When Harold Wilson walked through the polished black door of 10 Downing Street on 16 October 1964, he was very much a ‘Commonwealth man’, keenly supporting the ‘multiracial grouping of nations with Britain as its leader’. He intended to ‘develop British links with the Commonwealth by extending Commonwealth preferences in new commodities and matching Britain's plans for national economic development with specific needs in the Commonwealth’. For Wilson, the Commonwealth was the key to future British economic success, looming far larger than either Europe or the United States. He had supported Hugh Gaitskell's opposition to British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1962–63, and he was as ambivalent about American power as Ernest Bevin had been two decades earlier. His analysis of Britain's place in the world economy differed sharply from Macmillan's, Eden's or Churchill's before him, all of whom had recognised (at least to some extent) that the Commonwealth would play an increasingly small role in British economic life. As the Labour Party manifesto stated before the 1964 General Election, ‘Although we shall seek to achieve close links with our European neighbours, the Labour Party is convinced that the first responsibility of a British government is to the Commonwealth’.

Much had happened over the months leading up to the election, from the French veto in January 1963 to October 1964. Immediately after the veto, the Daily Mirror opined that ‘the world now knows’ what Britain had always suspected, that General de Gaulle would forever ‘sabotage Britain's efforts to join the European Common Market’. The newspaper was not despondent, however, as Britain's course was clear: ‘She is forced to mark time in her attempt to join the Common Market as it now stands. But she must not turn her back on Europe. This government (and the next) must continue to strive for a wider European unity. … This is the real European ideal’. The French newspaper Le Monde also blamed de Gaulle, lamenting that ‘A single man in the name of his own idea of Europe and the world, has vetoed the entry into the Common Market of a country whose application had the sympathy of all our allies’. It wondered how ‘after such a display of bad faith, can one be believed when one repeats that the door remains open to England’.