David Torrance

The incredible story of the first Labouradministration and the 'wild men' who shook up the British establishment.

Writing to The Timesfrom the Carlton Club in early 1924, the Conservative MP George Terrell railed against the ‘Communists, the wild men,’ –in other words the people who, in the first election since all adult men had gained the vote, had voted for a radically different sort of government. It was a revolution against the top-hatted landed gentry who had run Britain for centuries.Ramsay MacDonald, their leader and Labour’sfirst Prime Minster, was the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm labourer; Arthur Henderson (the Home Secretary) was a Scottish iron moulder; J. H. Thomas (Colonial Secretary) a Welsh railwayman; John Wheatley (Minister of Health) an Irish-born miner and publican; and William Adamson (Scottish Secretary) a Fife coal miner. Never before had men from such backgrounds occupied the corridors of power in Westminster.Wild Men tells the story of that first Labouradministration –its unexpected birth, fraught existence, and controversial downfall –through the eyes of those who found themselves in the Houses of Commons, running the country for the people. Blending biography and history into a compelling narrative, David Torrance reassesses the UK’s first Labourgovernment a century after it shook up a British establishment still reeling from the First World War.