One of the first MPs to address the new Society, in Thwaite Hall, was Dennis Healey. Hugh Gaitskell, then Labour Party Treasurer, was also the honorary Vice-President of the Society in 1954–55. One of the club's key early focuses was on foreign policy, in part because there was broad cross-party consensus on domestic issues, and in part because the club had a sizeable number of Nigerian members, as well as a couple of Cypriots, who accorded a high priority to colonial policy. The club thus hosted many colonial speakers, most notably in 1953, when, jointly with the Socialist Society, it hosted Cheddi Jagan, the deposed Chief Minister of Guyana, in the joint common room of the University Union. Jagan had been dismissed by the Churchill government and army earlier in the year, under American pressure, due to fears of his Marxist sympathies. In 1956, then-Hull University Union Secretary Kevin McNamara led a march against Anthony Eden's invasion of the Suez, in which he was nearly kidnapped, as a joke, by members of the Hull University Conservative Association. Hattersley and McNamara were also founding members of Hull's debating society.