The quote about blue rinse from 1964 Punch was not about Britain & the 1964 election at all. It comes from a piece by Alan Coren, The Man Who Ran For President, and is a satire on American presidential politics, published just a week before the election in which LBJ beat Goldwater in a landslide.
Coren imagines a meeting with a down & out in the Bowery, a man who once ran for president but was spectacularly brought low, & now eases the pain with benzedrine & meths.
It had all started so well:
… my grandfather was the only coloured rabbi ever to win an Olympic gold medal … my Irish grandfather won the Medal of Honour before opening a chain of cut price liquor stores across the country, my family had a tradition of political & moral leadership ...
By the second month of campaigning [on horseback] “I’d ironed out the whole racial problem at a campaign dinner for the KKK & the NAACP. Malcolm X was the guest speaker & General Walker handed round the furry hats.”
He was the perfect candidate, a shoo-in because “I was all things to all men, see? No one could object to me, because in my soul, in the very fibre of my being, son, was –well – a little bit of them.”
But then disaster & scandal struck:
“… some fink stands up in public & says he knows for a fact that my brother in law’s niece kicked a dog for a bet. We had the guy committed, but it was too late.”
The full ‘blue rinse’ quote reads:
“The blue rinse vote went down the drain, & when they found out the dog was black, the Northern liberals & the coons went with them.”
Also in October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev stepped down as leader of the Soviet Union, & Harold Wilson became the first Labour prime minister for 13 years.
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