Mark Pack

For a few astonishing days in March 1962, the Liberal Party led the Conservative and Labour parties in the opinion polls, the only time it had ever done so since polls were invented. Just a few months later Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked half his cabinet in his ‘night of the long knives’, prompting Jeremy Thorpe’s most famous comment – ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life’.