Word: leyton
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...most shocking blow Harold Wilson's Labor government could have received. Never before had a British Prime Minister been so brutally humiliated at so early a stage of a new government. Running for Parliament in a supposedly "safe" seat in the London constituency of Leyton, Her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, 57, was rejected by the voters -and lost his political life...
...incoming Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted Gordon Walker to be Foreign Secretary in his new government, and under the British system a Cabinet member must have a seat in Parliament. Casting about for a safe constituency, Labor officials settled on Leyton, a drab East London working-class neighborhood represented in the House of Commons for the past 30 years by a 73-year-old Labor M.P. named Reginald Sorensen. Abruptly, Sorensen was invited to accept a life peerage and vacate the constituency, and a by-election was scheduled...
...first, Leyton seemed not only safe for Labor but also safe from the race issue, since only 3% of its population is nonwhite. But in politics no issue stays dormant. Gordon Walker found things complicated by the fact that last November-after reading a Gallup poll showing 68% of all Britons to be in favor of some curbs on immigration-Wilson's Labor government voted to renew the same immigration law it had fought so vigorously in 1961. Kicking off the Tories' campaign against Gordon Walker in Leyton, former Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod chortled, "I welcome, though...
...Candidate." Into the imbroglio dropped the British Fascist Party, a gang of racists who decided to bring the color question into the by-election campaign with a vengeance, even though Gordon Walker and his Tory opponent, Leyton Engineer Ronald Buxton, tried to soft-pedal it. Nastily and noisily, the neo-Nazis invaded Gordon Walker's first campaign rally in Leyton, were only repulsed after Gordon Walker threw a right uppercut and Labor's burly Defense Minister Denis Healey hurled the Fascist leader, Colin Jordan, off the platform into the front...
Last week, as Gordon Walker continued his campaign in Leyton, at least 30 burly Labor stewards guarded the halls in which he spoke. Although a massive journalistic contingent from Fleet Street was, in The Times of London's words, "ready to pounce at the drop of a swastika," no Fascists showed up-though Spoiler Jordan sent an agent in blackface to the Leyton town hall, where the interloper declared himself, in crude parody of Negro vernacular, to be "de noo candidate, Walker Gordon." And though everyone was protesting that race was not an issue in Leyton, the BBC hastily...