Despite winning nearly a quarter of a million fewer votes than the Labour Party, the Conservative Party triumphed in the general election of 1951. Harold Macmillan was the new Minister of Housing. His aim was to build a record number of houses - and build them he did! In 1954 no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new homes went up! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one got hold a copy of Macmillan's The Middle Way (written in 1938) and recommended it to the old man. The hard-faced Conservatism of the 1930s had taken a back seat.
Go back in your time machine from anty time between the late 1950s and the early 1960s and you would have seen Major Lansdowne - a sad-eyed figure with a droopy Harold Macmillan-style moustache - selling copies of the "Daily Worker!" The Major also believed in The Middle Way - although his was half way between Lenin and Keir Hardie. On Saturday mornings he would snip open his bundle of Daily Workers and get ready for the rush to buy. The amazing thing about Major Lansdown's selling technique was that by the end of the afternoon only one or two copies of the Daily Worker would be left, and yet no one was ever seen buying one. Supporters of the Fourth International sometimes shouted "It's Comrade Rigor Mortis!" and Cyril Connolly once stood in front of him and recited his poem about "classes and masses and masses of asses!" One letter writer to the Bath & Wilting said he disagreed with everything Major Lansdowne stood for but applauded his "indefatigable spirit." He also pointed out that it was a tactical error to stand outside the very building where - until 1954 - the masses had queued with their ration books. "The hidden semiotic message of selling Daily Workers on this spot is that socialism = rationing, which is spot on!"
Most of the shoppers ignored Major Lansdowne completely, but now and again a fierce discussion would break out. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic said the paper had made a serious mistake by claiming that religion had been described by Marx as "the opium of the masses." "This is a mistranslation. Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. It dulls the pain of life under capitalism which is what shopping and television does today." In 1963 a group of youthful sellers of the agit-prop newsletter Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! tried to muscle in on the Major's Daily Worker patch, but he would have none of it and with some friendly police assistance ended up winning the day.
After peaking at 102,780 votes in 1945 support for the British Communist Party melted away. The revival in the party's vote in the early sixties - it edged back to 62,112 in 1966 - proved to be a false Morning Star. The spirit of the age was not just turning against Major Lansdowne's party. It was turning against prefabs as well. Prefab estates became niche constructions for the discerning few. Most people wanted to live in Middle Way. Everyone has a car and a patio in Middle Way. No one looks scruffy in Middle Way. You never see anyone like Major Lansdowne in Middle Way!