consumed by doom. Despite the nightmare visions, some in high society adopted this fashionable new creed of socialism. Daisy Greville, the Countess of Warwick and a former lover of Edward VII, went beyond even the Labour Party, and disapproved of the trade union movement on the grounds that it “only postpones the revolution”. She joined the much more radical Social Democratic Federation, probably the only member of the party who ever hired a private train to take her home after a Marxist discussion meeting. Such figures proved irresistible to satirists. “I am nothing if I am not a socialist,” declares a countess in Philip Gibbs’s novel The Street of Adventure (1909). “I do so pity the poor Poor. I have taken them up as a hobby, and I find it ever so much more elevating and ennobling than poultry-keeping.” In Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington (1912), Lady Caroline Benaresq declares herself a socialist so that she can “disagree with most of the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists”.

There were also warnings that these wealthy patrons represented a source of temptation for decent working-class politicians. Saints in Society, the debut novel of Margaret Baillie-Saunders, was published in 1905 — even before the Party was officially created — and follows a poor printer from a South London slum who’s elected as a Labour MP. Embraced by the establishment, he loses sight of his roots, his values and himself. He loses touch with his wife as well. “Now, my dear, don’t be silly,” he tells her; “there are matters you can’t, as a woman, be expected to understand.” But of course, it’s she who remains true to their original ideals, while he is corrupted by wealth and prestige.

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What’s striking about all the fiction that poured out after the 1906 election is how rapidly the lines of attack on Labour were laid out. And then how very enduring they’ve proved to be. Workers on the boards of companies? Advocating that policy was evidence of Tony Benn’s lunacy in the Seventies. A minimum wage? It would lead to economic ruin, warned the Tories when it was finally introduced in 1998. High taxation? That’s a perennial, as is weakness on defence — hence Keir Starmer’s determination not to show an inch between him and the government on Ukraine or Israel.

The dystopian novels exaggerated, of course, but the fears they expressed were genuine and widespread at the time. Ramsay MacDonald complained that so many people saw socialists as “Mad Mullahs”, hell-bent on “the overthrow of ancient institutions, social organisations and the moral conscience”, and there was no shortage of those.

A century ago, MacDonald himself went on to become Labour’s first prime minister, embodying Margaret Baillie-Saunders’s fable of the worker seduced by society. Born the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a farmworker, now he could hobnob with the highest nobs in the land. And he revelled in it. As a contemporary commentator noted, MacDonald “enjoys the glory of richly embroidered uniform and white knee-breeches”.

And if that first Labour government didn’t achieve a great deal, it did at least, MacDonald believed, serve to reassure, ending the most extreme predictions of national ruin. As he told the King — he would have approved of that namedrop — he and his colleagues had done much “to dispel the fantastic and extravagant belief which at one time found expression that they were nothing but a band of irresponsible revolutionaries intent on wreckage and destruction”.

He was right. There was still talk of extremists bent on wrecking the nation, but by the Twenties it centred not on Labour but on communists. There was a newly popularised phrase, “the lunatic fringe”, to describe those who, in David Lloyd George’s words, “are always crying for the moon and will take nothing terrestrial in its place”. By definition, a party of government was not on the fringe; it was firmly in the mainstream. Macdonald had set the standard for the future — one where, as we saw yesterday, a Labour shadow chancellor can give a lecture to the City on the importance of “securonomics” and “long-term growth”.

Since Macdonald, just three Labour leaders have won a general election: two were public schoolboys, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair, while Harold Wilson, who went to grammar school, had his own children privately educated. In any event, despite his modest origins, Wilson was a thoroughly respectable member of society, an Oxford don and the recipient of an OBE for his work as a civil servant before he even entered Parliament. In the same way, Starmer — soon to become the fifth man to win — earned his knighthood as the Director of Public Prosecutions a year before he stood for election. Labour has been accepted as a government only when led by those who could move comfortably in establishment circles, smoothing away the fears of wild-eyed insurrectionaries.

Or, as one of Oxfordshire’s landed gentry observed after Macdonald’s government fell in 1924: “Well, we have been through a revolution, and our throats are still intact.”

Fashion is never just about utility, and these first-day uniform anxieties would come to symbolise all the tensions at the heart of the first Labour government, all its neuroses of class, radicalism and ideological purity. To whom did it owe allegiance: its working-class roots, its intellectuals or its own party machine? Some of its members simply wanted to disprove Winston Churchill’s notorious assertion that they weren’t “fit to govern”, conforming to the standards of previous administrations in order to establish a beachhead in the British Establishment. Others were more impatient. They wanted to demonstrate that a socialist government owed more to its voters than dressing up. Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a farmhand who had the previous day kissed hands as Prime Minister, belonged in the former camp. In an interview with the New Leader, he turned the argument against his critics:

“I have known people who showed vanity by the clumsiness of their clothes. A tattered hat and a red tie, a tone of voice and religious repetition of Marxian phrases, may be as indicative of a man who has sold himself to appearances as the possession of a ceremonial dress to enable him to attend ceremonies which are historical parts of his duties.”

As Ethel Snowden (Chancellor Philip’s wife) observed in The Spectator, had ministers attended Court functions “in hobnailed boots, with unwashed faces and collarless shirts”, they would “quickly have [attracted] deserved contempt and ignominy”. Meanwhile, MacDonald himself could see the bigger picture. And his account of a historic day betrayed both his shock at what had just happened, as well as his apprehension at what was to come: “Without fuss, the firing of guns, the flying of new flags, the Labour Gov[ernmen]t has come in… Now for burdens & worries. Our greatest difficulties will be to get to work. Our purposes need preparation, & during preparation we shall appear to be doing nothing – and to our own people to be breaking our pledges.”

This was prescient. Over the next nine months Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister would find himself battling on a number of fronts: for acceptance by voters, co-operation with not one but two opposition parties in Parliament (Liberals and Conservatives) and most of all for support from his own colleagues, many of whom were deeply uneasy that a party with only 191 MPs had taken office at all.

The Labour Party as represented in Parliament was complex. Its structure betrayed its chaotic inception, more a fusion of local bodies and ideological factions than a combined party under a unitary authority. The civil servant Percy Grigg described a “Trade Union element”, which was more interested in moderate “bread and butter” politics than the abstract economic and social doctrine favoured by the party’s faction of “intellectuals”. And this second grouping included both former Liberals and those who had emerged from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a separate but affiliated group. Grigg called the ILP-ers “Montagnards” after the most radical political group during the French Revolution, and remarked they followed “the lead of the Clyde in Scotland and Mr. [George] Lansbury in England”. Inclined to be unhappy at the moderation displayed by the trade unionists and intellectuals, the Montagnards would only be satisfied with the building of the New Jerusalem.

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But for their political opponents and the press, Labour was singular, lumped together as the “wild men”. As it would turn out, they were far from wild, and that was part of their problem. After two months in government, Ramsay MacDonald — consumed by international as well as domestic affairs — grew concerned at the failure of his backbenchers to respond adequately to the “new conditions”. Some of what he called the “disappointed ones” had become “as hostile as though they were not of us”. He was thinking of malcontents like E. D. Morel, the campaigning journalist, and George Lansbury, a future Labour leader. “I am thoroughly distressed about the Party,” Lansbury had told Beatrice Webb in the middle of March:

“Everybody seems so thoroughly cheerful, and thoroughly content with what we are doing, and yet we are doing nothing that is of any real worth. I certainly think the fact that we are so very satisfactory to our opponents… and so very unsatisfactory to the poor devils on whose votes people like me got into Parliament, is a tragedy of the first water.”

Webb herself did not accuse MacDonald of treachery (“for he was never a socialist”) she saw him as “a believer in individualist political democracy tempered in its expression by utopian socialism”. Where he had “lacked integrity”, she added, was, “in posing as a socialist, and occasionally using revolutionary jargon. If he succeeds in getting a majority of the electors into this revised version of reformist conservatism embodied in the Labour Party machine, things will move forward.” It seemed doubtful that the Prime Minister would have regarded this as a criticism, for “reformist conservatism” was truly his whole aim in office, as it had been in opposition. This isn’t to say his short government was inactive. MacDonald worked hard to make John Wheatley’s housing legislation a reality, formally recognised the Soviet Union and brokered a new settlement between France and Germany, something he hoped would boost trade as well as soothing post-war wounds. But with only 191 MPs, and a ministry dependent on Liberal votes, he couldn’t do everything.

When ministers in the first Labour government pointed out this Liberal support was a necessary evil to remain in office, critics insisted “that it would be better to go down with colours flying than to lower the flag in the hope of keeping the ship afloat”. The MP Frederick Pethick-Lawrence occupied a “middle position”, sharing disappointment “at the apparent inaction” but also believing “the country would have been annoyed if the Prime Minister, having taken office, had almost immediately courted defeat”. This alluded to a strategy favoured by the Left of the party and feared by Conservatives like Lord Birkenhead:

“[Labour would] bring in a Budget, which might include a Levy on Capital, increase of Death Duties and Super-tax. This would, naturally, be defeated in Parliament and then Mr. Ramsay MacDonald would go to the country with what would be regarded by the mass of the electorate as the most popular Budget that had ever been produced. The Labour Party would sweep the country and be in office for the next 5 years.”

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This fanciful scenario, however, was never in MacDonald’s mind, and when Philip Snowden’s first (and only) Budget was unveiled in April, its provisions channelled Gladstone rather than Marx, attracting a chorus of approval from many Liberals and Conservatives. Hardly anyone noticed the absence of a capital levy (wealth tax), which had been the centrepiece of Labour’s manifesto in the December 1923 election. Instead, like the apostle Paul, the Labour Party put away such childish things and chose the moderate, constructive path. And although this made it, to quote Fenner Brockway, “a Social Reform Government rather than a Socialist Government, a Liberal Government rather than a Labour Government”, the fact remained that it managed to be in office as well as in power, which was the only means by which it could deliver anything at all.

The rest of the MacDonald story is well known. His first administration lost a confidence vote in October 1924 and took its case to the country, only for the fabricated Zinoviev Letter (which called for Communist sedition and therefore stoked fears of a “red menace”) to derail the election and drive voters back to the Conservatives for five years. In June 1929 Ramsay returned as the prime minister of another minority government, although this time Labour was the single largest party with 287 seats. In the midst of rising unemployment and a sterling crisis, the government agreed to resign in August 1931, but then the King persuaded MacDonald to head a “National” government. Labour’s National Executive Committee voted to expel all those who remained in office, and in the election that followed, the National government was returned with a majority of nearly 500 (mostly Tories) and the “official” Labour Party was reduced to just 52 MPs.

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This became known within the Labour movement as the “great betrayal”, and it took (as David Marquand has argued) some time for the Labour Party to get over its “complex” about MacDonald. Surveying events from the perspective of 1937, the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee did not doubt the “utility” of his party’s determination in 1924 to prove that Labour men and women could “administer the country”. And, he added cautiously, “the British elector is very sceptical of anything which he has not seen. The mere formation of a Labour Government and its existence for nine months registered a vital change in the political situation. Henceforth Labour was the alternative Government.”

Ramsay MacDonald and his colleagues had been dealt a very difficult hand which, for the most part, they played surprisingly well. This had not been guaranteed. The fledgling ministers might have been a disaster, spooking the City of London, offending the King and alienating moderate voters by attempting to pass “extreme” measures. The Labour Party might have been rendered unelectable. But that did not happen, in large part due to the skill of its leader. As a result, the “wild men” so feared in late 1923 had, within the space of an eventful year, shown they were competent men after all. Labour, contrary to Winston Churchill’s wounding assertion, were fit to govern. But this only begged the question that has dogged them since: who were they there to govern for?

To understand Labour’s seething discomfort about its first prime minister is to begin to understand why that great angst-ridden movement seems unable to drag itself into power without cries of treason being raised against its own leaders.

MacDonald is shunned because of his fateful decision in 1931, during his second stint as prime minister, to form a “national government” coalition rather than go into opposition with the rest of his party who wouldn’t back the spending cuts he wanted to balance the budget during the Great Depression. MacDonald had offered the King his resignation, but was asked to stay on at the head of a new emergency government. He accepted and when he was expelled from Labour, created his own “‘National’ Labour Organisation” which he led to the biggest landslide in British electoral history, crushing his old party in the process.

The problem for MacDonald was that the vast bulk of this new national government wasn’t his. There were 473 Conservatives to only 13 new “National Labour” MPs and 68 Liberals. MacDonald had, in effect, enabled a Tory landslide, leaving his old party with just 52 seats. No wonder the Labour party felt betrayed by MacDonald. Imagine if something like this had happened after the great financial crisis of 2008, with Gordon Brown creating a national government to impose George Osborne’s austerity programme.

To understand just how appalled Labour was — and still is — by MacDonald’s behaviour, you need only take a look at its official account of what happened. “The 1924 government lasted only a few months,” reads the quickfire history of its first prime minister published on the Labour Party website. “Five years later came the election of the second. Dominated by the world economic crisis, the following two years were focused on action to tackle the unemployment of the Great Depression. It was not an easy Parliament and the 1931 election saw only 52 Labour MPs elected.” I suppose “not an easy parliament” is a fair description.

The party’s refusal to even mention MacDonald’s break reveals far more than it conceals: both how uncomfortable it is about that first failure as a political party, when it proved itself singularly incapable of managing the crisis it faced, and about the dangers of its own kind abandoning the cause once in power. “The fear of the great betrayal starts with MacDonald,” one senior Labour figure put it to me. “It starts there and has never left us.”

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There have only been three other elected Labour prime ministers — Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — each of whom faced repeated claims of betrayal, all of which were indelibly shaped by MacDonald’s memory. Throughout his premiership, Blair was, rather straightforwardly, accused of being “Ramsay MacBlair”. And Clement Attlee, despite loathing MacDonald for his actions, ended up being accused of treachery for introducing prescription charges.

Even Harold Wilson, who had made his name as a Bevanite man of the Left, was tarred, particularly during the depths of the “July crisis” of 1966, when he announced a fresh round of austerity to protect the value of sterling. To fend off such comparisons, Wilson used a centenary lunch that year, intended to mark 100 years since MacDonald’s birth, to claim Labour’s first prime minister had died in 1931 when he joined the national coalition and not, in fact, five years later when he actually passed away. An appalling assessment by any measure.

For some, the depth of their loathing for MacDonald has a lot to do with class snobbery. He was easily Britain’s most working-class prime minister. And as such, he could not win, assailed from both sides for getting above his station — for enjoying the company of the rich and the royal far too much. A century on, Angela Rayner must know how he feels. As ever, class remains the sedimentary rock of British life upon which all else is built. And much as I think this is true, the tragedy of MacDonald is far more profound. MacDonald could have rejected the King’s advances and taken Labour into opposition. But he could not have avoided the charge of betrayal forever, for it is the fate of all Labour leaders to campaign as liberals but govern as conservatives.

The conservative philosopher Maurice Cowling wrote that the essence of liberalism was the belief that “there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences” in life (which he said was plainly false). In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton argued that this was the liberal faith that lay at the heart of today’s “spirit of improvement” — the inclination of the liberal, as he put it, to “change whatever he cannot find better reason to retain”. Conservatives like Scruton and Cowling, by contrast, do not believe all difficulties and differences can be reconciled — or, in fact, should be. To govern is to weigh up competing goods and to make least worst choices based on incomplete information.

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The fate of all Labour prime ministers, then, is to campaign with the “spirit of improvement” but to be forced, once in power, to choose between options which you previously hoped could be reconciled. Harold Wilson promised to modernise Britain and to protect its global influence, but as prime minister was forced to sacrifice one to save the other — maintaining the value of the pound to protect Britain’s overseas commitments at the cost of dousing the flames of his very own “white heat of technology”. (In the end, of course, the austerity he chose to protect the pound did not work and he lost both his economic plan and Britain’s global influence.)

This Wilsonian attempt to reform Britain at home and conserve the country’s influence abroad lies at the heart of many of the Labour Party’s difficulties over the years. Tony Blair sought to protect British influence in Europe and the United States, but was forced to choose between the two when George Bush insisted on the invasion of Iraq. Clement Attlee was similarly forced to accept the reality of Britain’s financial restrictions after the war, forcing him to betray the Left by chipping away at the NHS’s founding principle of “free at the point of use”.

There is little reason to believe Keir Starmer can avoid the fate of his predecessors. In one obvious sense, he has already been tried and found guilty of betrayal by the Left for breaking the promises he made to secure the leadership. During the Labour leadership campaign, Starmer pledged to “reverse the Tories’ cuts to corporation tax” only to then order his MPs to vote against the Tories’ own decision to reverse their own cuts themselves. He also pledged to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”, only to then make keeping out of free movement a red line in any future relationship with the EU. But the fundamental challenge for Starmer is that it is impossible for him to reconcile all of the competing promises he has made to the wider electorate and so will, inevitably, betray someone.

In his speech at the Labour Party conference in October, he turned to the party’s history to illustrate the scale of his ambition: “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology [and] in 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice, then in 2024 it will have to be all three.” It was a neat formulation, connecting Attlee, Wilson, Blair and himself — and yet, what if these goals cannot be reconciled, but end up in competition with each other, as they did for Attlee, Wilson and Blair? What if, like Wilson, the truth is that Starmer will have to choose between his ambitions? Modernising the economy and rebuilding public services after the trauma of the pandemic might mean dramatically reducing the amount of money spent on sickness or old age benefits, for example. Good luck with that.

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Even Starmer’s neat account of Labour’s record of government is, on closer inspection, as incomplete as the party’s account of MacDonald’s second spell as prime minister. Did Wilson really modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology, as he promised? That’s certainly not how it looked in 1966, when he abandoned economic planning to protect the pound. “The 1964 Government had been elected with the slogans of ‘purposive’, and ‘scientific’ planning held high,” writes the author Ben Pimlott in his largely sympathetic biography of Wilson. “Wilson had believed in planning, and built his rhetoric upon it. Now planning… had to be set aside. A hole was created in Labour’s raison d’être which, arguably, has never been filled.”

Pimlott published this in 1992, five years before Blair became prime minister. But Blair did not seek to return Labour to any sort of Wilsonian economic planning either. Instead, he largely accepted the structure of the economy built by Margaret Thatcher and attempted to fill the hole left in Labour’s raison d’etre by using the proceeds of this new economy to improve public services and reduce poverty. The problem for Starmer is that even this option has now gone, blown apart by the financial crash of 2007/08. And so what is left?

Today, Labour’s economic plan remains markedly empty. Rachel Reeves’s £28 billion a year green investment package has already been scaled back. Labour does not plan to rejoin the EU, its single market or customs union — and nor does it show much appetite for a trade deal with the United States. If anything, Reeves’s “securonomics” offers more barriers to growth in order to offer the country more security of supply. Today, it is very hard to see how Labour can fulfil its pledge to make Britain the fastest growing economy in the G7.

The obvious danger for a future Starmer government is that without an economic strategy, there won’t be enough money to build a new Britain or fix its crumbling public realm. Instead of doing all three of the missions Starmer set himself, he will not be able to do any. And so difficult choices will follow. Should this happen, it will not be long before the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald once again starts to haunt the Labour party.

An official lays out a swathe of papers on the desk. It’s a document that speaks of evacuations, plebiscites and the Sudetenland, and requires four signatures. Mussolini, Daladier and Hitler ink their names. But when Prime Minister Charles Spencer Chaplin is offered a pen, he takes two, sticks them into a pair of bread rolls he has saved from dinner, and uses them, like a little pair of feet, to kick the Munich Agreement on to the carpet.

It’s a dream, of course. An easy one to have if you’ve seen The Great Dictator (1940) in which Charlie Chaplin plays two of his greatest roles — Adenoid Hynkel, the hare-eyed and preposterous dictator of the fictional totalitarian state of Tomania, and his lookalike, a barber from the Jewish ghetto, who puts on an identical uniform to denounce his tyrannical double from the podium at a Nuremberg-style rally. Hitler might have had the same dream. Chaplin’s films were banned in Nazi Germany, where it was widely believed he was Jewish. (“I do not have that honour,” said Chaplin, when journalists asked him if this was true.)

The fantasy of the Little Tramp in Downing Street first entered my thoughts ten years ago on a visit to the Chaplin archive, a secure and temperature-controlled vault beneath Montreux, where the star’s press-books, manuscripts, photographs and letters were then stored on 75 metres of rolling shelving. Working through a stack of newspaper cuttings relating to Chaplin’s trip to Britain in 1931, I was surprised to discover that their emphasis was not on cinema, but politics.

Chaplin’s views on unemployment, economic reform, industrial automation, the banking system and American and European politics were all recorded by the British press. Reynolds’s Newspaper described his ideology as “left-wing Labour”. The Sphere declared him a “radical millionaire”. The Weekly Dispatch, reporting on Chaplin’s meeting with Ramsay MacDonald, then leader of a minority Labour government, wrote it up as a summit between two heads of state, with Chaplin as “the film premier of mirth”. In the photograph, both men looked serious, as if discussing whether Britain should come off the Gold Standard. Perhaps they were. When Chaplin met Albert Einstein a few weeks later, he bent his ear about price controls and quantitative easing. “You’re not a comedian,” said Einstein. “You’re an economist.”

1931 was a cold rough year in British politics. Ramsay MacDonald spent it in government and in crisis. The summer brought the May Report (which urged urgent action on a £120m budget deficit), MacDonald’s resignation and instant return in coalition with the Tories. The October General Election split the Labour Party and left its leader as head of a Conservative-dominated National Government committed to a £70 million reduction in state spending. Labour would not be alone and united in power until 1945.

The newspaper columnist Henry Hamilton Fyfe — a Fabian Socialist and unsuccessful Labour candidate — wondered if Chaplin might be the man to secure the party’s future. He published his thoughts on the day after Oswald Mosley, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, resigned from government to found the New Party, which offered an economic rescue plan on Keynesian principles. (Mosley’s journey to Tomania was, at this point, far from complete.) Fyfe predicted, correctly, that Mosley’s resignation would hand seats to the Tories. “Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have done that,” he declared. Had the star of City Lights and The Gold Rush been in Mosley’s position, he would have argued the same case, passionately and successfully, from inside Labour. “He would have known that it isn’t enough to have a good story to work with,” wrote Fyfe. “You must be able to catch the fancy of the public. You must grip their interest. You must keep on repeating what you want them to remember. Somehow or other, Mr Charles Spencer Chaplin MP would have managed to get his proposals before the nation in an understandable, attractive form.”

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But what proposals? The answer lies in the cuttings. “I think,” said Chaplin, “there is something wrong with our methods of production and systems of credit.” Like Mosley, he was a fan of Keynes. He was also an enthusiast for Major CH Douglas, a former Stockport Grammar School teacher whose Social Credit system envisioned economic regeneration through the payment of a “national dividend” — an early version of Universal Basic Income. (Douglas’s theories about the relationship between unemployment and profit led Chaplin to convert his stock portfolio into liquid capital in 1928, saving him from the effects of the Wall Street Crash.)

Asked by journalists about rising unemployment and stuttering economies, Chaplin proposed “shorter hours for the working man and a minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labour which will guarantee every man over the age of twenty-one a salary that will enable him to live decently.” The alternative he considered too dangerous to contemplate: “If we continue to view the present conditions as inevitable the whole structure of our civilisation may crumble.” His views were not changed when he travelled on to Berlin, and found Nazi agitators demonstrating outside his hotel. For this, too, he had an answer — one informed by Keynes’s Economic Consequence of the Peace (1919). The issue of $35 billion of a new currency linked to the price of gold, which Germany could use to settle its war debts to the Allies.

Fyfe was not the only person to imagine Chaplin in power. A few days before Mosley’s resignation, Winston Churchill invited the comedian to Chartwell, and, after a robust argument about Lenin and Gandhi, told him to stand for Parliament. Churchill and Chaplin had been friends since 1929, when they met in California by the heated swimming pool of Marion Davies, the actress, producer and mistress of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. They decided to collaborate on a film about Napoleon. Progress was minimal, but a script was developed by another figure from the British political wilderness — John Strachey, a former Labour MP who had supported Mosley’s ideas for a planned economy, and followed him, briefly, to the New Party. The Napoleon project was never concluded — partly because it evolved, under the influence of the rise of Hitler, into The Great Dictator.

With this in mind, let’s try the full counterfactual. Let’s imagine that when Mosley declines to contest his old seat in the 1931 election, Chaplin takes Hamilton Fyfe’s hint and stands for Labour in Smethwick. (There’s a pleasing resonance to this: when Chaplin died in 1977, his daughter Victoria discovered, locked in a bureau drawer, a letter from a man who claimed that Charlie was not born in London, but “in a caravan [that] belonged the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie … on the Black Patch in Smethwick.”)

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By Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Chaplin’s presence in the Labour party stops it from splitting. He is one of the best-loved figures in the world. His art is founded on an intense personal knowledge of poverty. Working-class voters remember him eating his own boot in The Gold Rush and raising a baby in a garret in The Kid. But he is also admired in Conservative circles and curious about Tory politics. (In our 1931, he went on a boar-hunt with the Duke of Westminster, ballyhooed his friend Nancy Astor at a meeting in Plymouth, wore a disguise to hear the Conservative candidate for Woolwich West speak at Plumstead Baths, and even spent time in the company of Churchill’s ghastly son, Randolph.)

In a country administered by a National Government, he is a unifying figure. The Weekly Dispatch joke about two premiers has become a reality. The Chaplin/MacDonald administration rejects the Means Test and a £13 million cut to the dole, and, converted to Keynesianism, welcomes back Oswald Mosley, preventing the birth of British Fascism.

As for the Continental variety, Chaplin has seen its intolerance and brutality for himself. Nazi publications have been denouncing him for years as a “disgusting Jewish acrobat”. When MacDonald dies in 1937, Chaplin, now the Prime Minister of a Labour-dominated National Government, is ready for Hitler. A draft script for the final speech of The Great Dictator, held in the Chaplin archive, offers a whisper of a possible opening gambit: “Let us right the wrongs done to nations. But as a price let us all disarm — totally — till every instrument of death is destroyed.” It’s not an argument that Hitler would ever have accepted. But Chaplin is also close to Churchill, who has already formed an anti-Fascist network with like-minded figures within British intelligence and the British film business. So the Munich Agreement goes unsigned, and after Chaplin has performed the Dance of the Bread Rolls at Number 12, Arcisstrasse, the Second World War is sooner, swifter and shorter.

At which point we wake up — back in the real world, where The Great Dictator was made, despite the Chamberlain’s government’s active discouragement. (Richard Carr’s 2017 biography of Chaplin unearths this story, which includes a government threat to ban the film’s release in Britain.) Thankfully, its star ignored this pressure, and kept the cameras rolling. Churchill saw the film on 14 December 1940. It was screened for him at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he stayed on moonlit nights that made Chequers too visible to the Luftwaffe. He laughed heartily, particularly at a scene in which a totalitarian buffet descends into a food fight. He watched Chaplin’s Jewish barber make his speech against tyranny: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls — has barricaded the world with hate — has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.” Then, after sending a secret cable to Washington, the Prime Minister retired to bed.