In the Leyton by-election held on 21 January 1965, Patrick Gordon Walker, the newly appointed foreign secretary, was defeated.

The general election held on 10 October 1964 resulted in a win for Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, ending 13 years of Conservative government. Labour won 317 seats on 44.1% of the popular vote, narrowly defeating the Conservative Party, led by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, which secured 304 seats on 43.4%.

Wilson’s working parliamentary majority of just four seats was the smallest since 1847.

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Walker, who had served as shadow foreign secretary since February 1963, was one of four incumbent Labour MPs to lose their seats. He had first won the Smethwick seat for Labour in an October 1945 by-election.

Walker lost the Smethwick constituency at the 1964 general election by 1,774 votes.

The Conservative campaign in Smethwick was centred on hostility to Commonwealth immigration. Supporters of the Tory candidate, Peter Griffiths, were reported to have used the slogan “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.”

Griffiths refused to condemn the slogan, telling the Times newspaper: “I should think this is a manifestation of the popular feeling. I would not condemn anyone who said that. I would say that is how people see the situation in Smethwick. I fully understand the feelings of the people who say it.”

Following the campaign, Malcolm X visited Marshall Street in Smethwick – just nine days before he was assassinated in New York. Malcolm X told reporters he was visiting Smethwick because he was “disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being treated badly”.

Despite his election loss, Wilson appointed Walker to the cabinet as foreign secretary. Walker’s brief tenure as foreign secretary represents one of the very few occasions in British political history when a cabinet minister has sat neither in the commons nor the House of Lords.

In parliament, Wilson expressed regret that Walker could not take part in parliamentary proceedings. This concession provoked laughter from Conservative MPs.

Wilson, who did not appreciate the Tory response, immediately condemned the “utterly squalid” Conservative campaign in Smethwick. The party’s tactics, he said, would “leave a lasting brand of shame on the Conservative Party”.

The prime minister asked if Douglas-Home, the Conservative leader of the opposition, was “proud” of the new Tory MP for Smethwick.

Wilson declared: “Does he now intend to take [Griffiths] to his bosom? Will the Conservative whip be extended to him, because if he does accept him as a colleague he will make this clear: he will betray the principles which not only his party but the nation have hitherto had the right to proclaim.

“And if he does not, if he takes what I think is the right course… the Smethwick Conservatives can have the satisfaction of having topped the poll, and of having sent here as their member one who, until a further general election restores him to oblivion, will serve his term here as a parliamentary leper.”

A series of Conservative MPs responded by objecting to the term “parliamentary leper”. When Wilson returned to the government dispatch box, he was met with repeated cries of “withdraw”.

A total of 25 opposition MPs reportedly walked out after Wilson’s diatribe; at least 25 more then signed a motion of censure against the prime minister.

The relevant motion read: “That this House regrets the action of the prime minister on the first day of this parliament in describing as a parliamentary leper an honourable member who had had no opportunity of making his maiden speech, thereby implying that he should be universally shunned in this House although duly elected by the people of Smethwick; and further regrets the refusal of the prime minister to withdraw that expression although repeatedly urged to do so.”

Four Labour MPs responded by tabling a tongue-in-cheek motion that censured Wilson for “a cruel and unmerited slight on lepers.”

In his maiden speech, Griffiths sought to defend his campaign against “second-hand reporting”. The Conservative said he knew of “no cause for shame arising from the Smethwick election.”

Notably, Griffiths’ speech did not contain a tribute to Walker, his predecessor as the MP for Smethwick.

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The 1965 Leyton by-election was engineered to provide Walker with a swift return to the House of Commons. Leyton, represented by Reginald Sorensen since 1935, was thought to be a Labour stronghold. Sorensen had secured a majority of 7,926 votes in the 1964 general election.

The contest came after Sorensen, the popular local MP, was made a life peer on 15 December 1964.

At one point on the campaign trail, Walker remarked to an American: “Secretary of state [Dean] Rusk doesn’t have to do this, does he?”

But he maintained that he did not object to having to campaign, adding: “Foreign policy should be related to the people.

“And one can be so much more effective politically if one is elected. I think that is one reason for the problems of your secretaries of state with the senate.”

In the end, the Conservative candidate, Ronald Buxton, won the Leyton by-election with 16,544 votes – a majority of just 205 votes over Walker.

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The result, dubbed “the most astonishing election result since the war”, dealt a significant political blow to Wilson.

The prime minister was subsequently asked if the contest represented a “condemnation” of the government’s first 100 days in office.

Wilson responded: “No, it was a disappointment of course. I think there were obvious local factors in it, for example any constituency that has been represented faithfully and well by a good local resident may feel a certain objection to a by-election being caused and a stranger coming in.”

He added: “But I think the main thing we faced in a national sense was this – that for our first three months we decided that whatever needed to be done was going to be done, popular or not. We had taken over a very grim economic situation.

“We thought it right to put the country on its feet again, even if that meant political unpopularity…

“For example, we had, as almost our first act, and I’m proud of it, decided to increase old age pensions, and we did it in the middle of an economic crisis. But of course, for reasons we all know, the pensions couldn’t be paid until March”.

Buxton’s victory forced Walker to resign as foreign secretary. It also reduced Wilson’s already razor-thin parliamentary majority from four to two. (The election of a Conservative MP as speaker of the commons raised this back to three).

Wilson appointed Michael Stewart as the new foreign secretary. Stewart had served as education secretary since the 1964 general election.

In the commons, Douglas-Home labelled the Leyton by-election as the “best epitaph on the 100 days of socialist government”.

He stated: “Now we have had the surprises – and more than enough of them, if I may say so. The dynamism about which the prime minister spoke has been the dynamism of the bull in the china shop.

“The pronouncements of the government and their methods of proceeding have made confusion worse confounded, though I must now announce that the honeymoon is over, and for the best of all possible reasons – that the promises have proved false and the solemn vows undertaken at the general election have been dishonoured.”

Labour MP William Hamilton added: “I believe that the first lesson which we on this side and the opposition have to learn from the Leyton result is that we must not take the electorate for granted.

“We should not insult them by using them for purely party political convenience.”

Hamilton said the by-election was “little more than a crude attempt at ballot rigging”.

On the same day as the Leyton contest, 21 January 1965, a by-election for the constituency of Nuneaton was held in similar circumstances. Frank Cousins, who had been appointed to lead the new Ministry of Technology following the 1964 general election, was returned as a Labour MP.

Cousins, previously the secretary general of the Transport and General Workers Union, emerged with a majority of 5,241 votes (down from 11,702 at the 1964 election).

Labour’s 1964 general election manifesto had featured a pledge to establish a “Ministry of Technology to guide and stimulate a major national effort to bring advanced technology and new processes into the industry.”

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Labour won a landslide 98-seat majority at the 1966 election.

Walker was returned as the MP for Leyton with a majority of 8,646 votes. He then sat in the cabinet from 1967 to 1968, first as minister without portfolio, then as secretary of state for education and science.

The Smethwick constituency was also reclaimed by the Labour Party in 1966.

Addressing the commons for his maiden speech, the new MP for Smethwick, Andrew Faulds, said he was “not prepared to make favourable references” to his predecessor.

The former actor added: “If I am required to do so by the practice of the House, I must plead in this case temporary amnesia.

“The campaign which won him his brief sojourn in this place was completely unwholesome and totally unacceptable in terms of British political life. That feverish seizure is now happily over – and I am here!”

Peter Griffiths returned to the commons as the MP for Portsmouth North, winning the seat at the February 1974 general election. He served as the Conservative MP for Portsmouth North until the Labour landslide at the 1997 election, when he was defeated.