Choosing Party Leaders: Britain's Conservatives and Labour Compared 1526134861, 9781526134868

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Towards the end of the magic circle
A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party
Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party
From chairman to leader: the selection of Labour leaders by the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1906–80
From Healey to Miliband: the election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College
The Labour leadership election(s) of Jeremy Corbyn
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Choosing party leaders

Choosing party leaders Britain’s Conservatives and Labour compared Andrew Denham, Andrew S. Roe-Crines and Peter Dorey

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Denham, Andrew S. Roe-Crines and Peter Dorey 2020 The right of Andrew Denham, Andrew S. Roe-Crines and Peter Dorey to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3486 8 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of tables vi Acknowledgementsvii List of abbreviations viii Introduction1 1 Towards the end of the magic circle 5 2 A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party 41 3 Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party 79 4 From chairman to leader: the selection of Labour leaders by the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1906–80 129 5 From Healey to Miliband: the election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College 159 6 The Labour leadership election(s) of Jeremy Corbyn 192 Conclusion229 References232 Index253

v

Tables

2.1 MPs’ support in 1995 Conservative leadership contest 70 2.2 MPs’ support in first ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest 73 2.3 MPs’ support in second ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest73 2.4 MPs’ support in third and final ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest 74 3.1 MPs’ support in first ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest 91 3.2 MPs’ support in second ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest92 3.3 MPs’ support in third and final ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest 94 3.4 2005 vote on changing the Conservative leadership election rules 102 3.5 MPs’ support in first ballot of 2005 Conservative leadership contest 105 3.6 MPs’ support in second ballot of 2005 Conservative leadership contest105 3.7 Conservative members’ support in final ballot of 2005 leadership contest106 3.8 Conservative Party members’ views on leadership (survey conducted 1–4 July 2016) 114 3.9 Conservative members’ degree of support for Brexit, 2019 122 4.1 PLP leadership elections 1922–80 132 5.1 Labour Party leadership and deputy leadership elections, 1981–2010163 6.1 Results of the 2015 Labour Party leadership election 213 6.2 Results of the 2016 Labour Party leadership election 222 6.3 Results of the 2017 general election 227

vi

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to pay tribute to our friends and families who have supported us throughout the research and writing processes, particularly Carl Bowler. We would also like to thank the staff at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; and The Churchill Centre, Cambridge. Special thanks to The National Archives, Kew, for their unfailing efficiency in responding to numerous requests for archival materials over the last two years. We would also like to thank the many members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords whom we approached to interview, particularly Neil (Lord) Kinnock for his very helpful comments. Finally, we are especially grateful to Mark Stuart (University of Nottingham), Brendan Evans (University of Huddersfield) and Timothy Heppell (University of Leeds) for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Finally, our gratitude must also be extended to Tony Mason and Tom Brook for their assistance.

vii

Abbreviations

AEU Amalgamated Engineering Union ASTMS Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs AUEW Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers CAB Cabinet CCO Conservative Central Office CLP Constituency Labour Parties CM Cabinet Minutes CPA Conservative Party Archive EEC European Economic Community EETPU Electoral, Electronic Telecommunications and Plumbing Union ESRC Economic and Social Research Council GLC Greater London Council GMB General Municipal Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union GMCs General Management Committees IFTS in-from-the-start ILP Independent Labour Party IRA Irish Republican Army LRC Labour Representation Committee MEPs Members of the European Parliament MPs Members of Parliament NA National Archives NEC National Executive Committee NHS National Health Service NUA National Union of Conservative & Unionist Associations NUGMW National Union of General and Municipal Workers NUM National Union of Mineworkers OMOV One Member One Vote viii

Abbreviations

PLP POEU PR SDP STV TGWU UKIP USDAW VAT WM

Parliamentary Labour Party Post Office Engineering Union proportional representation Social Democratic Party Single Transferable Vote Transport and General Workers Union UK Independence Party Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers value-added tax War Cabinet Minutes

ix

Introduction

How political parties choose their leaders and why they choose the leaders they do are questions of fundamental importance in contemporary parliamentary democracies. Reflecting the breadth and diversity of the discipline of political science, the academic literature on this subject ranges from studies of specific leadership contests involving a single party or country on the one hand, to large-scale, comparative studies of developments between countries on the other (Cross and Blais, 2012; Pilet and Cross, 2014; Cross and Pilet, 2015). In this book, our focus is on a single country, Britain, and the questions of how its two major parties, Conservative and Labour, have chosen their leaders and which factors have shaped their choices. Since the early 1990s, six books have been published on the selection of British party leaders. Of these, two were single-party studies of the Conservative Party (Denham and O’Hara, 2008; Heppell, 2008), while a third focused exclusively on Labour (Heppell, 2010a). The others were multi-party studies, covering five major British parties: the Conservatives, Labour and three third parties, the Liberal Party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Liberal Democrats (Punnett, 1992; Stark, 1996; Quinn, 2012). By focusing exclusively on the two major parties in British politics and covering both in a single volume, this book differs from these studies. By excluding third parties, this book is able to provide detailed coverage of how the Conservative and Labour parties have chosen their leaders and why, from their origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively to the present day. In so doing, it draws extensively on primary sources, including documents located in the Conservative and Labour party archives, interviews, and the diaries and memoirs of party leaders and leadership candidates themselves. More historical in its scope and methodology than previous studies, such as those by Punnett (1992), Stark (1996), Denham and O’Hara (2008), and 1

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Quinn (2012), it is also more contemporary. The six previous books on this subject were published between 1992 and 2012, and all are now, to varying degrees, out of date. Since the General Election of 2015, dramatic events have occurred in British politics, including the election of a rank outsider, Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader in 2015; the UK electorate’s vote to leave the European Union (EU) in a referendum in 2016; the resignation thereafter of David Cameron as Prime Minister and Conservative leader; the election of Theresa May as his successor; the re-election of Corbyn, following a formal challenge to his leadership, in September 2016; a snap General Election called by May, in 2017, in which the Conservatives, following a disastrous campaign, lost their parliamentary majority; an unsuccessful attempt in December 2018 by disaffected Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) to force May’s departure from office by triggering a vote of confidence in her leadership; her highly emotional resignation in June 2019; and finally, the election by party members of her successor, Boris Johnson, following a protracted campaign, in July. In Chapters 3 and 6 of this book, we examine the two leadership elections held by each party since 2015 and explain the changes to their selection procedures that preceded the elections of 2015 (Labour) and 2019 (Conservative). As Cross and Blais (2012: 3) note, the selection of their leaders is one of the most important decisions parties make, and in parliamentary systems the choice is fully controlled by the parties themselves: They decide when and how to select leaders, who to allow to seek the leadership, who to enfranchise in the selection, and how long leaders will serve; and there is generally no state regulation governing these decisions. In essence, parties are sovereign when it comes to selecting their leaders – the men (and, rarely, women) who serve at the centre of our politics and government and from among whom we choose our Prime Ministers.

The most fundamental question when considering the politics of party leadership in parliamentary systems, they argue, is that of who selects the party leader and there is ‘frequently an ongoing struggle between the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary groups within parties for influence in leadership politics’. The question of who is empowered to participate in the process of selecting the leader ‘speaks directly to the issue of where power lies in the party. As leaders play a key role in party and legislative decision-making, those who have [a] voice in their selection have indirect influence in these matters’ (Cross and Blais, 2012: 14, 8–9). As Stark (1996: 2) explains, British parties have employed, generally speaking, four different systems for choosing their leaders: 2

Introduction Leaders have been (1) informally selected by party elites or formally elected by (2) the parliamentary party, (3) by a college composed of sections of the party, or (4) by a ballot of party members. In the period since 1963, each major British party has moved from one of these systems to another.

As we explain in the next three chapters, the Conservative Party used the first of these methods until 1965, when it adopted the second, a complicated system of secret ballots in which only MPs were entitled to vote. In 1998, it adopted a new system in which MPs would initially vote for their preferred candidate in a series of secret ballots in which the last placed candidate would be eliminated until just two remained. These two would then proceed to a postal ballot of party members, which would decide the outcome. If only one candidate remained following the parliamentary stage of the process, he or she would be elected unopposed. As we explain in Chapter 3, this occurred in 2003, when Michael Howard was the only candidate to be nominated by MPs and again in 2016, following Andrea Leadsom’s decision to withdraw from the contest after she had secured second place in the final ballot of MPs. As we explain in Chapter 4, Labour initially used the second method of formal election by the parliamentary party, a relatively straightforward system of eliminative and secret ballots in which only MPs were entitled to vote. This was superseded in 1981 by the adoption of an electoral college, a special conference designed solely to elect the Party’s leader and deputy leader. Three sections of the party – MPs, constituency parties and affiliated organisations (primarily trade unions) – each received a fixed percentage of the votes. The operation of the new system proved to be controversial and, as we explain in Chapter 5, was modified in 1988 and then more substantially in 1993, with the abolition of block voting in both the constituency party and trade union sections, and the introduction of One Member One Vote (OMOV). As we explain in Chapter 6, the electoral college itself was abolished in 2014 and replaced by a pure OMOV system, in which the leader and deputy leader would be elected by Labour’s members, and registered and affiliated supporters, each of whom would receive a single vote of equal value to every other. This meant, for example, that members of trade unions affiliated to the party who were not already party members were now required to register as Labour supporters in order to vote. As well as explaining the selection rules adopted and used by each party, and how and why these have changed over time, this book examines how they have affected the conduct of leadership campaigns and the impact of the latter on the outcomes of leadership contests. In terms of the former, it (almost) goes 3

Choosing party leaders

without saying that exclusively parliamentary contests, in which MPs alone were allowed to vote, have been shorter and less expensive to organise, and have attracted less coverage in the national news media than those in which extra-parliamentary groups (a party’s affiliated organisations, members, and, more recently, affiliated and registered supporters) were also entitled to do so, and have either made, or had a significant impact on, the final decision. With regard to the latter, Stark’s study, published in 1996, concludes that: While the rules do affect some of the general characteristics of leadership campaigns, each system is sufficiently flexible to allow candidates to decide how active or restrained their campaigning will be. Leadership campaigns seem only to influence the outcome of a contest if MPs are electing the leader; rank-and-file party members appear to be far less susceptible than MPs to being swayed by campaign tactics. (Stark, 1996: 7)

Of the sixteen campaigns involving the five major British parties between 1963 and 1994, Stark finds that a vote swing of sufficient size to change the outcome of a contest occurred in only four. Intriguingly, all four campaigns that mattered (1963, 1965, 1975 and 1990) occurred during Conservative Party contests in which only MPs were entitled to vote. Conversely, only one of Labour’s seven campaigns (1963) even influenced the margin of victory and all four electoral college contests (1983, 1988, 1992 and 1994) were won decisively by the clear front-runner at the start of the campaign (Stark, 1996: 117–21). Selection rules, the study concludes, do not typically determine who wins a leadership contest and becomes a party leader: Most likely, only two of the 16 leaders chosen between 1963 and 1994 – Home and [Margaret] Thatcher – would have failed to have been chosen under their party’s alternative selection system. A candidate wins [the] party leadership because he or she is thought to be most capable of enabling the party to fulfil its strategic goals of remaining united [‘acceptability’], winning elections [‘electability’] and ­implementing policies in government [‘competence’]. (Stark, 1996: 7)

As we explain in Chapters 3, 5 and 6, the years that have passed since Stark’s study was published do not invalidate its findings for the period in question, but have produced a number of examples, both Conservative and Labour, that call into question its assumptions and applicability to more recent leadership contests.

4

1

Towards the end of the magic circle

When ill-health compelled Harold Macmillan to resign as Conservative leader and Prime Minister in October 1963, he declared that his successor would be chosen in accordance with the party’s ‘customary process of consultation’ (Macmillan, 1973: 506). Yet, the phrase ‘customary process of consultation’ implied a rather more regular and consistent procedure than what actually existed for ascertaining opinions and preferences within the Conservative Party. In fact, the actual process varied from one leadership to the next and was partly dependent on the circumstances and personalities involved. As one of Macmillan’s biographers observes, the phrase implies ‘precedents when none in fact existed. The leadership contests of 1911, 1923, 1940 … were all sui generis’ (Thorpe, 2013: 27). The only feature that was common to all Conservative leadership selections or appointments during the first half of the twentieth century was the absence of a formal role for Conservative MPs in their choice or preference. Instead, those most closely involved in choosing a new party leader were a few senior Conservative Party parliamentarians who consulted as narrowly or widely as they deemed expedient to do. However, the controversial manner in which Macmillan’s successor was chosen in October 1963 fatally tarnished the socalled magic circle, and thus led to the adoption of a formal method for choosing subsequent Conservative leaders, entailing a secret ballot of the party’s MPs. Prior to the democratic method adopted in 1965, the Conservatives’ closed and elitist mode of leadership selection reflected the party’s history and organisational development, and some of the key tenets of conservatism as a phil­ osophy. Historically, the Conservatives had mostly evolved incrementally and organically, and although 1832 is often cited as the year when the modern Conservative Party was born, its antecedents stretched back further. Even in 1832, it was only the parliamentary Conservative Party that was established; the 5

Choosing party leaders

extra-parliamentary party was not created until 1867, when sections of the male working class were enfranchised. The party beyond parliament was titled the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations (hereafter referred to as the National Union), but it was explicitly subordinate to the parliamentary party. Its role was to serve and support the Conservatives in Parliament, and it certainly had no formal role in the selection of Conservative leaders. As such, the Conservatives made no pretence of being an internally democratic party. Instead, power was strongly concentrated in the hands of its most senior parliamentarians, both in terms of policy-making and leadership selection. For example, with regard to policy, Arthur Balfour once declared that ‘I’d rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference.’ Meanwhile, with regard to Conservative leadership selection, the Conservative MP Ernest Pretyman asserted in 1921 that: great leaders of parties are not elected, they are evolved … It will be a bad day for this or any other party to have solemnly to meet to elect a leader … There is no necessity, either now or at any future time, to hold a competition for the leadership of the party. (quoted in McKenzie, 1955: 34)

Such attitudes also reflected key aspects of the Conservatives’ philosophy, most notably a strong belief in the virtues, or necessity, of authority, deference, empiricism, hierarchy, inequality, and wisdom derived from age and experience. These values (along with others beyond the scope of this book) not only shaped the Conservatives’ approach to governing and policies, but also strongly impacted on the manner in which the party selected its leaders. Rather than facilitating the direct involvement of Conservative MPs, or even the extra-parliamentary party, new leaders were usually selected either by an heir apparent being identified by the retiring or resigning incumbent, or by discussions among senior Conservatives on who was the best available candidate. Although the chosen one was then presented to the parliamentary Conservative Party for approval, this was a formality, as the MPs and peers were not being asked to make a choice, but to ratify the choice that had already been made or, in the case of an heir apparent, offer the party’s strong approval and acclamation for the natural successor to the outgoing leader. As such, the means by which a new Conservative leader was selected did not entail a ‘customary process’, but an ad hoc approach that depended heavily on the circumstances and personalities involved at any given juncture. In accordance with the Conservative principles identified, this ‘method’ reflected 6

Towards the end of the magic circle

the assumption that the party’s elders, by virtue of their superior experience and  accumulated wisdom, were best placed to gauge the leadership potential and qualities of their colleagues. The role of Conservative MPs would be that of ritual acclamation when the chosen one was announced and presented to their fellow parliamentarians. It was this mode of leadership selection which invoked the image of men in grey suits or the magic circle conjuring up a new leader prior to emerging from smoke-filled rooms to unveil their choice to the rest of the Conservative Party and the media. Even so, on a few occasions there was no choice to be made because the incumbent leaders had already made clear who their (preferred) successor would be, not least by the prestigious and prominent cabinet posts they had been awarded. That said, the leader would obviously need to be confident that their nominee would command widespread support in the rest of the parliamentary Conservative Party, although in the absence of a formal system of gauging backbench views on a leadership successor, much depended on the incumbent’s judgement about the mood of the party towards the chosen one in terms of acceptability and potential for achieving (or maintaining) unity, and also how popular and respected they were among their cabinet colleagues, partly in terms of proven competence. Pre-1945 Conservative leadership successions by an heir apparent There were three occasions, in the first half of the twentieth century, when an heir apparent was appointed, thereby enabling a smooth transition from one leader to the next. The first such occasion was in July 1902, when Lord Salisbury’s retirement led to the appointment of his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as his successor: ‘Balfour’s succession to the premiership was generally expected’ (Blake, 1985: 167; see also Norton and Aughey, 1981: 117). After all, Salisbury had been Conservative leader for almost twenty-one years, and thus had been granted plenty of time to identify a successor, and then ensure that they occupied senior and high-profile government posts so that they were suitably qualified (in terms of ministerial experience), competent and well known. In Balfour’s case, he was the Leader of the House of Commons and then First Lord of the Treasury (the latter subsequently being a title enjoyed by the prime minister). Balfour also deputised for Salisbury both at the Foreign Office and as acting prime minister when the latter was either ill or abroad on political business. Thus it was that ‘the leadership in effect passed automatically from Salisbury to Balfour … without any hint of opposition or serious rivalry within the Party.’ Indeed, when he was presented to a joint meeting of Conservative MPs and 7

Choosing party leaders

peers for formal endorsement, his appointment as Conservative leader and Prime Minister was unanimously endorsed (McKenzie, 1955: 26–8). The second occasion in the first half of the twentieth century when the Conservative leadership was passed on to an heir apparent was in 1921, when  Andrew Bonar Law resigned on health grounds and was succeeded by Austen Chamberlain as leader of the party in the House of Commons. Chamberlain had ‘long been regarded as heir apparent’ to Bonar Law, and his magnanimous withdrawal from the 1911 leadership contest in order to avoid exacerbating intra-party divisions had subsequently enhanced the widespread respect he enjoyed among Conservative MPs (Fisher, 1977: 24; see also Dutton, 2015: 184). As such, ‘his selection was a foregone conclusion,’ and he was unanimously endorsed by a meeting of Conservative MPs and peers at the Carlton Club in March 1921 (Shepherd, 1991: 117; Block, 1965). However, Chamberlain’s leadership proved short-lived, for when a majority of Conservative MPs voted to withdraw from the Coalition Government (with the Liberals) in October 1922, he immediately resigned as leader of the party in the House of Commons. He had been in favour of continuing the coalition, in spite of the growing opposition to it in the parliamentary party, which he had been informed of by George Younger, the party’s chair at the beginning of 1922 (Ball, 2013: 514). In the absence of an heir apparent, the King invited Bonar Law – who had by now recovered from the illness that had compelled him to resign the previous year – to resume his leadership of the Conservative Party, which he did, with the unanimous support of the parliamentary Conservative Party. However, he was again obliged to resign due to a recurrence of health problems in the following year (Blake, 1985: 204–6; Charmley, 1996: 61–2; Dutton, 2015: 190–2; Fisher, 1977: 25–6; Ramsden, 1999: 244–5; Shepherd, 1991: 120–6; Block, 1965). The third occasion, in the first half of the twentieth century, when an heir apparent was readily acknowledged was when Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin in 1937. As with Salisbury, Baldwin’s lengthy (fourteen-year) tenure as Conservative Party leader and sometime Prime Minister meant that there was sufficient time for a natural successor to be promoted, with Chamberlain twice serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer (albeit the first time was short-lived, due to electoral defeat), and once as Secretary of State for Health. He also deputised for Baldwin during the summer and autumn of 1936, when the Prime Minister was suffering from nervous exhaustion. When Baldwin retired the following year, Chamberlain was ‘his long preordained successor’ (Blake, 1985: 238). Indeed, because he was ‘the inevitable 8

Towards the end of the magic circle

successor … The transition of power was smooth’. Not only was he Baldwin’s natural and obvious successor, he had acquired ‘a reputation established over nearly fifteen years for executive capacity and legislative achievement’ (Ball, 2015: 215). Indeed, it has been claimed that ‘his succession as Tory leader was the smoothest since Balfour’s in 1902’ (Shepherd, 1991: 136). Pre-1945 Conservative leadership contests involving two candidates On other occasions, there were at least two contenders for the leadership, as was the case in November 1911, when Balfour resigned ostensibly due to ill-health, although he was really suffering from ‘boredom with the task of holding his restless Party together’, with Tariff Reform being a particularly contentious and politically divisive issue in the early twentieth century (Fisher, 1977: 22). With no heir apparent, two candidates materialised, namely Austen Chamberlain and Walter Long. However, support for them was relatively evenly divided, which posed a serious risk of exacerbating tensions in the parliamentary Conservative Party, particularly as there was considerable personal animosity between them. This divisive and potentially damaging situation was compounded by the party’s lack of a formal leadership (s)election procedure for choosing between two (or more) candidates. However, in this instance, even if there had been a ballot, the likely result would have been a very narrow victory of one of the contenders, which would have meant that a very large minority of Conservative MPs did not support them: a technical victory of, say, 51 per cent to 49 per cent would have posed serious problems to the authority and legitimacy of the winner. An intra-party crisis was averted when Chamberlain and Long agreed to withdraw their candidatures in favour of Bonar Law, who was persuaded to present himself as a unity candidate, although he did so with some with reluctance, having viewed himself as a potential future leader, rather than becoming one at this juncture (Fisher, 1977: 23; see also Blake, 1985: 194; Bogdanor, 1994: 73; Charmley, 1996: 45–6; Norton and Aughey, 1981: 244; Ramsden, 1999: 215; Shepherd, 1991: 113–15; Southgate, 1977: 242; Taylor, 2015: 157–8). As we will note later, there was another occasion when a reluctant candidate was persuaded to stand in order to provide unity when the support enjoyed by other leadership contenders was matched by the strong opposition they aroused among other Conservative MPs. Having overcome his initial reticence, and been formally proposed and seconded by Chamberlain and Long themselves, 9

Choosing party leaders

Bonar Law was unanimously endorsed as leader at a meeting of the parliamentary Conservative Party (Block, 1965). The next occasion when there were two contenders was when ill-health compelled Bonar Law to resign in May 1923, whereupon Lord Curzon and Baldwin were acknowledged as the main rivals to fill the vacancy. Although Curzon was widely viewed as the weightier and more experienced candidate – having held the posts of Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, and also deputised for Bonar Law when the latter was indisposed – it was Baldwin who was actually chosen, albeit with considerable confusion and some controversy surrounding this decision. In the absence of a formal leadership (s)election procedure, the monarch, King George V, took advice via his Private Secretary from senior Conservatives over who should replace Bonar Law. The latter was apparently too ill to inform the King of his own preference, but he was thought to have supported Baldwin (who had, in 1922, been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Bonar Law), and it may have been that this information was conveyed to the King via other sources (Fisher, 1977: 26–8; see also Dilks, 1977: 283–4; Ramsden, 1999: 249–50). It was Baldwin whom the King eventually chose, a key reason being that Curzon sat in the House of Lords. The 1911 Parliament Act had effectively confirmed the constitutional supremacy of the House of Commons, and it was now widely acknowledged that a prime minister ought to be a member of the latter. It was six days after his appointment as Prime Minister before Baldwin was unanimously endorsed by a meeting of Conservative MPs and peers, with Curzon himself magnanimously moving the motion of acceptance (Block, 1965). The final occasion during the first half of the twentieth century when there were two candidates was in May 1940, although the situation was complicated by the fact that, initially, it was a new prime minister who was sought, rather than a Conservative Party leader. The Conservative leader, Neville Chamberlain, had attempted to form a wartime coalition government to pursue Britain’s military resistance to the Nazi conquest of much of mainland Europe. However, by this time, Chamberlain had lost the confidence of many Conservative MPs (who seriously doubted his ability to provide effective leadership during wartime) – ‘He was no war leader, and he knew it’ (Charmley, 1996: 105) – while the Labour Party was adamant that it would not enter a coalition government led by him, not least because he had previously made no secret of his personal animosity towards Labour’s leadership (Ball, 2015: 230–3; Fisher, 1977: 38–45; Ramsden, 1999: 298). Thus, on 10 May 1940, Chamberlain 10

Towards the end of the magic circle

informed the cabinet of his decision to resign in order that someone more acceptable could lead a wartime coalition with the Labour Party (TNA, 1940). The only two acknowledged candidates to replace Chamberlain as Prime Minister and head a coalition government were Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill. Along with much of the Conservative Party, Chamberlain favoured Halifax (who had served under him as Foreign Secretary) and the Labour Party leadership too signalled its readiness to serve in a coalition government under his leadership. Halifax himself, ‘though gratified, was unenthusiastic. He thought, rightly, that he did not possess the qualities required in a war leader, and that Churchill’s drive and determination made him the obvious choice’ (Fisher, 1977: 46). Halifax was also concerned at the feasibility and practicability of being a prime minister who sat in the House of Lords, rather than the Commons. Although King George VI, who also favoured Halifax, wondered whether special provision could be made to allow Halifax to speak in the Commons given the gravity of the circumstances and international situation (Fisher, 1977: 49), Halifax ‘categorically refused to lead a Government’, which effectively meant that ‘it must be Winston’ (Colville, 1985: 121, diary entry for 10 May 1940). However, while Churchill did become Prime Minister and leader of a new wartime coalition government, Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons until serious illness forced him to relinquish the post in September 1940. Churchill to Eden It had long been widely acknowledged that Anthony Eden was Churchill’s heir apparent. As far back as 1942, during the wartime Coalition Government, Churchill had, just before flying to the United States for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, written to King George VI, explaining that: In case of my death on this journey … I avail myself of Your Majesty’s gracious permission to advise that you should entrust the formation of a new Government to Mr Anthony Eden … who is in my mind the outstanding Minister in the largest political party in the House of Commons and in the National Government … and who will, I am sure, be found capable of conducting Your Majesty’s affairs with the resolution, experience and capacity which these grievous times require. (quoted in James, 1987: 265)

Of course, in one major respect, Churchill was simply being prudent in informing the King who should be asked to take over as Conservative leader and prime minister in the event of the former’s death, given that Britain was in the 11

Choosing party leaders

midst of the Second World War. Yet, it was also constitutionally unusual for a prime minister to be so explicit in advising the monarch on who should head a new government in the event of the incumbent’s fatality, because it might have been construed as impinging upon the Royal Prerogative, whereby the monarch formally decides whom to invite to form a new government. Certainly, in normal circumstances, a prime minister would not venture to suggest whom the monarch should appoint unless such advice was explicitly requested, but these were obviously not normal times, and Churchill himself was a unique leader. It had presumably been part of Churchill’s longer-term plan for Eden that he appointed the latter Foreign Secretary in 1940. This is one of any government’s most prestigious and high-profile ministerial posts, but a position which naturally acquired even greater gravitas during a major war. Such an appointment offered Eden an enormous opportunity to enhance his authority and stature as a major political figure and future prime minister, although his sole concern at that time was pursuing political and diplomatic measures to defeat Hitler and Nazism, and thus save parliamentary democracy from totalitarianism. When Churchill became Prime Minister again in 1951 (the Conservatives were resoundingly defeated by Labour in July 1945 and then narrowly defeated in February 1950), Eden returned to the Foreign Office, but because Churchill was by now seventy-five years old and in declining health (he suffered a number of strokes during his second premiership), it was widely assumed that he would make way for his chosen successor sooner rather than later. Indeed, following the Conservative Party’s 1951 election victory, ‘Eden expected … that he would succeed Churchill as Prime Minister in a matter of months’ (James, 1986: 345). Yet, the following summer Churchill was informing a meeting of the Conservative Party’s 1922 committee, comprising the party’s backbench MPs, that it ‘must trust me … I would not stay if I found I was failing physically or mentally’ (Moran, 1966: 418, diary entry for 20 June 1952). A year later, while recuperating after one of the strokes he suffered during his second premiership, he alluded to his possible retirement, asserting that ‘I shall do what is best for the country’, before mischievously adding, ‘Circumstances may convince me of my indispensability’ (Moran, 1966: 448, diary entry for 3 July 1953). Throughout his second premiership, Churchill repeatedly alluded to dates when he would resign, only to postpone his retirement as the specified date approached, and cite another one a few months in the future. In so doing, he would often claim that there was a forthcoming international summit he ought to attend, or a serious domestic policy issue whose resolution he wanted to 12

Towards the end of the magic circle

preside over: ‘As the different dates [for his expected retirement] drew near, there were reasons, or excuses, for remaining in office’ (Fisher, 1977: 67). On one occasion, Macmillan wrote to Eden suggesting it might be ‘worth having another shot at getting him to go on his 80th birthday’ for this would give him ‘a fine end’ (Macmillan, 1954). The clear reluctance to resign was naturally a source of increasing frustration, not only for Eden, but for sundry other cabinet ministers who were concerned that Churchill was steadily becoming mentally and physically incapable of providing effective leadership: ‘his life had now passed far beyond the great climacteric. His mind was as fine as ever, for short periods … he was not cap­ able of any prolonged or detailed negotiations’ (Macmillan, 1968: 536; see also Watkins, 1998: 55). Indeed, by summer 1954, an exasperated Macmillan was complaining that: The Government has ceased to function with full efficiency; many Ministers were unsuited to their posts; no one co-ordinated policy; Cabinets were becoming long and wearisome, as well as too frequent. The Parliamentary Party, already discontented, might soon break into groups and cabals; the whole Party machine was losing grip. All this was due to the continual uncertainty, discussed openly in the press, as to Churchill’s intentions. (Macmillan, 1968: 541)

However, although cabinet ministers and sections of the parliamentary Conservative Party were growing restive over Churchill’s personal equivocation and declining political leadership, there existed no formal mechanism for removing an incumbent leader. A new Conservative leader could only be selected when the incumbent died, resigned or retired, yet Churchill repeatedly refused to stand-down. The only alternative, in such circumstances, was for a senior party figure, or maybe a group of men in grey suits, to visit the party leader, and implore them to exit stage left, for the sake of the party and the country. Yet ‘such was Churchill’s authority and prestige that no one could challenge his continued leadership’ (Fisher, 1977: 67). Eventually, in spring 1955, Churchill, either as a purely personal decision or perhaps bowing to mounting behind-the-scenes pressure, declared that ‘I am going, and Anthony will succeed me. We can discuss details later’ (Butler, 1971: 176). Even then, he confessed to his doctor that ‘I don’t want to go, but Anthony wants it [the premiership] so much’ (Moran, 1966: 683, diary entry for 1 April 1955). Yet, when Churchill visited Buckingham Palace on 5 April, to tender his resignation formally, he refrained from advising the relatively new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, about who his successor should be. This was in accordance with established constitutional protocol, although as noted above, this 13

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had not prevented Churchill from advising the monarch back in 1942 of who should be appointed as the Prime Minister’s successor in the event of his death. Nonetheless, in 1955 there was no need for the Queen to consult or seek advice about whom she should send for to form a new government, because ‘there was never any doubt about his [Eden’s] right or qualification to succeed to the premiership. Throughout the fifteen years of Churchill’s leadership, Eden had been acknowledged as his eventual successor.’ Indeed, so widespread was this acknowledgement and acceptance by the Conservative Party, that: ‘No rival candidate existed, so there was no discussion or controversy of any kind’ (Fisher, 1977: 69). Richard Austen ‘Rab’ Butler, whose political seniority and ministerial experience (he had served as Education Secretary in the wartime Coalition and then as Chancellor from 1951, both posts imbuing him with an experience of domestic policies which Eden lacked), might otherwise have been a likely successor to Churchill, but he fully accepted that Eden was the heir apparent: in a letter to Churchill in August 1956, Butler remarked that ‘we have all accepted that Anthony is to be your successor’ (Butler, 1971: 174). As such, the official endorsement of the new leader by the wider Conservative Party, comprising MPs, peers, adopted candidates and members of the Executive Committee of the National Union (the body officially representing the extra-parliamentary party), at its meeting at Church House, Westminster, on 21 April 1955 was a formality (CPA, 1955). Churchill remarked, ‘No two men ever changed guard more smoothly’ (quoted in Eden, 1960: 265). Eden to Macmillan It was a tragic irony that after such extensive and distinguished service as Foreign Secretary, particularly during the Second World War, and having waited for more than a decade to become Prime Minister as Churchill’s chosen heir, Eden’s premiership lasted less than two years. The details of the Suez Canal debacle have been extensively analysed by many other writers, so we will not discuss it here; it is enough to note the unavoidable damage to Eden’s authority and credibility as a consequence of Britain’s ‘defeat’. It is conceivable that Eden might have recovered politically in due course, and certainly, at a mid-December 1954 cabinet meeting, his ministerial colleagues urged him not to resign, but instead ride out the storm, partly because resignation would be tantamount to yielding to his critics, but more importantly because remaining as Prime Minister would actually help sustain the unity of the Conservative 14

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Party (Fisher, 1977: 81; James, 1987: 593). However, the strain of the Suez episode had taken a serious toll on Eden’s health, and the two phenomena became inextricably linked in the public mind. He explained that ‘it was not illness, but an inability to get back his ordinary vigour’, which was compounded by difficulties sleeping. As a consequence, he was worried that ‘he would be a Prime Minister at half-cock, and therefore unable to give a lead over the grave questions which faced us’ (Kilmuir, 1964: 583–4). Indeed, so concerned was Eden about his health at this juncture that he consulted no less than three physicians, whose medical advice was sadly similar: that his health would almost certainly deteriorate if he continued, for he would place his body under too much strain (Eden, 1960: 582; see also James, 1987: 595). In effect, the decision of whether or not to resign was taken out of Eden’s hands, whereupon he informed his senior ministerial colleagues of his immediate resignation, at a specially-convened cabinet meeting on the afternoon of 9 January 1957 (TNA, 1957). Following this announcement, which seemed to surprise most of Eden’s senior colleagues, Macmillan recorded that ‘it became clear that Eden was a very sick man. The strain of recent weeks and months has told on him terribly’ (Catterall, 2004: 612, diary entry for 3 February 1957). Lord Salisbury (Lord President of the Council) and Lord Kilmuir (Lord Chancellor) elicited the views of the cabinet by jointly interviewing each minister about their choice of successor. The process was conducted by these two cabinet members primarily because they were peers, and were not, therefore, potential leadership contenders themselves. This would presumably ensure that the probity of the process was beyond reproach. The two peers then reported the results of their survey to the Queen. As there were only two contenders, the question was, in effect, ‘Who is it to be – Rab (Butler) or Harold (Macmillan)?’, to which the vast majority of ministers answered ‘Harold’ (James, 1987: 599). There were no formal consultations with the wider Conservative Party, either in Parliament or in the constituencies, and ‘such information as was sought from these quarters was random, although several [MPs] did telephone to give their opinion to the Whips’ when they heard of Eden’s resignation (Catterall, 2004: 612, diary entry for 3 February 1957). To the extent that the views of Conservative MPs were made known, they too clearly preferred Macmillan, as did Churchill, who was summoned by the Queen – as an elder statesman of vast experience and stature – to proffer his ‘independent’ advice (Kilmuir, 1964: 285, 286; see also Catterall, 2004: 612, diary entry for 3 February 1957). 15

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Looking back, Kilmuir judged that this process worked extremely well in 1957. Indeed, he was highly dismissive of the notion that a party leader (and prime minister) could or should be directly elected by the wider party. He advanced two objections to a system of intra-party democracy in selecting a leader. The first was that in undertaking a public election, a party ‘might discredit itself if there were a contested election, with all its probable attendant intrigue, lobbying, and personal animosity.’ The second objection was more constitutional in character; Kilmuir argued that intra-party leadership election contests would ‘seriously limit the prerogative of the Crown’ because ‘the Sovereign … could only invite an individual proposed … as a result of a party vote’ (Kilmuir, 1964: 288). At this stage, the wider Conservative Party was not formally consulted for two reasons. The first was that in the circumstances, time was of the essence, for it was vital that the Queen should be able to summon Eden’s successor to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands as quickly as possible. Had Eden’s health not necessitated such a swift departure, there might have been time for a more  extensive process of consultation with the Conservative Party beyond the cabinet. The second reason for confining the main consultations to cabinet ministers was that these were the people who were best placed to judge the qualities of their senior ministerial colleagues. Moreover, they were the ones who would have to work most closely, on a day-to-day basis, with whoever was chosen. However, contrary to Kilmuir’s sanguine view about how smoothly the leadership selection process and transition was conducted in 1957, it was not entirely without dissent and demurral. Not only had some commentators expected Butler to succeed Eden as ‘he was the more obvious candidate,’ having served as Chancellor, and also deputised for Eden when the latter had been ill (Punnett, 1992: 35, 36), but there was also some unease at the fact that Macmillan became Prime Minister less than twenty-four hours after Eden’s announcement that he was resigning, with Butler himself observing that the process was rushed (Butler, 1971: 195; see also Butler, 1992: 65–6; Daily Telegraph, 1957). These two criticisms are readily rejected. Support in the parliamentary Conservative Party for Butler was outweighed by the opposition to his potential leadership, both on personal and policy grounds, it being alleged that he ‘had a peculiar flair for arousing Tory hostility, and … for not rising to the occasion’ (Sampson, 1967: 124). Or as Blake expressed it, ‘Butler had a reputation for equivocation, ambivalence and delphic utterance’ (Blake, 1985: 278; see also Shepherd, 1991: 147–8). 16

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As for the alacrity of Macmillan’s appointment, the widespread support he enjoyed in the cabinet, as expressed on 9 January, rendered a longer, more extensive process of intra-party consultation unnecessary. Consequently, in spite of the isolated quibbles over the manner of Macmillan’s succession to Eden, there was no real questioning of the continued efficacy of the magic circle as the most appropriate means of choosing a new Conservative leader. Ironically, it was because of the controversial manner in which Macmillan’s own successor was chosen six years later that the magic circle was acknowledged to be no longer fit for the purpose, thus compelling the Conservative Party to devise a more formal and transparent method for choosing its leaders. Macmillan to Home During the summer and early autumn of 1963, there was a growing feeling at all levels of the Conservative Party that its prospects in the next general election, due by October 1964 at the latest, might be significantly enhanced if it had a new leader. Certainly, Conservative Central Office received numerous letters or other reports from constituency parties urging a change of leader before the next general election. For example, a letter from the secretary of the Bradford constituency party advised that ‘there is a widespread feeling in this Party … that there should be change of P.M. before the next election,’ with this being ‘the view of almost 100 per cent of the younger element of the Party’ (Lee, 1963). Similarly, Evelyn Emmett, the Conservative MP for East Grinstead reported that although her local party members were highly supportive of Macmillan in the current situation (the repercussions of the sex scandal involving Secretary of State for War John Profumo), and also very appreciative of what he had achieved during his premiership, ‘support disappears’ when the question is asked of whether he should lead the party into the next general election. Instead, there was a general view that he ought to retire in the next few months, and thereby enable a younger leader to succeed him, and again, this view was particularly prevalent among younger party members in the ­constituency (Emmett, 1963). It was also reported that much of the parliamentary Conservative Party shared these views. Quite apart from the political ramifications of the Profumo scandal, various policy decisions had upset some Conservative MPs, most notably the 1961 decision to apply for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), which had been strongly opposed by about 30 per cent of the parliamentary party, and the 1961 Pay Pause imposed by Chancellor 17

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Selwyn Lloyd. There was also growing unease on the backbenches due to byelection defeats suffered by the Conservative Party in the early 1960s, most notable of which was the loss of Orpington in March 1962. The growing discontent in the parliamentary party was, Lord Poole explained, exacerbated by its particular character and composition at this time, both ‘because of the number of ex-ministers and ex-junior ministers on the back benches’, and also because of ‘the number of inexperienced members who got in in 1959 with small majorities … some of whom can hardly be expected to hold their seats’. These factors meant that: ‘The Parliamentary Party is more difficult to handle than in previous parliaments.’ In view of the unease on the backbenches, it was deemed likely that the Government’s Chief Whip, and also the chair of the 1922 Committee, would ‘advise you that the Parliamentary Party wish for a change [of leader] before the next election’. Whatever Macmillan decided, whether to remain or resign, Poole urged him to make his intentions known as soon as possible, so that the uncertainty and speculation could be quelled, and the ­government could regain the political initiative (Poole, 1963). Similar advice emanated from a cabinet discussion – from which Macmillan naturally absented himself – about the current political situation and speculation about the Prime Minister’s intentions. The cabinet’s view was that whether Macmillan decided to stay or to go, his decision should be announced at the annual conference the following week. There was no indication, though, that the cabinet wanted him to relinquish the leadership at this stage; if he decided to stay and contest the following year’s general election, most of the cabinet would fully support him – although there might be ‘some internal strains in the Party in the House’. However, ‘these stresses’ could be overcome if the cabinet provided a clear display of unity (Marples, 1963). Macmillan contemplated his political future, wondering whether to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, due the following year, or to resign at the beginning of 1964 in the hope that a clear successor would have been established who would then be able to choose the date of the next election themselves. However, upon further reflection, Macmillan thought that if he was to resign, it would be better to do so before the new parliamentary session due to commence at the end of October, rather than endure ‘a tiresome eight weeks from November to Christmas, with [the] Party in the House of Commons making trouble, and then resigning at Christmas … the extra two months are not worth the trouble’ (Macmillan, 1973: 491, diary entry for 16 August 1963). This though, would present two problems. First, it would be too soon for a ‘natural’ successor to have been identified, whereupon ‘I should leave the Party in 18

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complete disarray – with some for Butler, some for [Lord] Hailsham, some for [Reginald] Maudling’ (Macmillan, 1973: 499, diary entry for 7 October 1963). The second problem about retiring before the imminent parliamentary session was that the announcement would, in effect, have to be made at the Conservatives’ annual conference in early October, and this would inevitably have meant that proceedings would be almost completely overshadowed by speculation and manoeuvrings concerning Macmillan’s successor. Every public  appearance and peroration would be scrutinised for possible clues or coded  messages about either the speaker’s own possible candidature or their perceived preference about who should succeed Macmillan. The whole ­character and conduct of the conference would be negatively affected. In spite of these two objections, Macmillan deemed there to be two main arguments in favour of an autumn resignation, one of which was the decade’s growing emphasis on ‘youth … there was little respect for age’, which might prove disadvantageous given that Macmillan would be seventy in 1964. Macmillan acknowledged that Churchill had been somewhat older, but had been ‘unique’. Certainly, Macmillan did not want to be thought of as ‘just clinging on … [like] a limpet’ (Macmillan, 1973: 494, diary entry for 18 September 1963). The other factor cited by Macmillan in support of an autumn resignation was the imminent publication of Lord Denning’s official report into the Profumo scandal, in which the Secretary of State for War had pursued an affair with Christine Keeler, who was already in a relationship with a Russian diplomat at the Soviet Embassy (this being the era of the Cold War). This major misdemeanour and potential security risk was compounded by Profumo subsequently lying to Parliament over the episode, having initially denied, in the House of Commons, his relationship with Keeler. Macmillan was concerned that if he continued as Prime Minister, there was the risk that he would ‘go down in history as a Prime Minister who had been drowned by the flood of filth which had seeped up from the sewers of London’ (Macmillan, 1973: 492). On the other hand, Macmillan felt a moral and political responsibility to deal with the imminent Denning Report, which thus precluded an October resignation as Prime Minister. As the Profumo affair had occurred under his ­premiership – although he had nothing to reproach himself for – Macmillan recognised that it would be unfair to let a successor deal with the forthcoming report. The honourable course of action would be to respond to the report and then resign at the beginning of 1964. This, though, still left Macmillan with the dilemma of whether to defer announcing his resignation until January 19

Choosing party leaders

or February 1964 (not announcing his intention to resign would avoid confusion and speculation about who would succeed him, and would also prevent perceptions or allegations that he was now a lame duck prime minister) or to announce, in advance, his intention to resign at the start of the New Year, in order that a successor could be identified and appointed in readiness for January or February 1964, thereby facilitating a smooth and orderly transition (Catterall, 2011: 597, diary entry for 21 September 1963; Horne, 1989: 533–4). Yet, even while grappling with the dilemma of when to announce his resignation, Macmillan was at times inclined to remain as Conservative leader for at least another couple of years, which would have meant leading the party into the 1964 general election and, if victorious, a year or two beyond (Swinton, 1965). Part of this temptation to stay on was due to the strong support he received both from the Queen and most his cabinet colleagues, who expressed sorrow at the prospect of his resignation at this stage, but Macmillan was also vexed that ‘there is no clear successor’ (Macmillan, 1973: 497, diary entry for 6 October 1963, emphasis in original). Evidently at this stage, Macmillan (like most people) did not envisage Alec Douglas-Home as a potential successor. Macmillan finally decided, on the night of 7 October 1963, not to resign, but instead to lead the Conservative Party through to the 1964 general election and possibly beyond. Macmillan informed the cabinet of this decision the following morning, albeit after a night of extreme pain caused by a serious prostate problem which manifested itself at this time. Macmillan was obliged to leave the cabinet on a couple of occasions due to recurring painful spasms, after which doctors agreed that immediate surgery was necessary. By this time, a pain-stricken Macmillan had to concede that his diminished health now precluded him from remaining Conservative leader; the decision to resign had effectively been taken out of his hands. Even if the surgery proved successful, he acknowledged, he would need a lengthy period of convalescence, and this would prevent him from leading the party in the imminent election campaign (Horne, 1989: 542–4, diary entry for 8 October 1963; see also Blake, 1985: 290–1; Catterall, 2011: 604–5, diary entry for 9 October 1963; Shepherd, 1991: 152). Macmillan thus called for the ‘customary process of consultation’ (as noted earlier) to be instigated. In so doing, he alluded to concerns in some quarters that the consultation process invoked when he himself replaced Eden as Conservative leader (and prime minister) had been too narrow (Horne, 1989: 555; see also Shepherd, 1991: 155). Macmillan thus devised his own procedure for intra-party consultations over his successor, wherein Lord Dilhorne (the Lord Chancellor) would elicit 20

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the views of cabinet ministers, Martin Redmayne (Government Chief Whip in the House of Commons) would ascertain the preferences of Conservative MPs and junior (non-cabinet) ministers, Lord St. Aldwyn (Government Chief Whip in the House of Lords) would consult Conservative peers, and Poole (co-chair of the Conservative Party), along with Dame Margaret Shepherd (chair of the National Union) and Lord Chelmer (chair of the Executive Committee of the National Union), would consult representatives of the extra-parliamentary party (Macmillan Papers, 1963b). To forestall or pre-empt any subsequent complaints about this process, Macmillan also secured cabinet approval for it (albeit in his absence, Butler chaired the meeting), thereby ensuring that senior ministers were collectively responsible for the comprehensive consultation procedure which would yield his successor, and their imminent leader and prime minister (Macmillan, 1973: 510, diary entry for 15 October 1963). However, because of the timing of Macmillan’s sudden illness, which was just before the Conservatives’ annual conference, there was insufficient time to undertake this consultation process before the party’s delegates met in Blackpool. Consequently, when the conference was informed of Macmillan’s imminent resignation, the sundry speeches by various ministers acquired heightened significance because some of them now had a particular interest in impressing those attending; an especially good performance on the platform might significantly enhance their leadership prospects. In fact, on the eve of the conference, while he had been in hospital for his prostate operation, Macmillan had – to the understandable concern of his doctors, who wanted him to rest and recuperate – been visited by a succession of ministers and other senior Conservative figures. While they naturally wanted to convey their respects to Macmillan, and wish him a speedy recovery, he treated these well-wishing visits as an opportunity to discuss the future leadership of the Conservative Party. It was during a visit by Hailsham, who had already received reports over the summer that he was the Prime Minister’s chosen heir, that Macmillan confirmed his preference for the former to succeed him (Hailsham, 1990: 348, 350). Some Conservatives lamented that the announcement of Macmillan’s impending resignation had a deleterious impact on conference proceedings, for according to Butler, it effectively ‘turned Blackpool into a sort of electoral convention á l‘Americaine. After that there was no peace’ (Butler, 1971: 242). Hailsham’s conduct caused the most consternation, because his apparent overexuberance at being Macmillan’s imminent successor was widely interpreted 21

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as hubristic and undignified, and therefore fuelled doubts about his political acumen. As such, Hailsham’s conduct at Blackpool proved counter-productive, and fatally damaged his chances of becoming party leader, for he behaved in an ‘opportunistic manner which offended the party’s sense of propriety’ (Campbell, 1993: 143). However, Hailsham himself insisted, to Macmillan, that ‘he was not conscious of having done anything unusual’, and argued that much of the alleged controversy was due to manner in which the press and television had reported the proceedings (Macmillan Papers, 1963a). The offence this caused was compounded by the conduct of some of his supporters in the Young Conservatives, who ostentatiously distributed rosettes displaying the letter ‘Q’ (for Quintin, his Christian name), which many older Conservatives deemed distasteful, if not downright vulgar. Even Macmillan, having read and received reports of the conference proceedings, lamented that Hailsham ‘had foolishly yielded to this excitement … was in a state of hysteria … and generally behaving in a very strange way’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963b). Such was the concern over Hailsham’s conduct at conference that Kilmuir informed Macmillan that ‘members of the Cabinet … would be less and less willing to serve under Lord Hailsham’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963b) Meanwhile, Home confessed that he had been alarmed by Hailsham’s conduct at Blackpool. Initially, he had attributed Hailsham’s behaviour to ‘a man being a show-off ’, but he subsequently concluded that ‘it was because the person concerned was actually mad at the time … he had not been able to control himself.’ Moreover, Home claimed that Hailsham was widely viewed as right wing, which would mean he would ‘lose some votes on the Left’. For these reasons, Home declared that he would be willing to be considered as a leadership contender, if the Prime Minister considered him acceptable, ‘in order to prevent the Party from collapsing’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963c). Ironically, in a separate meeting later the same afternoon, Hailsham informed Macmillan that the notion of Home becoming Conservative leader ‘would be absurd’ (Macmillan, 1963d). Yet shortly after Hailsham’s bilateral with Macmillan, Edward Heath informed the Prime Minister that neither Hailsham nor Butler would be suitable as leader, whereas Home would provide the best prospect of uniting the parliamentary Conservative Party, which was otherwise at increasing risk of several internal divisions. Given Hailsham’s conduct in Blackpool and the subsequent doubts about his leadership qualities which even some of his erstwhile admirers now harboured, Macmillan no longer felt able to endorse him. Indeed, Macmillan was concerned that Hailsham’s volatility could actually be deeply damaging 22

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in the realm of international affairs, where diplomacy and patience were vital qualities: ‘there is a real sense of alarm lest under the tremendous stress of world politics, Lord Hailsham would not be able to remain sufficiently calm to handle the kind of situation which only too frequently arises’ (Macmillan, 1963e). However, Macmillan was also opposed to Butler succeeding him, for although he readily acknowledged the latter’s intellectual skills and political experience, he noted that there were many in the party who viewed him as ‘a dreary figure’ who would struggle to inspire either his parliamentary colleagues or ‘floating’ voters (Macmillan, 1963e). The Prime Minister himself also turned his attention to Home. Like many in the party, he had not previously viewed Home as a leadership contender, not because of his unsuitability per se, but because Home had not intimated any willingness to be considered, hence discussions and speculation had hitherto been about the most likely or well-known leadership contenders, namely Butler, Hailsham and Maudling. Lord Home’s expression of interest – or, at least, willingness to offer his services if called upon to do so, ‘as a compromise candidate, for unity’ (Macmillan, 1973: 515, diary entry for 18 October 1963) – suddenly meant that an alternative candidate was now available who could unite the party. One other external development of a major constitutional character also unexpectedly transformed Home into a leadership contender: the 1963 Peerage Act. Hitherto, hereditary peers could not renounce their titles and could not, therefore, become MPs. Or, if they were already an MP, they could not remain so if they subsequently inherited a title. This latter scenario occurred in 1961, when Anthony ‘Tony’ Wedgwood Benn’s father, Viscount Stansgate, died and Benn acquired the title, very much against his wishes. In so doing, he was obliged to cease being an MP, a constitutional requirement which he bitterly resented. Benn pursued a legal challenge against the rule and it was largely as a consequence of his case that the 1963 Life Peerage Act was passed, allowing hereditary peers to renounce their titles and become (or remain) commoners, thus enabling them to sit in the House of Commons as MPs (for an account of the 1963 Life Peerage Act, see Dorey and Kelso, 2011: ch. 4). Although Benn was intended to be the immediate beneficiary of the right of renunciation bestowed by the Peerage Act, two Conservative peers also greatly benefitted at the time: Hailsham and Home, for either could now renounce their title and seek election as an MP if selected as Conservative leader. It was not actually an explicit requirement for Conservative leaders to sit in the House of Commons, but it had become a convention, with Salisbury having been the 23

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last Conservative to serve as leader (and prime minister) while sitting in the House of Lords (his premiership ended in 1902). Thereafter, it was accepted that as the House of Commons was the elected chamber, it was highly desirable for reasons of both principle and practicability that Conservative leaders should be recruited from the Commons; it was not considered feasible for Conservative MPs to be led by someone who sat in the other House. In response to the unease occasioned by the conduct of Hailsham and some of his more exuberant, often younger, supporters at the party’s 1963 conference, coupled with a perception that he was on the party’s right, many other Conservative ministers and MPs followed Macmillan in transferring their support to Home once the latter had intimated his willingness to be considered as a candidate for the party leadership, buoyed by the knowledge that he could now renounce his peerage and seek election as an MP, if chosen. Indeed, when Macmillan was informed of the results of the consultation process, Home was deemed the most popular choice at all levels of the parliamentary party. In the cabinet itself, it was reported that ten ministers had opted for Home, compared to four for Maudling, three for Butler and two for Hailsham (Dilhorne, 1963). Macmillan noted the extent to which practically all of these Ministers … whether Hoggites or Butlerites or Maudlingites, agreed that if Lord Home would undertake the task of P. M., the whole Cabinet and the whole Party would cheerfully unite under him. (Macmillan, 1973: 513, diary entry for 16 October 1963)

Yet, Randolph Churchill claimed that ‘originally, there had been six adherents of Butler and six of Hailsham’ in the cabinet, although neither he, nor anyone else, cited the original survey, or indicated when it was supposed to have been conducted (Churchill, 1964: 133). It was this type of opacity which partly fuelled subsequent concerns and controversy about the veracity of the consultation process, and ultimately led to the adoption of a formal system of election for Conservative leaders, as discussed in the next chapter (see, for example, Iain  Macleod’s review in the Spectator of Randolph Churchill’s book on the 1963 leadership contest, which was published just a few weeks later, Macleod, 1964: 65–7). Incidentally, ten years later, when Macmillan published the last of his sixvolume political memoirs (the volume which addressed the 1963 leadership issue), Enoch Powell reviewed it for the Spectator, and recalled that no less than eight cabinet ministers had expressly favoured Butler, whereas Macmillan claimed that only three did so. Lest his readers thought that Powell’s memory 24

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was faulty or fading due to the ten years which had elapsed, he explained that he had recorded the figures at the time and deposited them with his bank, to be retrieved at an appropriate time or occasion in the future, or even after his death (Powell, 1973: 481). Meanwhile, In the House of Commons, Conservative MPs, along with junior ministers, expressed their first choice as follows:

Home – 87 Butler – 86 Hailsham – 65 Maudling – 48 Macleod – 12 Heath – 10

However, the MPs and non-cabinet ministers were also asked further questions, one of these being which of the candidates did they have a ‘definite aversion’ to, the answer to which was:

Home – 30 Butler – 48 Hailsham – 78 Maudling – 6 Macleod – 1 Heath – 1

It was apparent that although Butler and Hailsham enjoyed strong support in some sections of the party, with Butler having been the only one vote behind Home when Conservative parliamentarians had expressed their first choice, this was matched by strong opposition from other Conservative MPs. Indeed, in Hailsham’s case, this opposition rather exceeded the support he attracted. Meanwhile, although thirty MPs and junior ministers expressed a ‘definite aversion’ to Home becoming leader, this was clearly far fewer than those clearly opposing Butler and Hailsham. Home was also the second or third choice of a plurality of Conservative MPs and junior ministers: Home – 89 Butler – 69 25

Choosing party leaders



Hailsham – 39 Maudling – 66 Macleod – 18 Heath – 17

These figures were then interpreted as evidence that, overall, Home was the most popular candidate, even though his lead was ‘sometimes very narrow’. However, Redmayne added that: Apart from Home’s actual lead, I am impressed by the general goodwill shown towards him, even by those who give reasons in favour of other candidates, and I cannot fail to come to the conclusion that he would best be able to secure united support. (Redmayne, 1963a)

Redmayne also suggested that, with regard to Home’s lead, ‘account must be  taken of the uncertainty about his intentions’, the implication being that more MPs would probably have declared their support for him had they been sure that he was definitely a leadership contender (Redmayne, 1963a). At a meeting with Macmillan the following day, Redmayne claimed that it was ‘perfectly clear in my mind that Home would be the MP [sic] most likely to secure the widest support of the Party’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963f). Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, twenty-eight Conservative peers reportedly declared Home to be their first choice, compared to fourteen in favour of Butler, ten for Hailsham and just two for Maudling (St. Aldwyn, 1963). Only Conservative constituency party members failed to proffer support for Home, instead dividing 60:40 for Hailsham and Butler respectively, albeit ‘with strong opposition feelings to both’ (Macmillan, 1973: 514, diary entry for 17 October 1963, emphasis in original). However, as Poole pointed out to Macmillan, Conservative constituency members were unaware of Home’s potential candidature when their views were elicited: ‘Home would have been second if they had known he was running’ (it is not clear on what empirical basis Poole made this claim) (Macmillan Papers, 1963f). After a final meeting in the afternoon of 17 October 1963 with those who had formally undertaken the ‘soundings’ of the various sections of the Conservative Party, Macmillan wrote that it: ‘Looks on the advice it will be probably Home.’ When he conveyed this advice to the Queen that evening, Macmillan emphasised that throughout the Conservative Party, those whose first choice was one of the other leadership candidates invariably preferred Home as the alternative: ‘he seems to be the second choice of everybody … Everyone seems to think he 26

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has all the [requisite] qualities.’ Macmillan thus advised the Queen to invite Home to form a government, emphasising that if she did so, she ‘would be held to have chosen a man generally supported by all the various sections to whom a Minister must look for the support of his administration’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963g). According to Randolph Churchill’s account, published as a book within weeks of the contest: Never in the history of the Tory Party, or indeed of any other British political party, have such full and diligent enquiries been made in the selection of a new leader. This was no decision made in a ‘smoke-filled room’. Everyone in the party had an opportunity to make his or her views felt, and the result of the canvas had been decisive. There was no election, no precise counting of noses! It was Tory Democracy in action. (Churchill, 1964: 134)

Yet, in stark contrast to Salisbury’s eulogisation of the consultation process, Home’s selection as Conservative leader subsequently proved controversial for two reasons. The first was that, although he was viewed as a unity candidate, he nonetheless aroused strong opposition from some Conservatives who believed that he inadvertently perpetrated an out-of-touch ‘tweeds and grouse-shooting’ image of the party in an increasingly meritocratic and modern Britain. A flavour of this criticism was conveyed in a letter sent to Central Office towards the end of 1963, from an industrialist and hitherto Conservative voter who complained that the party was dominated by ‘too many Etonians’. The correspondent added that life-long Conservatives like himself were ‘sick of seeing old-looking men dressed in flat-caps and bedraggled tweeds, strolling with  a  12-bore [shot-gun]’ (quoted in Ramsden, 1980: 225). As one Conservative backbencher observed (albeit not personally endorsing the perception), ‘there is a considerable section of the middle-class vote which is jealous of the power which is still wielded by the old and aristocratic families,’ and which feels that ‘many people in the Government are there by relationship or connection. This feeling … has been accentuated by recent events’ (Glyn, 1963). A further reason why some Conservatives expressed criticism of Home’s appointment was that it was tantamount to acknowledging that ‘we were proposing to admit that, after twelve years of Tory government, no-one amongst the 363 members of the Party in the House of Commons was acceptable as Prime Minister’ (Macleod, 1964: 5). The second, and more substantive, reason why Home’s appointment proved controversial was due to the grave doubts which immediately emerged about 27

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the process by which he had been selected, as many Conservative MPs were deeply sceptical about the degree of support which he actually enjoyed in the party. Indeed, in praising the process which had yielded Home, Randolph Churchill had boasted that there had been ‘no precise counting of noses’. That, critics in the party complained, was precisely why the customary process of consultation was now in disrepute and discredited. There were deep concerns about the manner in which the choice of candidates had been presented to respondents¸ the interpretation of the responses and the weighting ascribed to the stated preferences of different individuals in the Conservative Party. One of the key criticisms was the manner in which Home’s candidature was presented when Conservatives were asked whom they would support as Macmillan’s successor and how their responses were interpreted. For example, James Prior (who had first been elected in 1959, and many years later was a cabinet minister in the first two Thatcher Governments) recalled that after he had expressed his preference for Maudling and was about to depart, the following exchange occurred: Chief Whip: ‘By the way, what about Alec if he decides to stand?’ Prior: ‘I don’t really know him, and in any case, he’s in the House of Lords.’ Chief Whip: ‘So he’s not a runner?’ Prior: ‘Well, we don’t know do we?’ Chief Whip: ‘But if he does renounce?’ Prior: ‘I suppose he would be possible.’

In recounting this, Prior (1986: 32–3) strongly suspected that ‘even at that early stage, I was put down as an Alec supporter’. Elsewhere, John Hare, the Minister of Labour, informed Macmillan that his preference would be for Hailsham, but he conceded that many in the party were strongly opposed to him, especially after his conduct at the Conservatives’ conference: ‘He is not always in control of himself when he speaks.’ Consequently, Hare confessed that he would be ‘quite satisfied if Lord Home is chosen’ (Macmillan Papers, 1963h). Meanwhile, Lloyd thought that either Butler or Hailsham would prove to be excellent Conservative leaders and prime ministers, but suggested that: if there was any question of a deep rift within the Party between the Hoggites [Hailsham supporters] and Butlerites, the unity of the Party was much more important than any other question – in which case there was a lot to be said for Lord Home. (Macmillan Papers, 1963i)

Unease was exacerbated when the Chief Whip confessed that the opinions of some people had been ascribed greater weight ‘since in every organisation, 28

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there must be people whose opinion one would more strongly rely on than others’ (Redmayne, 1963b: 1013). Indeed, when he had informed Macmillan of the views and preferences of Conservative MPs and junior ministers in midOctober, Redmayne had not only counted the support for each contender in a purely quantitative manner, but had ‘carefully studied the quality of support given’, which reaffirmed his view that Home was the best candidate in terms of breadth of support and thus potential for fostering party unity (Redmayne, 1963a). As such, although Randolph Churchill claimed that ‘everyone in the party had an opportunity to make his or her views felt,’ it subsequently became clear that some views were treated more seriously than others (Churchill, 1964: 134; see also Ramsden, 1999: 378; Renton, 2004: 310–11; Shepherd, 1991: 155–7; Thorpe, 1996: 344). The leadership selection process was further discredited by suspicions and, indeed, claims that Macmillan not only favoured Home (having initially wanted Hailsham to succeed him), but was actually determined to ensure that Home became leader. According to Heath, ‘Macmillan informed me that that he favoured Home, and asked me to use all my whipping skills to ensure that Alec became leader’ (Heath, 1998: 256). In a similar vein, Douglas Hurd recalled that ‘Macmillan was sewing it up in the background … the Chief Whip’s exercise … was designed to have the effect of playing into the hands of Alec Home’ (Hurd, 2012: 190). Macmillan’s apparent determination to ensure Home’s victory over Butler and Hailsham would clearly account for the manner in which MPs, ministers and peers were questioned about their preferences, not merely being asked who they favoured as Conservative leader, but also who they strongly opposed and who they thought would constitute a good second choice or unity candidate if the declared first choices revealed marked intra-party divisions. The loss of the 1964 general election was instrumental in effecting a change in the Conservative party’s method of selecting its leaders. Those Conservatives who had warned that Home’s age and social background would prove an electoral liability were deemed to have been vindicated, although his leadership  was certainly not the only factor contributing to the Conservatives’ defeat after thirteen years in office. Nonetheless, there was a widespread recognition that  a  new (younger, less aristocratic, more dynamic) leader, was needed – as was a new, more transparent, method of choosing Conservative leaders.

29

Choosing party leaders

Devising new leadership selection rules Due to controversy that surrounded his appointment, Home ‘came to the conclusion that, with all its disadvantages, it was necessary to adopt a system of election of a leader’ in order to ensure that throughout the process, ‘everything was seen to be open and above board’ (Home, 1976: 218). Or as Norman St. John-Stevas expressed it, ‘justice must be seen to be done, as well as done,’ something which had not been evident to many outside observers during the 1963 leadership contest. On the contrary, although no blame could be apportioned to Home himself, his selection had been perceived by critics as unfair, and the Conservative Party had been ‘badly damaged by that perception’ (St. John-Stevas, 1964). In fact, several months before Home’s selection, a Conservative MP, Humphry Berkeley, had suggested that Conservative leaders be elected by the party’s MPs, but found that ‘this proposal was treated with ridicule’ (Berkeley, 1972: 28). Undeterred, and in response to Home’s appointment, Berkeley wrote a letter to the Times, arguing that the extant method had proven to be ‘utterly inadequate’, and reiterated his call for a more formal and transparent system of choosing Conservative leaders, ‘a procedure which avoids both secret manipulation and mass participation’. What he envisaged was ‘a small electoral college, in which [Conservative] Members of Parliament predominated’ (Berkeley 1972: 30). Then, at the beginning of 1964, Berkeley wrote to Home directly, claiming that, on the basis of conversations with Conservative MPs and ministers, there was ‘a widespread view that we should not continue with the present system’ of choosing the party’s leader and as such, he urged Home to consider establishing a small committee to consider the matter and examine the options. Home replied that he ‘not averse to the idea of a private study of the methods which might be used on some future occasion’, but believed that such an inquiry should be deferred until after the general election, which had to be held that year (Berkeley, 1972: 150). After the Conservative Party’s defeat in that year’s election, which some critics partly attributed to Home’s leadership and image (compared to the younger and seemingly more dynamic Labour leader, Harold Wilson), an intraparty committee was duly established to examine options for (s)electing future Conservative leaders, although there remained reservations about democratisation, because ‘it opens the way to lobbying, log-rolling, public attitudes, and strong public canvassing of personalities which can leave wounds’ (Block, 1963). It should be emphasised that there is no evidence to suggest that this committee 30

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was appointed in direct response to Berkeley’s exhortations; it would almost certainly have been established regardless, and it is notable that Berkeley was not appointed as a member. Instead, the fifteen members (and their roles or official positions) were: Sir Alec Douglas-Home – chair Sir William Anstruther-Gray – chair of the 1922 Committee Lord Blakenham – chair of the Conservative Party Rab Butler – leadership contender in 1963, and Foreign Secretary 1963–4 Lord Carrington – Conservative leader in the House of Lords Lord Chelmer – chair of the National Executive Committee of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations Lord Dilhorne – Conservative deputy leader in the House of Lords James Douglas – senior official, Conservative Research Department Michael Fraser – deputy chair of the Conservative Party Lord Hailsham – leadership contender in 1963 Selwyn Lloyd – former chancellor, and leader of the House of Commons 1963–64 Iain Macleod – leadership contender in 1963, and shadow chancellor from October 1964 Martin Redmayne – Conservative (Government) Chief Whip until October 1964 Lord St. Aldwyn – Conservative Chief Whip in the House of Lords William Whitelaw – Conservative (Government) Chief Whip from October 1964 This naturally prompted debates and proposals concerning four aspects of potential leadership election methods: how candidates would be selected, who would be entitled to vote, which electoral system should be adopted and what margin of victory should be required in order to constitute an effective majority. Of course, many of these four aspects were closely related. Nominating leadership contenders The issue of candidate nomination actually entailed two considerations: who would be entitled to nominate leadership contenders and how much support would such nominations require. The first consideration reflected divergent views about whether Conservative MPs only should be permitted to nominate 31

Choosing party leaders

leadership candidates or whether the extra-parliamentary party should also be entitled to do so. With regard to the latter, one particular proposal was that the three sections of the party beyond the House of Commons – Conservative peers, Conservative candidates (adopted for the next general election) and the individuals serving on the Executive Committee of the National Union – would be invited to nominate MPs. Any MP who received at least 25 per cent of the nominations from any of these three sections of the Conservative Party would be placed on the shortlist presented to MPs for a vote. The 25 per cent threshold was intended to yield a reasonable choice of candidates, while preventing seemingly maverick nominations from reaching the shortlist. Of course, while this would provide the party outside Parliament with a significant input into the leadership selection process, it would also come with the risk that it might nominate candidates who would be considered unsuitable by many of the party’s MPs, notwithstanding the 25 per cent threshold. If and when those MPs then consistently ignored or rejected these nominations, and instead only voted for candidates who had been nominated by their parliamentary colleagues, the extra-parliamentary party would almost certainly feel aggrieved, and perhaps view its own participation as a sop or a sham. Ultimately, the committee agreed that the actual nomination of leadership candidates should be confined to the party’s MPs, as these were the people who were best able to judge the potential leadership qualities of their colleagues in the House of Commons. Entitlement to vote Naturally, once candidates had been nominated, the question was who would be entitled to vote. Once again, there were two general perspectives or options: either the ballot should be confined solely and wholly to Conservative MPs, but with the extra-parliamentary party entitled formally to endorse this choice (which it effectively did under the erstwhile system of leadership selection) or the extra-parliamentary party should also be granted a meaningful role in electing the leader. The argument in favour of limiting the ballot to Conservative MPs was (as with the actual nomination) that these were the people who directly knew the candidates, having worked alongside them, often for many years or even decades, and were therefore best placed to judge their personal qualities and thus their leadership potential. Conversely, if a significant electoral role was granted to Conservatives beyond the House of Commons, there was a significant risk that they might vote for a leader who was not widely or 32

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strongly supported by the party’s MPs. This would have serious implications for Conservative cohesion and unity in the House of Commons, and the party’s erstwhile supreme skill at practicing statecraft. Incidentally, the case for confining the ballot to Conservative MPs only was cogently expressed in the memorandum submitted by Berkeley (Berkeley, 1964). In spite of this concern, there was a general recognition that the party beyond the House of Commons ought to be granted some role in Conservative leadership elections. Carrington warned that ‘a good deal of ill-feeling could be caused if they [Conservative peers] had a very small representation, especially amongst those who were ex-MPs,’ while Dilhorne was equally adamant that the extra-parliamentary party ought to have an ‘effective voice’ too (CPA, 1964). There was concern that if Conservative peers and/or the wider party membership were given a significantly smaller input than MPs, this might be construed as a ‘token derogatory role’ (Douglas, 1965). A key reason advanced for granting more than merely a token role to the extra-parliamentary party was that while the leader’s most important and obvious role was leading the party in the House of Commons (and inter alia serving as prime minister when the Conservatives were in government), they also formally led the party outside the House of Commons. As such, it was readily agreed that the wider Conservative Party should be granted some input into the leadership election, although there was less agreement on what and how extensive this input should be. Among those favouring a minimalist role was St. John-Stevas, who believed that their role should indeed be a ‘token’ one, in order to ensure that Conservative MPs were the only electorate for the party’s leader. Extending the role to party members beyond the House of Commons, he warned, ‘would … raise grave constitutional difficulties’ (St. John-Stevas, 1964). Various options were mooted to address this conundrum, one of which was that the different sections of the Conservative Party would be allocated a weighted vote, either collectively or individually, but ensuring that the party’s MPs were granted the largest weighting. Needless to say, various weightings were suggested, one of which was that Conservative MPs should hold 51 per cent, the party’s peers 31 per cent, adopted candidates 13 per cent, and the National Union’s Executive Committee the remaining 5 per cent. This would grant the party beyond the House of Commons a considerable input into choosing a leader, while ensuring that the largest role (just over half) remained with Conservative MPs. An alternative model suggested that Conservative MPs could be allocated three votes each, with Conservative peers each having 33

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two votes, and the party’s candidates and members of the National Union’s Executive Committee casting one vote each. At the time, the latter option would have granted Conservative MPs an overall majority of the total votes cast, but there was always a risk that if the party had fewer MPs elected in a subsequent general election, then the total votes cast by the other three groups might outweigh those of the party in the House of Commons. Furthermore, such outweighing was also possible if the votes of Conservative MPs were relatively evenly divided between two candidates, whereas the other sections of the party were strongly in favour of one of those candidates. Perhaps not surprisingly, these variants of an electoral college were rejected, it being acknowledged that they risked rendering Conservative leadership elections too complex or convoluted (Douglas, 1963a). After all, so much of the intra-party discontent over Home’s appointment derived from the lack of clarity and transparency surrounding the process from which he emerged as leader. Electoral system Once it had been decided that the formal vote should be confined to Conservative MPs only, with the extra-parliamentary permitted to express its views and preferences informally via local Conservative MPs or the National Executive of the National Union, the question remained of what precise method of election should be adopted. Initially, attention was focused on the Single Transferable Vote (STV), for this would both enable the party’s MPs to be presented with a relatively wide choice of candidates, and ensure that the winning candidate had a clear majority as a consequence of the additional votes redistributed from the less popular candidates. A further advantage attributed to this method of election was that it would only require one ballot, as voters ranked their preferences at the same time, whereas other methods of election might require multiple ballots over several days until one of the candidates attained a majority or/and new candidates were permitted to enter the contest. This would be a particularly pertinent consideration when the Conservatives were in government and it was vital to expedite the election of a new leader (and prime minister). However, after due deliberation, it was acknowledged that adopting the STV system for Conservative leadership contests would have three disadvantages. The first and simplest was that adopting a form of proportional representation (PR) for Conservative leadership contests might well lead to 34

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demands for PR to be adopted for other types of elections, such as general elections. Given the Conservative Party’s strong and consistent commitment to the simple plurality (first-past-the-post) electoral system for parliamentary elections, it would be incongruous to adopt a version of PR for electing its leaders. The second objection to adopting STV was that, hypothetically at least, a candidate who failed to attract enough first-choice votes, and was thus eliminated, might still have been the preferred alternative of those voting for the two leading candidates. As Douglas (1965) explained, if three candidates were standing before 100 voters, with A receiving thirty-seven votes, B attracting thirty-three and C winning thirty, then C would be eliminated, and the second preference votes on their ballot paper distributed to A and B. However, if A and B were close rivals reflecting clear divisions in the party, then the supporters of A might prefer C to be leader rather than B, just as the supporters of B might also prefer C rather than A. In other words, C might have been the second-preference of the seventy voters who voted for A and B. This, of course, highlighted a constant dilemma of democracy, namely how to secure a balance between strength of support and breadth. This led to the third objection to STV, namely that it militated against compromise or unity candidates. Of course, such candidates were perfectly free to stand at the outset, but in practice, such candidates are more likely to be identified if an initial vote has: a) failed to deliver a clear winner and b) support for the two leading candidates is relatively equal and strongly divided. As the above example illustrated, supporters of candidate A might also be bitterly opposed to B, and vice versa, such that whichever of them wins a leadership contest will lack the support of those MPs who supported the defeated candidate. This, of course, would make subsequent intra-party divisions more likely or more explicit, and thus pose serious problems for the new leader in terms of successful party management and statecraft. It was therefore agreed that a much simpler option should be adopted, whereby each Conservative MP cast a vote, and if a candidate received a sufficient margin of victory, then s/he would be declared the duly elected Conservative leader. If the requisite margin of victory was not achieved, then subsequent ballots would be held, but the criteria for victory would vary in each case. Apart from its simplicity and transparency, one further advantage of this particular system was that if no candidate attained a sufficient majority in the first ballot, then other candidates could stand in the second ballot. This reflected recognition that the leading candidates in the first ballot were relatively evenly 35

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matched in terms of support or/and were supported by distinct blocs within the party, which might reflect potential or actual divisions, such that if either contender narrowly won the second ballot, their victory might grievously weaken party unity. A second ballot would allow other candidates to step forward, one of whom might present themselves or be perceived as a compromise or unity candidate. Such a candidate would be much more likely to meet Stark’s criterion of acceptability to the party’s MPs, and thereby serve as a unifying factor, which, in turn would significantly enhance the second leadership criterion, namely electability. Margin of victory Having agreed that the electorate for future Conservative leadership contests should be the party’s MPs only, it was then necessary to specify what would constitute a sufficient margin of victory. There was concern that, in a contest comprising just two candidates, a simple majority might enable one of those candidates to win by securing just one vote more, or perhaps, in percentage terms, 50.1 per cent of votes to 49.9 per cent. This, though, could prove damaging to unity and cohesion if the two candidates represented distinct blocs among the party’s MPs, such that the victorious candidate was unacceptable to a large number of MPs, or what were termed ‘pockets of radical opposition’ among ‘the remainder of the Party in the Commons (the fifty per cent minus who did not vote for the candidate)’ (Douglas, 1963b). Of course, it might be argued that the MPs who supported the defeated candidate should respect the majority verdict by rallying behind the winner, but this would, perhaps, be naive, particularly if the two candidates represented distinct ideological visions or markedly different stances on a major policy issue facing the party (and inter alia the nation). In such cases, the veracity of the winning candidate’s mandate would almost certainly be subject to dispute, their political authority questioned and thus their ability to unite the party seriously weakened. After all, in 1963, the consultation process had revealed the extent to which the supporters of a particular candidate also expressed strong opposition to another, sometimes to the point of deeming them unacceptable. Indeed, this had been a major reason why Home emerged as the unity candidate, even though Macleod and Powell had refused to serve under Home back in 1963. Clearly, therefore, a margin of victory rather greater than 50 per cent plus one was needed to ensure that the elected leader had genuinely extensive and widespread support among Conservative MPs. Indeed, it was suggested that: 36

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‘Ideally, the chosen candidate should receive such overwhelming support as to preclude the emergence of factions of determined opposition to his [sic] leadership’ (Douglas, 1963c). The committee’s recommendations When the committee’s report was published in February 1965, it decreed that subsequent Conservative leaders would be chosen according to the following rules and procedures (Conservative Central Office, 1965): • Any Conservative MP wishing to put themselves forward as a candidate would need to be nominated by two of their parliamentary colleagues, although the names of the proposer and seconder would not be made public. • The election would then be conducted via a secret ballot of Conservative MPs, each of whom would cast one vote. Members of the extra-­parliamentary party would be allowed to express their views and preferences, but these would not be binding on MPs, who were, as Edmund Burke had insisted (in his 3 November 1774 speech to voters in Bristol), representatives, not delegates (cited in Bromwich, 2000: 55). However, the elected leader would still be subject to formal confirmation at a special meeting of the wider party. • If a candidate won both an overall majority of votes cast and fifteen 15 per cent more than the second-placed candidate, they would be declared the winner and thus the new party leader, subject to formal confirmation by a special meeting of the wider Conservative Party. • If none of the candidates met these two criteria, then a second ballot would be held within four working days. This time, new candidates could present themselves, if they too could secure a proposer and seconder. In a second ballot, an overall majority would be sufficient to secure election to the party leadership; the 15 per cent rule would not apply. • If no candidate received an overall majority, then a third ballot would be held, comprising the three candidates who obtained the most votes in the second ballot. Each Conservative MP would then vote by ranking these candidates in order of preference. The candidate receiving the lowest number of first-preference votes would be eliminated, and the second-preference votes cast by their supporters would be allocated accordingly. This would ensure that one of the two remaining contenders received an overall majority and would duly become leader. 37

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This method was deemed to be the simplest of the various options, certainly with regard to confining the vote to Conservative MPs. It reflected the concern raised in the committee’s deliberations that if peers or/and party members were granted a significant vote, there was the risk that they might vote for a leader who was not supported by Conservative MPs, although the latter would then be obliged to work with such a leader on a daily basis (as many Labour MPs ‘led’ by Corbyn would doubtless attest). It was conceded, though, that the extra-­ parliamentary party should be able to convey its views either through local MPs or by communicating them directly to the chair of the National Union (Chelmer, 1965; du Cann 1965). However, this rather assumed that Conservative MPs would take heed of the views and preferences of the grassroots membership when voting for a new leader, but as the party’s parliamentarians saw themselves as representatives exercising their own judgement, not delegates mandated to vote in a particular way, the new system of leadership selection still left some extra-parliamentary members unhappy; particularly as they had no say whatsoever in the removal of an incumbent leader. Conclusion Until the 1960s, the selection of a new Conservative leader without the direct or active involvement of the party’s MPs was not generally viewed as problematic. Vesting such an important decision in the hands of a small coterie of the party’s most senior parliamentarians and elder statesmen reflected the Conservatives’ philosophical veneration of authority, deference, hierarchy and wisdom acquired through age and experience. It was unashamedly elitist, but it had the advantage of minimising the damaging public divisions which were likely to manifest themselves if a more formal system of direct elections was adopted. Not only would the candidates and contenders almost certainly be (or at least feel) obliged to engage in campaigns to elicit support from their parliamentary colleagues, with all the public arguments and disagreements that this might reveal, the eventual result would also highlight the different levels of support enjoyed by each candidate. This would not be too problematic if a candidate won by an emphatic margin, but if a leader was elected on the basis of a very narrow victory, then their legitimacy and political capital might well be weakened, because it would be clear just how many MPs did not vote for them in the leadership contest. There were only two ways of avoiding such a scenario. One was only to 38

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announce whom the ultimate victor was in a party leadership election contest, rather than declaring the number of votes won by each candidate. However, this risked complaints about lack of transparency and suspicion about just how popular the new leader really was, especially if large numbers of prominent Conservative parliamentarians subsequently declared that they had not voted for the new leader. The other way of avoiding the divisions, suspicions and recriminations which were likely to arise from a formal intra-party leadership election was simply not to hold such contests in the first place, but instead to delegate the task of choosing a leader to the party’s most senior and respected figures. It was the latter approach that the Conservative Party adopted for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. That it worked well most of the time owed at least as much to serendipity as it did to the skills or wisdom of the magic circle, because on four occasions, there was a clearly acknowledged and acceptable heir apparent to the resigning leader: Balfour in 1902, Austen Chamberlain in 1921, Neville Chamberlain in 1937 and Eden in 1955. Meanwhile, in two other instances where there were two clear contenders, either they both graciously withdrew to allow a third unity candidate to be chosen or one of them declined to pursue their candidature, thus allowing the other contender to acquire the leadership without the need for a conscious and possibly contentious choice being made: Austen Chamberlain and Walter Long withdrew in 1911 to allow Bonar Law to become the unity candidate, while in 1940 Halifax was so reluctant to become Conservative leader and prime minister of the wartime Coalition (in spite of being widely viewed as the favourite) that Churchill was chosen, albeit with Neville Chamberlain remaining as Conservative leader for a few more months. The other occasion where there were only two contenders was in 1957, when Butler and Macmillan were the two acknowledged rivals to succeed Eden. However, a potentially divisive contest was averted when it became evident that Macmillan enjoyed the overwhelming support of his cabinet colleagues and much of the parliamentary Conservative Party, too. Nonetheless, Macmillan’s elevation to the leadership was not entirely without criticism over the manner of the consultative process, so when he himself was obliged to resign on health grounds in 1963, he resolved that his successor would be chosen on the basis of a wider and more systematic consultation among all levels of the Conservative Party. However, far from eradicating criticism, the manner in which the consultation was conducted aroused considerable controversy and a strong suspicion 39

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that it had been rigged to ensure that Home, a unity candidate favoured by Macmillan, actually won. Indeed, it transpired that MPs, peers and members of the extra-parliamentary party had not simply been asked who they thought should be the next Conservative leader, but how they ranked or rated the other candidates and who they thought would not be acceptable. It was also subsequently conceded that the views and preferences of some Conservative parliamentarians were ascribed greater weight than others. As a consequence, the magic circle was grievously discredited, and the Conservative Party was obliged to acknowledge that a new method of choosing its leaders was required, entailing some form of election. The day that Pretyman had hoped would never arrive was imminent.

40

2

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

Having adopted a system whereby Conservative leaders would subsequently be elected by a secret ballot of the party’s MPs, pressure for an immediate leadership election almost inevitably increased, particularly in view of the controversy which had surrounded Home’s appointment in 1963 and the doubts raised by some former ministers about the accuracy or reliability of the figures cited as evidence of support for him. The subsequent election of Heath heralded a new era for the Conservatives, not solely in terms of intra-party democracy, but because the next three leaders emanated from relatively humble social backgrounds. The adoption of secret ballots for the election of Conservative leaders both reflected and reinforced the decline, in numbers and influence, of Old Etonians and patrician aristocrats, as the parliamentary party steadily became more meritocratic in terms of the socio-educational and occupational backgrounds of its MPs. This yielded two significant consequences. First, the ideological outlook of the party gradually changed, more particularly from the 1980s onwards, with  the older, One Nation paternalists and their associated ethos of noblesse oblige steadily replaced by a younger cohort of Conservative MPs who increasingly shared many of the views and values of Thatcher: the party became increasingly Thatcherite – even more so after her resignation. It also, pari passu, became increasingly Eurosceptic, in accordance with the nationalistic and populist discourse of Thatcherism, and its rhetorical appeals to national identity, independence and traditions against the supposedly alien ‘Other’. Second, the newer, more middle-class or petit-bourgeois Conservative MPs were much less deferential to the party establishment, and were thus much more willing to criticise and challenge leaders who were judged either to have become an electoral liability or to be veering from the part of ‘true Conservatism’ (which became defined as Thatcherism). Home was replaced partly as a consequence 41

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of the party’s 1964 election defeat under his leadership, while Heath was also replaced following two (very narrow) defeats in 1974. Thatcher herself was replaced in November 1990, not because she had lost a general election, but partly because she was thought to be likely to lead the party to defeat in the next (1992) general election. This is because many Conservative MPs thought she had become an electoral liability due to some of her more radical policies, her increasingly strident tone towards Europe and her high-profile clashes with senior colleagues, some of whom resigned as a consequence. Her successor, John Major, was subject to constant criticism for allegedly not being sufficiently Thatcherite or anti-European. He received absolutely no deference from his critics on the right of the Conservative Party. None of this is to claim that pre-1965 Conservative leaders were never criticised, either over specific policies or electoral performances, but such criticisms were generally articulated with much more discretion and usually in private, perhaps over a gin-and-tonic in a members-only gentleman’s club or via a visit from the men in grey suits to convey to the leader the unease of the party’s backbenchers. Moreover, such concerns were generally much less attributable to or derived from ideological stances, certainly not in comparison to leadership criticisms and challenges from the 1970s onwards. Furthermore, the adoption of a system of direct election of Conservative leaders, coupled with the 1975 rule change which provided for annual ­(re-)­elections, meant that criticisms of the incumbent also often came with the distinct possibility of a challenge being instigated against them by one of their critics, perhaps a colleague who represented a different ideological section of the party or who supported a fundamentally different approach (or change) to a major policy. Instead of Conservative MPs feeling obliged – and often happy – to support the party leader, due in large part to deference and a sense of loyalty, the introduction of ballots resulted in a perception that Conservative leaders ought to somehow show greater deference and respect to the MPs who voted for them in the first place. The flow of authority and accountability was partly reversed. Moreover, when Conservative leadership elections were conducted between 1965 and 1997, the criteria of acceptability and unity were increasingly interpreted in a particular way; they became imbued with a specific meaning. Leadership candidates were increasingly judged in terms of their ideological stance, or their attitude towards Europe. As each successive intake of Conservative MPs from the 1980s onwards became more right wing and Eurosceptic than the previous cohort, and the parliamentary party thus became increasingly Thatcherite  – a process which continued unabated after her resignation – the judgement 42

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

about whether a particular leadership candidate was acceptable or capable of unifying the party often meant, in effect, was s/he sufficiently Thatcherite or Eurosceptic? This meant that a One Nation or pro-European leadership candidate was increasingly viewed as unacceptable to a growing number of Conservative MPs, and as being likely to divide the party – even when such a candidate was more likely to be electable in terms of public popularity. Home to Heath It had been widely envisaged that Home would tender his resignation when the new leadership contest rules were published, but he indicated his intention to remain as leader for the foreseeable future. Yet, during the first half of 1965, opposition to his continued leadership steadily increased in the party. Of course, some Conservative MPs had resented the manner of his selection from the outset, and/or believed that his age and social background made the party look outdated or even backward-looking in a decade supposedly characterised by equality of opportunity, meritocracy and social mobility ostensibly promoted by the significant expansion of comprehensive schools and higher education. However, these critics were joined by more Conservative MPs following the party’s 1964 general election defeat, which ended its thirteen consecutive years in office, and seemed to prove conclusively, that whatever his other qualities, he was an electoral liability. A decade or two earlier, he might well have been lauded as ‘a good egg’, and ‘the right sort of chap’, but in the mid-1960s, he seemed to personify the Old Etonian, aristocratic, grouse-moor image which was no longer politically advantageous or socially representative in a ­supposedly meritocratic Britain. Even the Conservative Party itself was gradually beginning to change in terms of its social composition, as a growing number of its MPs emanated from less privileged socio-educational backgrounds. From the mid-1960s onwards, the number of Conservative MPs who had been educated at Eton, for example, steadily declined and were replaced by those who had attended a grammar school: whereas 22 per cent of Conservative MPs in 1964 had once attended Eton, only 12.5 per cent of the 1983 intake had done so, and this figure fell to 6 per cent for new Conservative MPs. There was also, during subsequent decades, a gradual decline in the proportion of Oxbridge graduates in the parliamentary Conservative Party, as more of the party’s MPs emanated from other universities: between 1964 and 1983, the proportion of Conservative MPs who were Oxbridge graduates declined from 56.3 per cent to 35 per cent. Ironically, 43

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during the same period, the Labour Party witnessed an increase in the number of its MPs who were Oxbridge-educated. In effect, while the Labour Party in the House of Commons was becoming more middle class by virtue of being less proletarian, the Conservative Party was becoming more middle class as a consequence of being less aristocratic. Or as Julian Critchley tartly observed, the knights of the shires were steadily replaced by the knights of the suburbs, estate owners superseded by estate agents and the land-owner shooting grouse on the moor had been supplanted by a car-dealer on the Kingston by-pass (Critchley, 1994: 195; Critchley, 1992: 58). By mid-July 1965, though, with the growing intra-party opposition to his leadership reflected and reinforced by press speculation about his future (see, for example, Rees-Mogg, 1965), Home informed the 1922 committee of his resignation on 22 July, in order both to end the constant speculation and to enable a new leader to become firmly established in readiness for an imminent general election: Labour’s narrow 1964 majority had been whittled away due to by-election defeats to the extent that another general election, early in the following year, was virtually inevitable (Prime Minister Wilson having already confirmed that there would be no election in 1965). While he was clearly acting in the interests of the Conservative Party, Home also confessed that ‘I didn’t see why, after doing Commonwealth and Foreign Secretary, and Prime Minister, I should … have to fight for the position as leader of the Opposition’ (quoted in Young, 1970: 232). This time, there were three contenders – Heath, Maudling and Enoch Powell  – while three of the other senior Conservative parliamentarians who had been contenders in the 1963 leadership contest – Butler, Hailsham and Macleod – declined to stand two years later. Heath’s biographer notes that if Macleod had stood as a candidate in the 1965 leadership contest, ‘he might have been a formidable rival’, not least because he ‘had more fire in his belly than Maudling’ (Campbell, 1993: 147). With Powell clearly viewed as the candidate of the Conservative right – but also as something of a political maverick – and Maudling generally associated with the One Nation tradition, ‘Heath’s support was more widely based’ (Prior, 1986: 37), thereby rendering him the de facto unity candidate who would be most acceptable to many Conservative MPs. In the 1963 leadership contest, Heath had attracted nugatory support, in spite of the respect and experience acquired while the Chief Whip in the late 1950s followed by his early 1960s role in conducting negotiations during Britain’s first (albeit unsuccessful) application to join the Common Market (EEC). However, just two years later, he had acquired much greater popularity 44

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

among Conservative MPs and ministers, primarily due to his role as shadow chancellor in Home’s frontbench team. This enabled Heath to win plaudits from many Conservative MPs for his skill in attacking the tax increases imposed via the newly elected Labour Government’s (Budget) Finance Bill in November 1964 and then again during the parliamentary debates concerning Labour’s second budget, in April 1965 (Heath, 1998: 268; Walker, 1991: 42). These plaudits were readily translated into direct support when the ballot to elect Home’s successor was held, by which time, some Conservatives who had previously been sceptical about Heath, such as Peter Walker, had acquired great admiration for him and discerned leadership qualities which they had not previously recognised (Campbell, 1993: 174; Laing, 1972: 165). As BBC’s Panorama documentary on the 1965 leadership contest observed: ‘Thrustful, pugnacious, aggressive, Heath is admired for his skill as the Chief Whip, brilliance as the Common Market negotiator and toughness in opposition. Ted is the man for those Conservatives who think the party needs “a tiger in its tank”’ (the phrase ‘put a tiger in your tank’ was an advertising slogan used by the Esso petrol company to signify the improved performance that a car would supposedly accrue from using its fuel). Maudling, meanwhile, was deemed to be the safe pair of hands ‘for those Conservatives who want the driver at the wheel to be steady, sound and shrewd’ (BBC, 1965). These different qualities were clearly reflected in their respective leadership campaigns, for whereas Maudling’s was deemed to be ‘loose, easy-going and amateurish’, Heath’s was described as ‘energetic, tightly-organised, and thoroughly professional’ (Campbell, 1993: 178; see also, Walker, 1991: 46; Whitelaw, 1989: 55). The disciplined and clearly focused conduct of Heath’s campaign owed much his appointed campaign manager, Walker, whereas Maudling’s was more laid-back and ‘haphazard’, not merely reflecting the latter’s personality and political style, but also deriving from a deliberate decision ‘to refrain from any sort of high-pressure canvassing which, he believed would merely irritate experienced politicians who were quite capable of making up their own minds’. In itself, this was a commendable and courteous stance to adopt, but in Maudling’s case it merely reinforced a reputation for ‘amiable indolence’ and fuelled the impression that his name was actually ‘a combination of “dawdling” and “muddle”’. It could also be interpreted as a reflection of complacency, which was arguably ‘the real fault of Maudling’s campaign’ (Campbell, 1993: 179). Certainly, Philip Goodhart, a member of Maudling’s team, subsequently confessed that it had been ‘the worst organised leadership campaign in Conservative history: a total shambles’ (quoted in Baston, 2004: 256). 45

Choosing party leaders

Had Heath and Maudling represented distinct ideological approaches, then the dynamics of the actual contest and their different personal styles might have been less important, because most support would have been proffered primarily on the basis of each candidate’s ideology and their programme or vision for the future of the Conservative Party and, indeed, Britain. Yet apart from Powell’s candidature as the representative of the Right given his strong advocacy of free-market principles and policies, there was little substantive programmatic difference between Heath and Maudling – save for Heath’s voguish allusions to ‘modernisation’ – and as such, the choice for most Conservatives was about perceived leadership competence and potential electoral appeal. The result of the 1965 Conservative leadership contest was: Edward Heath – 150 votes Reginald Maudling – 133 votes Enoch Powell – 15 votes This did not meet the 15 per cent rule requirements for victory in the first ballot, which meant that Maudling could have insisted on a second ballot, in which a simple majority would have sufficed. Instead, he graciously conceded defeat, thereby enabling Heath to become the Conservative Party’s first directly elected leader. He had also, incidentally, not attended Eton as a school-boy, but a grammar school in Kent. It subsequently transpired that Heath had been supported by approximately 75 per cent of the shadow cabinet, including Home himself, Chief Whip Willie Whitelaw and Keith Joseph, who also persuaded Thatcher to support Heath after she had initially intended to vote for Maudling. A major fillip for Heath was the endorsement offered by Macleod, who, having decided not to stand as a leadership candidate himself on this occasion, exhorted his supporters to vote for Heath, which the vast majority of them duly did. This support proved crucial, because ‘If Macleod had stood he would not have won: the best estimate is that he would have received forty-five votes … he would have deprived Heath of such vital support that victory would in all probability have gone to Maudling’ (Hutchinson, 1970: 99; see also Campbell, 1993: 181). In many respects, Heath’s victory was due to his apparent dynamism and energy – ironic given that he subsequently lost support partly due to his perceived stilted manner and wooden performance – which, as noted above, contrasted  starkly with Maudling’s apparently lacklustre or lackadaisical approach. Heath’s seeming sense of purpose and enthusiasm appealed to many 46

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

Conservative MPs who might otherwise have been attracted by Maudling’s previous ministerial experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Macmillan’s and Home’s premierships. Yet, the loss of the 1964 election was deemed in some quarters of the Conservative Party to have been partly attributable to Maudling’s failure to deliver more tangible economic results during his time at the Treasury. Or as Heath’s biographer expressed it, Maudling was ultimately held ‘responsible for not delivering the economic keys to unlock the drawers to electoral success’ (Campbell, 1993: 166). However, quite apart from the overly relaxed manner of Maudling’s 1965 campaign, two further factors concerning Maudling’s roles after the 1964 general election defeat inadvertently weakened his leadership credentials and boosted Heath’s popularity. The first was that after a couple of years at the Treasury, Maudling sought a different challenge and as a consequence became shadow foreign secretary. While this desire to broaden his policy expertise was in itself highly commendable (although he had once served as Colonial Secretary), it also meant that he unwittingly removed himself from many debates about domestic policies and the future programmatic direction of the Conservative Party, which would more readily have maintained his public profile. By contrast, Heath’s appointment as shadow chancellor placed him at the heart of debates and developments concerning economic policy, both in British politics in general and in the Conservative Party in particular. This was to give Heath a slight advantage in the leadership contest, in terms of proximity and relevance to, or direct involvement in, key policy debates pertaining to economic and industrial affairs, and how the party should reposition or renew itself. The second factor which arguably weakened Maudling’s leadership prospects slightly was that after the 1964 election defeat, he had taken on no less than thirteen directorships, whereas Heath accepted just one. Maudling could claim that these extra-parliamentary roles imbued him with direct experience of the real world and a deeper insight into the needs of the business community on which wealth creation ultimately depended, but critics could argue that it implied a less than whole-hearted commitment to parliamentary politics; time spent in ‘the City’ was time not spent in the House of Commons (although, to be fair, Maudling was certainly not the only Conservative to hold multiple directorships and/or pursue other extra-parliamentary roles). This, in turn, meant less time and fewer opportunities for cultivating political friendships and alliances among fellow Conservative MPs, which might prove costly when ­seeking their support in the next party leadership contest. 47

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Revised leadership contest rules In a February 1974 general election, the Conservatives emerged as the largest party in terms of parliamentary seats, but without an overall majority. When the Liberal Party spurned Heath’s attempts to form a coalition, the Labour Party formed a minority government instead (on the coalition initiative, see Dorey, 2008–09). A second general election was held in October that year, when Labour hoped to secure a parliamentary majority, which it achieved, but only by three seats. From the Conservative Party’s perspective, this meant that Heath had failed to lead them to victory in three out of the four general elections held during his leadership. True, he could hardly have been deemed culpable for the party’s defeat in 1966, having only been leader for eight months, but many Conservative MPs were much less forgiving of Heath for twice failing to lead them to victory in the 1974 elections. This resentment was compounded by two other factors. First, there was the context and rationale of the February 1974 election. In response to a national strike by Britain’s coal miners, who were seeking a pay rise greatly in excess of the government’s statutory pay limit, Heath decided to call a general election, in which the de facto question would be of ‘who governs Britain’ – democratically elected governments or militant trade unions. Heath envisaged that the voters would emphatically re-elect the Conservative government and thereupon grant him a mandate to stand firm against the miners. However, many Conservative MPs had considered this election to have been wholly unnecessary and a gross error of judgment by Heath. The government already had a comfortable parliamentary majority and did not need to call a general election until the following year. Nor did it require a mandate for resisting the miners’ pay claim, and as such, Enoch Powell denounced the February 1974 election as ‘fraudulent’ and ‘an act of gross irresponsibility’ (Butler and Kavanagh, 1974: 66). That the party then failed to win a majority in this election merely exacerbated the resentment which some Conservative MPs felt towards Heath. The second reason why many Conservative MPs were unforgiving of Heath vis-à-vis the outcomes of the 1974 general elections was that he had alienated some of them during his premiership due to his apparently haughty personal manner and autocratic style of leadership. He was renowned for being shy and gauche to the extent that even some of those who nonetheless admired or respected him lamented that Heath ‘was all too often solitary, gruff, angular, and strangely inarticulate’ (Patten, 2018: 232), such that in informal social 48

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

settings, ‘Ted never had any small talk’ (Renton, 2004: 296). As a consequence, during his premiership, many of his colleagues considered Heath to be ‘brusque and rude’ and increasingly ‘rigid and authoritarian’ (Fisher, 1977: 132–3; see also Behrens, 1980: 31–2). Certainly, there was increasing frustration within the parliamentary Conservative Party at Heath’s failure to communicate with backbenchers (Norton, 1978: 228–30). One of the party’s MPs referred to a perception that Heath ‘did not understand the need to be nice to people’ (Fisher, 1977: 133). One of his biographers claims his attitude and approach reflected Heath’s former role as chief whip, the experience of which ‘gave him an essentially disciplinary view of party management … he took it for granted that backbenchers would always ultimately do what the whips told them, as they had done in his day’ (Campbell, 1993: 103). However, by the 1970s, as Norton’s extensive studies of backbench dissent indicate (Norton 1978), Conservative MPs were increasingly willing to defy the leadership and party whips on various policy issues, as evinced by the growing incidence of cross-voting (voting against their own party/government) and abstentions in parliamentary divisions. While such behaviour was itself partly a reaction against Heath’s autocratic style of leadership, it also reflected a more general decline in deference in British society since the early 1960s, and a greater willingness to question authority. Within the Conservative Party, this can also be partly attributed to the socioeducational changes cited earlier, for the gradual diminution of aristocrats and Old Etonians on the party’s backbenches also resulted in a discernible decline in deference towards the parliamentary leadership, more particularly when the leaders were judged either to be disregarding the views and policy preferences of the party’s MPs or were deemed an electoral liability. This is not to say that Conservative MPs had not previously been critical of their leaders, but hitherto criticisms had usually been expressed privately or in-house and perhaps conveyed to the leader by the Chief Whip or via the 1922 committee. From the 1960s onwards, however, as more Conservative MPs originated from less privileged backgrounds, there was less reticence about openly criticising party leaders who were judged to be failing – however ‘failure’ was defined or interpreted. Clearly, leading the party to electoral victory was the key criterion of success, but even then there was stronger and more visible pressure on the victorious leader to pursue the right policies, and a greater willingness to criticise them if the party’s poll ratings or electoral prospects declined. 49

Choosing party leaders

What reinforced this decline in deference within the parliamentary Conservative Party from the mid-1960s was the very fact that its leaders were now directly elected by the party’s MPs. While a Conservative prime minister could tell their MPs that they were in government partly as a consequence of his/her skilful or successful leadership, which therefore deserved their gratitude and loyalty, post-1965 Conservative MPs could remind their leader that it was they who had elected him/her to lead the party in the first place: had the magic circle still operated, s/he might not have been appointed Conservative leader. Consequently, the adoption of direct elections to choose Conservative leaders, with each MP having one vote in a secret ballot, further changed the relationship between the leader and their party, because what the MPs giveth, they could taketh away. Another source of resentment towards Heath per se was his apparent failure to deploy prime ministerial patronage sufficiently, in terms of rewarding loyalty or competence with promotion (Norton, 1978: 230–44). This seemingly left some Conservative MPs feeling frustrated and resentful towards Heath for failing to recognise and reward their apparent talents, and instead leave them (and their political careers) languishing on the backbenches. Of course, for some aggrieved Conservative MPs, this failure to recognise and reward their loyalty and talents was itself indicative of Heath’s apparent lack of people skills or emotional intelligence: ‘A combination of this lack of social grace an illiberal approach to promotion from the ranks had encouraged a reputation for being cool and aloof’ (Wapshott and Brock, 1983: 117). Indeed, one loyal Heathite later suggested that if he had dispensed more honours during his premiership and recommended a greater number of long-serving Conservative parliamentarians for knighthoods, ‘he might well have stayed on as leader’ (Walker, 1991: 129). However, the 1965 leadership rules under which Heath had been elected as Conservative leader in the first place only allowed for a contest when a vacancy occurred due to the death or resignation of the incumbent. Heath, though, evinced no willingness to resign in 1974 and could point to the narrowness of the two election results as a clear indication that victory was attainable next time, provided that the party held its nerve and waited for the Labour government to implode. For his Conservative critics though, this stance was interpreted as further evidence of his apparent arrogance. Moreover, there was a growing feeling in the parliamentary party that the prospect of a Conservative victory in the next general election would be significantly enhanced under a new leader. Thus it was that following the October 1974 election defeat, the executive of the 1922 committee requested, as a matter of urgency, an examination of the 50

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(1965) leadership contest rules. Aware that there was widespread ­dissatisfaction – even among some of his own supporters – in the parliamentary party with the existing machinery, Heath responded positively to this request by establishing a twelve-member intra-party committee, chaired by Home. This held five meetings between 22 November and 10 December 1974, as a consequence of which, three significant revisions to the 1965 leadership contest rules were proposed (CPA, 1974): • An annual leadership election if a nominated challenger (or challengers) presented themselves, within twenty-eight days of the start of the new parliamentary session. If there were no such challenger(s), then the incumbent leader would be deemed re-elected unopposed, without the need to conduct a ballot. • The 15 per cent rule’s requirements for victory should be based on all of those eligible to vote, not just those who actually voted. • The extra-parliamentary Conservative Party should be granted greater input, with constituency parties expected to convey their views to their Conservative MP, or in the absence of such an MP, to the Executive Committee of the National Union. The first two changes seemed to render the position of an incumbent Conservative leader slightly less secure. Hitherto, a contest was only conducted when the extant leader died or resigned, but now the leader could, in principle, face a challenge every year, provided that it was within the specified timeframe. This also meant that summers and early autumn (in years when the new parliamentary session commenced in November) were now more likely to have media speculation about whether there would be a leadership challenge, and if it was deemed likely, then who the most probable challenger(s) would be. This also meant that the speeches or other public comments of perceived rivals or potential contenders would be subject to intense scrutiny, seeking clues or coded messages about any potential intentions. Meanwhile, the new stipulation that a leader would require a majority of all Conservative MPs, rather than only those who actually voted, raised the bar somewhat. Hitherto, if fifty MPs abstained, it did not matter, because the result was determined on the basis of those MPs who actually voted. Now, however, those fifty abstentions would, in effect, constitute fifty votes which the leader or a challenger had failed to win, which thus made it more difficult to meet the conditions of the 15 per cent rule in the first ballot. 51

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With regard to the third rule change, although under the previous system adopted in 1965, constituency parties had been entitled to express their views of the candidates, the revised rules sought to formalise the role of the extraparliamentary party. This revision, however, fell short of granting sections of the party beyond the House of Commons a vote, although it had been urged by a large majority of members of the Executive Committee of the National Union, many of whom also opposed the provision (adopted in 1965) allowing new candidates to enter the contest at the second ballot stage (Taylor, 1975). Given the National Union’s formal role as the representative of the extraparliamentary party and as a conduit between it and the party in Parliament, it was not surprising that, on these two particular issues, many constituency parties held similar views. One such local party was that of Finchley (whose MP was Thatcher) which decreed that ‘the method for selecting the Leader of the Conservative Party is wrong,’ both because the party beyond Westminster was denied a formal and direct input, and because of the (unexplained) belief that all candidates should stand in the first ballot (Langstone, 1975). Heath to Thatcher Having accepted the recommendations of the Home committee on revising the party’s leadership rules, Heath then announced that a leadership contest would be held, with the first ballot to be conducted on 4 February 1975. At the time of this announcement, Heath had been informed by Chief Whip Humphrey Atkins that he was very likely to be re-elected as leader. Heath was also buoyed by reports of strong support from both Conservative peers and the extra-parliamentary party (Heath, 1998: 532–3). This apparent support was partly due to the respect and loyalty which he still enjoyed among sections of the Conservative Party, but also because of ‘a dearth of likely leaders’ in the Conservative Party at this time (Behrens, 1980: 37). Some of those who might once have been considered leadership contenders were no longer available, such as Powell, who by this time had left the Conservative Party and been elected as an Official Unionist MP in South Down, in Northern Ireland. Other potential candidates, such as Whitelaw, declined to stand against Heath due to a deep sense of loyalty and respect. It was Sir Keith Joseph who initially emerged as the most likely challenger to Heath, the former having announced that since 1974 he had discovered true Conservatism, thereby seeking to downplay his collective responsibility for policies pursued by the Heath Government of which he had been a member. 52

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

These policies, he declared, had not been genuinely conservative policies at all, although he had not realised it at the time. It was after the loss of the February 1974 election that Joseph discovered economic neo-liberalism, a firm belief in the economic efficiency and moral superiority of the free market and a private ownership, private enterprise economy in which the ‘natural laws’ of supply and demand, not state intervention or direction, effectively determined economic activity and variables such as what was produced, by whom, at what price, etc. Having become thoroughly disillusioned with the direction of postwar British politics generally and that of the contemporary Conservative Party in particular, Joseph discovered Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in ‘the manner of a sudden vision on the road to Damascus’ (Keegan, 1984: 60). Yet Joseph raised serious doubts about his political acumen when he made a speech in Birmingham in October 1974 which expressed concern that: ‘The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened,’ and which suggested that in the context of growing social problems such as crime and juvenile delinquency, stricter birth control ought to be applied to or practised by working-class women. The controversy aroused by this speech led Joseph to acknowledge that his political judgement and communicative skills were perhaps not of a sufficiently high level for a potential party leader and possible future prime minister, whereupon he declined to stand. It was Joseph’s decision that he would not put himself forwards a candidate which prompted Thatcher to enter the contest instead. Although she too had been a member of the Heath cabinet and so might also have been deemed jointly culpable (collective responsibility) for the policies of the 1970–74 Government, being Education Secretary had effectively distanced her from the controversy surrounding economic and industrial policies between 1970 and 1974; these had been beyond her bailiwick. Put simply, ‘she was opposite the spot on the roulette wheel at the right time and didn‘t funk it’ (Wickham-Jones, 1997: 75). Thatcher was thus better placed to stand against Heath than former ministerial colleagues who either had been more closely involved in economic and industrial policies or were his close friends and supporters. Thatcher subsequently confessed that ‘it seemed to me most unlikely that I would win. But I did think that by entering the race, I would draw in other stronger candidates’ (Thatcher, 1995: 267). However, given that Joseph and Edward du Cann had already ruled themselves out – which was why Thatcher felt compelled to stand – and most other Conservative heavyweights were closely associated with Heath personally and ideologically, it is difficult to discern who else might have been considered a stronger non-Heathite candidate at that time. 53

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In the event, and against her initial expectations, the fact that Thatcher was a relatively unknown outsider actually enhanced her potential, due to the fact that many Conservative MPs considered the time ripe for a fresh start under a new leader. It has been claimed that ‘Mrs Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975 principally because she was not Edward Heath, not because of a widespread commitment to her views’ (Riddell, 1985: 10), but this underestimates the extent to which her developing ideological stance was welcomed, and indeed shared, by a growing number of Conservative MPs. Indeed, her economic and social vision helped force a new direction for Conservatives (Cowley and Garry, 1998: 479). Although she was certainly not a fully-fledged Thatcherite at this stage, because her political philosophy was still being honed, she was clearly leaning to the (new) right, as evinced by her co-founding with Joseph of the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974, a think tank committed to re-stating the case for the free market in the economic sphere and restoring individual responsibility in the moral and social spheres. Indeed, even at this early stage, Thatcher evidently viewed herself as the candidate of the right, for she initially insisted that she would not stand if du Cann put himself forward as a candidate, because: ‘We must not split the right-wing vote’ (Thatcher, 1995: 269). Only when du Cann publicly announced, on 15 January, that he would not be standing for the leadership did Thatcher formally declare her candidature. There was one other notable factor which enhanced Thatcher’s popularity in the Conservative Party at this time, namely her skilful performance and oratory during the parliamentary debates on the Labour Government‘s Finance Bill (the legislation which gives formal approval for the budget). Immediately following the October 1974 election defeat, Heath had appointed Thatcher to the shadow treasury team, from where ‘he had himself gained the Parliamentary réclame which was a significant factor’ in his own leadership election a decade earlier, making him something of ‘a hostage to fortune to give an opponent the same opportunity’ (Fisher, 1977: 164). Had Heath appointed Thatcher to a less prominent post or one where her political and oratorical skills would have had fewer opportunities to be displayed, it is unlikely that she would subsequently have attracted as much support among Conservative MPs in the leadership contest. Indeed, she might have been more widely viewed as a candidate putting down a marker for the future rather than a serious contender for the current leadership. Yet, Thatcher utilised her new post to display formidable debating and oratorical skills, and in so doing alerted many Conservative MPs to her political 54

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

qualities and credibility (on her use of rhetoric and oratory, see Dorey, 2015). Having studied chemistry as a student and then trained as a barrister, Thatcher applied her ‘forensic’ skills to provide a detailed critique of Chancellor Denis Healey’s taxation policies, thereby alerting Conservative MPs to her intelligence grasp of detail and overall confident parliamentary performance: ‘She marshalled huge quantities of statistics with the strict logic of the lawyer and chemist’, which were then articulated with ‘vigour and certainty of delivery’ (Wapshott and Brock, 1983: 162). She further endeared herself to some Conservative MPs by her acerbic personal attacks on Healey. On one notable occasion, she observed: ‘Some Chancellors are macro-economic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap’ (Hansard, 1975: Vol. 884, cols. 1553, 1554). When the ballot for the Conservative Party leadership contest was finally held on 4 February 1975, Thatcher received 130 votes to Heath’s 119, with the rank outsider Hugh Fraser mustering just sixteen. Due to the 15 per cent rule, this was not enough for Thatcher to be declared leader, but it was sufficient for Heath to acknowledge defeat and resign. He subsequently suggested that Thatcher’s lead in the first ballot was partly accidental, in that some Conservative MPs had voted for her in the hope of ensuring a second ballot, whereupon a politically more attractive or unity candidate could present themselves. Moreover, Heath alleged that Thatcher’s campaign manager, Airey Neave, had actually cunningly played down her chances of victory, and urged some Conservative MPs to vote for her primarily to prevent a landslide for Heath: ‘I was told afterwards of the Conservative Members who fell for this cunning manoeuvre.’ Indeed, Heath was ‘convinced that I would have won the first ballot if he [Neave] had not taken charge of the Thatcher campaign’ (Heath, 1998: 532; see also Hurd, 2003: 231). This might sound like churlishness from Heath, but at that time, Thatcher also ‘reckoned that a substantial number of those voting for me in the first round would only do so as a tactical way of removing Ted, and putting in someone more acceptable but still close to his way of thinking’ (Thatcher, 1995: 278). Certainly, Nigel Fisher confessed that he was one of the Conservative MPs who voted for Thatcher in the first ballot, but without necessarily intending to vote for her in a second ballot: ‘I wanted to see what other candidates might enter the lists at that stage before committing myself’ (Fisher, 1977: 163). Indeed, it was widely envisaged that once Heath had withdrawn from the contest, at least one other senior colleague would stand as a candidate, having held back in the first ballot out of loyalty to Heath. Moreover, it was widely 55

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assumed that such a candidate would offer greater experience, seniority and proven competence than Thatcher, and would therefore win the second ballot. In fact, four new candidates presented themselves alongside Thatcher: Sir Geoffrey Howe, John Peyton, James Prior and Whitelaw. It was Whitelaw who was widely expected to win the second ballot, due to his possession of the qualities just mentioned. Certainly, in the United States’ White House, there was both surprise that Thatcher had defeated Heath in the first ballot and an expectation that in the second ballot, Whitelaw would be the winner (Springsteen, 1975a). Thatcher herself was slightly perturbed by Howe’s candidature, ‘because he held similar views to mine and might split the right-wing vote’, thereby making it much more likely that a Heathite candidate would secure a majority (Thatcher, 1995: 278). Yet when the second ballot was held a week later, on 11 February, the result was:

Margaret Thatcher – 146 William Whitelaw – 79 James Prior – 19 Sir Geoffrey Howe – 19 John Peyton – 11

This gave Thatcher a majority of eighteen, and with the 15 per cent rule not applicable in this ballot, she was duly declared Conservative Party leader. This result once again caused astonishment in the White House, where her victory was viewed as ‘as surprising as Whitelaw’s poor showing’, although it was suggested that for Thatcher to lead the Conservatives to victory in a general election ‘she will have to move an appreciable distance from her position on the right wing of her party’ (Springsteen, 1975b). It should be reiterated that her election did not constitute a sudden and decisive swing to the right by the Conservative Party. The move to the right would be a slower, more subtle process, even though the antecedents were certainly discernible in the mid-1970s. Although her right-wing instincts were certainly coming to the fore and appealed to many Conservatives who were similarly disillusioned with the post-war direction of British Conservatism, it remained the case that many others voted for her primarily because: ‘Electing Margaret had simply been the most effective way of getting rid of Ted’ (Critchley and Halcrow, 1998: 60). According to Fisher, ‘the most decisive reason for Heath’s loss of support was his own personality … There can be no doubt that this flaw in his political make-up contributed more than any other single factor to his defeat in the 56

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leadership election’ (Fisher,  1977:  4, 144). Fisher also emphasised that some of Thatcher’s support in the 1975 leadership contest owed less to her political views than to her ‘personal qualities’ (Fisher, 1977: 181). It should also be noted that while Thatcher subsequently became greatly revered by much of the Conservative grassroots during her premiership, she was less warmly received by Conservatives beyond Westminster when first elected as party leader. This was largely due to a residual regard and respect for Heath among many local party members and activists. Indeed, many constituency parties had supported Heath in the 1975 Conservative leadership contest and as a consequence, his defeat reinforced reservations and recriminations about the nugatory role of the extra-parliamentary party in electing a new leader. For example, the chair of the Bassettlaw Conservative Party complained of ‘the independent way in which the Conservative Members of Parliament acted in the first ballot; they seem to pay little regard to the overall opinion of the Constituencies’ (Barrass, 1975). The Halifax constituency party similarly deplored the manner in which Conservative MPs had seemingly ignored the views of the extra-parliamentary party when voting (Renfree, 1975), a source of strong resentment fully shared by the Derby North Conservative Association (Gothard, 1975). Meanwhile, the chair of the Pelbridge (East Grinstead) Conservative Association complained not only that ‘the Conservative Party is out of touch with the grass-roots,’ but that it had been humiliating, disillusioning and embarrassing’ to see the party ‘deliberately rending itself asunder in this most undignified manner … presenting the country with the degrading spectacle of further divisions between former colleagues’ (de la Poer Beresford, 1975). These concerns were shared by the Cleveland and Whitby Conservative Party, which ‘strongly deprecates the procedure and rules adopted for the election of the Party leader’, for these were ‘so devisive [sic] and damaging that they have brought the Party into disrepute.’ As such, it was ‘strongly urged that the present system should be abolished forthwith, and be replaced by a more effective and dignified method’, although what would constitute such a system was not explained (Tyne, 1975). Further trenchant criticism emanated from the Conway Conservative Association, which viewed the prospect of an annual leadership election ‘with alarm’. It was even suggested that if a more acceptable and effective method of electing the party’s leader could not be devised, ‘then the socalled “magic circle” process should once again operate’ ( Jones, 1975). One possible alternative to the electoral system which had just been adopted and deployed was proposed by J. F. C. Williams, the chair of the New Forest 57

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constituency party, who shared the widespread resentment at the lack of direct input for Conservatives beyond the House of Commons: ‘the provision this time for consultation with the grass-roots and peers … only went half-way,’ for there was no mechanism for ensuring that their views were ‘circulated … far less for their expression in the ballot-box’. Those who had devised and endorsed this method of election were ‘naïve’ to assume that ‘we party workers would be content with a voice without echo and no vote’ (Williams, 1975). In order to reconcile the need to ensure that Conservative MPs had the determinant vote, with the right of other Conservatives to have their views formally counted and registered, the chair of the New Forest constituency party revisited the idea of a weighted system of voting, suggesting that the votes of Conservative MPs, party members and Conservative peers should be valued or weighted as four, two and one respectively. For example, if 43 per cent of Conservative MPs voted for Candidate A, then that would be classified as 172 votes (4 × 43), whereas if 43 per cent of party members voted the same way, this would constitute 86 votes (2 × 43). It was conceded that the precise values were open to debate and refinement, but regardless of the precise details, ‘almost any moderate solution would be better than the 1975 scheme’ (Williams, 1975). Thatcher to Major The only amendment to the leadership election rules during Thatcher’s premiership occurred in her first year as Prime Minister, 1979. This was the year in which the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held and to reflect this, the rules were revised to allow for consultations with Conservative Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) when a contest took place (du Cann, 1979). It is important to remember, as Cowley and Garry (2000) note, that ‘by the final phase of Thatcherism, the problematic issue of European integration had risen to primary importance and become the key issue by which candidates for the succession were judged’ (Cowley and Garry, 1998: 496). In November 1989 a stalking-horse candidate – or as the then-Chief Whip described him, ‘a pilot fish, which the bigger fish would watch and possibly follow’ (Renton, 2004: 29) – Sir Anthony Meyer, challenged Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party. He was convinced that Thatcher had become a serious electoral liability for the Conservative Party (because the electorate was now tiring of many of her more radical, increasingly dogmatic, economic and social policies, just as they had tired of socialism and state interference in the 1970s), but it was ‘her manifest distaste for everything that emanates from 58

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Europe that finally decided me to launch my challenge’. However, from the outset, Meyer had ‘lived in the constant expectation that long before the closing day for nominations … a more redoubtable challenger would have appeared on the scene’ (Meyer, 1990: 162–3). In this regard, Meyer was doing exactly what Thatcher herself had done in the 1975 leadership contest, hoping to prompt a stronger and more credible challenger to emerge, but then discovering that no-one else was willing to enter the contest. None did so, which meant that Meyer was the only candidate standing against Thatcher in November 1989. To the extent that this leadership contest retained any significance, given that Thatcher’s victory was a foregone conclusion, attention was focused on just how much support would be withheld from Thatcher, either in terms of votes cast for Meyer or abstentions. The answer was that he attracted thirty-three votes, while twenty-seven Conservative MPs abstained or spoilt their ballot papers, meaning that the 314 votes won by Thatcher delivered a clear victory. This had never been in doubt, but the fact that a no-hope candidate such as Meyer could deprive Thatcher of sixty votes led critics to speculate on how many more votes might accrue to a serious leadership candidate, one of the Conservative Party’s big beasts, such as Michael Heseltine? This, of course, was the very question that Meyer had intended to pose. The answer was provided a year later, by which time Meyer’s challenge had prompted a slight revision to the leadership contest rules, namely that if any MP decided to challenge the incumbent leader, the names of their two nominators were to be published; they lost their previous anonymity. In November 1990, in the wake of the Eastbourne by-election defeat, Howe – having already been publicly humiliated by Thatcher when she had removed him from the Foreign Office, and half-heartedly granted him the non-post of Deputy Prime Minister in the summer of 1989 – resigned from the cabinet. The main reason was his disagreement with Thatcher‘s increasingly hostile stance towards Europe and the undiplomatic language with which this was often articulated. However, Howe’s resignation also derived from exasperation at the often brusque and abrasive manner in which Thatcher treated and spoke to him, sometimes in the presence of others and occasionally even in public. Thatcher characteristically sought to downplay the significance of Howe’s resignation, claiming that it was ultimately a disagreement over policy style rather than substance, but this antagonised him even more. He consequently made a devastating resignation speech in the House of Commons, tartly suggesting that ‘I must be the first Minister in history who has resigned because he 59

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was in full agreement with Government policy.’ It was the end of his speech, though, which was most significant with regard to Thatcher’s leadership, because having ridiculed her attitude towards Europe – ‘the nightmare image sometimes conjured up … [of] … a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming’ against Britain – Howe declared: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long’ (Hansard, 1990: Vol. 180, cols. 463 and 465). From this moment, all eyes turned expectantly to Heseltine, widely acknowledged to be ‘the man most likely to’. Yet in fact, Heseltine was placed in something of an awkward situation. If he declared his candidature, he would be accused by many Conservatives, both at parliamentary and constituency level, of rank disloyalty and treachery against Thatcher. Yet, if he declined to put his name forward for election, Heseltine would be accused – not least by Thatcherites themselves – of cowardice and of lacking the courage of his convictions. It was the former course of action which Heseltine opted for, declaring himself a leadership candidate the day after Howe’s devastating resignation speech. One of Heseltine‘s apparent advantages was that, not having held ministerial office since 1986, he was free of the collective responsibility which cabinet colleagues had to share for unpopular policies such as the poll tax. Indeed, Heseltine shrewdly made the poll tax one of the central issues of his leadership campaign, pledging that if he were to be elected, he would fundamentally review the tax, presumably with a view to replacing it altogether. This was clearly intended to place ministers on the defensive, for as they were collectively responsible for the introduction of the poll tax, they could hardly disavow it and admit that it was misconceived. In focusing on the unpopularity of the poll tax, Heseltine was also seeking to persuade Conservative backbenchers that if Thatcher and the poll tax were still in place at the next general election, then the accompanying unpopularity of both could have serious consequences for their own chances of re-election. In a skilful and subtle manner, Heseltine sought to convince Conservative MPs that their own self-interest would best be served by electing him leader of the Conservative Party. Failure to do so, he intimated, would lead to many of them suffering from the imminent electoral backlash against Thatcher and the poll tax. The first ballot was a simple choice between Thatcher and Heseltine, as other potential candidates awaited a second ballot before declaring their own 60

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

candidacies. In most cases, these putative challengers were themselves cabinet ministers and effectively obliged to declare their support for Thatcher while denouncing the divisive and diversionary leadership contest prompted by Heseltine. Yet some of them evidently envisaged, even hoped, that Heseltine would secure enough support to necessitate a second ballot, whereupon other candidates would present themselves, particularly if Thatcher resigned at this stage. This evidently seemed to be John Major’s perspective, because when a journalist asked him if he intended to stand as a leadership candidate, he replied ‘not against her [Margaret Thatcher]’ (Alderman and Carter, 1991: 133). Thatcher did win the first ballot, receiving the support of 204 Conservative MPs, whereas Heseltine won 152 votes; 55 per cent to 41 per cent. However, Thatcher was four votes short of the 15 per cent majority stipulated by the party’s leadership rules, thus necessitating a second ballot. There was some criticism of Thatcher at the time for being in Paris during the first ballot, rather than back in Westminster where she could have lobbied and persuaded undecided or wavering Conservative MPs personally, thereby increased her majority sufficiently to have obviated the need for a second ballot. This critique also suggested that some Conservative MPs were offended at seemingly being take for granted, both by Thatcher herself and by her campaign team, which manifested itself in the ‘insufficient trawling for support among backbenchers’ prior to the first ballot (Alderman and Carter, 1991: 138). Indeed, with supreme irony, it seemed as if she was repeating the same mistakes Heath made by alienating backbenchers through arrogance and aloofness: apparently taking them and their support for granted, and treating them as mere lobby fodder in the House of Commons. Some of her supporters calculated that had she been in London instead of Paris, then ‘simply by going into the [House of Commons] tearoom, she would have collected an extra ten votes, and that by casting her gaze on the remaining waverers, she would have rallied them’ (Shepherd, 1991: 51; see also Ridley, 1991: 245; Watkins, 1991: 181). As one of her former cabinet colleagues, Norman Fowler, wryly remarked: ‘In truth, it is difficult to run a campaign without the presence of the candidate’ (Fowler, 1991: 350). However, some of her colleagues suspected that her presence, coupled with her proclivity to hector the people whom she was purporting to persuade, might actually prove counter-productive. For example, Hurd confessed that: ‘I had little confidence in her tearoom techniques,’ for these might well have done her ‘more harm than good’ (Hurd, 2003: 401). It has also been suggested that ‘if Thatcher … had actively canvassed MPs, this might have suggested a lack of confidence, and 61

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given credibility to Heseltine’s challenge’ (Shepherd, 1991: 21; see also Major, 1999: 182). Besides, there had been a tactical rationale for Thatcher’s absence in Paris during the run-up to the first ballot, namely a calculation that her attendance at a prestigious international summit and the associated prominent media coverage would further raise her profile and remind Conservative MPs that their leader was a major figure in international affairs. Her immediate decision to contest the second ballot caused considerable consternation among many of her own supporters and ministerial colleagues. There was a view that with the margin so close and some Conservatives likely to switch their votes to Heseltine in the second ballot, Thatcher would better serve the party (and the country) by standing down, thereby permitting other candidates to come forward in an attempt to prevent Heseltine’s election as Conservative leader and prime minister. According to this perspective (subscribed to by many Conservatives who had voted for her in the first ballot), ‘Mrs Thatcher’s continued participation in the contest could only prove disastrous for the party: she might either scrape a narrow victory and limp on, having lost the confidence of the party, or lose and allow Heseltine to become Prime Minister’ (Alderman and Carter, 1991: 135). On 21 November 1990, Thatcher returned earlier than scheduled from Paris, in order to elicit the opinions of cabinet colleagues, although at the suggestion of John Wakeham, whom she appointed as her campaign manager after the first ballot – some of her previous campaign team having been criticised by Thatcher’s supporters for being too complacent and laid-back – she interviewed her senior ministers individually. It had been envisaged that if they were consulted together, some of them would feel sufficiently emboldened to advise her to resign; strength in numbers. It was thus assumed that if each cabinet minister had an audience with Thatcher individually, they would more readily be persuaded to continue supporting her in the second ballot, particularly if Thatcher convinced each minister that the cabinet colleagues she had already interviewed had pledged their support. However, there was some informal consultation among several cabinet ministers, albeit unplanned. What happened was that ministers arriving for their bilateral with Thatcher found some of their cabinet colleagues already waiting in the area outside her office in the House of Commons or spoke to a minister who emerged from their meeting with her (Shepherd, 1991: 39–41; Watkins, 1991: 17–20). This unwittingly enabled several cabinet ministers to glean what advice most of their colleagues were intending to offer or had already offered, 62

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

and it was this which arguably fortified some of them sufficiently to inform Thatcher that she would not win the second ballot, in spite of their own support. In effect, Thatcher encountered a succession of cabinet ministers saying ‘I will vote for you, Margaret,’ while at the same time warning that she would lose because others would not support her. It did not add up, and she knew it. Moreover, while pledging their continued support for Thatcher, some ministers were reported to be threatening to resign from the cabinet if she proceeded to the second ballot (Renton, 2004: 104; Alderman and Carter, 1991: 135). The only cabinet ministers who urged Thatcher to fight on, apparently, were Kenneth Baker and Cecil Parkinson, whereas even ‘the most ideologically sound members of her cabinet – Norman Lamont, Peter Lilley, Michael Howard’, were exhorting her not risk a humiliating defeat in the second ballot (Shepherd, 1991: 42). Such a defeat, Thatcher was repeatedly warned, would both allow Heseltine to succeed her, thereby jeopardising the policies she had pursued for the previous eleven years, and cause deep rifts in the party. Many of the cabinet ministers advising Thatcher that she would not win the second ballot were hoping to persuade her to resign now, not merely to avoid the personal humiliation of a defeat – if she stood down before the second ballot, she could claim to be doing so of her own free will and volition, technically undefeated, and with much of her dignity intact – but also to enable other cabinet colleagues to stand as candidates themselves in order to prevent a Heseltine victory. In principle, other ministers could have stood at this stage anyway, but many of them were loath to challenge Thatcher while she remained in situ. Indeed, the two cabinet ministers who were widely viewed as the most likely candidates to defeat Heseltine in the second ballot if Thatcher stood down were Hurd and Major, both of whom had, with some reluctance, nominated her candidature for the second ballot. Major recalls that it was Thatcher’s automatic assumption that he would nominate her for the second ballot which irked him, ‘a classic example of her management style … I would like to have discussed her prospects and campaign strategy … But Margaret was peremptory, and once again I despaired of her style even as I pledged my support’ (Major, 1999: 187). At just past 9 a.m. on 22 November, an understandably tearful Thatcher informed the cabinet of her decision to resign. One of her staunchest supporters and ideological acolytes, Nicholas Ridley, likened the circumstances of her resignation to ‘medieval savagery’ and referred bitterly to ‘her betrayal by those whom she had brought to her cabinet table’. Ridley even expressed regret that the Conservative Party had abandoned the pre-1965 magic circle system of 63

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selecting its leaders, because at least an unpopular leader could be visited by the men in grey suits and privately be persuaded to stand down: ‘it left the leader free to leave with dignity’ (Ridley, 1991: 250–1). This immediately enabled Hurd and Major to contest the second ballot alongside Heseltine. That both of them decided to contest the leadership seemed a little incongruous, because if the objective of many ministers was to stop Heseltine, then ostensibly it would have been more sensible for just one candidate to stand against him rather than risk splitting the anti-Heseltine vote. The concern, though, was that if Hurd alone was chosen to challenge Heseltine, that would antagonise the Thatcherites who would feel deprived of a genuine choice, given that both men were associated with the One Nation, pro-­ European, wing of the parliamentary Conservative Party. On the other hand, if Major stood instead of Hurd, that might alienate those MPs who wanted a genuine, senior, One Nation candidate to vote for, but did not support Heseltine per se (Renton, 2004: 103). A further reason for both men standing against Heseltine has been offered by Major himself, namely the need to avoid any impression of ‘a Cabinet stitch-up’, a risk which has been astutely identified by the Chief Whip Richard Ryder (Major, 1999: 188). Besides, it was reasoned that Hurd might attract some votes which had been won by Heseltine in the first ballot, thereby weakening the ­latter’s chances of victory in the second ballot. In the second ballot, Thatcher made clear her support for Major, not merely because she was determined to prevent Heseltine from replacing her, but because she assumed that Major would continue with her economic policies and ‘protect her legacy’ (Slocock, 2019: 320). Yet, Major was adamant that: ‘She and her allies deceived themselves if they thought I would pursue unchanged policies’ (Major, 1999: 190). Hurd too argued that Thatcher wrongly believed that ‘his [Major’s] views on policies and the nature of politics were indistinguishable from hers,’ although many years later, she confessed to Hurd that her support for Major had been because ‘he was the best of a very poor bunch’ (Hurd, 2003: 404, emphasis in original). Many of her acolytes in the cabinet similarly viewed Major as both a stop-Heseltine and a continuity candidate, with Parkinson averring that it was ‘important to choose a leader who would pursue the central economic policy … John Major was the one most likely to do so’, whereas if Heseltine became leader, ‘we would be taking a step backwards, towards the corporatist policies of the sixties and seventies’, and as such, Heseltine’s economic stance was a ‘fundamental disqualification’ (Parkinson, 1992: 43, 45). Other right-wing/Thatcherite cabinet supporters of Major included Howard, Lilley and Lamont, along with the arch-Thatcherite 64

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

ex-minister and former Conservative Party chairman, Norman Tebbit (Major, 1999: 189; Clarke, 2016: 249). Yet in spite of Hurd’s candidacy, Major was also endorsed by some senior ministers who were closer to the One Nation wing of the Conservative Party and who apparently believed (or hoped) that at heart he shared their vision of a more compassionate and consensual mode of Conservatism. Such ministers included John Selwyn Gummer, David Mellor, Tony Newton and Gillian Shephard (Seldon, 1997: 124–5; Parkinson, 1992: 45–6). In fact, Kenneth Clarke (who actually supported Hurd) judged Major to be ‘obviously the most left-wing Conservative of the trio’, while Heseltine was ‘undoubtedly more right wing … than either of them’ (Clarke, 2016: 250). That Major attracted such an ideologically diverse array of ministerial support reinforced the notion that he was the unity candidate, who could appeal to both ideological wings of the parliamentary Conservative Party, which would in turn help to persuade centrist or ideologically non-aligned Conservative MPs of his leadership credentials and unifying potential: ‘many in the middle thought he had a balanced view of politics’ (Walker, 1991: 235). Indeed, the formal nomination statement by Major’s proposer and seconder, Gummer and Lamont – themselves located on different wings of the Conservative Party – explicitly characterised him as ‘the candidate most likely to unite the party … He will lead a united party to a general election victory’ (quoted in Watkins, 1991: 201). Cowley’s detailed study of the second ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership contest reveals that while Major was certainly the preferred choice of most Thatcherites, his strongest support actually came from the party’s MPs and ministers who constituted ‘the party faithful’, as defined by Norton: those Conservatives who were ideologically non-aligned (Cowley, 1996: 205; Norton, 1990). In this respect, the breadth of his support reflected the fact that he was ideologically enigmatic: ‘John Major is the great unknown’ (Meyer, 1990: 175), because: ‘No one had any reason to know what his views really were’ (Patten, 2018: 151). Consequently, Thatcherites and One Nation Tories alike contrived to convince themselves that Major was at heart ‘one of us’. The former envisaged that he would consolidate Thatcherism; the latter hoped that he would depart from it. Meanwhile the ideologically indeterminate party faithful viewed him as the unity candidate. The result of this ballot, held on 27 November, was: John Major – 185 Michael Heseltine – 131 Douglas Hurd – 56 65

Choosing party leaders

Although technically Major narrowly lacked the straightforward majority required in the second ballot, Heseltine and Hurd both declined to continue to a third ballot, thereby allowing Major to become leader of the Conservative Party and of the country. Major to Hague Major endured a torrid premiership, particularly after the Conservatives won a fourth consecutive general election in 1992, albeit with a parliamentary majority of just twenty-one seats. This was steadily whittled away during the next five years, due both to a series of by-election defeats – even in hitherto safe Conservative seats – and an unprecedented number of defections by the party’s MPs to other parties, due to their disillusionment with the Government’s stance on various issues and its the overall ideological direction. As Heppell and Hill (2008: 88) reflected, ‘By electing the junior, inexperienced, less electorally attractive, economically dry, socially conservative, Eurosceptic, Hague, the Conservatives ensured that they would drive down the cul-de-sac of the common sense revolution and the core vote strategy.’ As noted previously, Major’s election as Conservative leader in November 1990 owed much to the perception that he was a unity candidate who appealed to both wings of the party, as well as to the solid centre. Of course, he was also deemed the stop-Heseltine candidate, but given that the latter would have been unacceptable to the Thatcherite right of the party, this reinforced expectations that Major would unify the party. In fact, he increasingly discovered that trying to heal the divisions which had developed in the latter part of Thatcher’s premiership often unwittingly exacerbated them, because both wings of the party suspected that he was betraying them and their mode of Conservatism. The remaining (but dwindling in number and influence) One Nation Tories who had hoped that Major’s leadership would herald a return to a more consensual type of politics – Major himself used his victory speech to talk of creating a nation at ease with itself, having previously eulogised Macleod – were deeply dismayed at the continued right-ward drift, as divisive or dogmatic policies were often pursued which were at odds with Major’s less rebarbative rhetoric. His oratorical genuflections to One Nation Toryism were belied by the various economically neo-liberal and socially authoritarian policies enacted by his Government, coupled with occasional recourse to moral absolutism, as exemplified by Major’s ill-fated ‘Back-to-Basics’ speech at the party’s 1993 conference and the scapegoating of people such as lone parents and unmarried 66

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

mothers, who, if not directly blamed for many of Britain’s problems, were deemed to symbolise much that had allegedly gone wrong with the country, morally and socially, since the 1960s. Yet although most of the economic, social and welfare policies enacted by Major’s 1992–97 Government constituted a continuation and consolidation of Thatcherism rather than its abandonment, the Thatcherite right somehow convinced itself that Major was betraying them and the ideals of their heroine; they seemingly viewed his more emollient demeanour and rhetoric as evidence that he was not ‘one of us’, and would therefore need to be harried and watched like a hawk to prevent any departure from the hallowed path of Thatcherism. Indeed, just four weeks after her resignation and endorsement of Major’s candidature, Thatcher was complaining that: ‘The new government have embarked on a course of great danger. It is quite clear already that they want to undo many of the things we have accomplished … All the wrong people are ­rejoicing … they are walking down the wrong road’ (quoted in Urban, 1996: 162, diary entry for 19 December 1990). Of course, as has increasingly been the case since Thatcher’s resignation, the EU has become the symbol of ideological divisions in the Conservative Party, with Thatcherites invariably constituting the most implacable Eurosceptics, while many of the most prominent Europhiles were on the One Nation wing. Just as the old left in the Labour Party used to equate commitment to public ownership (nationalisation) with whole-hearted commitment to socialism, so did the Thatcherites invoke hostility to the EU as a symbol of ideological purity; of being one of us. Thus any apparent concessions to the EU, and ceding of powers (and thus sovereignty), were loudly condemned as a betrayal and a sell-out of Britain’s independence by weak or duplicitous ministers who were insufficiently patriotic, and who were, in effect, colluding with Eurocrats in Brussels. To these critics, every acceptance or adoption of policies on the basis of harmonisation and Europeanisation was another betrayal of everything that Thatcher had striven for in the 1980s, a trashing of her legacy. The parliamentary battles over ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992–93 clearly illustrated this perspective (on these battles, see Baker, Gamble and Ludlam, 1993 and 1994). Although Major secured a number of concessions and opt-outs intended to pacify the Eurosceptics, many of them remained fundamentally opposed to the Maastricht Treaty and its vision for the EU and single currency. As the arch-Eurosceptic John Redwood subsequently argued, the Maastricht Treaty and the subsequent (1997) Amsterdam Treaty ‘represented a major step on the way to a single country’. Indeed, he suggested that 67

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anyone reading them for the first time ‘would conclude that the intention is none other than the establishment of a new country called Europe’ (Redwood, 1999: 29, 33). Redwood contested Major for the Conservative leadership in 1995, although only after the latter had taken the highly unusual step of resigning as party leader, but not as prime minister. This was Major’s exasperated response to the continual criticisms of his premiership which emanated from the Conservative Eurosceptics. They had bitterly resented Major’s tactic of characterising parliamentary ratification of the Treaty as an issue of confidence in his Government, which they viewed as tantamount to blackmail, because if a government loses a vote of confidence, then the constitutional convention is that it will resign and a general election be held. In explicitly making the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty an issue of confidence, Major was daring the Conservative Party’s Eurosceptics to defeat the Government and force an election in which a much more pro-European Labour Government might be elected. Indeed, it was subsequently alleged that some of the party whips had engaged in ‘dirty tricks’ in an attempt to secure support in the division lobbies of antiMaastricht Conservative MPs. According to one of these MPs, Teresa Gorman, they used ‘every trick in the book, from threatening to expose who knows what scandal to intimating they could kiss goodbye to a knighthood’. She claimed that some MPs were threatened with de-selection by their constituency party, while another received an envelope, inside which was a white feather (signifying cowardice and surrender). Gorman herself claimed to have been subject to sexism and sexual harassment by at least two Conservative MPs during the parliamentary debates about ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (Gorman, 1993: 126–7, 131–3). Nor were relations between Major and his right wing critics improved when he described three of his (un-named) Eurosceptic cabinet colleagues as ‘bastards’; the description coming after recording a television interview, but with Major’s microphone still switched on while he engaged in conversation with the interviewer. The unfortunate episode also reinforced a more general image of Major as being somewhat hapless and gaffe-prone. By the summer of 1995, in the context of continuous criticisms of his leadership by the Conservative right, coupled with a poor performance by the party in May’s local government elections, there was constant chatter in the House of Commons, in private members’ clubs frequented by Conservative MPs and in the press about possible leadership challenges to Major in the autumn. Under the Conservative Party’s leadership rules at the time, a challenge to 68

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party

an incumbent leader could only be instigated during the first twenty-eight days of the new parliamentary session, so Major was safe for the summer at least. However, the relentless rumours were themselves debilitating and further weakened his political authority, while portraying a government prone to deepening ideological divisions, personality clashes and internecine warfare more redolent of the Labour Party. On 22 June 1995, Major announced his resignation as Conservative leader in order to allow one (or more) of his critics to step forward and see how much support they could muster. Referring to the fact that ‘for the last three years I‘ve been opposed by a small minority in our party. During those three years there have been repeated threats of a leadership election,’ he declared that it was time for his vociferous opponents ‘to put up or shut up’ (Major, 1995a). Major was ensuring that there would be no need to wait until November, because the party’s leadership rules naturally permitted a contest to be held anytime – indeed, as swiftly as practicably possible – if the incumbent had resigned (or died in office). In the event, Redwood proved to be the only challenger, as other senior Conservative critics of Major declined to stand against him at this juncture, perhaps because this would effectively necessitate them resigning their cabinet seats and thereafter languishing on the backbenches if they were defeated. What might also have caused reticence among his critics was the likelihood that the party would lose the next general election, scheduled for 1997, to a new Labour Party led by Tony Blair. Certainly, opinion polls and continued by-­election defeats indicated the Conservatives were likely to fare poorly unless there was some miraculous recovery or Labour implosion in the next year or two, but neither scenario seemed likely. Of course, it might have been envisaged that a new leader at this point would be able to galvanise the party and revive its popularity and thus its electoral prospects during the next two years, but this was not the case. With uncanny parallels to the Conservative Government of May in 2018, the potential big name challengers were unlikely to prove any more popular electorally than the beleaguered incumbent. Indeed, in the case of Major, even if one of his critics did win a leadership contest against him, they might then be blamed if the party still lost the next general election. In this regard, it was rational for Major’s critics to refrain from a direct challenge, although this, of course, left them open to allegations of cowardice, of lacking the courage of their convictions. Redwood was not deemed a serious contender, although he was more than a mere stalking horse; his only cabinet experience was serving as Secretary of State for Wales, not any of the more exalted ministerial posts, such as 69

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chancellor, or foreign secretary. True, Thatcher herself had not occupied either of these posts, but she had, as noted above, earned plaudits and crucial credibility as a result of her skilful scrutiny and cogent criticisms of the Labour Government’s budget. No such opportunities to enhance his stature were available to Redwood, beyond berating Major for being insufficiently robust in opposing the EU. In fact, during the contest, Redwood challenged Major to a public debate over the EU, to which the Prime Minister tartly replied, via letter: I recall when I was a Tory candidate fighting a hopeless seat with no chance of winning, I was advised to challenge the incumbent MP to a debate. The gist of his reply was, ‘nice try; but no’. You may wish to know he went on to win a handsome victory. (Major, 1995b)

It was widely acknowledged that Redwood was putting down a marker for a more serious leadership bid in the future, although the 1995 contest provided an opportunity for him to articulate his vision for the future of the Conservative Party (and inter alia the UK), particularly with regard to policies pertaining to the economy and the EU. Much of Major’s appeal was that he remained the person who was most capable of fostering a semblance of unity in the parliamentary Conservative Party. This claim might have been deemed outlandish given the degree and depth of intra-party divisions which had developed by this time, but in fact it was testimony to how divided the Conservatives had become that party unity would probably have been even more elusive under any other leader. Whatever else Redwood was offering, he was not pledging a party at ease with itself. Instead, he was offering a program which he believed would prove electorally popular, namely a revival of Thatcherism, which the right believed Major had abandoned, or, in their eyes, betrayed, and a much stronger Euroscepticism. That Major won was not a surprise, but as can be seen, Redwood polled a respectable 27.1 per cent of the vote, which immediately begged the question of how much more support a more credible or heavyweight leadership challenger might attract. It should also be noted that as the Conservative Party Table 2.1  MPs’ support in 1995 Conservative leadership contest

John Major John Redwood

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of Party’s MPs voting for

218

66.3

89

27.1

70

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had 329 MPs at this time, twenty-two of them did not vote for either candidate. Put another way, this meant that over 100 Conservative MPs, constituting virtually one third of the parliamentary party, did not vote for Major – just as nearly 100 MPs had not voted for his predecessor in November 1989 (not withstanding that the party had rather more MPs at that time). Indeed, like Thatcher before him, Major was now able to continue as Conservative leader for the foreseeable future, but the result was perhaps not quite the ringing endorsement that he would have hoped for. Also, as with Thatcher, although the victory  was  comfortable, the number of votes not proffered served to weaken the leader’s authority somewhat: it was by no means a fatal wound, but it was injurious nonetheless and an unwelcome reminder of their political mortality. Just under two years later, the Conservatives suffered a catastrophic defeat in the 1997 general election, whereupon Major immediately announced his resignation as Conservative leader. He judged it best that the contest to elect his successor be conducted as soon as possible: ‘When the curtain falls, it is time to leave the stage’, he declared (Major, 1997). Yet even this decision was criticised by some Conservatives, who believed that Major was plunging the party into an even deeper crisis by resigning immediately, rather than remaining in situ until the aftermath of the defeat had abated somewhat. There had been some concern that rather than conducting a leadership contest immediately, the Conservative Party ought to have a period of self-reflection to ponder why it had been so resoundingly defeated (Letwin, 2017: 100–2). Such an exercise might then provide a clearer indication of what sort of leader was required in order to render the Conservatives electable again. Yet if Major had decided to remain as leader for a few months, he doubtless would have been condemned by others in the party for clinging-on rather than instantly making way for a new leader who could begin the long process of rebuilding the shattered and demoralised party. From this perspective, reflexivity and rebuilding would best be conducted under a new leader, someone not associated with the party’s recent problems and crushing defeat. The scale of that defeat, coupled with a medical issue for one of the most likely contenders for the leadership, meant that the ensuing contest was lacking some of the party’s big beasts. The astonishing defeat of Michael Portillo in Enfield and Southgate immediately ruled out one of the (hitherto) likeliest contenders, while Heseltine, ‘the biggest beast in the Tory jungle’ at the time (Critchley and Halcrow, 1998: 210), was also unavailable, due to a heart condition which required surgery. Had these two senior figures been available, it is 71

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highly likely that they would have been the main (perhaps the only) contenders and offering a clear choice to Conservative MPs: an older, dirigiste Europhile versus a younger, neo-liberal Eurosceptic. One other senior, experienced leftleaning Conservative who was also unavailable was Chris Patten – ‘some would say the party’s lost leader’ (Critchley and Halcrow, 1998: 210) – who was coming to the end of his tenure as Britain’s last governor of Hong Kong, a post he had occupied since losing his seat in the 1992 general election. In Heseltine’s (and Patten’s) absence, Clarke stood as the main Europhile candidate and also the representative of left-leaning Conservatives, although beyond his pro-European views, it has never been quite clear why he is widely viewed as a One Nation Tory. It is a reputation which seems to have been acquired largely through mere sheer repetition and also because so many of the Conservatives’ most pro-European MPs and ministers have been on the left of the party. Clarke himself confessed that apart from attitudes towards the EU, ‘John [Redwood] and I usually agreed on domestic matters, and we had similar views on economic policy in particular’ (Clarke, 2016: 399). The other supposedly left-leaning contender, Stephen Dorrell, withdrew almost immediately due to a lack of support, leaving Clarke facing three candidates from the Eurosceptic right of the party – Howard, Lilley and Redwood – and the ideologically indeterminate Hague. Of the three right wing Eurosceptics, Howard was initially judged to be the main challenger to Clarke, not least because he had recently served as home secretary, whereas Lilley’s cabinet experience had been confined to social security, and Redwood’s to Welsh affairs. However, while possessing greater political seniority and experience, Howard’s credibility was undermined by a controversy in January 1995, when three Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners escaped from Parkhurst Jail on the Isle of Wight. Howard had blamed the director-general of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis (who was dismissed and then sued for wrongful dismissal), rather than accepting individual ministerial responsibility as Home Secretary. This reflected a classic tension between policy-making and policy implementation, and in particular, the extent to which the blame for a policy failure should be attributed to the politician(s) who created an apparently flawed policy in the first place rather than the official(s) who failed to administer it effectively thereafter. Howard’s leadership credentials were further weakened by the public interjection of one of his former junior ministers at the Home Office, Ann Widdecombe, who claimed that there was ‘something of the night’ about him (quoted in Sengupta and Abrams, 1997). 72

A democratic parliamentary Conservative Party Table 2.2  MPs’ support in first ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest

Kenneth Clarke William Hague John Redwood Peter Lilley Michael Howard

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of MPs voting for

49 41 27 24 23

29.9 25 16.5 14.6 14.0

As can clearly be seen, Howard came last in the first ballot, while Lilley only polled one more vote, finishing in fourth place, whereupon both candidates withdrew from the contest. Although he had polled a plurality of votes, Clarke’s overall position was less propitious than it ostensibly appeared, because at this stage, he had benefitted from the fragmentation of support for the right-wing candidates. Once two of these had been eliminated from the contest, much of their erstwhile support was likely to be transferred to the other two candidates, enabling them to narrow the gap with Clarke or even overtake him. This is exactly what transpired, because although Clarke attracted an additional fifteen votes in the second ballot, Hague won an extra twenty-one, closing the gap to just two votes. Redwood was in third place and withdrew, meaning that the outcome of the third and final ballot would effectively be determined by who his supporters chose between Clarke and Hague. At this juncture, two new factors emerged that had a decisive impact on the final result. The first was that Clarke and Redwood announced an alliance, whereby the latter would urge his supporters to vote for Clarke, in return for which Redwood would be offered the post of shadow chancellor. On the major issue which most divided them, namely the EU, it was agreed that any future British membership of the single European currency (the euro) would require prior endorsement by a free (un-whipped) vote in the House of Commons. This pact was viewed by the two leadership contenders as a means of fostering Table 2.3  MPs’ support in second ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest

Kenneth Clarke William Hague John Redwood

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of MPs voting for

64 62 38

39 37.8 23.2

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greater unity, or as the Clarke-supporting Ian Taylor justified it, ‘an attempt to demonstrate that apparently warring factions could come together in the wider interests of the Party’ (Taylor, 2003: 234). Yet the announcement of this pact proved disastrous to both men, because it alienated many of their erstwhile supporters. One veteran Conservative backbencher, Sir Peter Tapsell, condemned it as ‘one of the most contemptible and discreditable actions by a senior British politician that I can recall during 38 years in the Commons’ (quoted in Watkins, 1998: 197). This pact prompted the second new factor which was to have a decisive effect on the final result, namely the public endorsement of Hague by Thatcher herself. Prior to this point in the contest, Hague had been viewed by some as a makeweight and lightweight ‘who had not had the time during the Major government to establish himself as a political figure of the first rank’, and who ‘does not look the part of a national leader’ (Critchley and Halcrow, 1998: 208), he benefited enormously from the Clarke-Redwood alliance, the announcement of which actually alienated some of their respective supporters. Having previously supported Redwood, Thatcher very publicly switched her support to Hague (Campbell, 2003: 788), disgusted that Redwood was willing to support the leadership bid of the arch-Europhile Clarke in return for a position on the opposition frontbench. Many other erstwhile Redwood supporters evidently shared Thatcher’s distaste and dismay, and similarly transferred their support to Hague in order to prevent Clarke from becoming Conservative leader. At the same time, some of Clarke’s supporters recoiled in revulsion at this deal with Redwood, and also switched to Hague, albeit perhaps more in sorrow than in anger at this ‘Nazi-Soviet agreement’ (Clarke, 2016: 400). Consequently, in the third and final ballot, Hague attracted an extra thirty votes, whereas Clarke’s tally increased by just six votes, thereby delivering the former a clear majority over the latter, in spite of having been widely viewed  as  a rank outsider at the outset, someone who was ideologically opaque – apart from his Euroscepticism, which was fast becoming the default stance in the party – and was assumed to be putting a marker down for the future. Table 2.4  MPs’ support in third and final ballot of 1997 Conservative leadership contest

William Hague Kenneth Clarke

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of MPs voting for

92 70

56.1 42.7

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That Hague won such a surprising victory owed much to the ideological hostility that Clarke and Redwood attracted from beyond their loyal supporters and acolytes. In this regard, Hague became the de facto unity candidate, by virtue of being the leadership contender who was the least unacceptable choice to Conservative MPs who wanted neither Clarke nor Redwood to lead the party. However, as Clarke himself noted, the 1997 intake of Conservative MPs had rendered the parliamentary Conservative Party even more hostile towards the EU, with several older, pro-European colleagues having stood down or been defeated in 1997, and being superseded by ‘Thatcher’s children’, a younger cohort which was ‘much more Eurosceptic than previous cohorts, altering the balance of the party considerably’ (Clarke, 2016: 398). This ideological transformation has been highlighted by academics such as Bale (2016), Dorey and Garnett, (2015), and Heppell (2013). It certainly did not begin in 1997, though, for Heppell notes that the 1992 cohort of Conservative MPs was also more Eurosceptic their predecessors, which, of course, greatly exacerbated Major’s problems of party management (2002). This trend, and the concomitant difficulties it posed for successful party leadership, was to continue in subsequent parliaments and under subsequent Conservative leaders. Conclusion The 1965 introduction of leadership elections, with Conservative MPs each casting one vote in a secret ballot and the extra-parliamentary party being granted an indirect consultative role, yielded four notable consequences with regard to the conduct and candidacies of the subsequent contests. The first was that the greater transparency facilitated by direct elections and the associated campaigns by the contenders increasingly made intra-party ideological divisions much more explicit, and therefore more clearly highlighted schisms and tensions within a party once renowned for maintaining a public façade of unity, especially when compared to the rather more openly fractious and fratricidal Labour Party. Hitherto, the Conservatives had usually been able to present the electorate with an image of relative unity and cohesion, which in turn was a major factor in the party’s reputation for statecraft. These attributes became increasingly difficult to maintain once Conservative leaders were elected by the party’s MPs, because the candidates often represented different ideological strands within the party or adopted a different stance on a key policy, with Britain’s relationship with or membership of the EU having become a totemic issue since the 1980s. As a consequence, 75

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Conservative leadership election contests were often viewed as battles between left and right in the party; between adherents of One Nation Toryism and acolytes of Thatcherism; between those who wanted to return to a more compassionate and conciliatory mode of Conservatism and those who were determined to continue with the Thatcherite permanent revolution. Often overlaying, or closely mirroring, this division was the division between Europhile and Eurosceptic Conservative MPs. Yet as the Conservative Party has become increasingly Eurosceptic (in tandem with its exponential Thatcherisation), this demarcation has itself largely been superseded by a division between soft Eurosceptics and hard Eurosceptics. The former favour(ed) retention of Britain’s membership of the European Union, but on renegotiated terms and with various powers reclaimed from Brussels, while the latter were fundamentally opposed to British membership and thus favoured Brexit (on the distinction between soft and hard Euroscepticism, see Taggart and Szczerbiack, 2008: 7–8. On the increasing Euroscepticism of the parliamentary Conservative Party, see Dorey, 2017; Heppell, 2013; Lynch, 2003). The second feature of post-1965 Conservative leadership contests has been the manner in which the decline of deference, coupled with the increased importance of ideology and attitudes towards the EU, has imbued some of the contests with a degree of personal animosity and bitterness. For example, in response to his stalking horse challenge to Thatcher in 1989, Meyer received hundreds of letters (now stored at the British Library) bitterly condemning and denouncing him, with some of this correspondence being little more than a barrage of personal abuse and insults (Meyer Papers, 1989). He was subsequently de-selected by his local constituency party for his perceived treachery. A year later, Thatcher herself was personally critical of her challenger, Heseltine, virtually accusing him of being a socialist because of his willingness, in some circumstances, to pursue state intervention in industry and therefore, according to Thatcher, of favouring similar economic and industrial policies to the Labour Party of the 1970s and 1980s (Thatcher, 1990). In 1997, Widdecombe’s claim that Howard had ‘something of the night’ about him was clearly intended to reduce his popularity and thus his leadership prospects. Then, four years later (looking briefly ahead to the next chapter), Portillo’s potential popularity in the 2001 leadership contest was damaged by the homophobia he faced from some members of the social conservatives, after he had confessed to having had ‘homosexual experiences’ in his youth and also by his post-1997 promotion of social liberalism, seeking an end to discrimination against minority groups in British society and greater acceptance of ‘alternative’ lifestyles. 76

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Following on from the above two developments, the third notable feature of most Conservative leadership contests from 1975 onwards is the extent to which the criteria of acceptability and unity have been interpreted, by many Conservative MPs, in terms of stopping a particular leadership contender. This was particularly evident in those leadership contests from 1975 onwards which entailed a second or third ballot, and thus a wider range of candidates. In such circumstances, a key question for many Conservative MPs was not so much who would be the best candidate per se in terms of their own personal qualities or political vision, but who would be most likely to defeat a specific candidate who was deemed wholly unacceptable to a particular section of the parliamentary Conservative Party. In 1975, Thatcher emerged as the most credible stop-Heath candidate; in 1990, Major was viewed as the most likely contender to prevent Heseltine from succeeding Thatcher in the second ballot; and in 1997, Hague attracted support in the third ballot primarily because he was cast as the stop-Clarke candidate. In each of these three leadership contests, the MP who apparently had to be prevented from becoming leader was also deemed to be someone who would cause or exacerbate intra-party divisions. Of course, as Heath, Heseltine and Clarke were universally viewed as enthusiastically pro-Europe, and also widely perceived to be closer to One Nation Toryism (Heath after 1972), the determination to ensure that another candidate was elected in 1975, 1990 and 1997 also reflected and reinforced the right-ward shift of the Conservative Party since the 1970s, coupled with its increasing Europhobia. With successive intakes of Conservative MPs being more Thatcherite and Eurosceptic than the previous cohort, Heseltine and Clarke especially were viewed by many Conservative MPs as divisive figures in the party, whereas candidates perceived to sufficiently right-leaning (especially if endorsed by Thatcher herself) and/or Eurosceptic were now viewed as unifiers, which therefore reinforced their acceptability to the parliamentary party overall. The fourth particularly noteworthy feature of Conservative leadership contests since 1975 was the discontent which they unwittingly provoked among members of the extra-parliamentary party, many of whom believed that their views and preferences were being largely disregarded by MPs when the latter voted. Although the revised 1975 leadership rules had provided for an ostensibly more formal system of consulting Conservative Party members beyond Parliament in order to elicit their preferences among the candidates, there were often complaints after a new leader had been elected that Conservative MPs had disregarded the expressed views of the extra-parliamentary party. 77

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In 1975, Thatcher had been elected in spite of the continued loyalty to Heath among much of the mass membership. Then, in 1990, Conservative MPs had replaced Thatcher, even though, by this time, she had acquired the support of most of the extra-parliamentary party; one estimate was that 70 per cent of Conservative constituency parties wanted Thatcher to be re-elected party leader (Alderman and Carter, 1991: 132). Again, in 1997, there was strong extraparliamentary support for the incumbent leader, Major, and only limited support for his elected successor, Hague. The widespread perception among the Conservative Party’s mass-­ membership that their views were not being taken sufficiently seriously fuelled demands for a new electoral system, one that would grant the extra-­ parliamentary party an explicit input into future leadership contests. With Hague’s leadership campaign having placed a strong emphasis on Conservative modernisation, he duly inaugurated a series of intra-party reforms, the most notable of which was a major reform of the party’s leadership election process.

78

3

Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party

When the Conservative leadership rules had been devised in 1965 and then revised in 1975, they deliberately denied the extra-parliamentary party a formal input, reflecting the firm belief that MPs were best placed to make judgements about who should lead them. Provision was made for the Conservative Party beyond Parliament to express its preferences, but on a purely consultative basis; the party’s MPs were under no obligation to vote in accordance with the views expressed by members of the extra-parliamentary party. Moreover, as Conservative MPs voted by secret ballot, there would have been no means of knowing if an individual’s choice of candidate corresponded with the preferences of the grassroots membership. Conservative MPs remained representatives exercising their judgement, rather than delegates mandated to vote as instructed. However, in subsequent years, the absence of a formal role for the extraparliamentary Conservative Party revealed another source of concern, namely that grassroots members had no say in the instigation of a leadership contest, because launching a challenge to the incumbent was solely the prerogative of Conservative MPs. Of course, in one sense, this was entirely logical: if MPs alone elected a Conservative leader, then those same MPs were entitled to replace that leader with someone else if that leader subsequently failed to deliver electoral success, acceptable policies or party unity, or otherwise proved incompetent. Yet this ostensibly rational approach sometimes conflicted with the views of grassroots members who had become enamoured with a particular party leader and resented a decision by Conservative MPs to launch a new leadership contest in order to elect a replacement. As noted in the previous chapter, many extra-parliamentary party members were unhappy at the determination of many Conservative MPs to replace Heath in 1975 and this unhappiness was replicated when Thatcher felt obliged to resign in 1990. In both instances, many 79

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grassroots party members retained an affinity and a loyalty to the incumbent leader which was not shared by a sufficient number of Conservative MPs. Consequently, pressure grew for the extra-parliamentary party to be granted a formal role in the election of Conservative Party leaders, although this naturally raised questions about the mechanism or electoral system to be adopted, the precise role or weighting to be granted to the grassroots and at what stage in a leadership contest the party’s mass membership would exercise their vote. Once a new leadership election system had been inaugurated, whereby Conservative MPs conducted a series of eliminative ballots after which the extra-parliamentary party cast the decisive vote on the two remaining candidates, it became apparent that the grassroots could vote for a candidate who had only enjoyed limited support among the party’s MPs but had still been one of the final two candidates. In effect, the extra-parliamentary party might choose a candidate who was relatively unpopular among many Conservative MPs and ultimately much of the British electorate, but who reflected the (possibly unrepresentative) ideological views of the grassroots, or their stance on a specific prominent issue. This, of course, had serious implications with regard to Stark’s criteria of party unity, electability and competence. This also posed the problem of replacing a leader who Conservative MPs deemed to be divisive, unelectable or/and incompetent, because this would entail ousting the incumbent who had been chosen by the party’s rank-andfile. Certainly, the new leadership rules adopted in 1998 (but not actually used until 2001) did not offer the extra-parliamentary party any role in challenging an extant leader. The new rules did, however, revise the procedure by which Conservative MPs sought to instigate a vote of (no) confidence in a leader, and thus seek to precipitate a new leadership contest. The new leadership election rules One of the pledges made by Hague during his 1997 campaign to become Conservative leader was to reform the leadership process itself, such that future contests would involve the extra-parliamentary party. We noted in the previous chapter that many constituency party members had, in 1975, been irked at the manner of Heath’s replacement by Thatcher, and the extent to which Conservative MPs seemed to disregard the views and preferences of the extraparliamentary party when casting their votes. The same discontent manifested itself again in response to Thatcher’s downfall, by which time, many rank-andfile Conservatives had acquired a deep reverence for Thatcher and were aghast 80

Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party

at what they viewed as the treachery of the party’s MPs in failing to support her in sufficient numbers. Furthermore, there were concerns that the extant leadership rules made leadership challenges too easy, such that Conservative leaders were vulnerable to demoralising and distracting speculation about being challenged at the start of each parliamentary session. This had, in 1991, prompted revision of  the leadership rules so that an incumbent Conservative leader would now only be subject to a challenge if at least 10 per cent of the party’s MPs informed the chair of the 1922 Committee of their support for a leadership contest. This would clearly prevent a stalking horse or otherwise frivolous candidate compelling a leadership challenge. It was envisaged this would significantly reduce the annual speculation about a leadership challenge being launched at the start of each parliamentary session, because the bar for instigating such a contest was now much higher. Beyond this, Major himself evinced little interest in intra-party organisational reform or democratisation, although even if he had been so inclined, his premiership was consumed with a plethora of more urgent problems and crises of party management in the House of Commons, not least over EU-related issues. In fact, internal reorganisations are rarely conducted when a party is in office, precisely because the issues of day-to-day governance, policy-making and crisis-management naturally take priority. A prime minister who decided to prioritise internal reform of their parliamentary party would almost certainly be accused of dereliction of duty and have their political judgement called into question. As such, changes to a party’s modus operandi, including leadership election rules and procedures, are most likely to be undertaken when it is in opposition and thus has more time to engage in self-reflection about its internal rules and regulations, ideological orientation and policy renewal, following a general election defeat. As such, it was not until Hague was elected Conservative leader that serious attention was focused on radical reform of the procedure for party leadership contests. As in 1965 and 1975, much of the debate was about whether the extraparliamentary Conservative Party should be granted a formal role in leadership elections, and if so, how the views of ordinary party members would be collated and how much weight they would be apportioned. In terms of whether the extra-parliamentary party should play a more substantive role in leadership elections, some senior Conservative parliamentarians remained opposed to empowering the party beyond Parliament. They remained convinced that Conservative MPs were best placed to judge the 81

Choosing party leaders

qualities of leadership contenders, because they would have worked alongside them on a day-to-day basis, possibly for very many years. These MPs would also have to work under or alongside whoever was elected party leader, which meant that acceptability was naturally a major criterion for many Conservative parliamentarians when electing a colleague to lead the party. This perspective had doubtless been reinforced by observing the problems intra-party democracy had caused in the Labour Party, whose electoral college had left Labour MPs with a minority of votes overall and thus rendered them vulnerable to the leadership choice of the generally more ideological rank-and-file membership, whose interpretation or operational definition of acceptability might well be rather different to that of Labour MPs. For some senior Conservatives, therefore, it was vital that sovereignty over the election of the party’s leaders remained with Conservative MPs, rather than being surrendered to or shared with the extra-parliamentary party. This was certainly the view of Clarke, who remained convinced that ‘the leadership of major political parties should be decided by a secret ballot of that party’s MPs,’ because ‘these parliamentarians know the candidates and their views best, and by working alongside them, have been able to appraise their potential’ (Clarke, 2016: 417). However, by the time of the 1997 leadership contest, there had developed a broad, if sometimes grudging, acknowledgement that the extra-parliamentary party should be granted a formal role in electing Conservative leaders, one which went beyond mere consultation. Not only was there continuing concern that many Conservative MPs disregarded the views of ordinary party members when choosing a new leader, there was an additional recognition that following the 1997 general election, there were 476 British constituencies in which local Conservative associations did not have an MP to convey their preferences to anyway. Indeed, there were no Conservative MPs whatsoever in Scotland and Wales, such was the scale of the 1997 rout. This meant that the next Conservative leader would be chosen by just 165 MPs, all representing English constituencies. In the context of these criticisms and the scale of the 1997 electoral defeat, there was a much greater acknowledgement than hitherto that the Conservatives’ mass membership was entitled to a direct role in future leadership contests. Indeed, Hague had pledged such a reform in his 1997 leadership campaign in the context of more general Conservative modernisation and intra-party re-organisation. In a speech at Conservative Central Office in July 1997, shortly after being elected Conservative leader, Hague had declared the 82

Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party

principles underpinning organisational reforms of the party to be decentralisation, democracy, involvement, integrity, openness and unity. The objectives of ‘democracy’ and ‘involvement’ especially reflected an acknowledgement that ‘we have failed to involve sufficiently those members we have recruited, to provide attractive new avenues for participation’ and as a result, there has been a continuation of the decline in membership’ (Conservative Party, 1997: 2). Part of the reason why activism and participation had acquired greater significance was that deference had declined in Britain, even in a Conservative Party whose core principles had hitherto included respect for authority, hierarchy and leadership. While this decline of deference was a general phenomenon in Western societies since the 1960s, and partly linked to the expansion of higher education and the concomitant rise of meritocracy, it was further fuelled, ironically, by Thatcherism’s iconoclasm and individualism. As Kelly notes, ‘with social deference in decline, it is even harder to recruit members if they are to be denied substantial influence’ (2003: 84). This avowed commitment to intra-party democratisation was not solely driven by dissatisfaction among the grassroots membership with the choices made by Conservative MPs in leadership elections, important though this factor certainly was. There was also an acknowledgment of ‘the decaying state of the Conservative Party’ (Peele, 1998: 143), with the extra-parliamentary party experiencing atrophy. This was partly because eighteen years in government had led to a neglect of intra-party organisational matters, even by the various party chairs who did not have ministerial portfolios to contend with and so could, in principle, have been more pro-active in reforming the organisational structure and processes. The Conservative Party’s decaying state was also due to demographics, as an overwhelmingly elderly mass membership literally died out, but was not replenished by a corresponding influx of young(er) members. This led to recognition that there had to be tangible benefits to membership beyond constituency social events; a more active political role and input was required, and one way of facilitating this would be granting extra-parliamentary party members a voice in future Conservative leadership elections. Another motive for pursuing a programme of intra-party reform was presentational and symbolic; it would signal to the British electorate that the Conservatives were genuinely seeking to modernise themselves, and in so doing, persuade voters that the party was not closed, backward-looking, elitist, insular and out-of-touch. Somehow, this was supposed to render the Conservative Party more reflective and representative of the British society it sought to govern and thereby reconnect with the voters who had abandoned the party in 83

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1997, while attracting additional support from people who had perhaps never voted Conservative. Of course, in the case of the latter at least, it would require rather more than reform of the party’s internal machinery and leadership election procedures to attract new sources of electoral support. With Hague having pledged to grant the extra-parliamentary party a formal role in future Conservative leadership elections, his victory in the Conservatives’ 1997 contest meant that considerable attention was given to the twin questions of how the views of ordinary party members would henceforth be collated when a new leader was being chosen and how much weight they would be accorded. It was widely assumed that some form of Electoral College would be established, in which the extra-parliamentary party would be allocated a proportion of the vote, albeit with Conservative MPs having a majority share. As noted in Chapter 1, such a college had been considered when the leadership election procedure had first been adopted in 1965, but had been rejected partly because of the strong belief that such an important decision should be taken wholly and solely by the party’s MPs. Even the Conservatives who had been willing to grant the extra-parliamentary party a formal input into leadership contests, via an Electoral College, were unable to agree on how much this should be: as we previously noted, a small share of the vote in an Electoral College risked being viewed as tokenistic, whereas a larger share would obviously grant the Conservatives’ mass membership considerable influence in choosing the party’s leaders, to the extent that if the MPs were relatively evenly divided in their support for two leadership candidates, the extra-parliamentary party’s vote(s) might prove decisive. By the mid-1990s, the National Union had revived the proposal for the extra-parliamentary party to be given a 20 per cent share of the vote in an Electoral College. What transpired, however, was actually much more radical, namely a system in which MPs would conduct a number of eliminative ballots of leadership candidates, with the last placed candidate being removed in each ballot and another ballot held: if the first ballot had involved five candidates, then the second would involve the remaining four – no new candidates could stand. This process of elimination would eventually yield two candidates, whereupon the extra-parliamentary party would choose between them via a postal ballot conducted following several weeks of hustings and speeches or question-andanswer sessions at Conservative Party events throughout Britain. This system thus granted the extra-parliamentary party the final decision in Conservative leadership contests, but ensured that the choice of candidates per se was retained 84

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by the party’s MPs. The party beyond Parliament would be allowed to choose between the two most popular candidates as determined by the MPs. This would ensure that Conservative MPs did not have a totally unacceptable leader foisted upon them by the extra-parliamentary party, because whoever was finally chosen would already have been successful in the preceding eliminative ballots. A candidate who would have been wholly unacceptable as party leader to a large number of Conservative MPs would almost certainly have been eliminated in one of the earlier ballots and thus never presented as an option to the mass membership. This major reform accompanied several other notable changes to the Conservative leadership election rules, the most significant of which was that unless a vacancy had arisen due to the death or resignation of the extant leader, a leadership contest could only be held if the incumbent lost a vote of confidence among the party’s MPs. However, whereas a confidence motion had hitherto required the support of just 10 per cent of Conservative MPs, the threshold was now raised to 15 per cent. This was a compromise between those who had favoured a higher threshold, with 20 per cent, 25 per cent and 30 per cent all receiving support from some Conservative MPs when they voted on the reform proposals in early 1998, and others who wished to retain the extant 10 per cent (Alderman, 1999: 266–7). In the event of a confidence vote, a Conservative leader would only require a simple majority of votes in their favour in order to remain in situ and avoid a leadership contest. Furthermore, another confidence vote could not be instigated for twelve months. Of course, in the case of a really narrow victory in a vote of confidence, the incumbent might feel (or perhaps be persuaded) that their political authority and credibility had been sufficiently weakened such that their continued leadership was untenable. In effect, a Conservative leader’s success in a (no) confidence vote would depend not only on obtaining a simple majority, but a sizeable majority. Crucially, a Conservative leader who lost a vote of confidence would not be permitted to stand again as a candidate in the ensuing leadership contest. After all, why should a leader who was unable to attract the support of a simple majority of their parliamentary colleagues in a vote of confidence then expect those same colleagues to re-elect them as leader? However, this rule change was important in another way, because with the extant leader no longer permitted to stand again, other senior colleagues would be able to offer themselves as candidates in the first ballot, rather that feeling compelled to refrain out of loyalty to the incumbent (precisely the dilemma faced by Hurd and Major 85

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in November 1990, before Thatcher changed her mind about proceeding to the second ballot), or/and to prevent recriminations arising from charges of disloyalty. This would also reduce the apparent need for the kind of tactical voting in the first ballot witnessed in 1975 and 1990, when the first ballot either comprised just two candidates (as in 1990), or only two heavyweight candidates out of the several MPs who initially stood (as in 1975). In both of these contests, some Conservative MPs had wanted neither of the two (main) candidates to win outright, because they wanted a second ballot in which a wider range of hopefully more politically attractive contenders would present themselves. After all, as noted in Chapter 2, some of the Conservative MPs who voted for Thatcher in the first ballot back in 1975 had not actually wanted her to become party leader, they had wanted to prevent Heath’s re-election, in the hope that he would withdraw from the contest and thus allow other frontbench colleagues, who had declined to stand in the first ballot out of loyalty to Heath, to offer themselves in the second ballot. Similarly, in 1990, many Conservative MPs no longer wanted Thatcher as party leader, but neither did they want Heseltine to replace her. However, they were effectively compelled to vote tactically or try to second-guess how their colleagues might vote in order to secure a second ballot in which a wider choice of candidates would be available, including senior figures who had not stood in the first ballot out of loyalty (albeit duty-bound, rather than heart-felt, by this time). In other words, presented with two unpalatable candidates, some Conservative MPs found themselves voting in the hope that neither would ­actually win in the first ballot. Intrinsically important though the 1998 leadership rules clearly were, they also need to be understood as part of a wider attempt under Hague’s early leadership to revitalise the Conservative Party in terms of organisation and membership. Membership had been inexorably declining for decades; back in 1950s, the Conservative Party had boasted approximately 2.8 million members, but this had fallen to 756,000 by the early 1990s and to just 400,000 by the mid1990s (Audickas, Dempsey and Keen, 2018: 9; Whiteley, Seyd and Parry, 1996: 25). Much of this steady decline reflected the fact that the majority of the party’s members were elderly and so were, quite literally, dying out. Of course, in principle, the party’s ageing membership might have been replenished by younger members, but quite apart for the overall lower levels of political engagement by young people (most evident in their traditionally lower turnout in general elections), by the 1990s the Conservatives had become 86

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particularly unattractive to many young people, among whom the party was widely viewed as socially intolerant and morally authoritarian, especially in its attitudes on race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and self-identity, and those who adopted ‘alternative lifestyles’. This was coupled with the apparent xenophobia that underpinned much of its increasing Euroscepticism. Indeed, for many young people, that the membership of the Conservative Party was elderly in itself reinforced a view that it was out-of-touch with the seemingly progressive or liberal views and values of much of the younger generation at the end of the twentieth century. The individual freedom which the Conservatives preached only really seemed applicable to those individuals who conformed to the party’s narrow view of what was deemed ‘normal’, which effectively meant white, middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual and patriarchal. It was therefore envisaged by Hague and fellow Conservative ‘modernisers’ that reforming the party’s organisational structure and leadership rules in order to grant ordinary members a more substantial and active role, would provide an incentive for new members to join and thereby rejuvenate the party. On this basis, it was intended that by the early twenty-first century, the party’s membership would have increased to one million. Of course, it was also anticipated that expanding the number of Conservative members would offer the added advantage of replenishing the party’s depleted funds, which had diminished due both to the declining membership (fewer members paying their annual subscription fees and engaging in fund-raising social activities) and to the reduction in corporate donations to a party which looked as if it might be out of office for at least two Parliaments (eight to ten years). Besides, some companies felt less inclined to make generous donations to the Conservative Party once the Blair-led Labour Party had morphed into New Labour, the latter proudly ­proclaiming its pro-business stance. From Hague to Smith However, Hague’s reform of the party’s organisation and leadership rules did little to render the Conservatives more attractive to the electorate. This was hardly surprising, because for many voters, the key criteria when evaluating a party’s attractiveness or competence are the appeal and credibility of its policies, its likely governing competence, the apparent degree of intra-party unity, and the qualities of the leader (do they seem to be prime ministerial?). Although Hague did not expect these organisational reforms to deliver a direct or immediate boost to the Conservatives’ popularity, he did envisage that they would 87

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contribute indirectly to a medium-term electoral recovery, partly by increasing and rejuvenating the party’s membership in a manner which made it more socially representative of and ‘in touch with’ Britain on the cusp of the twentyfirst century, but also by constituting part of a more general modernisation of the Conservative brand. The latter entailed an initial advocacy of social liberalism, in an attempt at tackling the reputation for authoritarianism and intolerance which the Conservative Party had acquired. In this context, and at this juncture, the Conservatives appeared to many people to be out of touch with the notion of Cool Britannia which New Labour was (briefly) associated with or sought to exploit to its political advantage. Not even Hague’s high-profile appearance at the 1997 Notting Hill Carnival, wearing a supposedly fashionable baseball cap, could persuade non-Conservatives that he was anything other than a young-ish fogey. Indeed, these symbolic and sartorial initiatives courted derision from many people who were not Conservatives, while causing embarrassment to many of those who were; a right wing middle-aged man pretending to be ‘down there with the youth’ was the political equivalent of cringe-inducing dad-dancing. Consequently, Hague found himself in a no-win situation. Purporting to embrace modernisation and social liberalism risked alienating the Conservatives’ moral and social traditionalists and core vote, but without securing a compensating increase in support from more liberal and/or younger voters, very few of whom were persuaded that Hague and his party had really changed and moved on from Thatcherism. Such scepticism proved justified, for after a year or so of flat-lining in the opinion polls, Hague reverted to a stance more redolent of Thatcherism, and which now sought to place clear blue water between the Conservative Party and New Labour. A more traditionalist or morally conservative stance was adopted on issues pertaining to crime (law-and-order), immigration and asylum seekers, the family and sexual politics, coupled with renewed advocacy of tax cuts in the economic sphere. This was fast becoming the Conservative Party’s default stance and comfort zone despite Quinn’s contention in 2010 that ‘they were ideological, but not blindly so [given that] they had a sophisticated understanding of the necessity for internal unity before electoral considerations’ (Quinn, 2010: 115). Hague also led a renewed Conservative attack on the EU, making ‘Save the Pound’ a key issue in the 2001 election, in emphatic opposition to adoption of the euro. Indeed, Hague melded Euroscepticism and xenophobia when he depicted Britain under New Labour as ‘a foreign land’, and promised the British people that a Conservative government would ‘give you back your 88

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country’ (for Hague’s shift from policy modernisation to traditionalism, see Dorey, 2003). Yet this ideological shift back to the right failed to yield much improvement in the Conservative Party’s performance in the 2001 general election, when it gained just one extra seat. In effect, Hague’s rightward move merely sustained the party’s core vote, but failed to win many new supporters. On the contrary, it confirmed the suspicions that Hague’s initial advocacy of social liberalism had never really been serious or sincere, but was simply driven by a short-term tactical expediency which was swiftly jettisoned when it failed to increase the party’s popularity. Alongside these problems, and in many respects, inextricably linked to them, Hague struggled to convey a convincing image of authoritative political leadership and gravitas sufficient to persuade many voters that he was prime ministerial, even though he often scored political points against Blair during Prime Minister’s Question Time. Sadly for Hague, most voters pay little attention to parliamentary performance. Consequently, ‘his task of presenting a credible alternative government was doomed’ (Collings and Seldon, 2001: 636). When the 2001 general election resulted in a wholly expected second successive landslide victory for New Labour, Hague wasted little time in announcing his resignation, although just like Major four years earlier, this prompted some complaints that he ought to remain in post for a while longer, in order to give the Conservative Party time to contemplate the causes of its defeat and thereby consider how to respond. The more widely accepted counter-argument, though, was that such reflection could not be adequately conducted under the leader who had just led the party to a heavy defeat, having clearly failed to increase its popularity during the previous four years. Instead, any ideological re-orientation and concomitant policy review should be conducted under a new leader. Moreover, the leadership contest itself would provide an opportunity for the candidates to articulate their own prognosis of why the party had failed to make much progress since 1997 and thereby signal their proposed remedies. Crucially, the 2001 leadership contest would also be the first to be conducted under the revised (1998) procedures, whereby the final choice of Conservative leader would be made by the extra-parliamentary party. The major intra-party reform inaugurated by Hague would now be deployed to elect his successor and for the first time grant the mass membership a formal role in electing a Conservative leader. The 2001 leadership contest comprised of five contenders, after Widdecombe had decided not to enter the contest due to a lack of support among Conservative 89

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MPs. These were: Michael Ancram, Clarke, David Davis, Portillo, and Iain Duncan Smith. Of these, Clarke and Portillo were assumed to be the front-­ runners or big beasts, primarily because of the ministerial experience and concomitant high profile they had acquired in the Thatcher and Major governments, with Clarke emphasising his electability, as evinced by opinion polls which confirmed his popularity beyond the Conservative Party, particularly when compared to the other candidates. By contrast, neither Ancram nor Davis were widely viewed as serious contenders, although the former attempted to portray himself as the unity candidate who could bridge the ideological gulf between Clarke on the one hand, and Portillo and Smith on the other. Smith, meanwhile, lacked ministerial experience, but was also renowned as one of the Maastricht rebels under Major’s premiership, a reputation which would endear him to the Eurosceptic right but would equally repel many MPs from other ­sections of the parliamentary party. In many respects though, Portillo’s candidature in the 2001 leadership election ultimately suffered as a consequence of his response to the party’s crushing 1997 electoral defeat, when he had also lost his Enfield and Southgate seat. Following these twin defeats, Portillo had sought to reinvent himself as a socially liberal or progressive Conservative – albeit remaining a staunch Eurosceptic – urging the party to do much more to support social and sexual minorities, and promote gender equality, not least by adopting more female candidates, and even alluding to the possible legalisation of cannabis. He also admitted in September 1999 to having had ‘homosexual experiences’. As a consequence, by 2001, Portillo was less politically attractive to the Thatcherite right, for he no longer seemed to be ideologically ‘one of us’. Indeed, his candidature in the 2001 leadership election was accompanied by various homophobic comments and innuendo from some on the party’s right who were ‘traditionalists’ on moral and lifestyle issues, and thus strongly opposed to social liberalism. One parliamentary colleague suggested that he should focus on bread-and-butter political issues rather than his apparently new-found obsession with ‘weed, women and woofters’ (quoted in Hoggart, 2001). In fact, several months before the Conservative leadership contest, Tebbit had acidly referred in the Spectator to ‘the coming-out of the new touchy-feely, pink-pound Portillo’, adding that Portillo’s new stance was symptomatic of a wider excess of politically correct social liberalism in which ‘the Church scarcely recognises any sins but racism, sexism and homophobia’ (Tebbit, 2000: 17). During the leadership campaign itself, Tebbit declared his support for Smith not just on ideological grounds, but because the latter was a 90

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‘normal family man with children’, a comment which was widely interpreted as another (disdainful) allusion to Portillo’s youthful dalliances with homosexuality, even though he himself been married since 1982 (Alderman and Carter, 2002: 573). Yet, while Portillo’s confession about his youthful sexual history and his apparent political re-birth as a social liberal alienated many of his Thatcherite colleagues in the party, his attempts at distancing himself from Thatcherism were not enough to persuade many non-Thatcherite Conservatives (notwithstanding their steadily diminishing number) about the scale or sincerity of his proclaimed ideological transformation. He had unwittingly alienated some potential or former supporters on the Conservative right, while failing to attract a corresponding increase in support from more left-leaning or socially liberal Conservatives, the latter failure doubtless reinforced by Portillo’s continued Euroscepticism, which meant that he was never likely to attract support from Conservative MPs who backed Clarke. Although these factors did not prevent Portillo from winning the first ballot, as can be seen below, he attained first place with just under 30 per cent of the vote. Ostensibly, the most notable aspect of the first ballot result was the performance of Smith, who achieved second place having polled three more votes than Clarke. Smith seemed to have been the beneficiary of right-wing Conservatives who no longer felt able to support Portillo, but who were also unwilling to support the somewhat less well-known Davis. As noted by Heppell and Hill (2010: 37), ‘Iain Duncan Smith had no Cabinet or ministerial experience and made his reputation as an anti-Major Eurosceptic rebel.’ As had been the case with Hague in the 1997 leadership election, it was widely assumed that having achieved a somewhat surprising second place in this initial ballot, Smith had momentum and would attract considerably more support in subsequent ballots. Indeed, his relative success was likely to garner votes from Conservative MPs who had declined to support him in the first ballot precisely because they did not think he could succeed. Conversely, Portillo was assumed Table 3.1  MPs’ support in first ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest

Michael Portillo Iain Duncan Smith Kenneth Clarke David Davis Michael Ancram

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of MPs voting for

49 39 36 21 21

29.5 23.4 21.7 12.7 12.7

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to have peaked already, such that he was unlikely to attract much more support in the next ballot. Before proceeding to the second ballot, though, the first ballot had to be re-run, because neither Ancram nor Davis, who had jointly finished in last place with 21 votes each, would agree to stand down. Although the leadership rules were unequivocal in stating that the last-placed candidate was required to withdraw from the contest, it had not been envisaged that two candidates would actually share last place in a leadership ballot. In the re-run of the first ballot, Ancram polled four fewer votes than before, while Davis’ support fell by three votes. While this now meant that Ancram was in last place, with seventeen votes compared to Davis’ eighteen, Ancram’s enforced withdrawal from the contest was accompanied by Davis’ voluntary withdrawal. In so doing, Davis was enabling his erstwhile supporters to switch to Smith, thereby making it almost certain that the latter would reach the final stage of the leadership contest, the ballot of the mass membership. In the second ballot (not the re-run of the first ballot), Smith won fifty-four votes, sufficient to overtake Portillo by just one vote, the latter having won only four additional votes since the first ballot; he had indeed peaked too soon. Had Portillo not alienated some on the right by embracing social liberalism post1997, he would probably have proved more popular than Smith, certainly in terms of charisma and communication skills. If just one of the votes cast for Smith had gone to Portillo instead, the latter would have proceeded to the final ballot. Meanwhile, Clarke was the clear beneficiary of Ancram’s withdrawal from the contest, attracting twenty-three votes more than in the first ballot, sufficient to make him the winner of this second ballot, which meant that he and Smith would be the two candidates presented to the mass membership. Clarke wryly expressed regret that his rival in the final (mass membership) ballot was not Portillo, because this would have compelled the party ‘to choose between two of it its more unpalatable prejudices’, and in so doing, determining ‘whether the party was more Europhobic than homophobic or vice versa’. Clarke hazarded Table 3.2  MPs’ support in second ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest

Michael Portillo Iain Duncan Smith Kenneth Clarke

Number of MPs voting for

Percentage of MPs voting for

53 54 59

32% 32.5% 35.5%

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a guess that if it had been faced with such a choice at that time, ‘they would almost certainly have plumped for me’ (Clarke, 2016: 416). Of course, it was partly homophobia which almost certainly, but narrowly, prevented Portillo from reaching the final ballot anyway. Instead, the Conservative Party’s mass membership was presented with a rather different but still stark choice: the highly experienced, economically pragmatic, socially liberal, pro-European Clarke or the inexperienced (having never held ministerial office) economically neo-liberal, socially conservative/ traditionalist, staunch Eurosceptic (having been one of the Maastricht rebels) Smith. Clarke’s Euro-enthusiasm was always likely to prove problematic given the prevalence of Euroscepticism throughout the Conservative Party by the early 2000s, which also reflected the extent to which Thatcherism was actually becoming more, not less, entrenched among Conservatives since Thatcher’s resignation. However, Clarke hoped that his considerable ministerial ­experience – including having served as Chancellor under Major – and the extent to which opinion polls suggested he enjoyed popularity and respect among much of the British public, would persuade the Conservatives’ grassroots members that he was the candidate most likely to make the party electable again: acceptability to much of the electorate would, it was envisaged, render him more acceptable to the Conservative Party’s mass membership. Moreover, it was Clarke whom the Blair Government most feared as potential Conservative leader, for his political authority and pugnacious style would render him a formidable political opponent, particularly in parliamentary debates and at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Yet, these ostensible political advantages were still insufficient to overcome the Euroscepticism prevalent among much of the extra-parliamentary Conservative Party, which thus ensured that many grassroots Conservatives continued to view Clarke unfavourably. Conversely, for many of the party’s rank-and-file members, Smith’s unequivocal Euroscepticism, coupled with his strong conservative or traditionalist stance on moral and social issues, more than compensated for his lack of ministerial experience and apparent lack of public popularity. Indeed, some commentators believed that his staunch Euroscepticism was the determinant factor in Smith’s popularity among the Conservatives’ grassroots, with Portillo himself reflecting that ‘Iain Duncan Smith was chosen because the members knew almost nothing about him except that he disliked the EU, whereas Ken Clarke’s enthusiasm for it was all too evident’ (Portillo, 2016). 93

Choosing party leaders Table 3.3  MPs’ support in third and final ballot of 2001 Conservative leadership contest

Iain Duncan Smith Kenneth Clarke

Votes

Share (%)

155,933 100,864

61 39

In this respect, acceptability on ideological or policy grounds, rather than electability, was the key factor influencing the support of many Conservatives outside Parliament, because Smith appeared to offer a continuity with or reversion to Thatcherism, and as such was viewed by many Thatcherite Conservatives as ‘one of us’. Indeed, Smith was belatedly endorsed by Thatcher herself, although this avowed support was seemingly prompted primarily by a determination to prevent Clarke from being elected Conservative leader. In the event, Smith comfortably defeated Clarke in the ballot of the Conservative Party’s mass membership. However, we should be careful in assuming that ideological purity and electability are viewed as distinct or diametrically opposed by the voters in such leadership contests, even if political scientists consider them as such. For many Thatcherites in the Conservative Party, rather like their hard-left ideological counterparts in the Labour Party, electoral defeats are often explicated in terms of leadership betrayal, entailing a failure to pursue conviction politics when in government or seeking to occupy the perceived centre ground when in opposition, and thereby diluting the brand or muddying the message. From this perspective, many grassroots members might genuinely believe that a leader who is acceptable (to them) on ideological grounds will also render the party more electable by providing voters with clear principles and vision, rather than diluting its policies in pursuit of soggy centrism. Certainly, Thatcherites tend to assume that the Conservative Party’s failure to win a clear parliamentary majority since 1987 (in 1992, the party won by a margin of twenty-one seats and in 2015 by twelve seats) was largely due to the perceived abandonment or watering-down of Thatcherism, rather than because her eponymous doctrine is no longer electorally attractive or politically relevant to the problems facing Britain since the 1990s. In this context, at least some of the Conservative Party members who voted for Smith rather  than  Clarke might have envisaged that the former would fulfil the criterion of electability once he had been granted the opportunity to establish his political authority, develop a policy programme and enhance his public profile. 94

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It has also been suggested that the Conservatives’ grassroots viewed Smith as being more likely to facilitate party unity than Clarke, because the latter’s proEuropean stance would be much more likely to fuel divisions in an increasingly Eurosceptic party (Cowley and Green, 2005: 50). Yet, this scenario never materialised. Rather like his immediate predecessor, Smith commenced his leadership by espousing the rhetoric of modernisation and alluding to a new mode of compassionate conservatism in order to broaden the Conservative Party’s electoral appeal, but this failed to elicit any improvement in its popularity, with opinion polls clearly indicating that the Conservatives were continuing to flat-line in the 30–32 per cent range in opinion polls. This betokened another heavy defeat for the party in the next general election, not least because few centrist voters or even non-Thatcherite Conservatives were persuaded by Smith’s sudden advocacy of modernisation and greater compassion; it never seemed genuine or heartfelt. Indeed, it was possible that the party might even lose more support (and seats) because while the modernisation phase of Smith’s leadership failed to boost the party’s popularity, it also risked alienating some of its core support, much of which yearned for unadulterated Thatcherism and which was therefore dismayed at the apparent advocacy of politically correct social liberalism and caring Conservatism. Consequently, and again replicating Hague before him, Smith jettisoned the modernisation trope and instead reverted to the comfort zone of Thatcherism, with a renewed emphasis on social conservatism, traditional or Victorian morality, and stronger Euroscepticism, notwithstanding May’s warning at the Conservatives’ 2002 conference that they were viewed by many people as ‘the nasty party’. The ideological oscillation which characterised Smith’s leadership failed to improve the Conservative Party’s popularity and failed to enhance his own authority or credibility as leader. Those who had been sceptical about Smith’s advocacy of modernisation felt vindicated by his abandonment of it when it failed to yield immediate dividends; it seemingly proved that it had been superficial and half-hearted from the outset. At the same time, any joy felt by Thatcherites that Smith had now reverted to their perspective and policies was tempered by the sense that he had wasted a year espousing an apparently trendy modernisation agenda which he never really believed in and which had persuaded no-one, least of all those to whom it was targeted. This, though, was only one of the problems which Smith faced as Conservative leader from the outset. A particular problem which deprived him of political 95

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authority and credibility among much of the parliamentary Conservative Party was that he had attracted the support of barely a third of his fellow MPs, but this had been sufficient to enable him to come second in this ballot and thus be presented to the mass membership alongside Clarke in the final ballot. This electoral system meant that on the first occasion it was deployed, the person elected to lead the party had been supported by 60 per cent of the mass membership, but only supported by 23.4 per cent of Conservative MPs in the first ballot. Smith’s lack of credibility was then greatly compounded by his poor leadership skills in terms of communication, party management and political tactics (see Hayton, 2012; Hayton and Heppell, 2010; Heppell, 2015). However, the deep despondency which many Conservative MPs felt about Smith’s leadership raised an important issue which had not, it seemed, been envisaged when the new electoral college had been adopted in 1998, namely the extent to which the parliamentary party could remove an unpopular or incompetent leader who had been widely supported by the mass membership. Not only did this risk exacerbating tensions between the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Conservative Party, it was also quite possible that a similar scenario would ensue if the incumbent was persuaded (or compelled) to resign and another contest held to elect a new leader; the mass membership decisively electing a leader who had only made it into the last two by the narrowest of margins in the penultimate ballot. From Smith to Howard By autumn 2003, discontent with Smith’s leadership was so widespread in the parliamentary Conservative Party that his position became untenable. Rumours abounded of an imminent motion of (no) confidence being proposed, in the expectation that he would lose and be forced to resign, whereupon a new leadership contest could be held. The 1998 reform of the leadership rules made this much easier to precipitate, because instead of requiring an MP to challenge the incumbent, the result of the confidence motion would determine whether there would actually be a contest: if the leader won the confidence vote comfortably, they would remain in post and could not be similarly challenged for the next twelve months. If, however, they lost the confidence vote, they were required to resign and would not be permitted to stand for re-election in the ensuing leadership contest. The one ambiguity was what would constitute a comfortable victory in a confidence vote: the support of 80 per cent of fellow Conservative MPs would be unequivocal, but what if they only won the 96

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confidence vote by a margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent? This would constitute a technical victory (a simple majority), but would nonetheless illustrate that they lacked the support of a very large minority of the parliamentary party, such that their moral authority would almost certainly be fatally undermined and they would probably resign anyway. The virtually inevitable vote of (no) confidence was precipitated in October 2003, when the requisite twenty-five MPs (15 per cent of the parliamentary party at that time) had submitted letters to the Chair of the 1922 Committee demanding such a vote. By this time, two further factors fatally undermined Smith’s leadership completely (Heppell, 2008: 163). The first was the result of a by-election in Brent East (north London), in which the Liberal Democrats, who had finished third place behind the Conservatives in the general election just two years earlier, won the ostensibly safe Labour seat on a swing of 29 per cent. Although the result was obviously deeply disappointing for the Labour Party, it could at least rationalise the defeat as a backlash against Blair’s decision to launch the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq earlier that year. However, it was also a thoroughly disappointing result for the Conservatives, for having finished in second place in Brent East in 2001, they might ordinarily have been expected to benefit electorally from Labour’s unpopularity. Instead, the Conservatives’ ongoing unpopularity under Smith meant that the party was actually pushed into third place, its share of the vote falling from 18 per cent to 16 per cent (BBC, 2003). The second factor which finally and fatally undermined Smith’s leadership was a YouGov survey of Conservative grassroots views about his leadership. This revealed that by the early autumn of 2003, just over half of Conservative Party members had come to the conclusion that electing Smith had been a mistake (Heppell, 2008: 163–4; Kelly, 2004: 402). This naturally provided a fillip to Conservative MPs who were keen to replace Smith but were apprehensive about alienating the party’s grassroots membership. It was now apparent that a majority of rank-and-file members acknowledged the flaws in Smith’s leadership (which had been evident to many Conservative MPs from the outset) and the wider impact on the party’s electoral prospects – which in turn was having a negative impact on its finances, as donations dwindled further (Seldon and Snowden, 2005: 272). The survey of the grassroots membership tacitly provided the parliamentary party with permission to seek to replace him via a vote of (no) confidence. Indeed, as one commentator suggested, ‘These MPs might have been less inclined to ditch their leader, and thus overturn a grassroots ballot, had he still enjoyed grassroots confidence’ (Kelly, 2004: 402). 97

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At this time, the Conservatives had 165 MPs, which meant that twenty-five of them (15 per cent of the parliamentary party in the House of Commons) would need to submit a letter to the chair of the party’s backbench 1922 Committee demanding a (no) confidence vote. One Conservative MP who supported such a vote, John Greenway, reported a mood of ‘gloom and despondency’ in the parliamentary party and claimed that many of its MPs did not view Smith as a potential prime minister. Another critic of Smith, Derek Conway (a former party whip), insisted that Smith was ‘not up to the job’ and predicted that there would likely be ‘well beyond’ the twenty-five letters needed to launch a confidence vote (Jones, 2003). After the requisite letters had been duly submitted to the chair of the 1922 Committee, Sir Michael Spicer, the vote was swiftly arranged for 29 October, when ninety Conservative MPs expressed no confidence in Smith’s leadership of the party, compared to seventy-five MPs who supported him: 54.5 per cent to 45.5 per cent. Although many media reports emphasised the relative narrowness of the result, a margin of fifteen votes, it is highly unlikely that a similar margin expressing confidence in his leadership would have been sufficient to prevent his resignation. Even if Smith had been supported by a margin of fifteen votes and thus won a technical victory, it would almost certainly have proved political damaging and raised serious questions about his moral authority. Not only was Smith required to resign, having lost the (no) confidence vote, the party’s leadership rules also decreed that he could not stand as a candidate in the ensuing leadership contest, although it is obviously highly unlikely that someone defeated in this manner would want to put themselves forward again anyway, even if the rules permitted it. Under the 1998 procedure, the Conservatives now faced the possibility of a leadership contest spanning several weeks, which meant that the party might not have a new leader until the beginning of 2004. There was also the potential for the extra-parliamentary party to opt again for a leader who was supported by significantly less than half of the party’s MPs. However, these two scenarios were averted due to Howard being the only Conservative MP to announce his candidature, even though several other senior party figures had been expected to present themselves, such as Ancram, Clarke, Davis, May, Portillo, Redwood and Tim Yeo. There were two reasons why they declined to offer their own candidatures. First, there was a strong desire at all levels of the party to avoid a lengthy and potentially divisive leadership contest, particularly as this would distract from the needed attacks on the (second) Blair Government at a time when 98

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its popularity was waning and Blair’s erstwhile lustre was fast losing its shine. Davis himself acknowledged that ‘a long, protracted leadership contest would worsen the divisions and faction fighting,’ not just in the contest itself, but probably in the run-up to the 2005 general election (quoted in White and Wintour, 2003). The second reason – inextricably linked to the first – why none of these senior Conservatives (nor any others) put themselves forward as candidates to succeed Smith was that they were happy to endorse Howard, who thus became a unity candidate by default: a ‘smooth and bloodless coup’ (Letwin, 2017: 129). Although he was ideologically similar to Smith in terms of being a strong Eurosceptic and social conservative or traditionalist, he had the enormous advantage of possessing much greater credibility, stature and political experience, having served as Home Secretary under Major, shadow foreign secretary under Hague, and shadow chancellor under Smith. Consequently, senior Conservatives spanning different ideological strands in the parliamentary party, such as Dorrell, Liam Fox and Oliver Letwin, endorsed Howard as the most attractive and authoritative candidate to lead the Conservative Party into the next general election. Even Widdecombe now offered her support, explaining that ‘you don‘t have to be lovey-dovey to work with someone. If I can support him, what‘s anybody else’s problem?’ (White and Wintour, 2003). Thus, when the deadline for formal nominations closed on 6 November 2003, Howard was the only candidate. Moreover, he had attracted the endorsements of at least 130 of the Conservatives’ 166 MPs, clearly a remarkable degree of support and unity. The only concern was how the extra-parliamentary party would react to the absence of any other candidates denying them the opportunity to make the final choice. However, as Davis argued: ‘The constituencies will understand that with an election 18 months away, and Labour in disarray, this would not be the time to turn in on ourselves’ (quoted in White and Wintour, 2003). He was correct, because according to Don Porter, president of the National Conservative Convention, an internal survey of party activists had revealed that, by a margin of 20–1, they did not want a divisive three-month election to find a new leader (Elliott, 2003). Instead, once Howard had been elected unopposed, the extra-parliamentary party’s role was confined to an informal consultation – not even a formal ratification via secret ballot – the weekend after Howard’s ‘coronation’ (Tempest, 2003).

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From Howard to Cameron A third successive general election defeat in 2005 (albeit not as crushing as the previous two), heralded Howard’s announcement that he intended to resign as Conservative leader, the party’s fourth leadership resignation in eight years. However, rather than resign immediately, Howard resolved to remain as Conservative leader pending a review of the leadership rules. He was not enamoured with the post-1998 role granted to the extra-parliamentary party in electing Conservative leaders and therefore hoped that a review of the process would result in the party’s MPs regaining complete sovereignty over the choice of future leaders; he wanted them to take back control. However, some Conservatives and commentators suspected that Howard harboured another motive by pursuing this reform, namely to reduce the chances of Davies becoming Conservative leader – the latter was known to be highly popular with much of the extra-parliamentary party, but less so among some Conservative MPs, among whom he ‘had acquired a reputation for ­disloyalty’ – while also providing more time for other, perhaps younger leadership candidates to present themselves and acquire more support, most notably Cameron and George Osborne (The Economist, 2005: 37). The proposed reforms were delineated in a document entitled A 21st Century Party and were endorsed by Conservative backbench MPs and their shadow cabinet colleagues before being presented to the extra-parliamentary party for consideration in late May 2005, with a final vote scheduled for September. In the document’s Introduction, Conservative Chair Francis Maude explained that the party had ‘too few activists, too few qualified agents, our resources are not concentrated in the right areas and in some parts of the country our organisation has collapsed altogether’, with almost 200 constituency parties each having fewer than 100 members. This not only reflected the well-documented ageing of the Conservative Party’s membership, but was a tacit acknowledgement that the reforms introduced by Hague eight years earlier had failed to rejuvenate and replenish the extra-parliamentary party; the party’s literally dying membership was still not being replaced by younger members. Of course, seeking to remove the extra-parliamentary party’s role in electing the Conservative leader was hardly likely to reverse the steady decline in membership, so A 21st Century Party proposed another tranche of organisational reforms, coupled with a different type of input from the wider party in leadership elections. Structurally, it was proposed that the existing system of local (atrophying) constituency parties should be streamlined, with fewer but larger 100

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local Conservative organisations, the premise being that this would render them more cost-effective via economies of scale. With regard to reforming the party’s leadership process per se, A 21st Century Party proposed that when a vacancy arose, due to the death, resignation, or defeat of the incumbent in a vote of (no) confidence, any Conservative MP who obtained the support of at least 10 per cent of the party in the House of Commons would be presented to a national convention, unless one candidate attracted more than 50 per cent from the outset, in which case they would automatically be declared the new leader. The National Convention would be comprised of the chairs of local parties and sundry other Conservative dignitaries and would conduct a ballot to gauge how much support each of the candidates enjoyed in the extra-parliamentary party. After this ballot, Conservative MPs would cast their votes (one vote per MP, via secret ballot), but with the expectation that they would bear in mind the preference of the national convention when making their choice. However, the leadership preference of the national convention was not to be binding on Conservative MPs; they were free to disregard it when choosing the candidate they believed would be the best Conservative leader. Once again, the option of an electoral college in which different sections of the Conservative Party would be allocated a proportion (percentage) of the votes, albeit with MPs enjoying the clear majority, was rejected, partly due the complexities: what would be the proportions allocated to each component of the party? Would each constituency party vote for one candidate on the basis that s/he was the choice of a majority of local members or would the preferences of individual local party members be counted – 35,000 extra-­parliamentary members supported candidate A, 29,000 supported candidate B, etc. However, alongside these potential complexities, an electoral college was also rejected because of the risk that the extra-parliamentary party might choose a Conservative leader who was not widely supported by the party’s MPs. This, of course, had been the case in 2001, when Smith enjoyed much more support among grassroots Conservative members than he initially did among the party’s MPs and which subsequently compounded the difficulties he experienced in ­establishing his political authority over the parliamentary party. These proposals were rejected by the Conservatives’ 1922 Committee on 15 May 2005, when 100 of the 180 MPs present instead supported a counter-proposal drafted by the Committee’s Executive, whereby Conservative MPs could stand as candidates if they attracted the support of 5 per cent of their colleagues in the House of Commons. The views and preferences of the 101

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extra-parliamentary party would then be ascertained during a two-week consultation exercise, whereby MPs would elicit the views and preferences of their constituency party and local councillors. Each MP would then report back to the chair of the 1922 Committee, who would inform Conservative MPs of the names of the two most popular candidates among the extra-parliamentary party. This would herald a series of ballots in which the MPs (but no-one else) would vote, whereupon the last placed candidate in each ballot would be eliminated. This process would continue until just one candidate remained, who would be declared the new leader (Kelly and Lester, 2005: 10–11). This counter-proposal suffered from two obvious deficiencies, though. First, although it was expected that Conservative MPs would consider the views and preferences of their local party and councillors when casting their vote, there was no explicit obligation to do also and as ballots were secret, there was no effective means of gauging how far (if at all) MPs were reflecting the choices of their constituency members and local councillors. Second, this counter-proposal still entailed terminating the extra-parliamentary party’s direct role in electing a Conservative leader, because it would no longer be able to vote in the final stage of the eliminative ballots, when just two candidates remained; this choice would once again be the sole prerogative of the party’s MPs. Certainly, many grassroots Conservatives were reluctant to relinquish the (final ballot) vote which they had been granted only eight years earlier, but what compounded their unhappiness with the new proposals was the binary choice they were being presented with: accept or reject the proposed return to the pre-1998 system of leadership elections, without additional options, such as an electoral college (in which they would be granted a share of the vote, even if this was a minority) or perhaps, more radically, allowing the extra-parliamentary party to determine the shortlist of candidates from which the party’s MPs would then choose a new leader. When these counter-proposals were presented to the 1,141 members of the party’s Constitutional College – comprising MPs, MEPs, peers and various senior representatives of the extra-parliamentary party (such as local chairs, and area and regional officers) – they voted thus: Table 3.4  2005 vote on changing the Conservative leadership election rules Section of Party

For

Against

MPs Peers and MEPs Extra-parliamentary

132 (71.4%)   33 (63.5%) 446 (58.5%)

  53 (28.6%)   19 (36.5%) 317 (41.5%)

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Not surprisingly, Conservative MPs were rather more supportive of the proposed reform than the representatives of the extra-parliamentary party, although some prominent figures in the parliamentary party strongly opposed it: in a letter to the Daily Telegraph (2005), Ancram, Andrew Lansley, May, Smith and David Willetts argued: ‘It is not too late for the parliamentary party to find a way of involving grassroots members in the Conservative Party’s most important decisions. Any proposals that do not facilitate democratic involvement deserve to be defeated.’ However, the support attracted by the proposed reform proved insufficient, because the party’s rules stipulated that two-thirds of the Constitutional College needed to vote for a proposal in order for it to be adopted, yet the overall vote in this instance fell slightly short: 64.4 per cent of those who actually voted supported the proposed reform, but with 1,001 out of 1,141 members of the College voting (a turnout of 87.7 per cent), this meant that ‘only’ sixty-one per cent of the total College membership had actually supported the recommended change (Kelly and Lester, 2005: 12). As a consequence, Howard’s successor would now be elected under the system adopted in 1998, with a series of eliminative ballots yielding two Conservative MPs who would then be presented to the extra-parliamentary party to make the final choice. The 2005 Conservative leadership contest initially involved four candidates; Cameron, Clarke, Davies and Fox, with Cameron assumed to be a centrist, not because of his previous public statements on key policy issues, but because few of his parliamentary colleagues knew what his views on key issues really were. As it was unclear whether he was really a Thatcherite or One Nation Tory, he acquired the label of pragmatic centrist by default. Of course, this might have made him a unity candidate from the outset, on the grounds that he would be able to appeal to a cross-section of Conservative MPs spanning all strands of the parliamentary party, but initially his relative youth (at thirty-nine years of age) and political inexperience (having only entered the House of Commons in 2001, and thus never having held ministerial office) meant that some of his colleagues and many political commentators failed to view him as a serious contender when he first announced his candidature, and it was widely assumed that he was putting down a marker for the future. Initially, Davis was generally viewed by many political commentators as the front-runner and while he was undoubtedly on the right of the Conservative Party, he recognised the need to broaden his appeal to other parliamentary colleagues. Although the Conservative Party in the House of Commons had become even more Thatcherite and Eurosceptic following the 2005 general 103

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election due to the ideological stance of many of its new MPs, he could not assume that appealing solely to the right would garner sufficient support in the first ballot, because some Thatcherites would initially vote for Fox. Of course, the added dilemma for Davis was that in seeking to broaden his appeal to other sections of the party, he might actually alienate some of the party’s MPs who would start to doubt his continued commitment to Thatcherism and thereby unwittingly boost Fox’s support, while failing to persuade centrist Conservatives that he was anything than an unreconstructed right-winger at heart. Meanwhile, what had initially been deemed Cameron’s lack of credibility as a leadership contender actually proved to be an increasing advantage. His relative youthfulness became attractive to a growing number of Conservative MPs who judged that it might be time to ‘skip a generation’, and choose a leader from the more recent parliamentary intake. This, of course, was the obverse of the view among some Conservatives that Clarke was too old; he would be nearly seventy by the next general election, and quite apart from his pro-European views, was perhaps ‘yesterday’s man’. Moreover, and counterintuitively, Cameron’s lack of ministerial experience also became viewed as politically advantageous, for not only did it absolve him from responsibility for the failures or unpopularity of policies pursued under previous Conservative leaders, it provided an opportunity to offer something new or more original, an ideological perspective or policy stance which purportedly transcended the binary opposites of Thatcherism and One Nation Toryism. He certainly would not be able to denounce or depart from Thatcherism economically, not only because of the continuing Thatcherisation of the parliamentary party, but because of the seemingly hegemonic nature of Thatcherism and the extent to which neo-liberalism seemed to have become deeply embedded in Britain. The right had, it seemed, emphatically won the economic war against the left, a victory confirmed by the transformation of the Labour Party into New Labour, with the latter accepting that much of the Thatcherite revolution, at least in the economic realm, was irreversible. However, Cameron did emphasise the need for a more compassionate, socially liberal Conservatism and the need for the party to accept Britain (socially) as it was in the twenty-first century, rather than harking back to some supposedly halcyon Golden Age. As is clear from the data below, while Davis led in the first ballot and Clarke finished in fourth and final place, and was thus eliminated, it was Cameron’s support that was most noteworthy, for he won second place, just six votes behind Davis. 104

Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party Table 3.5  MPs’ support in first ballot of 2005 Conservative leadership contest

David Davis David Cameron Liam Fox Kenneth Clarke

Votes

Share (%)

62 56 42 38

31.3 28.3 21.2 19.2

It appeared that some of the votes which had been expected to be won by Clarke were actually cast for Cameron. Furthermore, following Clarke’s elimination, the expectation that much of his erstwhile support would be transferred to Cameron in the second ballot meant that it was the latter who suddenly enjoyed momentum against Davis. It should also be noted though that the two right wing candidates, Davis and Fox, secured a joint share of 52.5 per cent of the vote, reflecting the steadily increasing preponderance of Thatcherite MPs in the parliamentary Conservative Party. The extent to which Cameron benefited from Clarke’s elimination is evident below, where it can be seen that the former won an additional thirty-four votes, while Fox’s vote increased by nine. Davis, on the other hand, lost five votes. Nonetheless, although Cameron won a plurality of votes, Davis and Fox, as the candidates of the right, still jointly attracted over half of the votes cast by Conservative MPs. It was now for the extra-parliamentary Conservative Party to choose between Cameron and Davis, with the two candidates now embarking on a six-week campaign involving hustings across the length and breadth of Britain to garner support from Conservative members. Ostensibly, it might have been expected that the grassroots membership would choose Davis, because Cameron’s rhetoric about the need for modernisation, and socially liberal acceptance of multi-cultural Britain and alternative lifestyles risked alienating the party’s largely elderly, morally traditionalist and socially authoritarian mass membership, whereas Davis was clearly an advocate of social conservatism and also a ­prominent Eurosceptic. Table 3.6  MPs’ support in second ballot of 2005 Conservative leadership contest

David Davis David Cameron Liam Fox

Votes

Share (%)

90 57 51

45.4 28.8 25.8

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Yet, after three successive general election defeats, most grassroots Conservatives were now prepared to prioritise electability over ideological purity by supporting a relatively youthful, charismatic, articulate and telegenic leader who had abundant potential to broaden the Conservatives’ electoral appeal to people who would not previously have considered voting for the party, such as many younger people and public-sector workers. Cameron’s popularity was greatly enhanced by a speech he gave at the Conservative Party conference (albeit before the eliminative ballots of MPs) which, although light on detailed policy proposals, was well articulated, enthusiastically delivered, positive and upbeat in tone, and presented without a script. Even many Conservatives who had hitherto been uncertain or sceptical about Cameron, either for ideological reasons or because they deemed him inexperienced, were very impressed and rewarded him an enthusiastic standing ovation (Denham and Dorey, 2006: 38; Heppell, 2008: 181). The positive impact of this speech was increased by virtue of the fact that it was televised, thereby reaching an audience far beyond the Conservative Party conference hall. In stark contrast, the speech which Davis delivered to the conference (after Cameron) was lacklustre and leaden; long on detailed policy proposals, but both scripted and soporific. Indeed, it was so dull in delivery that Davis had to signal explicitly when he had finished and was then met with only polite, perfunctory applause. Consequently, the Conservative Party’s mass membership voted decisively for Cameron, evidently viewing him as the leadership contender most likely to provide unity, electability and competence, regardless of his lack of ministerial experience. Even Davis’s strong Euroscepticism failed to prevent a decisive victory for Cameron, because by this time the former intra-party divisions between Europhiles and Eurosceptics had been superseded by a demarcation between different strands or strengths of Euroscepticism. Similarly, the erstwhile distinction between economic interventionists or dirigistes (associated with a previous generation of One Nation Tories) and free market Conservatism had largely been transcended by the hegemony of economic neo-liberalism. As such, many Table 3.7  Conservative members’ support in final ballot of 2005 leadership contest

David Cameron David Davis

Votes

Share (%)

134,446 64,398

67.7 32.3

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Conservatives who might have otherwise endorsed Davis felt confident that Cameron would not reverse the Thatcherite economic revolution nor promote further integration with the EU. He might adopt less rebarbative rhetoric on the public sector and social/sexual minorities, but in essence he posed no threat to the Thatcherite legacy overall, particularly in the crucial sphere of economic policy. From Cameron to May In January 2013, Cameron announced that he intended to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU if the Conservatives were re-elected in the 2015 general election (BBC, 2013a). Although sundry opinion polls indicated growing support for British withdrawal from the EU, Cameron was confident that he would be able to persuade enough voters to endorse the UK’s continued membership of the EU, to vote Remain. This confidence was based on three factors. The first was Cameron’s intention to renegotiate the terms and conditions of the UK’s membership, with the objective of securing sundry concessions which would enable Westminster to regain greater control over specific policy issues, not least of these being immigration. Ultimately, Cameron envisaged securing a slightly looser, more flexible relationship with the EU, with somewhat greater domestic control being exercised over politically sensitive policies. If he could negotiate such a relationship, Cameron envisaged, then some people expressing a desire to leave the EU would be much more amen­able to supporting Remain because many of their prime concerns and ­objections would have been acknowledged, addressed and ameliorated. The second reason for Cameron’s optimism that he could secure a Remain vote in the promised referendum was linked to this last point, namely that more detailed survey evidence of public attitudes towards the EU and the UK’s membership of it revealed that some of the public dissatisfaction was with the EU as it functioned and impacted on the UK, rather than UK membership of the EU per se. Indeed, according to a July 2012 YouGov poll, 42 per cent of respondents claimed that they would vote to remain if the terms of the UK’s membership were renegotiated (albeit the precise terms of this not specified), while 34 per cent would still vote to leave the EU, although this meant that 19 per cent were undecided, perhaps waiting to see the outcome of any renegotiation (YouGov, 2012: 4). Such survey evidence doubtless strengthened Cameron’s confidence that if he could renegotiate the terms of the UK’s membership to facilitate a looser, more flexible relationship, then much of the hostility towards the EU 107

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would be ameliorated and a Remain vote would ultimately be secured in the referendum. The third reason for Cameron’s confidence in pledging this referendum was hubris. He possessed enormous self-confidence and faith in his own powers of persuasion, buttressed by perceived charm and charisma. This might have derived from both the strong self-belief inculcated at Eton and a pre-­ parliamentary career as a PR man at Carlton TV. Yet, the limits to his powers of persuasion became apparent well before the referendum, when Cameron failed to secure the agreement of other EU leaders for the reforms he was seeking. This meant that during the referendum campaign, he had little to offer the UK electorate in terms of concessions gained from the EU and was thus obliged to base much of his case for Remain on the alleged economic benefits of ­continued membership and of the risks entailed in leaving the EU. However, this proved problematic for several reasons. The failure to secure the envisaged reforms and more favourable terms of continued membership for the UK lent credence to those in the Leave campaign who claimed that the EU was incapable of reform, at least in a manner which would benefit the UK. Meanwhile, as the UK had been in recession since the 2008 global financial crash and was in the midst of an austerity programme entailing major cuts in public spending and social provision, Cameron’s claims about the economic benefits of EU membership carried rather less weight than they might have done in more propitious circumstances. Of course, it could be (and indeed was) argued that to Leave would wreak even more damage on the UK economy and thus cause even more hardship to those already suffering the most, but the Leave campaign swiftly denounced this as Project Fear and scaremongering. This reflected another problem for Cameron and the Remain campaign, namely that citing the economic case for staying in the EU often sounded rather abstract and technocratic compared to the more emotive or visceral strategy of those campaigning for Leave, whose slogans about taking back control and warnings about further immigration via freedom of movement, along with the allusion to spending the UK’s EU budgetary contributions on the NHS instead, resonated more with many voters. In many respects, the referendum campaign became a case of ‘Hearts versus Heads’ (Oliver, 2016: 203). The vote for Leave, by a 52 to 48 per cent margin, was therefore a profound shock and disappointment for Cameron, who announced his resignation within a few hours of the referendum result being announced. Although he was under no constitutional obligation to resign, he naturally recognised that his own political authority would henceforth be seriously weakened and his political 108

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judgement doubted, and thus that the Conservative Party should elect a new leader: ‘it would not be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination’ (BBC, 2016a). He would remain in situ until the leadership selection process had been completed and his successor announced in order to provide a modicum of continuity and stability in the meantime, rather than a caretaker leader having to be appointed. The timetable and procedure for leadership contests under the post-1998 rules meant that Cameron’s successor would probably be announced in early September. In fact, the party’s 1922 Committee stipulated that the new leader should be announced by 2 September, although at the suggestion of the Conservatives’ Board and with the subsequent agreement of the 1922 Committee, this deadline was put back by a week to 9 September in order to facilitate the maximum possible participation by the extra-parliamentary party in the final ballot. There was no acknowledged heir apparent to Cameron, but the candidatures of Boris Johnson and May were widely expected, although Johnson’s leadership bid bizarrely ended before the first ballot. When he put his name forward as a candidate, Johnson had been publicly endorsed by Michael Gove – both men having worked closely together as high-profile campaigners for Leave in the ­referendum – but the latter subsequently launched a scathing attack on Johnson’s character and personality, alleging that Johnson lacked the requisite qualities to be a successful Conservative leader and prime minister. Gove now announced his own candidature, while Johnson withdrew his. Yet Gove’s conduct raised questions about his own judgement and suitability as a potential Conservative Party leader and prime minister, for although his criticism of Johnson could be viewed as bold and courageous, it might just as readily imply that Gove could be disloyal even to those supposedly close to him personally and thus untrustworthy: too willing to sacrifice his political friends and allies in order to advance his own career. Four other leadership contenders appeared with Gove in the first ballot, held on 5 July: Stephen Crabb, Fox, Andrea Leadsom and May. Of these, Crabb was generally viewed as the representative of the party’s left-leaning MPs or those redolent of One Nation Toryism, although their numbers had inexorably dwindled to since the 1990s as Thatcherism – especially on economic issues – became the default stance in the party. Therefore, Crabb’s potential base of support was very small, and along with his low profile meant he was never viewed as a serious contender. The right was represented by Fox and Leadsom, with the former having been a contestant in the 2005 contest that had elected Cameron, although on that occasion he had been unable to pose a serious 109

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challenge to the right’s other candidate, Davis. In 2016, though, Davis was not standing, which would ostensibly have enhanced Fox’s support from the right, but this time he was competing against Leadsom, so again, could not claim to be the right’s sole representative in the leadership contest. Meanwhile, Gove and May were more difficult to characterise ideologically, but were generally perceived to be centrist technocrats within the Conservative Party, although both had previously pursued policies which would have endeared them to some MPs on the right. Gove’s reforms as Education Secretary and the consequent clashes with the teaching profession had been welcomed by the right. He had also prominently campaigned for Leave in the EU referendum and further burnished his populist credentials by claiming that the British people had ‘had enough of experts’ (quoted in Mance, 2016). Meanwhile, as Home Secretary, May had presided over the controversial anti-immigration campaign which had entailed large vans being driven round various cities adorned with the slogan ‘Go Home’. She had, though, supported Remain in the EU referendum, albeit maintaining a relatively low-­profile during the campaign itself – to the extent that some of Cameron’s officials nicknamed her ‘submarine May’ due to her apparent habit of ‘disappearing from view for long periods’ before resurfacing at a more opportune moment (Oliver, 2016: 394). In spite of this, her tenure at the Home Office had given her a higher political profile than the other candidates, reflecting the seniority of the home secretary in the cabinet hierarchy. Furthermore, the broad remit of the department – counter-terrorism, immigration, law-and-order (policing and prisons), national security – meant that she had often featured in news headlines and televised interviews (although, obviously, this did mean that any major blunders would also receive greater prominence). That May was thus the clear front-runner from the outset was confirmed by the number of votes won by each candidate in the first ballot, held on 5 July 2016.

Theresa May – 165 Angela Leadsom – 66 Michael Gove – 48 Stephen Crabb – 34 Liam Fox – 16

Her tally amounted to half of all votes cast by Conservative MPs, while Fox’s derisory sixteen votes constituted a mere 5 per cent and heralded his withdrawal from the contest. Before the next vote two days later, Crabb voluntarily 110

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withdrew from the contest, so that just three names remained on the ballot paper when Conservative MPs voted on 7 July 2016, when the result was: Theresa May – 199 Angela Leadsom – 84 Michael Gove – 46 Although it is not known exactly whom each Conservative MP voted for, it is notable that May attracted an additional thirty-four votes in the second ballot – precisely the same number of votes that Crabb had polled in the first ballot before withdrawing from the contest. Similarly, following Fox’s withdrawal from the contest having polled just sixteen votes, Leadsom’s tally increased by eighteen votes in the second ballot, while Gove’s fell by two. With Gove now obliged to withdraw, having finished in third and last place, Leadsom and May were due to spend the rest of the summer canvassing support among Conservative Party members nationwide. May’s strong support among Conservative MPs in the 2016 leadership contest owed much to her ideological stance on Europe and social issues, which had superseded former intra-party divisions on economic affairs. Now that economic neo-liberalism and deification of the market had become the default stance of the Conservative Party, the main demarcations and divisions were over the UK’s membership of the EU and socio-moral or lifestyle issues. In terms of the intra-party divisions over the EU, the early twenty-first century had witnessed a new demarcation emerge (Dorey, 2017). Whereas Major’s Government had been characterised by infighting between pro-Europeans (Europhiles) – many of whom were senior and highly respected figures in the party – and a steadily growing and highly vocal number of anti-Europeans (or, rather, anti-EU Europhobes), this had been replaced by a division between soft and hard Eurosceptics: Clarke remained one of the very few pro-European Conservative MPs, almost a relic of a bygone era (Heppell, 2013: 349, Table 4; see also Lynch, 2015). As explained by Taggart and Szczerbiack (2008: 8), soft Eurosceptics were those who were generally supportive of the UK’s continued membership of the EU in principle, but were unhappy with particular aspects and as such they wanted the relationship and some of the rules to be renegotiated. In particular, they wanted parliamentary sovereignty or political control to be regained or strengthened over social and employment-related issues, most notably immigration (by curbing the free movement of labour). Ultimately, soft Eurosceptics 111

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wanted the UK to remain a member of the EU, but on the basis of a somewhat looser and more flexible relationship. Conversely, hard Eurosceptics wanted nothing less than complete UK withdrawal from the EU, either as a matter of fundamental principle or because they did not believe that the reforms favoured by soft Eurosceptics were attainable (Taggart and Szczerbiack, 2008: 7). To the hard Eurosceptics, the EU itself was incapable of reform, except insofar as it continued to pursue ‘ever closer union’ and increased policy jurisdiction with each new treaty. Whereas the original goal of promoting free trade between member states had been entirely commendable and one which Conservative neo-liberals could readily support, the EU had, they believed, subsequently morphed into a sprawling supra-national institution continually seeking to extend its control and regulatory powers over an ever-increasing range of policies, thus inexorably eroding parliamentary sovereignty and, ultimately, national identity and statehood. Consequently, the only salvation for the UK was complete withdrawal from the EU; nothing less would suffice. The hard Eurosceptics were emboldened, and felt vindicated, by Cameron’s own failure to secure meaningful reforms or concessions during his pre-­ referendum negotiations with his European counterparts, especially over free movement. The EU’s apparent or perceived intransigence seemingly confirmed the view of hard Eurosceptics that the organisation was beyond reform and that continued membership was inimical to Britain’s interests and, indeed, future as an independent nation-state. For these hard Eurosceptics, therefore, the referendum had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to extricate the UK irrevocably from the EU’s deadly embrace. Although the hard Eurosceptics have been highly vocal in the twenty-first century Conservative Party, they have nonetheless been a minority, albeit a sizeable and well-organised minority with some high-profile and readily recognisable members, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. According to Heppell, in the early 2010s the hard Eurosceptics constituted 35.4 per cent of Conservative MPs, and thus a significant minority of the parliamentary party (2013: 347, Table 3). The hard Eurosceptics were further emboldened by parliamentary arithmetic: in the 2010 and 2017 general elections, the Conservative Party failed to win an overall majority of seats in the House of Commons, while in 2015 only a twelve-seat majority was attained. These results meant that the hard Eurosceptics were able to exercise considerable leverage over Conservative leaders and prime ministers: it was largely in a futile attempt to pacify them that Cameron had pledged the referendum in the first place. 112

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While May clearly enjoyed much higher support among Conservative MPs, it was variously claimed by some in the party that Leadsom was significantly more popular in the extra-parliamentary party than May (Ross, 2016; see also Payne, 2016). This, though, risked a repeat of the Smith (and, in the Labour Party, Corbyn) leadership, whereby a candidate who attracted only limited support from their parliamentary colleagues had nonetheless won strong support from the extra-parliamentary membership, largely on ideological grounds. This then meant that they struggled to establish their political authority over the parliamentary party, because many of the party’s MPs considered the new leader to have been foisted upon them by a mass membership which obviously did not have to work under that leader on a daily basis. Not only did this weaken the legitimacy of the new leader in the eyes of their party’s MPs, it also damaged morale among their fellow parliamentarians; especially when these colleagues were convinced that the leader was not going to lead the party to victory in the next general election due to their ideological stance – which was only attractive to the party’s core vote – and poor communication skills. Yet Leadsom’s alleged popularity among the grassroots membership was cast into doubt by a YouGov survey of extra-parliamentary party members, conducted at the beginning of July 2016 (YouGov/The Times, 2016). When respondents were asked whom they would vote for if eventually presented with a final choice between May and Leadsom, they chose the former by a comfortable margin of 63 per cent to 31 per cent. May also polled higher than Leadsom  among the grassroots membership on most other questions about leadership attributes. As indicated in Table 3.8, May enjoyed a lead over Leadsom on the four criteria which were deemed most important by Conservative Party members, three of which were those identified by Stark: potential to unify the party, electability and competence (Stark, 1996: 125–6; see also Jeffery, Heppell, Hayton and Roe-Crines, 2018: 265). The only two criteria on which Leadsom enjoyed a lead over May among Conservative Party members were supporting Leave during the recent EU referendum and offering a change of policy direction from the Cameron era. However, although Leadsom enjoyed an emphatic fifty-nine point lead over May on the Leave question, this issue was ranked fifth in order of importance by respondents, having been cited by less than a third of those surveyed. Meanwhile, although Leadsom led May on the question of who would best offer a break with Cameronism, this was only ranked seventh in order of ­importance, having been cited by just 5 per cent of respondents. 113

Choosing party leaders Table 3.8  Conservative Party members’ views on leadership (survey conducted 1–4 July 2016) Which two or three of the following criteria do you think are most important in deciding who should be the next leader of the Conservative Party?

All respondents citing. … (%)

Supporters of Theresa May (%)

Supporters of Andrea Leadsom (%)

Someone who would make a competent prime minister

74

78

66

Someone who will be able to unite the Conservative Party behind them

65

70

57

Someone who has good policy ideas for the country

41

45

34

Someone who has the best chance of winning the 2020 election

36

38

32

Someone who campaigned to leave the EU in the Referendum

30

10

69

Someone who will broadly continue the direction and policies of David Cameron

19

26

6

Someone who will be a clear change from the direction and policies of David Cameron

5

2

11

Someone who campaigned to remain in the EU in the Referendum

4

5

2

Source: YouGov/The Times, 2016.

However, long before the ballot of the extra-parliamentary Conservative Party was due to be completed, Leadsom announced on 11 July 2016 that she was withdrawing from the contest. Having won just 25 per cent of the votes cast by Conservative MPs, she stated that ‘I do not believe this is sufficient support to lead a strong and stable government should I win the leadership election’ (BBC, 2016b). Noble and magnanimous though this might have sounded, Leadsom had attracted criticism for suggesting that she would be a better Conservative leader because – unlike May – she had children and so, as a mother, could empathise more effectively with families. As May was unable to have children, Leadsom’s claim struck many as singularly insensitive and ironically rather undermined her claim about being able to empathise. Thus, when Leadsom withdrew from the contest, May was confirmed as Conservative leader without being formally presented to the extra-parliamentary party to 114

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secure their approval: a ballot in which there was only one remaining candidate was not deemed justifiable, and the YouGov poll had already indicated May’s overall popularity among the Conservatives’ grassroots anyway. From the moment she was elected as Conservative leader, May’s premiership was preoccupied with securing the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, a task which proved much more problematic than many Leavers had anticipated. While she accepted that the UK would leave the EU in accordance with the majority preference in the 2016 referendum, May and her cabinet colleagues found the next three years almost entirely consumed with complex and often highly administrative and technical diplomatic negotiations with senior EU officials and heads of member states over the precise details of the UK’s departure. While hard Eurosceptics demanded that the UK simply leave the EU, repeating their mantras of ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘Leave means Leave’, May and most of her ministerial colleagues soon discovered that it was not quite as simple as many Leavers envisaged. Not only were there different potential post-Brexit relations with the EU in terms of trade deals and continued access to the single market – Customs Union, Norway-Plus, Canada-Plus, etc. – but thousands of existing agreements and regulations, established over decades (and thus often deeply embedded), needed to be re-negotiated or terminated. However, the complexity of these negotiations, the potential for a continued close trading relationship with the EU after formal withdrawal and the time taken to achieve this departure, caused increasing frustration and suspicion among hard Eurosceptics. Consequently, the longer the seemingly Byzantine negotiations with the EU continued, the greater the fears of the hard Eurosceptics that their prize would be denied them grew and thus the more trenchant their criticisms of May’s leadership became; they did not trust her to deliver, irrespective of how often she too insisted that ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ They feared a ‘liberal elite’ establishment ‘stich-up’ and ‘betrayal’ by senior Conservatives (including May herself) who had supported Remain in the referendum, whereby instead of completely and unequivocally breaking away from Brussels, the UK would, in Johnson’s words, become a ‘a vassal state’ of the EU (Watts, 2017). As a result of such suspicions, and growing impatience with the time taken to leave the EU, May found her authority increasingly undermined by the party’s most fervent Eurosceptics, who constantly demanded a much tougher stance towards the EU in negotiations. From the perspective of the hard Eurosceptics, May and others involved in the negotiations were allowing the EU to bully 115

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and blackmail the UK, rather than standing up to other European leaders in negotiations. However, what really weakened May’s authority as Conservative leader was the party’s performance in the June 2017 general election, which she had called in order to capitalise on the huge leads which the Conservatives enjoyed in sundry opinion polls over a seemingly doomed Labour Party led by Corbyn. Many commentators and Conservative voters, along with many erstwhile Labour supporters and MPs who abhorred Corbyn’s populist left-wing stance, envisaged a repeat of the 1983 election, when the Conservatives had won a landslide victory against a hard-left Labour opposition led by another ageing, seemingly incompetent and out-of-touch leader, Michael Foot. Yet in 2017, the Conservatives, and May in particular, had a disastrous electoral campaign in which May’s limitations as party leader and her lack of communication skills were cruelly exposed. By contrast, Corbyn – with decades of experience addressing rallies and other well-attended public meetings – excelled on the hustings, and thereby won over some of those watching on television or social media who had previously harboured a negative opinion of him based on the deeply disparaging manner in which he was portrayed in the right-wing press. The 2017 general election saw the Conservatives’ twelve-seat parliamentary majority from 2015 disappear, as the party won 318 seats, eight short of the 326 needed for a simple majority. Although the party increased its share of the vote by 5.5 per cent, winning 42 per cent of votes cast in total, it still lost thirteen seats. Much of the Conservatives’ increased support came from voters who had supported the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in 2015 but were now ‘coming home’ following the referendum victory for Leave. That this did not yield a higher number of seats is largely due to the fact that much of this ‘returning’ support was in seats already held by the Conservatives, so the additional votes did not actually boost the number of seats that the party won. Meanwhile, the Labour Party confounded all expectations and virtually all the opinion polls (with the notable exception of the Survation polling company, whose poll on election day predicted a hung Parliament), by winning an additional thirty seats – including traditionally rock-solid Conservative Kensington, albeit by a mere twenty votes – and increasing its national share of the vote to 40 per cent, up from 30 per cent in 2015. Having lost the Conservatives’ erstwhile parliamentary majority following a disastrous election campaign, May’s continued leadership of the party and the likelihood of a challenge were continual sources of speculation; it was a matter not whether but when. That she was permitted to remain as leader following 116

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the election reflected a calculation among many MPs that she should atone for her role in the party’s poor campaign and ensuing loss of seats by negotiating Brexit. Only after securing Brexit, it was widely anticipated, would she be replaced; in effect, she was a dead woman walking. Yet it was the protracted character of the Brexit negotiations rather than their completion that actually prompted a motion of (no) confidence in May’s leadership in December 2018. After several weeks of speculation about how many Conservative MPs had sent a formal letter to the chair of the 1922 Committee expressing no confidence in May’s leadership, the morning of 12 December 2018 brought an announcement by Graham Brady that he had finally received the forty-eight letters (15 per cent of Conservative MPs) required to trigger such a vote (although he had apparently informed May the previous evening). The overwhelming majority of these had been submitted by hard Eurosceptics, many of them members of the European Research Group, chaired by ReesMogg, who was one of the letter-writers. Other hard Eurosceptics who submitted letters demanding a (no) confidence vote in May included Crispin Blunt, Peter Bone, Andrew Bridgen, Bill Cash, Nadine Dorries, Mark Francois, Philip Hollobone and Owen Paterson (BBC, 2018a; Nicolle, 2018). The vote was held on the same evening as Brady’s announcement, thus minimising disruption and uncertainty. There was little realistic expectation that May would be defeated, but there was considerable speculation about how large – or narrow – her margin of victory would be. Having pledged that she would stand-down as Conservative leader some time before the next general election (scheduled for 2022, although it could be held earlier, depending on circumstances), May won the confidence vote by 200 to 117. Of course, this division roughly corresponded to the two-thirds to one-third balance in the parliamentary Conservative Party between soft and hard Eurosceptics, as identified by Heppell (2013: 347, Table 3), and certainly, as the letters to Brady had made clear, the prime opponents of May’s continued leadership were the party’s most passionate supporters of Brexit. Although the confidence vote delivered May a margin of victory sufficient to enable her to remain as Conservative leader, it was certainly not emphatic and critics highlighted the fact that more than one-third of Conservative MPs had voted against her continued leadership. Indeed, some hard Eurosceptics insisted that with 117 Conservative MPs voting against her, May really ought to resign anyway, as her moral authority and political credibility had been grievously weakened. However, various opinion polls had indicated that none of May’s prominent critics and rivals – especially Rees-Mogg and Johnson – would 117

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prove any more popular with the British electorate: some of these putative leadership contenders had a strong but relatively small, or cult, following among some Conservative MPs and party members, but were unlikely to boost the Conservative Party’s support among ordinary voters (Sparrow, 2018). Moreover, under the Conservative Party’s 1998 leadership rules, when an incumbent leader won a confidence vote, another vote of (no) confidence could not be held for twelve months, which meant that May was safe until December 2019 at the earliest. In the meantime, she could only be replaced if she voluntarily resigned as Conservative leader, although it was not difficult to imagine that her more implacable and intransigent opponents on the backbenches might create so many problems for effective party management in terms of rebellions in parliamentary divisions, tabling wrecking amendments to bills and defecting to other political parties or groupings, that she might eventually decide that she had no real choice but to resign anyway because the party would have become unmanageable. From May to Johnson Indeed, after she infuriated hard Eurosceptics by negotiating a six-month extension to the UK’s formal (31 March) date of departure from the EU, intraparty hostility towards May intensified even further following the local elections in early May 2019, when the Conservatives lost more than 1,200 council seats. With Parliament continuing to reject her EU Withdrawal Agreement, the pressure on May became intolerable, and her position untenable, for although Conservative MPs could not compel her to resign at this juncture, a sense of political and parliamentary paralysis engulfed her Government. As a consequence, following a meeting with Brady, the chair of the Conservatives’ backbench 1922 Committee, the Prime Minister formally announced on 24 May that she intended to resign as Conservative leader on 7 June, although she would remain as caretaker Prime Minister until the party had elected her successor. In the meantime, with a relatively large number of candidates expected to declare themselves, the 1922 Committee revised the rules in order to expedite the leadership contest and announce the new leader before Parliament’s summer recess starting on 25 July. It was decreed that to stand in the first ballot, due on 10 June, a candidate would need at least eight nominations from fellow Conservatives and would then need to win at least seventeen votes (5 per cent of the parliamentary party) to proceed to the second ballot. In the second ballot, candidates would require votes from 118

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at least thirty-three Conservatives MPs (10 per cent of the party’s 2017 intake) to proceed to the third ballot. These rule changes would ensure that in the initial ballots, possibly two or three no-chance candidates would be eliminated simultaneously, thereby reducing the number of ballots needed overall in the leadership contest. This is exactly what transpired, because the result of the first ballot was as follows:

Boris Johnson – 114 votes Jeremy Hunt – 43 votes Michael Gove – 37 votes Dominic Raab – 27 votes Sajid Javid – 23 votes Matt Hancock – 20 votes Rory Stewart – 19 votes Andrea Leadsom – 11 votes Mark Harper – 10 votes Esther McVey – 9 votes

Leadsom, Harper and McVey were thus eliminated, while Hancock withdrew before the second ballot. Johnson, who had been the expected front-runner – indeed, he had been widely expected to succeed May since the disastrous 2017 election campaign, it having been a question of when rather than whether – was indeed the clear leader, polling 71 votes more than the second-placed Hunt, although at this initial stage, Johnson was supported by less than half of the parliamentary Conservative Party. In the next ballot, Johnson increased his lead, while Raab, who arguably rivalled Johnson in his willingness to countenance publicly a hard, No-Deal Brexit, was eliminated as the last-placed candidate with 30 votes. What was perhaps most notable, though, was that Stewart, the only candidate most associated with One Nation Toryism and most scornful of a hard, No-Deal Brexit, attracted an additional 18 votes. His limited support in the first ballot made him favourite to be eliminated in the second ballot, although he was widely acknowledged to have greatly impressed viewers in a televised leadership debate prior to the ballot. Jeremy Hunt – 46 votes Michael Gove – 41 votes Rory Stewart – 37 votes 119

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Sajid Javid – 33 votes Dominic Raab – 30 votes Stewart was eliminated in the third ballot, when he finished last with 10 votes fewer than in the previous ballot. This was a curious scenario, because usually all candidates, including the last-place contender, win more votes in the next ballot as the supporters of the previously eliminated candidate re-allocate their support among the remaining candidates. The determining factor is usually which of the weaker remaining candidates will poll the smallest increase in support in the next ballot and thus be eliminated.

Boris Johnson – 143 votes Jeremy Hunt – 54 votes Michael Gove – 51 votes Sajid Javid – 38 votes Rory Stewart – 27 votes

What apparently happened was that Stewart’s increased support in the second ballot was at least partly engineered by some of Johnson’s supporters or campaign team, who wanted to ensure that Raab was eliminated. This was achieved by lending some support to the candidate who was otherwise most likely to be eliminated in the second ballot, namely Stewart. One Conservative commentator suggested that ‘Team Boris have a sophisticated (and, from some reports, heavy-handed) whipping operation more than capable of trying to rig the race’ (Nelson, 2019). Certainly, a former cabinet minister suggested that Gavin Williamson, a former Conservative Chief Whip and a senior member of Johnson’s campaign team, might have ‘bullied a few weak souls into transferring their allegiance’ to Stewart in order to eliminate Raab (quoted in Elgot, Stewart and Syal, 2019). Once this result had been secured, Stewart’s support decreased in the third ballot, eliminating him from the contest, whereupon Bridgen, a prominent Brexiter and Johnson supporter, churlishly remarked: ‘It is reassuring that there are just 27 of my colleagues who are completely bonkers’ (quoted in Elgot, Stewart and Syal, 2019). The fourth ballot saw Javid eliminated, while Johnson’s lead over his closest rival, Gove, increased to 97 votes – 157 votes to 61. Hunt finished third, with just two votes fewer than Gove. Yet in the final ballot of Conservative MPs, Gove was pushed into third place due to the following distribution of support. Closer examination of this particular result raised two related issues. The first was that 120

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Johnson had only attracted three extra votes since the last ballot. As Javid had been eliminated with 34 votes, it was reasonable to expect that more than three of these would have been transferred to Johnson in the next ballot – had they been distributed roughly equally, Johnson could have been expected to attract an additional 11 or 12 votes in the final ballot. Boris Johnson – 160 votes Jeremy Hunt – 77 votes Michael Gove – 75 votes The second notable issue concerning the distribution of final ballot votes was that Hunt, who had finished third in the previous round, now polled two votes more than Gove, thereby securing second place and eliminating the latter, while ensuring that the Conservatives’ mass membership would be presented with a choice between Johnson and Hunt. Again, there were allegations of dirty tricks, whereby 10–15 of Johnson’s supporters had been actively encouraged by Williamson to vote for Hunt, because ‘Boris … did not want to face the waspish and interrogative Michael Gove in hustings across the country,’ but instead ‘would far rather face the more relaxed Jeremy Hunt, who he could beat without breaking a sweat’ (Connolly, 2019; Nelson, 2019; see also BBC, 2019; Rigby, 2019; Vaughan, 2019; Woodcock, 2019). However, if such dirty tricks had indeed been deployed, they were not just intended to ensure than Johnson faced a supposedly less formidable candidate in the final ballot, when the 160,000 Conservative Party members would cast the decisive vote. The determination to defeat Gove also derived from a desire for revenge for the 2016 leadership contest, when Gove (as described earlier in this chapter) had initially endorsed Johnson’s candidature but then withdrew this support to stand himself, while issuing an excoriating public denouncement of Johnson’s character and concomitant unsuitability to be party leader. After Gove’s 2019 elimination, one Johnson supporter declared that ‘Gove stabbed us in the back – we’ve stabbed him in the front’ (quoted in Elliott, Wright and Zeffman, 2019). It was also intimated that by waiting until the penultimate ballot of the contest, the pain caused to Gove would be that much greater, for he would have come tantalisingly close to reaching the final round and might have attracted more support among the Conservatives’ mass membership than Hunt. According to one unnamed Conservative MP, some members of Johnson’s campaign team had discussed whether to ‘take out Gove in the morning or the 121

Choosing party leaders Table 3.9  Conservative members’ degree of support for Brexit, 2019 Would rather Brexit took place, even if it led to…

Agree (%)

Disagree (%)

Scotland leaving the UK Significant damage to the economy Northern Ireland leaving the UK The Conservative Party itself being destroyed Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister

63 61 59 54 39

29 29 28 36 51

Source: YouGov, 2019.

afternoon … I think they are leaning towards dropping him from the highest height possible’ (quoted in Elliot, Wright and Zeffman, 2019). Following the last ballot of Conservative MPs, Johnson and Hunt embarked upon four-week hustings campaigns, where they directly addressed Conservative Party members across the length and breadth of the UK. Not surprisingly, Brexit was the main policy issue at these events, reflecting the extent to which it was clearly the overwhelming priority for most of the party’s members, as revealed by a YouGov poll conducted in mid-June, the main findings of which are illustrated in Table 3.9. Grassroots members of the erstwhile party of economic competence, statecraft and ‘the Union’ would now rather see the break-up of the UK and significant damage to the economy, than forego the UK’s departure from the EU. Only the likelihood of a Corbyn-led Labour Government would persuade them to abandon Brexit. The same poll discovered that 74 per cent of party members would not support a leadership candidate who had a good plan for domestic policies but a seemingly bad plan for Brexit. Similarly, 68 per cent of Conservative members would not endorse a candidate who, having supported Remain in the June 2016 Referendum, now claimed to favour Brexit but would not countenance leaving the EU without a deal. This was clearly problematic for Hunt, because he had indeed backed Remain in the referendum but now accepted Brexit on the basis of a negotiated withdrawal, a stance which was notably less hard-line than that of Johnson. Meanwhile, 46 per cent of Conservative Party members said they would be happy if Nigel Farage joined the party and became its leader. A separate survey of Conservative members, conducted under the auspices of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), found that if given a stark choice between a no-deal Brexit and remaining in the EU, 76 per cent of the party’s mass membership would vote for the first option (compared to just 35 per cent of the UK electorate). It was notable that 76 per cent of Conservative members also believed that warnings of the economic damage that would be 122

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caused by a no-deal departure were exaggerated or invented, a part of Project Fear by Remain supporters (Bale, 2019). To the extent that other policy pledges were offered amidst the promises on Brexit, Johnson did pledge to raise the threshold at which the 40 per cent income tax rate is applied from the current £50,000 to £80,000, while Hunt resolved to cut corporation tax from its current 19 per cent to 12.5 per cent, while raising the threshold at which workers started paying National Insurance from £8,632  to £12,000. With regard to public spending commitments, Johnson alluded to improved pay for public-sector employees and an increase in the National Living Wage, while Hunt pledged an extra £15 billion for defence (over five years), a major construction programme to provide 1.5 million new homes and promised to provide more funding for social care. Both candidates also declared their intention to increase education spending and cut the interest rates on student loan repayments. Hunt also proposed that graduates who started their own businesses and employed at least 10 people for 5 years would have their student debts cancelled by the Government (Bale, 2019). When the result of the mass membership’s ballot was announced on 23 July, Johnson had won an emphatic victory, attracting 92,153 (66 per cent) votes to Hunt’s 46,656 (34 per cent). This was no surprise, for Johnson had been the clear favourite to win from the outset. Indeed, ever since May’s disastrous election campaign in June 2017, Johnson had been widely viewed as her most likely successor. Johnson’s long-standing popularity among many Conservatives, particularly the party’s grassroots members, was hardly affected by his disastrous gaffe-strewn tenure as Foreign Secretary or the subsequent controversies he provoked, such as his comments about the burka worn by some Muslim women (BBC, 2018b). On the contrary, what his critics condemned either as incompetence, insensitivity or insulting, Johnson’s admirers viewed as evidence of his authenticity, candour and sheer charisma (in an era of bland, technocratic, political leaders), and of his courage in defying ‘political correctness’. These attributes enabled Johnson to be perceived by his supporters as an anti-establishment populist Conservative. However, he did benefit from a privileged background as the son of wealthy parents, a pupil of Eton, a Classics student at Oxford University, an ex-member of the notorious Bullingdon Club and a senior journalist for both the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, not to mention his penchant for inserting Latin phrases into his speeches – former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg once described Johnson as Donald Trump ‘with a thesaurus’ (Wright, 2016) while Clarke described Johnson as ‘just a nicer Donald Trump’ (quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 2016). 123

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Nor was Johnson’s popularity among many Conservative MPs and the party’s mass membership affected by a colourful love life that would previously have caused much spluttering into gin-and-tonics and clutching of pearls; instead, his romantic trysts seem to have been accepted with an indulgent eye-roll and even a grudging admiration – ‘Boris will be Boris’. Even when, in the midst of the leadership contest, there were reports of a loud row between Johnson and his latest partner, Carrie Symonds, accompanied by the sounds of banging, slamming and swearing from her flat, his supporters rushed to his defence and instead criticised the ‘politically motivated’ neighbours who called the police and then leaked the story to the Guardian. It was alleged that the ostensibly private incident was being exploited by Left-wing Remain supporters who were seeking to discredit Johnson to damage his leadership bid (Mairs, 2019). However, by far the main reason for Johnson’s immense popularity with many Conservative MPs, and even more so with Conservative Party’s membership, was his professed stance on Brexit, which had, as noted earlier, become a totemic issue among many Conservatives. Since the 2016 Referendum, Johnson had become a prominent supporter not merely of Leave, but of a hard Brexit or a no-deal Brexit. He had thus attracted enthusiastic, often ecstatic, support (along with Rees-Mogg) among those Conservatives who were convinced that the UK’s continued membership of the EU in 2019 was due to a lack of commitment or conviction among the senior Conservatives – not least May herself – who had been conducting negotiations with EU officials over the details of the UK’s departure and subsequent relationship with Europe. That the UK had still not left the EU three years after the Referendum was attributed by many Brexit backers to a conspiracy or behind-the-scenes sabotage by Remain supporters (even in the highest echelons of the Conservative Party) in collusion with EU officials to keep stalling and delaying a deal, in the expectation that the UK’s departure would eventually be abandoned on the grounds either that the administrative complexities were too great or that the momentum had dissipated. This, of course, was part of the wider populist narrative or discourse underpinning Brexit; the British people – in reality, the 52 per cent who voted Leave, out of a turnout of 72 per cent (so just 37 per cent of the UK electorate, in fact) – being ignored and betrayed by an arrogant, outof-touch, self-serving, pro-EU, liberal elite, a treacherous, traitorous, enemy within (O’Toole, 2018: 145, 147–8; for a prime example of this perspective by a vocal Brexit supporter, see Liddle, 2019). For many pro-Brexit Conservatives, therefore, a Johnson premiership offered the best – and perhaps last – opportunity to ensure that the UK finally left the 124

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EU on 31 October. He had indicated not merely his willingness to countenance a no-deal Brexit, but the possibility of temporarily suspending Parliament to prevent MPs from again voting to oppose or delay Brexit, or continue to ‘defy the will of the people’, as many hard Brexiters depicted it. To what extent, therefore, is Johnson’s victory in July 2019 explicable in terms of Stark’s three key criteria for winning a party leadership contest – unity, electability and competence? Perhaps more than ever before, it is necessary to recognise that the relevant electorate – in this instance, the Conservative party’s rank-and-file membership – might interpret these characteristics differently to political scientists. Many of the latter seriously doubted that Johnson was likely to unify his party, lead it to electoral victory (based on his relative lack of support or trust among the wider UK electorate, according to various opinion polls conducted during June–July 2019) and provide competent leadership. However, for the many Conservative members primarily concerned about achieving Brexit above all else, Johnson was viewed as the most likely unifier of the party, because they believe that only once this issue has been resolved – with the UK finally leaving the EU –the party can move on by regrouping around less contentious and divisive domestic policy issues. After all, 68 per cent of Conservative Party members cited Brexit as the issue they most wanted hear about from the leadership contenders (YouGov, 2019). Similarly, many of the grassroots Conservatives who voted for Johnson considered him the candidate with the greatest potential for electability. Their rationale was that the Brexit Party posed the greatest electoral threat to the Conservatives until or unless the UK actually left the EU, or was definitely going to do so imminently: the June 2019 YouGov poll found that almost twice as many party members deemed the newly formed Part led by Farage to be a more serious challenger to the Conservatives than the Labour Party – 67 per cent to 34 per cent. This was an understandable assumption, given that the Brexit Party was often slightly ahead of the Conservatives in various opinion polls (of voting intentions) and had won 30.5 per cent of UK votes in the European Parliament election, whereas the Conservatives had been pushed into fifth place (behind the Green Party) with just 8.8 per cent of votes cast. In the summer 2019 leadership contest, many Conservative Party members reasoned that if Johnson became leader and finally secured Brexit, then most of those who had switched to Farage’s party would return to the Conservatives at the next election, while the remain vote would be split between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – a fatal division under the First Past The 125

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Post electoral system. Such a scenario was judged likely to deliver an emphatic victory to the Conservative Party, which meant that to many of its grassroots members, Johnson did meet Stark’s criterion of electability, a quality further enhanced, many of them believed, by his charismatic personality, which offered a refreshing change after a succession of supposedly insipid technocratic leaders and Prime Ministers. According to the YouGov (2019) leadership poll, 44 per cent of Conservative members were confident that if the UK left the EU without a deal, the party would win the next general election, while a further 14 per cent believed that such an outcome would enable the party to win the next few elections. In stark contrast, 51 per cent of Conservative members feared that if Brexit was abandoned and that the UK remained in the EU, the party would never win an election again, while an additional 29 per cent envisaged that the party would be out of office for at least a generation. Clearly, therefore, much of the Conservative membership’s support for Johnson was motivate simultaneously by a wholehearted commitment to Brexit per se, a conviction that only he would ensure that the UK finally left the EU, and a widespread concern that attainment of this goal was absolutely vital to the future success or even survival of the party itself. With regard to Stark’s third criterion, competence, this was the one which Johnson’s critics were most scornful of, given his gaffe-strewn term as Foreign Secretary and various claims that he did not have the patience or attention span to focus on policy details. However, it is again important to emphasise the extent to which the majority of the Conservative rank-and-file viewed the leadership contest through the prism of securing Brexit and thus were almost wholly focused on which candidate was most committed – and trusted – to deliver this sacrosanct goal. Given that other policy objectives were ranked far lower than Brexit, the issue of Johnson’s potential (lack of) competence on health policy or the environment, for example, played little part in the decision of most Conservative party members. If he was likely to ensure that the UK left the EU by 31 October 2019, with or without a deal, then this was viewed as sufficient competence to warrant electing him leader of the party. In other words, there was clearly a discernible disjuncture between how Johnson’s critics would interpret Stark’s three criteria in evaluating Johnson’s suitability as Conservative leader, and how the subjects of those criteria – in this case, the Conservative’s mass membership – interpreted them in choosing Johnson to be their party leader. Moreover, it once again shows how  Conservative leadership candidates can (just like their Labour 126

Enfranchising the extra-parliamentary party

counterparts) be viewed much more favourably and ipso facto enjoy much greater popularity among a more ideological mass membership than among the party’s MPs. Conclusion The selection of the party’s leaders had had shifted from emergence via the magic circle until 1963, to election by the party’s MPs from 1965 onwards and finally, after the 1998 reforms, to election by the mass membership, who got to choose between the two candidates who had proved most popular among Conservative MPs. The 1998 system was a considerable surprise to most observers, because it had been widely assumed that any involvement in future leadership contests by the extra-parliamentary party would be via an electoral college, in which the party’s rank-and-file would be allocated a minority of votes. Instead, the system adopted in 1998 granted the extra-parliamentary party the final say in choosing from the two candidates who had survived a series of eliminative ballots by Conservative MPs. This system ensured that the initial choice of candidates was made solely by Conservative MPs, which ostensibly ensured that whoever made it to (final) ballot of the grassroots membership was relatively popular among the party’s parliamentarians; clearly, if they were not popular, they would not reach the final stage of the contest. However, the very first time this new electoral system was used, in 2001, a rather unique situation emerged, whereby the candidate who came second in the penultimate ballot, Smith, only beat the third-placed candidate, Portillo, by one vote. Yet, under the new procedure, this was sufficient to ensure that the extra-parliamentary party would be presented with a stark choice between the pro-European and socially liberal Clarke, and the staunch Eurosceptic and social traditionalist Smith. Thus, it was that the Conservative grassroots voted as leader a candidate who had commanded the support of barely one-third of the party’s MPs. His subsequent struggle to establish his authority and legitimacy was further undermined by his poor communication and organisational skills. The extraparliamentary party had foisted upon Conservative MPs a leader who fulfilled none of Stark’s three criteria of unity, electability and competence. Two years later, Conservative MPs terminated Smith’s leadership via a vote of (no) confidence, which excluded any input from the extra-parliamentary party. In effect, although the Conservative grassroots can vote for a leader, the decision (via a secret ballot vote) to terminate that leader’s tenure in case 127

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of poor performance or lack of electoral success rests wholly with the parliamentary party. An attempt by Smith’s successor, Howard, to revert to the pre-1998 leadership election rules that confined votes to Conservative MPs only and denied the ­extra-parliamentary party a formal role in choosing a new leader was ­narrowly defeated. However, the Conservative grassroots have only been called upon to choose between leadership contenders on two occasions since then, in 2005, when they, perhaps surprisingly, decisively opted for the self-proclaimed ­moderniser Cameron, and in 2019, when they emphatically endorsed Boris Johnson. The next time there was a leadership contest, after Cameron resigned in 2016, Conservative MPs whittled the candidates down to May and Leadsom, but the latter withdrew her candidature before the contest reached the grassroots, acknowledging that May had much more support among Conservative MPs. Had Leadsom allowed the contest to proceed to a ballot of the extraparliamentary party and then won, it risked a repeat of the Smith leadership of fifteen years earlier. That said, some polls suggested that May would have won among the Conservative grassroots anyway. The decisive role granted to the Conservatives’ rank-and-file members was again subject to critical scrutiny in July 2019, when they overwhelmingly chose Boris Johnson as May’s successor, even though he had the supported of only just over half of the party’s MPs in the penultimate ballot. In other words, after the series of eliminative ballots, Johnson was the preferred candidate of 51.4 per cent of the parliamentary Conservative Party, but the clear choice of 66 per cent of the party’s extra-parliamentary membership. Put another way, though, this meant that a very large minority of Conservative MPs had not supported Johnson in the penultimate ballot – notwithstanding that some of the votes won by Hunt were alleged to have emanated from Johnson’s supporters in order to eliminate Gove – which meant that he was likely to lead a party which remained deeply divided. Indeed, even before result of the final ballot was announced, two Conservative ministers (Alan Duncan and Anne Milton) resigned from the Government, while at least two more, including Chancellor Philip Hammond, announced that they intended to do so imminently. Johnson’s popularity was evidently much greater among the party’s mass membership than it was among the party’s MPs, again highlighting the legitimacy and statecraft problems which can accrue from a mode of intra-party democratisation that greatly empowers the rank-and-file members vis-à-vis the party’s parliamentarians. 128

4

From chairman to leader: the selection of Labour leaders by the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1906–80 Until 1981, Labour MPs had exclusive control of the process of choosing their party’s leader. As well as constituting the electorate, they alone would decide if and when a leadership contest should be held and, if so, which of their number would be candidates for the succession. As Punnett explains, this situation first arose and persisted until the 1970s in part because Labour was not entirely sure whether it had a party leader, as opposed to a chair or leader of its MPs: Until 1978, the Labour leader in the House of Commons had been generally regarded as the overall leader of the party, but the situation was undefined. Whatever assumptions there may have been about the de facto equation of the roles of Labour leader in the Commons and leader of the Labour Party, the de jure position remained unstated. (Punnett, 1992: 80)

This ambiguity stemmed from the party’s evolution from an extra-­ parliamentary movement with a handful of MPs, into a party of government. As Stark notes, Labour’s origins were very different from those of the Conservative Party: Conservative Members of Parliament created their mass party organisation in the nineteenth century for the purpose of strengthening the MPs’ support. By contrast, the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP] was founded at the turn of the [twentieth] century by the labour movement to represent its interests in Parliament. The PLP was intended to play an important, though decidedly subservient, role within the labour movement. (Stark, 1996: 37)

In the general election of 1900, only two Labour MPs were elected to the House of Commons: the socialist Keir Hardie and the trade union leader Richard Bell. In the next, in 1906, the party (then known as the Labour Representation Committee or LRC) returned twenty-nine MPs. At their first formal meeting, held in a Commons committee room on 12 February, the new Labour 129

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MPs elected officers, whips and a chairman of the PLP, to be re-elected on an annual basis at the start of each parliamentary session. As one of them, Philip Snowden, later recalled, the PLP decided at the outset that the post of chairman should not be permanent and ‘insisted that the Sessional Chairman should not be regarded as the “Leader”. It was considered to be undemocratic. The Party must not permit one man to dictate the policy of the Party. The Chairman was simply the mouthpiece of the [parliamentary] Party, stating its decisions to the House of Commons.’ The PLP, Snowden recalled, was ‘expected to take its decisions from resolutions of the Party Conferences’. ‘Fortunately’, he added, ‘it never quite worked out like that in practice’ (Snowden, 1934a: 218). The post of chairman was held by a succession of MPs until 1922. In the general election of November that year, the party returned 142 MPs and became the second largest party in the House of Commons. As a result, it was required to fill the post of Leader of the Opposition. At a meeting of its MPs held shortly after the general election, Ramsay MacDonald was elected chairman and leader of the PLP, having challenged and defeated the incumbent chairman, J. R. Clynes. The new title reflected MacDonald’s status as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister designate. As such, he was now leader of the party in a sense that none of his predecessors had been (Pelling, 1961: 52). Following a brief period as Leader of the Opposition, MacDonald became the Prime Minister when the first (minority) Labour Government was formed in January 1924. Following MacDonald’s accession in 1922, the elected leader of the PLP was widely regarded as the leader of the party as a whole. This status, however, was unofficial and the relationship between the leader of the PLP and the party outside Parliament remained ambiguous. During the 1970s, however, there was increasing interest in the question of how the Labour leader should be chosen. This, in turn, led to demands for clarification as to who that leader actually was. In 1976, the party’s annual conference agreed to establish a working party to consider these questions. In 1978, following its recommendations, a resolution calling for the creation of the new post of ‘Leader of the Party who shall be exofficio leader of the PLP’ was passed by the party conference (Punnett, 1992: 81–2). The question of how that leader should be chosen, however, remained controversial. Pressure for the widening of the electorate increased until in 1981 the Electoral College was established to take over the function of selecting the leader of the party from the PLP. The election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College between its creation in 1981 and the leadership election of 2010, when it was 130

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used for the last time, is examined in Chapter 5. In this chapter, we explain the selection of Labour leaders by the PLP alone until 1981. Before doing so, we explain how the system it used worked in practice. The PLP ballot Until 1981, the procedure for electing the Labour leader was specified in the ‘Standing Orders for the Election of the Officers of the Parliamentary Labour Party’. These applied only when the party was in opposition. No such formal procedure existed for when it was in office. Only once, following Wilson’s decision to retire in 1976, did a vacancy occur when it was in government. On that occasion, the PLP adopted the same procedure it had previously used when in opposition. As Punnett (1992: 85) notes, only the bare bones of the procedure were stated explicitly in the standing orders. At the start of each session of Parliament, MPs were informed that nominations for the post of leader could be received. If there were two or more nominations, a series of eliminating votes would be held until one candidate had secured an overall majority. There were no written stipulations governing nominations, but the normal practice was that a proposer and seconder, and the formal agreement of the nominee were required. All candidates were obliged to contest the first ballot, but could withdraw at any stage. If the first ballot was inconclusive, the candidate with the fewest votes, or the bottom two candidates if their combined vote was less than the candidate above them, would be eliminated. A further ballot would then be held involving the remaining candidates. This procedure was repeated until one candidate emerged with an overall majority (Punnett, 1992: 85–6). Although the rules provided for a leadership election every year when Labour was in opposition, in practice only eleven were held between 1922 and 1980. As Table 4.1 shows, Labour leaders, once elected, enjoyed considerable security of tenure. Clement Attlee led the party for twenty years, Wilson for thirteen and Hugh Gaitskell for seven until his sudden death (aged fifty-six) in 1963. Attlee’s re-election was challenged once and Gaitskell’s was twice, but on each occasion, they were comfortably re-elected with more than two-thirds of the votes. MacDonald’s accession in 1922 was unique, in that it was the only occasion when the incumbent (Clynes) was challenged and defeated in a ballot of the PLP. As Drucker observed, ‘Once Labour elects a Leader, it is noticeably reluctant to remove him’ (1976: 378). This reluctance has been explained with reference to the party’s ethos (Drucker, 1979: 1–2, 9) and/or leader-eviction 131

Choosing party leaders Table 4.1  PLP leadership elections, 1922–80 Year

Context

Number of candidates

Ballots required

Winner

Winner’s share of final vote (%)

1922 1931 1932 1935 1935 1955 1960 1961 1963 1976 1980

Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Government Opposition

2 1 1 1 3 3 2 2 3 6 4

1 0 0 0 2 1 1 1 2 3 2

MacDonald Henderson Lansbury Attlee Attlee Gaitskell Gaitskell Gaitskell Wilson Callaghan Foot

52.1 N/A N/A N/A 66.7 58.8 67.2 74.3 58.3 56.2 51.9

rules, specifically the ‘political risks and institutional costs’ incurred by prospective challengers and selection institutions alike. As Quinn explains, ‘Labour’s in-from-the-start (IFTS) rule compels all challengers to stand directly against the incumbent, ensuring that the processes of evicting the incumbent and finding a replacement are fused into one. It is almost certainly one reason why no modern Labour leader has been replaced by a challenger’ (2005: 799). As we noted above, the procedure for electing a new leader applied only when the party was in opposition. No such procedure existed when it was in office, as it was in 1924, 1929–31, 1945–51, 1964–70 and 1974–9. As one of Wilson’s biographers observes, a crucial reason why no challenge to his leadership occurred in 1968–9 was the absence of an eviction mechanism: [T]he rules of the Labour Party, unlike those of the Conservatives after the introduction of elections to the Party Leadership, contained no constitutional mechanism for disposing of a Prime Minister in office. This meant that for any assault to succeed, [it] needed overwhelming support from ministers and back-benchers; it also meant, since the outcome of any attempt was uncertain and the price of failure high, that there were always good reasons for postponement. (Pimlott, 1993: 504)

In addition, on the rare occasions when a vacancy arose and the PLP was required to choose a new leader, the favourite and front-runner at the close of nominations almost invariably went on to win. The campaign, to the extent that one existed, made little difference, if any, to the outcome (Drucker, 1976, 1981; Stark, 1996:112–13, 118–20; see also Heppell, 2010b; Heppell, Roe-Crines and Nicholls, 2010; Heppell and Roe-Crines, 2011). 132

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As Punnett (1992: 89) notes, the competitiveness of a leadership contest can be measured in three ways: the number of candidates it attracts, the number of ballots required to produce an outcome and size of the winner’s share of the vote in the final ballot. As Table 4.1 shows, PLP ballots were relatively noncompetitive in each of these respects. In most cases, the contests attracted only two or three candidates. Seven required no more than one ballot. In three, the winner received over two-thirds of the votes and in two others close to 60 per cent. The closest outcome in this respect was in 1980 when Foot narrowly defeated Healey. Having explained how the system used by the party until 1981 worked in practice, we now explain why the PLP elected the leaders it did. Chairman of the PLP Despite the return of twenty-nine MPs in the 1906 general election, the newly constituted PLP lacked cohesion from the outset. This problem arose, in part, from the democratic traditions of the labour movement. The Labour Party was a federation of independent organisations and it was to be expected that the differences that existed among the various bodies sponsoring its MPs, notably between socialist societies and trade unions, would also appear in Parliament. The difficulties this created were immediately apparent when the PLP met to elect its first chairman: There were two candidates: Hardie … the Socialist candidate, and Shackleton … a non-Socialist trade union leader. On the first vote, which was an open one, the two men obtained equal support … MacDonald as Secretary of the extra-­ parliamentary party abstaining. Then, a ballot was held: MacDonald again abstained and the result was the same. Finally, a second ballot took place with MacDonald participating, and Hardie was elected. (Pelling, 1961: 20)

According to the minutes of the meeting, all twenty-nine of the PLP’s newly elected MPs were present, along with members of the LRC’s executive committee. After the latter had withdrawn, the MPs, sitting alone, proceeded to elect officers and whips for the coming parliamentary session. The post of chairman, the first to be discussed, was resolved as follows: Chairman: W. Crooks moved ‘That D.J. Shackleton be the Chairman’: this was seconded. G.N. Barnes moved ‘That J. Keir Hardie be the Chairman’: this  was  seconded, and a vote being taken, 13 voted for D.J. Shackleton, and 13 for  J.  Keir Hardie. A ballot was then taken when there voted 14 for D.J. Shackleton and 15 for J. Keir Hardie. J. Keir Hardie thereupon took the Chair, 133

Choosing party leaders D.J. Shackleton being declared Vice-Chairman, and called for nominations for Whips. (Labour Party Archive, 1906)

Based on these figures, twenty-six MPs voted in the initial show of hands, while three others (presumably MacDonald and the two candidates, Hardie and Shackleton) abstained. The decisive vote in the final ballot was ‘apparently cast by MacDonald’ (Morgan, 1975: 155). Writing to a colleague a few months later, MacDonald admitted that he had voted for Hardie ‘with much reluctance, as I could not persuade myself that he could fill the place’ (Morgan, 1975: 155). Hardie was not a success as chairman and resigned after two years in 1908. Arthur Henderson, a trade unionist, was elected unopposed as his successor. Like Hardie, Henderson resigned after two years and was succeeded, again without a contest, by another trade unionist, George Barnes. The following year, Barnes was taken ill and resigned. MacDonald was then elected, again without a contest, and re-elected unopposed for the next three years (1912–14). In August 1914, he resigned after the PLP voted to support the Government on Britain’s participation in the First World War. Henderson was elected, again without a contest, as his successor. It was subsequently decided that Henderson should Remain as chairman for the duration of the war, but when he served in the cabinet from May 1915 to August 1917, two acting chairmen in turn, John Hodge and George Wardle, took his place. After leaving the cabinet, Henderson was reinstated as chairman once again. Shortly afterwards, he resigned and was succeeded, again without a contest, by trade unionist  Willie Adamson (McKenzie, 1964: 305–6). In the December 1918 general election, Henderson and MacDonald were both defeated and lost their seats in Parliament. When the PLP met to elect its chairman for the following parliamentary session, Adamson was re-elected unopposed. In February 1921, he resigned and was succeeded, again without a contest, by trade unionist Clynes. Chairman and leader In the 1922 general election, 142 Labour MPs were elected, an increase of eighty-five on the party’s return in December 1918. Of the PLP’s 142 members of the new House of Commons, fifty-six had retained their seats, but the majority (eighty-six) were new MPs, including many who had been re-elected after having lost their seats four years earlier. As one of the latter, Snowden, would later recall: 134

From chairman to leader The Labour Party had been slow in reaching the position of a full-sized parliamentary party. From the [general] Election of 1922, however, it emerged as the second largest Party in the State … The Labour Party in the new Parliament was remarkable in another respect. In previous Parliaments the Labour members, with few exceptions, were Trade Union nominees and representatives. … The new [PLP] contained a larger element of middle-class people and professional men. The ex-Liberals who had recently come into the Party, including Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Lees-Smith, Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, Mr. Roden Buxton, Mr. Noel Buxton and Mr. Morel, had been returned as candidates. We had doctors, lawyers and a parson! (Snowden, 1934b: 570–2)

As McKenzie notes, the PLP elected in 1922 had not merely increased in strength compared to that returned in December 1918. Its composition had been completely transformed: Only eight of the MPs elected in 1918 had been representatives of the [socialist] ILP [Independent Labour Party] or of the Divisional Labour Parties; but in 1922 the ILP returned 32 candidates and the divisional parties 19. The trade union nominees had risen to 85, but clearly the influence of the more militant  socialist element in the PLP was enormously strengthened; and what was particularly important, the PLP was reinforced by a whole group of younger men who  were to become leaders of the Party during the next three decades. In  addition, a  number of the most colourful pre-war leaders were returned, including  Snowden, Lansbury, Jowett and Ramsay MacDonald. (McKenzie, 1964: 347)

As MacDonald’s biographer David Marquand notes, in normal circumstances, it might have been expected that Clynes, as the incumbent chairman, would be re-elected unopposed, given the increased size and strength that the PLP had gained in the general election under his leadership. These were not normal circumstances, however, and many Labour MPs believed that the PLP required a more vigorous chairman than Clynes if it were to provide more effective opposition in the next Parliament than in the last (Marquand, 1977: 285). As a trade unionist himself, Clynes was backed by most, but not all, of the returning  trade union MPs who had constituted the overwhelming majority of the PLP in the previous Parliament. MacDonald was preferred by most of the (eighty-six) new Labour MPs who now constituted the clear majority of the PLP. As McKenzie explains, MacDonald also had ‘a further, enormous advantage: as no one else in the Labour Party did, he exemplified the qualities of Max Weber’s “charismatic leader”’ (1964: 352). On 21 November, six days after the general election, the PLP met to discuss arrangements for the next parliamentary session. As the incumbent chairman, 135

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Clynes presided at the outset. According to the minutes, an amendment was moved that all officers and whips for the next parliamentary session and for the following one beginning in the New Year should be elected forthwith, and this was carried. Nominations for the position of chairman were invited, and Clynes and MacDonald were duly nominated. Clynes then vacated the chair and Henderson, although no longer an MP, was asked to take his place. A vote was taken, and the result was as follows: Clynes, fifty-six votes; MacDonald, sixty-one. The election of MacDonald was then put to the meeting as a substantive motion and carried unanimously. MacDonald then took the chair and ‘suggested it would be a good thing to have a Deputy Leader’. He ‘expressed the hope that Mr. Clynes could see his way to accept nomination’. Clynes agreed, was duly nominated and elected unanimously (Labour Party Archive, 1922). As Lyman observes, ‘Looking back, the remarkable thing is not that MacDonald won, but that the result was so close’ (1962: 159). The basis of MacDonald’s appeal to his parliamentary colleagues, he argues, had more to do with his personal leadership qualities than his views, which were, at most, marginally different from those of his opponent: Here Clynes, ‘slight, grey-haired, and quiet voiced, turning his neat phrases in the true Parliamentary manner’, could hardly compete. ‘He does not inspire that devotion in his supporters, or that fear in his opponents, which characterises the real genius of leadership’, wrote Brockway in 1921. ‘He has worked hard, he has never “let down” the Party. But he has not lifted it up’. (Labour Leader, 1 September, 1921; quoted in Lyman, 1962: 159)

As Lyman notes, at no stage in his career was MacDonald the most trusted of Labour leaders, but in November 1922 he possessed an array of talents unmatched by any potential rival: He was Parliamentarian and mob orator; self-educated intellectual and practical politician; internationalist and Scottish patriot; a fundamentally moderate man who could arouse the most passionate devotion to the movement. His very vagueness as to how the socialist commonwealth would be attained was in this context an asset; most of the Party were vague about this, too, and those who were not were at loggerheads with each other. (Lyman, 1962: 160)

The PLP, he concludes, elected MacDonald in 1922 ‘for the most common of political reasons; they thought him the man best equipped to lead them to victory and power’ (Lyman, 1962: 160; Williams, 1965: 74–8).

136

From chairman to leader

From MacDonald to Attlee MacDonald remained leader until August 1931, when he was expelled from the party after agreeing to lead a coalition government dominated by Conservatives. As in 1914, Henderson succeeded him unopposed. In November, Henderson lost his seat in the general election, but remained leader of the PLP, in the expectation that he would soon return to the House of Commons. He was succeeded as chairman by George Lansbury. This dual leadership arrangement proved to be temporary and ended when Henderson retired the following year. Lansbury was then invited to continue as both chairman and leader of the PLP. The 1931 general election had reduced Labour to just forty-six MPs and marked ‘the slow transition of power from one generation to another, often an awkward moment for any political party’ (Golant, 1970: 318). In this case, the question of who should lead it thereafter was easily solved: The [PLP] did not want another great man like MacDonald … Most believed that the Party’s revival depended on developing bright plans for the next socialist government. The ideas mattered more than the individuals. At all events, since Henderson was sixty-eight when he became leader and Lansbury was seventythree when he succeeded him, their ages alone precluded the possibility that the Party would again be dominated by its immediate leader. The [PLP] followed the obvious rules of seniority. Henderson and Lansbury were the highest-ranking Cabinet Ministers and oldest MPs in the Party. (Golant, 1970: 318–19)

Apart from Henderson and Lansbury, the only other politician of stature in the PLP after the 1931 general election was Sir Stafford Cripps, but he was an abrasive character and apparently content to let others lead in the short term. The quiet and unassuming Attlee, meanwhile, made the most of his luck, as one of only three former ministers to retain his seat in Parliament, which he did by a mere 551 votes. His chance came, as many in politics do, by accident: Lansbury fell and broke his hip in December 1933. He had wanted Cripps to deputise, but Cripps was busy running his Socialist League and, apparently because he underestimated the time it would take Lansbury to recover, declined. The unassuming Attlee took over. In the event, he led the Party through much of 1934. He was more [of] a team leader than, like MacDonald, a man to impose his own views on his colleagues. (Drucker, 1976: 13)

Lansbury remained in hospital until the summer of 1934, which extended Attlee’s tenure as acting leader. This was crucial in ensuring his accession in 1935. By deputising successfully for Lansbury, Attlee had an invaluable opportunity to demonstrate his parliamentary skills. By general agreement, he did so 137

Choosing party leaders

with a high degree of competence. In so doing, he secured both the commendation of the party outside Parliament and election to its National Executive Committee (NEC) (McKenzie, 1964: 360). In October 1935, Lansbury resigned after the party conference overwhelmingly rejected a resolution, which he had strongly supported, endorsing a pacifist foreign policy. Lansbury’s resignation had been expected for several days and some newspapers had pressed the claims of former Minister of Health Arthur Greenwood as his successor. When the PLP met, however, the desire for continuity and an appreciation of Attlee’s parliamentary skill and efforts as acting leader prevailed and he was asked to lead the party through the general election campaign, after which, it was agreed, the Labour members of the new House of Commons should be left once again to make their own choice for the future (Jenkins, 1948: 162–3). In the 1935 general election, Labour recovered most of the national vote it had lost in 1931 and won 154 seats. When the PLP met shortly thereafter, it was assumed that the leadership was now ‘wide open’ (McKenzie, 1964: 361). As Attlee recalled in his autobiography: When I was elected to lead the Party after George Lansbury’s resignation, a writer in the Daily Mail said, ‘I don’t think he will hold it long’. This was not an unreasonable supposition, for the General Election brought back to the House a number of Labour members who had held Cabinet office—among them, the veteran J. R. Clynes, Herbert Morrison, A. V. Alexander … and Tom Johnston. (Attlee, 1954: 80)

In the event, three candidates were nominated: Greenwood, Morrison and Attlee. In the first ballot, Attlee received fifty-eight votes and Morrison fortyfour; Greenwood, with thirty-three votes, was eliminated. In the second ballot, Attlee defeated Morrison by eighty-eight votes to forty-eight. As his biographer, Roy Jenkins, observes: The figures in the first ballot strongly support the view that Attlee’s principal support came from his colleagues of the previous four years. His vote coincided almost exactly with the number of Labour members in the previous House. They were the men [sic] who knew him best and whose support, for this reason, he had every cause to value most … Greenwood’s support probably came largely from northern trade unionists, and these, it is clear, voted solidly for Attlee as their second choice. (Jenkins, 1948: 167)

In his memoirs, Morrison recalled that it was ‘perhaps unkindly said that in the 1931 Parliament, the hierarchy of the Labour Party was virtually a tea party’ and implied that this had helped to decide the outcome. ‘Those of the inner 138

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circle knew that they must tread very warily, for the rank and file were in a strange frame of mind where they were very suspicious of the leadership, even if MacDonald had gone overboard. I think they wanted a leader who was in fact a follower—“leadership from the rear” I heard it called’ (Morrison, 1960: 164). As his official biographers explain, however, there were numerous reasons for his defeat: The so-called left of the Party could hardly have supported Morrison with enthusiasm. For nearly twenty years he had hammered them at conferences. His concern for gradualism, constitutional procedures, financial responsibility and appeals to the middle class, together with his scorn for communists, United Fronts, Socialist Leagues and ‘socialism in our time’, struck no sympathetic chords in them … His obsession with the public corporation seemed to bolster up capitalism with bureaucracy. They distrusted his eagerness to reassure businessmen, as well as his emphasis on compensation for property taken over by the state. Morrison seemed an ‘arch-reactionary’. (Donoughue and Jones, 1973: 239)

Morrison, they note, was also defeated by the feeling of loyalty many Labour MPs, especially those who had served in the ‘rump’ Parliament of 1931–35, had developed towards Attlee: As temporary leader after Lansbury’s retirement, Attlee had led the Party in a General Election which increased their number by over a hundred. It seemed an act of ingratitude to deprive him of the leadership after he had done so well. Morrison, absent from the Commons since 1931, seemed an interloper. Indeed, Attlee had greater parliamentary experience. A member continuously since 1922, he had devoted himself to Parliament. But Morrison had been an MP only in 1924 and in 1929–31 … His experience of Parliament was limited [and] the Party was choosing a parliamentary leader above all. (Donoughue and Jones, 1973: 240)

Morrison also appeared too ambitious, his loyalty was suspect and he was too closely identified with London. He had also declined to give a clear undertaking that he would relinquish the leadership of the London County Council on becoming leader. Hence, the very position which had made his reputation as a vote-winner and administrator now stopped him from acquiring the leadership. In addition, many trade union MPs did not support Morrison. His understanding of and sympathy for the trade union movement were questioned. Ernest Bevin, the general secretary of Britain’s largest trade union, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), was determined that Morrison should not become leader. He issued no general instructions, but his influence was felt among trade union MPs. Bevin also had a pathological hatred for Morrison. Labour MPs, aware of this antipathy, knew that Bevin would not co-operate 139

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easily under his leadership. The two wings of the Labour movement, political and industrial, seemed likely to be more united under Attlee than under Morrison. Of the three candidates, Morrison’s background was closest to the working class. Despite this, trade union MPs preferred Attlee, ‘a public school, very bourgeois, leader’ (Donoughue and Jones, 1973: 241–3). As Golant explains, the 1935 general election revived the PLP and it was the effectiveness of Attlee’s efforts as one of its leaders and the ‘specific disabilities’ of his opponents that secured him the leadership thereafter: Within the Party Arthur Greenwood had the reputation of being ‘rarely sober’. Morrison, on the other hand, had incurred the hatred of Ernest Bevin … The election to the leadership of Morrison or Greenwood would have divided the Party more than [that] of Attlee … Attlee’s seniority, courtesy, hard work in the House of Commons and contrast with MacDonald led his colleagues to make him leader of the [PLP] in 1935. (Golant, 1970: 330)

Attlee’s election, he argues, was ‘a surprising choice’ from the public point of view, but to the PLP it was not. In contrast to MacDonald, Attlee embodied ‘leadership without vanity, which allowed the Party’s plans and policies to be the spearhead of its public appeal’ (Golant, 1970: 332). From Attlee to Gaitskell Attlee led the party for twenty years, eventually retiring in 1955. Like Attlee’s accession in 1935, that of his successor, Gaitskell, was contested. Morrison, now aged sixty-seven, still wanted to be leader and, with some justification, suspected Attlee of delaying his retirement in order to build up the claims of Gaitskell, who was forty-nine, almost nineteen years his junior (Drucker, 1976: 384). The struggle to succeed Attlee began after the resignations from his second government of Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman following the introduction of prescription charges in 1951. The two main protagonists were Chancellor the Exchequer Gaitskell and Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service (NHS) in the first Attlee government and, prior to his resignation, Minister of Labour in the second, who became the principal spokesmen thereafter for conflicting perspectives within the party on both the nature of socialism and on the defence and foreign policies it should adopt. As McKenzie explains: In the years that followed, the struggle was fought out within each section of the Labour Party, in the Parliamentary Committee, in the Parliamentary Party itself, 140

From chairman to leader in the NEC and in the Annual Conference. Throughout this period, the centre and right-wing elements, led first by Attlee and then by Gaitskell, always had on their side a majority of the Parliamentary Party; they consistently defeated the Bevanite faction, which in the Parliamentary Party usually numbered 50 to 60 MPs (or about one-fifth of the total). (McKenzie, 1964: 598)

Following the party’s defeat in the general election of May 1955, Attlee ­continued as leader. As his biographer Kenneth Harris notes: From the day after the election to Attlee’s resignation in early December, the question of when he would go and who would succeed him dominated discussion in the Labour Party. Attlee wanted to resign the leadership immediately after the  election, but he preferred to stay if it was clear that his going would precipitate a struggle for the succession between Morrison and Bevan which would ruin the Party. (Harris, 1995: 535)

By late November, Attlee had decided that the time had finally come for him to go. He summoned Chief Whip Herbert Bowden and informed him ‘I’m going. Fix a date.’ Bowden replied, ‘We should get it over before Christmas. Let us say December 7.’ Attlee nodded. Bowden then asked if he should let the contenders know privately, to which Attlee replied: ‘Tell Gaitskell’ (Harris, 1995: 541). On 6 December, Attlee wrote to his brother Tom as follows: I am tomorrow giving up the leadership of the Party. As you know I wanted to go after the last Election, but stayed on to oblige. There is, however, so much speculation as to the next leader going on that I think it best to retire now. The Party is in good heart. (Harris, 1995: 541)

The next morning, Attlee announced his retirement to the shadow cabinet. Significantly, he had made no attempt to inform Morrison in advance. He confirmed his decision at a meeting of the PLP later that day. The same evening, Gaitskell’s biographer Philip Williams records, Morrison and Bevan dined together: Nominations were due by 11 a.m. on Friday [9 December] and on Thursday afternoon [8 December] their last curious and desperate manoeuvre was mounted. Bevan told the press that he would willingly accede to the proposal of ten MPs (mostly ageing advocates of seniority) that the younger men [Gaitskell and himself] should withdraw and give Morrison an unopposed return … Public pressure was no way to persuade Gaitskell, but his enemies doubtless hoped his refusal would cost him votes. Their misjudgement was complete. The reputations that suffered were those of his two opponents, cynically allied after years of mutual hatred. (Williams, 1979: 366) 141

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The leadership election was held at the PLP’s next meeting, a week after Attlee’s resignation. As in 1935, there were three candidates: Gaitskell, Morrison and Bevan. Gaitskell was expected to win comfortably and did. In the first ballot, he received 157 votes, Bevan seventy and Morrison forty. As one of Bevan’s supporters later recalled, the result ‘hit [Morrison] like the dash of a sjambok across his face. His whole body crumbled … He was shattered not by being defeated, but by [his] very low vote, which showed that he had been coldly deserted by many whose support he had expected and indeed been promised’ (Mikardo, 1988: 155). As his biographer explains, Gaitskell secured the leadership for several reasons: He reaped the rewards of years of hard work, arguing assiduously and persuasively in the PLP, and becoming in the House [of Commons] ‘the mainstay of the Opposition. Bevan lost primarily because he treated the [PLP] with barely concealed contempt’. Having always dismissed the Labour MPs as irrelevant, [he] suddenly discovered, as [Richard] Crossman noted, that they mattered after all. He had waited too long. (Williams, 1979: 368)

Gaitskell’s vote, he notes, had ‘surpassed most prior estimates. It was so impressive because of a political factor: the urge to settle the debilitating succession struggle’ (Williams, 1979: 368–9). As Harris observes, ‘nobody had anticipated that Morrison would be so humiliated. Except Attlee’ (1995: 542). In a note of congratulations to Gaitskell, Attlee wrote: ‘I was delighted with your vote which was just about what I had anticipated. It was a pity that Herbert insisted on running. He had, I think, been warned of the probable result … I hope that Nye [Bevan] & Co. will now go all out to support you’ (Harris, 1995: 542). Attlee had achieved what he had wanted ever since the general election in May: He had kept Morrison out, and had performed what he thought was a real service to his party. If Morrison had become leader, Attlee believed, the Party would have staggered on to another disaster. A year after Attlee chose his time to resign, Bevan was Shadow Foreign Secretary, and two years after it Bevan was a powerful and accepted Number Two to Gaitskell. The Shadow Cabinet was made up of young men far more radical, able and appealing than Morrison would ever have mustered. By keeping Morrison out, Attlee did not create a new, strong and attractive Labour Party, but he saved it from an embittered and destructive wilderness. (Harris, 1995: 542–3)

As Harris records, however, Attlee’s ‘secret hope’ had earlier been that Bevan, not Gaitskell, would succeed him: During the crisis in the Party which had been brought on by the attempt [in February and March 1955] to have Bevan expelled, Crossman, as others did, went 142

From chairman to leader to see Attlee privately to ask him to intercede. According to Crossman … Attlee said: ‘Nye had the leadership on a plate. I always wanted him to have it. But, you know, he wants to be two things simultaneously, a rebel and an official leader, and you can’t be both.’ (Harris, 1995: 543)

In his book The Road to Brighton Pier, Leslie Hunter recalled a conversation with Attlee in November 1955, in which Attlee had apparently said he would have liked to see Bevan become leader: ‘I’d like to see him get it … Trouble is, he’s so unstable, all over the place, [and] you never know where you are with him. Anyway, he’s cooked his goose for the time being, and the [parliamentary] Party would never stand for him’ (Harris, 1995: 543). As Bevan’s most recent biographer argues: Bevan was a man of power. His period as a Cabinet minister had brought out the best in him. The early 1950s were to demonstrate that opposition could bring out the worst in him … Bevan had all the credentials to be Labour Party leader. By 1951, he was not only experienced in high office, but he had achieved great things in government. He had a vision of society … in which human spirit meant more than material wealth. With his seat on the NEC, he had influence within the Labour Party machinery, and a passionate following among Party members. He had personal charisma and was a magnetic speaker. Even Gaitskell’s wife, Dora, thought that Bevan, rather than Gaitskell, should have been Party leader. (Thomas-Symonds, 2015: 205)

In the 1950s, however, Bevan’s prospects of leading the party depended entirely on the support of his fellow MPs. For this reason alone, he was fighting a losing battle from the start. The right wing of the PLP, and Gaitskell in particular, was strongly backed by powerful figures in the trade union movement: Arthur Deakin, general secretary of the TGWU, Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and Tom Williamson, general secretary of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW). Young, Oxford-educated MPs, including Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, surrounded Gaitskell and became known as the Hampstead Set (Thomas-Symonds, 2015: 205). As one of Bevan’s supporters later recalled, a ‘somewhat incongruous alliance developed between these horny-handed sons of toil and the delicately nurtured aristos of the Hampstead set who surrounded Gaitskell’ (Mikardo, 1988: 123). Bevan’s support, largely confined as it was to the Bevanite group within the PLP, was simply too small to give him the backing he required to secure the leadership in December 1955 (ThomasSymonds, 2015: 205).

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From Gaitskell to Wilson Gaitskell’s victory was the largest yet of any newly elected Labour leader. As the first choice of 157 MPs, numbers were clearly on his side. Many of the party’s most effective parliamentarians, however, had backed Bevan instead. As McKenzie explains, two factors weighed heavily with Bevan and Morrison,  and  with their respective supporters, following their defeat in December 1955: The first was that, if they were to persist in their efforts to overthrow the Party’s chosen Leader, this would almost certainly destroy the possibility that Labour might win the next election … The second [was that Gaitskell] was [also] the ‘Shadow Prime Minister’; and if Labour did manage to win, then there was not the slightest doubt that he would become Prime Minister and have within his gift  the 80-odd offices which taken together constitute a Ministry. (McKenzie, 1964: 603)

These factors, McKenzie notes, unquestionably account for Gaitskell’s success as Leader of the Opposition from 1955 to 1959 in ‘holding the Labour Party to a line of policy in both home and foreign affairs which reflected, in almost every respect, the view of the majority of the PLP who had elected him’ (1964: 603). Following Labour’s defeat in the general election of 1959, however, Gaitskell chose to launch a full-scale attack on Clause Four of the party’s constitution, which committed the party to the eventual creation of a society based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. This resulted in a humiliating defeat for Gaitskell and, in July 1960, the NEC decided not to proceed with any amendment or addition to Clause Four. In October, the party conference met in Scarborough and voted to adopt a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gaitskell’s defiant response was to make it clear that he was not prepared to accept this decision and implement such a policy. On 14 October, Anthony Greenwood, a prominent unilateralist, resigned from the shadow cabinet and announced that, unless a stronger candidate came forward, he would challenge Gaitskell for the leadership. After some hesitation, Wilson, then shadow chancellor, decided to stand and Greenwood withdrew. When the result was announced on 3 November, Gaitskell was decisively re-elected by 166 votes to Wilson’s eighty-one. Having reversed the p ­ arty’s decision to adopt unilateralism at the following year’s conference, Gaitskell was challenged again, this time by Greenwood, and was re-elected even more decisively, by 171 votes to sixty-nine. 144

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By 1962, Gaitskell had acquired commanding authority within the party. Indeed, it is ‘doubtful if anyone in the party’s history, with the possible exception of MacDonald in the 1920s, [had] enjoyed a comparable position of ascendancy in the parliamentary party’ (McKenzie, 1964: 628). In October that year, his stature increased still further after a powerful speech to the party conference in Brighton in which he expressed strong opposition to Britain’s entry into the EEC. The speech demonstrated once again that Gaitskell was his own man and ‘did not hesitate to take up a position on a major issue which angered some of his staunchest friends and pleased his left-wing foes’ (McKenzie, 1964: 628–9). Following this speech, Gaitskell was now, more than ever, the unassailable leader of the Labour Party. Within three months, however, he was dead. On 18 January 1963, he died after a short illness. He was fifty-six. With the exception of Clause Four, he and his supporters had won every major battle in the party since the fall of the second Attlee government in 1951. Hence, there was ‘a certain irony’ in the outcome of the contest to determine who should succeed him (McKenzie, 1964: 630). As in 1935 and 1955, there were three candidates: Wilson, the shadow foreign secretary; George Brown, the party’s deputy leader; and James Callaghan, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer. Wilson had been Bevan’s principal lieutenant in the rebel campaign against the party’s parliamentary leadership following their resignations from the second Attlee Government in 1951. He subsequently made his peace with the leadership much sooner than Bevan, replaced the latter when he resigned from the shadow cabinet in 1954 and then supported Gaitskell, not Bevan, for the leadership in 1955. After Bevan’s death in July 1960, he sought to establish himself as the natural leader of the left by attempting to depose and replace Gaitskell, a decision which had ‘earned him the deep enmity of a considerable part of the PLP’ (McKenzie, 1964: 630). In November 1962, he also challenged Brown for the post of deputy leader, but was defeated by 133 votes to 103. Wilson’s unsuccessful challenges for the leadership and deputy leadership in 1960 and 1962 respectively appeared to show that there was considerable opposition towards him within the PLP and implied that he was seen as a divisive, rather than a unifying figure. In 1960, he had received only eleven votes more than Bevan had won in 1955 and the base of his support had merely replicated that secured by his former mentor five years before. In 1962, he had received only twenty-two more votes when challenging Brown for the deputy leadership than he had when challenging Gaitskell for the leadership two years before. Both challenges had apparently weakened his position and he feared that his 145

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leadership ambitions were over. As Heppell notes, however, there were two positives for Wilson that could be taken from this period: First, the two challenges [had] provided him with the nucleus of a voting bloc of between 80 and 100 Labour [MPs]. They could be assumed to be backers of Wilson in a future … leadership contest, should an opportunity arise. Second, the nucleus of the voting bloc for his assumed rival, Brown, may have been bigger at around 130, but there was a question mark over whether they [had voted] for Brown himself, or … were [merely] endorsing him as the candidate that Gaitskell was backing. (Heppell, 2010b: 157)

Brown, a former protégé of Bevin, had strong support from the trade unionists in the loyalist centre of the PLP and was ‘the candidate to beat’ (Drucker, 1976: 384). In the first ballot, Wilson received 115 votes, Brown eighty-eight and Callaghan forty-one. In the second, Wilson defeated Brown by 144 votes to 103. As McKenzie (1964: 630) explains, Wilson did not secure the leadership because the PLP had ‘swung to the left’. Instead, he argues, there are two principal reasons why he did so. First, Wilson was ‘incomparably the ablest parliamentary performer in a party no longer very rich in such talents after so many years in opposition’. The second reason was that Brown, who had a greater reputation than Wilson for loyalty to the party’s parliamentary leadership, ‘did not, for purely personal reasons, inspire widespread confidence among the members of the PLP’. Specifically, McKenzie notes, Brown had a reputation for ‘impulsiveness, truculence and insensitivity, which more than offset his other qualities’ (1964: 631). The reservations many Labour MPs had about Brown were threefold: First, there were concerns about his electoral appeal, both in terms of the party leadership ballot itself … and to the wider electorate in a General Election campaign. These concerns reflected a belief that his defeat [of] Wilson [for] the deputy party leadership was exactly that: for deputy. Moreover, in that ballot, Brown had benefited from the covert support of the Gaitskellites, who were keen to retain Brown as deputy to Gaitskell, rather than allow a Gaitskell—Wilson instability ticket to emerge. Implicit within this argument was the assumption that Brown had the skills and aptitudes to be a deputy party leader, but not necessarily to be a party leader and potentially a Labour Prime Minister. Second, there were reservations about his capacity to unify the Party. His alignment to the right was so absolute there was a concern that he would be so unpalatable to the left that there would be a new outbreak of infighting. Furthermore, there were doubts about his capacity to maintain the cohesion of the right themselves. The social democrats were dividing on the question of Europe, and the strong pro-Europeanism of Brown was a significant concern. (Heppell, 2010b: 158) 146

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Finally, there were concerns about Brown’s temperament. His reputation for excessive drinking was becoming well known and ‘deeply disturbing’ in a potential prime minister (Heppell, 2010b: 158). Doubts about Wilson’s reliability had been the most dangerous question mark hanging over his candidature from the outset and, as Howard and West observe, largely explain why, after Brown’s campaign team published an impressive list of his sponsors, it was impossible for Wilson’s to do the same: With the exceptions of Earl Attlee (the former Prime Minister), Bert Bowden (the Party’s Chief Whip) and one other member of the ‘shadow’ Cabinet (Fred Lee), Wilson was virtually without support in the highest echelons of the Party: for him to win it was essential that he should have the chance to make his appeal to the back benches – and a series of major debates in the House [during] the contest provided him with just the opportunity that he needed. Neither George Brown nor James Callaghan disgraced [himself] in these debates: but there was not the slightest doubt that Wilson, widely regarded since the death of Nye Bevan as the most brilliant Commons debater, emerged with the greatest advantage. From the moment that he began a speech … at the dispatch box, the message lying behind it came over: if the Party … really wanted a Leader who could successfully discomfit the Government, then he was ready. Wilson’s skill as a parliamentarian would have been an asset to him in any event: but events conspired to give him a bright opportunity. (Howard and West, 1965: 28)

In his memoirs, Wilson himself recalled that, during the campaign, he and other Labour MPs had attended Gaitskell’s memorial service. Later that day (31 January), he had spoken in a debate on defence in which Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had quoted a speech of Gaitskell’s in March 1960, apparently supporting the case for Britain possessing its own independent nuclear deterrent. This was seen as political point-scoring by many Labour MPs and as being in ‘exceedingly bad taste’. Wilson had then intervened to remind Macmillan that Gaitskell had also balanced the remarks he had just quoted by outlining the opposite case in the same speech. In his memoirs, he recalled that his intervention ‘for once, had Macmillan flurried. He did not have the reference and had no possibility of checking it. I always think that this exchange is what really won me the leadership, because what the Labour Party wanted was someone who could put Harold Macmillan down’ (Wilson, 1986: 191–2). As Heppell notes, a desire to stop Wilson and concerns about whether Brown was a suitable candidate for this task led to a fracturing of the right and it was ‘assumed amongst political journalists at the time that the consequence of Callaghan entering the [contest] was to the advantage of Wilson, as the candidate for the left, and to the disadvantage of Brown’ (Heppell, 2010b: 160). 147

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During the campaign itself, Brown’s conduct was flawed and self-defeating. After Wilson had let it be known that he would accept Brown as his deputy if he won, Brown issued a strong denial that he had agreed to do the same in return. In so doing, he appeared to be positioning himself against party unity, in contrast to his more conciliatory opponent. The Brown camp was also accused of engaging in ‘strong-arm tactics’. ‘Tales spread of [MPs] being bludgeoned with threats or bribed with rewards; there were stories of thirtyeight cabinet ministers having already been appointed, to say nothing of five law officers’ (Howard and West, 1965: 26). As one Wilson supporter, Benn, recorded in his diary, ‘George Brown’s arm-twisting produced a strong reaction and helped to contribute to Harold’s success’ (Benn, 1987: 5). In contrast to the aggressive approach of Brown and his supporters, Wilson and his team deliberately sought to avoid giving the impression that a campaign was being undertaken at all: The strategy was not to ‘whip’ votes, but to ‘seek disclosure’ of intended voting … the Wilson team could then use this as a ‘guide to action where appropriate’, such as making Wilson available for consultation with those who were undecided, or in need [of] reassurance. Adopting a low-key approach was appropriate given the reputation (i.e. for duplicity) that Wilson had. Consequently, they attempted to play down his associations with the left so as to draw in centrists, and by presenting Wilson as a moderate centrist they highlighted how Wilson was capable of uniting the Party, and winning the General Election. (Heppell, 2010b: 161–2)

In short, Wilson’s election in February 1963 can be attributed to the following factors. First, the fact that the left of the PLP elected to nominate a single candidate (Wilson) ensured that its support coalesced around him. Second, the fact that the right could not agree on a single candidate, and thus fractured in two, backing Brown and Callaghan respectively, gave Wilson a substantial lead after the first ballot and crucial momentum going into the second (and final) ballot. Third, the astute campaigning strategy of the Wilson team and the naïve approach of the Brown camp meant that Wilson was seen as better equipped to offer first, party unity; second, political and governing effectiveness; and third, electoral appeal and the characteristics of a potential prime minister in waiting (Heppell, 2010b: 166; see also King, 1966: 31–2). From Wilson to Callaghan Wilson would lead the Labour Party for thirteen years, serving as prime minister from October 1964 to June 1970, and again from March 1974 until his 148

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resignation in March 1976. Of his possible successors, two had been told of his intentions in advance. As he revealed in his autobiography, Callaghan received a telephone call in late December 1975 from Harold Lever, to whom Wilson had given a roving commission as a cabinet minister, to arrange a meeting. As Callaghan recalled, when Lever arrived, he emphasised that what he was about to say must be treated in the strictest confidence: His news was both dramatic and unexpected. The Prime Minister had made a firm decision to resign in March 1976, and I must prepare myself to take over … I was initially disbelieving … even if this was Harold’s present turn of mind, there would be plenty of time before March in which the Prime Minister could change his opinion. Not so, said … Lever, the decision was firm and I must make ready. (Callaghan, 1987: 387)

A second potential candidate, Healey, later disclosed in his autobiography that Wilson had told him three years earlier, in 1972, that he did not intend to serve another full term as prime minister. As Healey also recalled: In December 1975 Harold Lever told me he thought Wilson would soon announce his resignation. Unknown to me, Lever [relayed] the same message to Jim Callaghan, but much more specifically: Wilson would resign in March, and Jim must prepare himself to take over. Wilson himself told Callaghan after his sixtieth birthday party on March 11th – the very evening of my row with the Left over their abstention in the debate on public expenditure. He told me in the lavatory outside the Cabinet room just before informing the whole of the Cabinet on 16th March; so I was as flabbergasted as nearly all the rest of my colleagues. (Healey, 1989: 446)

As we noted earlier, Labour’s rules made no provision for its leader to be formally challenged or required to seek re-election when the party was in government. Consequently, as Kellner and Hitchens note, the leadership contest precipitated by the announcement of Wilson’s resignation was without constitutional precedent: Technically, [Labour MPs] were choosing a new Party Leader. In fact, of course, they were electing a new Prime Minister as well. All previous Labour and Conservative leadership ballots had taken place in opposition; now a ballot was being conducted by a party in power. This gave Callaghan an immediate advantage. Internal party battles in opposition are usually about policies and sometimes about principles. In government, these considerations tend to be subordinated to the more practical matter of staying in power. Callaghan could not market a strong line in policies or principles: he offered himself specifically as the [candidate] who could hold the Party together and give it the best chance of winning the next General Election. (Kellner and Hitchens, 1976: 168) 149

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In addition to Callaghan, who was Foreign Secretary, there were five other candidates: Secretary of State for Employment Foot; Chancellor of the Exchequer Healey; Home Secretary Jenkins; Secretary of State for Energy Benn and Secretary of State for the Environment Crosland. During the ensuing threeweek campaign, Benn released daily policy statements on subjects ranging from economic strategy to open government. Callaghan, for his part, said nothing. He issued ‘no statements about the contest, made no speeches about it, and gave no interviews’ (Kellner and Hitchens, 1976: 169). Instead, he behaved in a ‘detached, quasi-presidential’ manner and simply carried on his work as Foreign Secretary (Morgan, 1997: 470). As his official biographer notes, Callaghan’s campaign was ‘the most professionally organised of them all’ (Morgan, 1997: 470). Merlyn Rees, a close friend and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was his official campaign manager. Other supporters included cabinet ministers Lever, Fred Peart and John Morris, Attorney-General Sam Silkin and junior ministers John Smith and Roy Hattersley. The mastermind and chief organiser of Callaghan’s campaign was his principal private secretary Dr Jack Cunningham. As Kellner and Hitchens explain, Callaghan’s campaign team reflected the coalition of party factions which he had marshalled during his long career: John Golding and Tom Urwin were strong members of the trade union group of Labour MPs … Cunningham was the son of Andrew Cunningham who had at one time been an important ally of Callaghan on the Labour Party NEC. Ted Rowlands was the MP for Merthyr Tydfil, in the heart of Callaghan’s Welsh power base; Edmund Marshall was a left-wing MP who thought Callaghan would stand up to the right; James Wellbeloved was a right-wing MP who thought Callaghan would stand up to the left … The significant point about this group is that it was so heterogeneous. [Its] members did not represent a theory of what the Labour Party was about, or where it should be heading; instead they represented a series of credits that Callaghan had built up—in Wales, with the unions, in the Party, and among individuals. The time had now come to cash these credits in. (Kellner and Hitchens, 1976: 169)

In the first ballot, Foot received the most votes (ninety), six ahead of Callaghan’s eighty-four, but only because there were fewer candidates who appealed to the left of the PLP (Foot and Benn) than to the centre and/or the right (Callaghan, Jenkins, Healey and Crosland) (Stark, 1996: 119). Jenkins, Benn and Crosland received fifty-six, thirty-seven and seventeen votes respectively, so Crosland was eliminated automatically under the rules, while Jenkins and Benn withdrew after the first ballot. As Jenkins recalled in his memoirs: 150

From chairman to leader Foot’s lead was not of primary importance. He could be comfortably overhauled, even with the transfer to him of most of Benn’s vote, by whichever of Callaghan or me got into the position for a run-off. It was the relative positions of Callaghan and me which were therefore the news headline. And Callaghan’s lead while not overwhelming was nonetheless enough to settle the issue. The country, I thought, needed a new Prime Minister quickly, and not the long-drawn-out agony of a third, or even a fourth, slow round, and from fifty-six votes that Prime Minister was not going to be me. I therefore immediately decided to withdraw. (Jenkins, 1991: 436)

In his diary, Benn recorded that ‘Foot did extremely well, Jim less well than he expected, Roy Jenkins got twenty less than he expected, I got twenty more than many people thought, Healey did very badly and Crosland did marginally better than the disastrous result that had been forecast’ (Benn, 1989: 544). Healey, with a mere thirty votes, had finished fifth, but elected to contest the second ballot, and was widely criticised for it. In the second ballot, he received thirty-eight votes and was eliminated from the contest. Foot received 133 and Callaghan, who now led the field, 141. In the third and final ballot, Foot secured only four of Healey’s votes, whereas Callaghan’s tally increased by thirty-five votes to 176. Led by Rees, his team had campaigned primarily by reacting and avoiding mistakes. As front-runner, Callaghan had most to lose from a  vigorous and aggressive campaign. His team understood this at the outset and  the  ‘general desire to keep the Government together played into their hands. So too did the obvious contrast between the inexperience of the Conservative front bench and Labour’s experienced team’ (Drucker, 1976: 392). As Heppell (2010b: 62) notes, Callaghan won the contest for the following reasons. First, he had received prior notice of Wilson’s impending resignation and was therefore better prepared than his opponents were. Second, he was ideologically acceptable to the majority of the PLP. In the final ballot, he merely had to secure the loyalty of the centre and right of the PLP, whereas Foot needed to attract support beyond his natural constituency on the left. Third, compared to the other three centre and right-wing candidates, Callaghan was both more experienced, having served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, and less divisive. In short, Callaghan was seen by most of his parliamentary colleagues as superior to Foot on all three of the essential criteria for selecting party leaders in parliamentary systems: acceptability, electability and competence (Stark, 1996: 127–8).

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From Callaghan to Foot Callaghan served as Prime Minister until Labour’s defeat in the general election of May 1979. Instead of resigning immediately, he chose to continue as leader for another seventeen months. On 15 October 1980, he suddenly announced his resignation. The question of who should succeed him was complicated by the fact that while Labour’s constitution provided that the party’s leader and deputy leader were elected by the PLP alone, the party conference of October 1980 had agreed to extend the franchise by setting up an electoral college, the configuration of which would be decided at a special conference in January 1981. As one MP later recalled: The Left in the PLP were keen to postpone the election of a new Leader till then by appointing the current Deputy Leader, Michael Foot, as a caretaker for the short period up to the constitutional conference. The Right, by contrast, wanted the election held at once by the PLP alone, because they could be expected to elect the Right’s favoured candidate, Denis Healey. (Mikardo, 1988: 201)

On 28 October, the PLP ‘considered whether the contest should be postponed, but rejected the proposal by 119 to sixty-six (though with eighty-three MPs not voting). The selection of Callaghan’s successor thus proceeded as a “normal” contest under the established rules’ (Punnett, 1992: 91). Following Callaghan’s resignation, three candidates had immediately declared their intention to stand. Healey was the clear favourite and it soon became apparent that he would be the only candidate from the right. Callaghan, while refusing to offer any public endorsement, backed Healey and expected him to win (Jones, 1994: 447). Initially, Healey’s main challenger was the shadow foreign secretary, Peter Shore. A third candidate, John Silkin, the shadow secretary of state for industry, was seen as more consistently left wing than Shore, but was thought to have little chance (Drucker, 1981: 385). The most obvious prospective candidate on the left was Benn, but he declined to stand, preferring instead to bide his time until the next contest that would operate under the new selection procedure. After Callaghan had announced his resignation to the shadow cabinet on 15 October, four shadow ministers (Albert Booth, Stan Orme, Silkin and Shore) adjourned to Silkin’s room to discuss what to do next. Two others on the left, Foot and Benn, were unable to attend. The four who were present agreed that their objective must be to stop Healey. Shore said that he thought he had a good chance of doing so. Silkin went much further and claimed that he would defeat 152

From chairman to leader

not just Healey, but anyone else who might stand (Mikardo, 1988: 201–2). As the veteran left wing MP Ian Mikardo later recalled, the urge to stop Healey was one he shared in full: When the leadership election loomed … my friends in the Tribune Group and many other people in the Party and the trade unions wanted to stop Healey because he was way out to the Right and was likely to go even further than Wilson and Callaghan in leading the Party away from its socialist principles. But even though I shared that view I had an even stronger motivation for frustrating [Healey’s] leadership bid. I had seen at first hand his emery-paper abrasive manner, his crude strong-arm all-in-wrestling ways of dealing with dissent, his undisguised contempt for many of his colleagues, his actual enjoyment of confrontation, his penchant for pouring petrol on the flames of controversy, and I was thoroughly convinced that if he became Leader of the Party it wouldn’t be long before these aggressive characteristics of his would split the Party from top to bottom; and that was a prospect which scared me. (Mikardo, 1988: 202–3)

On his return to London on 17 October, Mikardo’s immediate reaction to the buzz of intrigue, speculation and calculation reverberating around Westminster was ‘to wonder how anyone could possibly imagine that either Peter Shore or John Silkin had any chance whatever of defeating Healey’. The next morning, he telephoned Foot, and urged him to stand (Mikardo, 1988: 203–4). Foot received similar representations from trade union leaders, notably Clive Jenkins, and others. Two days later, on 20 October, Foot confirmed his decision to stand. As Drucker explains: Two immediate effects of Foot’s decision were to scupper Shore’s chances of doing well and to force Healey’s camp to concede that they now had little chance of a first ballot victory. But ultimately more important may have been the appreciation that a slim Healey victory on the established rules might not be authoritative. Foot, narrowly defeated in the PLP, could honourably stand again under the new rules and have the decision reversed. (Drucker, 1981: 385)

Four days earlier, one of Healey’s supporters had noted in his diary, ‘It is clear that Denis is likely to get at least 120–125 votes on [the] first ballot and should beat Peter Shore, though Peter is likely to do very well’ (Radice, 2004: 19). On 20 October, the same day that Foot announced his decision to stand, his assessment of Shore’s (and Silkin’s) prospects was very different: Michael Foot enters the fray, the last fling of a vain old ‘Bollinger Socialist’. By doing so, he effectively dishes both Peter Shore and Silkin, because the left-wing vote will unite behind Michael. I fervently hope that the candidature of a man who will be over 70 at the next election will not also undermine Denis. A lot of 153

Choosing party leaders talk about Foot yielding to ‘overwhelming pressure’. The reality is that the left, particularly the Bennite left, are desperate to stop Denis. (Radice, 2004: 20)

Superficially, the campaign that followed was similar to the previous contest of 1976, in that the four candidates rarely appeared on television, fearing they had more to lose than gain in so doing. Like Callaghan in 1976, Healey, as the front-runner, was ‘particularly reticent’ (Drucker, 1981: 385). In other respects, however, the campaign this time was different from the last: Then the PLP chose a Prime Minister. Members acted with that fact in the front of their minds. In 1980 the PLP trimmed; it ran away from a fight with the rest of the Party. Few MPs mentioned the ability to be a good Prime Minister first when asked why their colleagues voted as they did. Had Foot remained out of the race it might well have been different. But once Foot entered the race, his team had a strong suit which they could, and did, repeatedly play to advantage: Healey as leader would exacerbate the tensions within the Party while Foot would not; [moreover], a Healey victory would further enrage the unions and CLPs and unite them against the PLP while Foot’s victory would reassure the Party that the PLP could be trusted … A Foot victory was preferred by one or two who might have otherwise preferred Healey because a Foot win in the PLP was seen as a way of ending an argument with the Party which might just conceivably end up ­forcing Benn on the PLP. (Drucker, 1981: 386)

As Punnett (1992: 92) notes, the campaign was ‘unspectacular’, with the ‘very real intra-party conflicts that underlay the contest being hidden from the public gaze’. Foot appeared to make little effort to campaign – one supporter described his performance as ‘bloody awful’ – believing, as he did, that Healey was certain to win. His campaign, however, led by senior figures such as Orme, was ‘vigorously conducted by three backbenchers, Neil Kinnock, Peter Snape and Jim Marshall, and made some headway across the Party’ (Morgan, 2007: 378–9). Healey’s ‘right-wing views and abrasive manner, including a talent for abuse, caused several on the centre-right to have doubts about him’ and at least one centrist MP, Phillip Whitehead, eventually voted for Foot, following Healey’s ‘incomprehensible refusal to set out a manifesto in The Guardian, as Foot, Silkin and Shore had done’ (Morgan, 2007: 379). To some who, like Healey himself, wanted to restore the party to ‘something like normality’, he appeared too combative; to others who were ‘so angry with [the party’s] leftward drift that they were ready to leave it’, not combative enough (Pearce, 2002: 542). In a major debate in the Commons on industrial policy on 29 October, Foot was generally thought to have performed better than Healey. The candidates’ own assessments of their support, based on canvassing undertaken by their campaign 154

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teams, proved to be unreliable. By the eve of the second ballot, Healey had been promised 140 votes and Foot 135 – more promises than there were actual votes (Punnett, 1992: 92). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the opinion polls suggested that, whereas Healey was the first choice of the PLP and Labour voters, Foot was preferred by party activists. As Punnett notes: BBC Newsnight surveys of Labour MPs early in the contest, and then just before the first ballot, revealed that Healey was supported by about 45 per cent of MPs who were prepared to indicate a preference, Foot by about a third and Shore and Silkin by about a quarter. A Marplan poll just before the first ballot showed that Healey was the choice of over two-thirds of Labour voters and Foot of just a quarter. In contrast, a survey conducted by The Times of 131 constituency parties that had tested their members’ views showed that 60 per cent supported Foot and just 27 per cent backed Healey. (Punnett, 1992: 92–3)

The result of the first ballot was announced on 4 November. Healey had received 112 votes, Foot eighty-three, Silkin thirty-eight and Shore thirty-two. As Silkin and Shore had received only seventy votes between them, thirteen fewer than the next lowest-placed candidate, Foot, both were eliminated from the contest. Shore, who would probably have secured a respectable second place had Foot adhered to his original decision not to stand and to back Shore instead, immediately pledged his support to Foot for the second (and final) ballot. Silkin did the same. As Drucker notes, Healey’s vote on the first ballot came as a considerable blow to his team: The fact that he was 29 ahead of Foot was less important than the fact that he was [23] short of the required majority. To gain votes from the defeated candidates Healey’s team needed to be in an impregnable position. They had admitted before the vote that fewer than 115 would be worrying. Hattersley had predicted 116. Some extra votes always go to a sure winner as bandwagon jumping occurs, but this time it was particularly important for Healey to appear unbeatable—and to win by a large margin—because a narrow victory would legitimise a subsequent challenge under the new rules. (Drucker, 1981: 386)

The Healey team, Drucker notes, could not regain the initiative after the first ballot and argued in vain that Healey was more popular with the British electorate. ‘The contest was not about winning the next election, let alone about becoming prime minister. Even so, both sides were somewhat surprised when Foot’s 10 vote majority (139–129) was announced on 10 November’ (Drucker, 1981: 386). Foot’s share of the vote in the final ballot (a mere 51.9 per cent) was lower than that received by any of his predecessors. Several factors contributed to 155

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the outcome. First, Foot was a popular and respected figure in the PLP. As deputy leader, he had been consistently loyal to his predecessor, Callaghan, both in office and in opposition. He was a committed and dedicated parliamentarian, an excellent speaker in the Commons and the only candidate who was also, at the time of the contest, a member of the party’s NEC. Healey, by contrast, was  a loner, and a more divisive figure in the PLP and among trade union leaders. As Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Wilson and Callaghan governments, he had also come to be identified, as one MP recalled, with ‘bombs, cuts, incomes policy and the final ignominy of the 5 per cent pay policy. All were crimes against humanity in the eyes of the left’ (Mitchell, 1983: 49). More importantly, perhaps, many MPs also recognised that Foot would be more acceptable than Healey to the party outside Parliament: The reasoning of many of the right and centre MPs who might have been expected to vote for Healey, but in fact voted for Foot, was that if a left-wing leader was likely to emerge from the Electoral College in due course, it was desirable that he was seen to have been the choice of the PLP in the first place  …  Foot  was  aware  of this view and sought to capitalize on it, declaring at the beginning of his campaign that ‘If I am elected the likelihood of my being rejected by the Electoral College is very small indeed’. This factor was reinforced after the first ballot, when it became clear that the best Healey could hope for was a narrow  win. Such an outcome would subsequently undermine Healey’s prestige as leader and make it even more likely that an attempt would be made to overturn the result when the Electoral College was in place. Thus some MPs felt that if Healey could not win decisively, and be seen to be the overwhelming choice of the PLP, it would be better if he did not win at all. (Punnett, 1992: 94)

As Punnett notes, a further consideration that weighed heavily with some MPs was that if a left-wing leader was inevitable once the electoral college was established, it was preferable for that leader to be Foot than Benn. In this respect, Foot’s candidature was strengthened by his declaration that, should he win the contest, he would lead the party into the next general election. In the event, he was re-elected unopposed in 1981 and 1982, and remained leader until his resignation shortly after the 1983 general election. Had Healey been elected leader in 1980, he would almost certainly have been challenged by Benn in the electoral college (as, indeed, he was for the deputy leadership) in 1981 (Punnett, 1992: 95; see Chapter 6). As Stark explains, ‘That Foot was considered the best candidate around whom the Party could unite spoke volumes about the situation in which 156

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Labour found itself in 1980’. Foot, he notes, ‘was no neutral figure; he had long been associated with the Party’s left wing’. Compared to Healey, however, who was ‘clearly from the Party’s right wing’, Foot ‘truly was the unity candidate’ (1996: 128). While this was clearly true of the party as a whole, it was much less so of the PLP, in which Foot emerged victorious by a mere ten votes. Of these, four were cast by right-wing MPs – Ron Brown (brother of George,  the party’s former deputy leader), Tom Ellis, Neville Sandelson and  Jeffrey Thomas  – who would later defect to the SDP, having apparently ‘voted for Foot in the belief that his left wing views and lack of capacity to  lead would  destroy the Labour Party all the more quickly’ (Morgan, 2007: 379). In the final ballot of the 1976 contest, eight moderate Labour MPs – Leo Abse, Ian Campbell, Tam Dalyell, John Fraser, James Hamilton, Peter Hardy, Whitehead and the outgoing leader Wilson – had voted for Callaghan, not Foot. They did so partly because they were choosing a prime minister, not merely a new party leader. As Kinnock recalls, voting for Callaghan in that contest ‘was what “mainstream” people did’ (Kinnock, 2018). In the final ballot in 1980, all eight voted for Foot; had they voted for Healey instead, Healey would have won. Most were not members of any campaign group. Instead, they ‘occupied the vital centre ground which candidates must appeal to in order to win’ (Roe-Crines, 2010: 201). Crucially, it was Foot, not Healey, who was able to garner their support. In some cases, notably Abse and Dalyell, long-term friendship with Foot and lack of personal affection for Healey were relevant factors (private information). In others, political affiliation may have been decisive. As Kinnock recalled, Fraser was ‘always on the “sensible Left” of the PLP and a longtime member of the Tribune Group’, while Hardy had ‘strong interests in the environment and animal rights. His manner made people think of him as conformist Rightish Labour, but often his inclinations were to the Left’ (Kinnock, 2018). Whitehead, as noted above, declined to back Healey following his refusal to contribute a statement of his views to the Guardian and voted (twice) for Foot thereafter. Wilson voted for Healey in the first ballot, but switched to Foot in the second. According to Kinnock, Healey was ‘a lazy campaigner (a main reason for his defeat – MPs thought that they were being taken for granted) and it’s possible that Harold thought Denis should have been more grateful for his support’ (Kinnock, 2018). According to one of Healey’s supporters, ‘at least  a dozen uncommitted MPs’, including some who went on to lose their seats in the 1983 general election, ‘succumbed to 157

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constituency pressure and [voted] for Foot to save their skins’ (Radice, 2002: 292–3). Faced with a critical test in the party’s last purely parliamentary leadership election, he concluded, the PLP ‘lost [its] collective nerve and voted for a prolonged spell in opposition’.

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5

From Healey to Miliband: the election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College The period of Foot’s leadership that began in November 1980 was one of ‘unremitting gloom’ for the Labour Party and ended in June 1983 with its lowest share of the vote in any general election since 1918 (Heppell, 2010a: 89–90). In this chapter, we examine the election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College from its creation in 1981 until 2010, when it was used for the last time. Before doing so, we first explain why Labour’s previous system of leadership selection by the PLP alone came under increasing attack in the 1970s and how its replacement emerged thereafter. We then explain the rules governing the Electoral College in its initial configuration and how the system worked in practice. The case for widening the franchise For the most part, the form and operation of the PLP ballot, discussed in Chapter 4, was subjected to little criticism until the 1970s. It was generally seen as straightforward, practical and efficient. In the 1970s, however, the process was increasingly challenged by the alternative view that the Labour leader should be selected by an electorate that extended beyond the PLP. As Punnett notes, various arguments were used to support the case for a wider franchise: In any system of election by MPs, the size of the electorate will vary according to the party’s performance in the previous General Election. The variations can be considerable. In 1935 Clement Attlee was elected leader by a PLP of just 52 members, while in 1976 James Callaghan was elected by a PLP of 314 members. This randomness in the size of a parliamentary electorate is unfortunate and unavoidable. For some, however, the PLP simply constituted too small an electorate, even after a General Election in which Labour had done well. Regardless of its numbers at any particular time, some regarded the PLP as an elite in a party that was increasingly anti-elitist in its sentiments. (Punnett, 1992: 95–6) 159

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In addition, it was argued that, following the creation of the new post of ‘leader of the party’ in 1978, the franchise should now be extended to include the party outside Parliament. As one MP, Michael Meacher, argued at the 1979 conference: ‘The fundamental reason, I believe, for supporting [it] is simply this: that the Leader of the Party is accountable, not just to the Parliamentary Party, but to the movement as a whole and he should therefore be elected by those to whom he is more broadly accountable’ (quoted in Punnett, 1992: 96). Related to these arguments was a long-held suspicion that Labour’s parliamentary leadership could not be trusted to represent and serve the interests of the party as a whole. MacDonald’s alleged betrayal in 1931 remained part of Labour folklore and the Wilson and Callaghan governments of 1964–70 and 1974–9 were similarly accused of having betrayed socialism and ignored policies that had been approved by the party conference. In addition, as Punnett explains, the trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) had legitimate claims to be involved in the process of choosing the party’s leader: The Labour Party is often seen as resting on the three bases of the PLP, [CLPs] and [trade] unions. The trade unions gave birth to the Party and are still at the core of its organizational structure. The [CLPs] undertake the mundane dayto-day work of the Party. The concept of ‘activist democracy’… demanded that those who ‘knock on doors’ in support of the Party should have a major role in [its] decision-making machinery – including [that] for selecting the Leader. As long as the franchise was confined to MPs, the [CLPs] had only an indirect influence on the contest (while those constituencies that did not have a Labour MP were denied even this indirect influence). (Punnett, 1992: 98)

In addition to these arguments of principle, there was an ideological factor. The above debate was part of the conflict between left and right within the party. The majority of its MPs were from the right or centre of the party, and the left saw the inclusion of CLPs and trade unions in the process for electing the leader as a means of combating the influence of the right. It was this factor, above all, that led to the creation of the Electoral College in January 1981 (Punnett, 1992: 98–9). In the next section, we explain how the new system emerged in the form that it did. The emergence of the Electoral College As we noted in Chapter 4, the Labour Party Conference of 1976 agreed to establish a working party to consider the issues of who the party’s leader was and how that leader should be elected. In its report to the conference the 160

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following year, the working party recommended that the new post of leader of the party be created and that the NEC present the conference with a choice of three possible methods by which that leader might be chosen: by the PLP, by conference itself or by an electoral college consisting of MPs, parliamentary candidates and representatives of CLPs and affiliated organisations. In 1978, the party conference formally approved the creation of the post of leader of the party and voted by a two-to-one majority in favour of the election of that leader by the PLP (Punnett, 1992: 99–100). The question of how the leader should be chosen remained controversial, however, and pressure continued for the franchise to be extended beyond the PLP. At the 1979 conference, it was decided to waive the rule that prevented the re-opening of constitutional issues for a period of three years after a decision had been reached and allow a further debate on the matter. A resolution calling for the creation of an electoral college was defeated, but the conference also approved the creation of a commission of enquiry to consider possible reforms in the party’s organisation. This initiative was designed to settle, once and for all, the constitutional issues that had divided the party throughout the 1970s. In June 1980, the commission recommended that the leader should by chosen by an electoral college, in which MPs would have 50 per cent of the votes, the trade unions 25 per cent, CLPs 20 per cent and other affiliated bodies the remaining 5 per cent. This body would also have the final say in the formulation of the party’s general election manifesto. Had the 1980 party conference accepted this proposal, much subsequent turmoil would have been avoided (Punnett, 1992: 101). In the event, it ended in confusion. By a narrow majority, the conference approved the principle of an electoral college, but proceeded to reject each of the three proposals for how it should be configured. Instead, a special conference was arranged to determine how the issue should finally be resolved. At the special conference, held at Wembley in January 1981, various alternatives were again considered, but the overwhelming majority (88 per cent) of delegates voted in favour of an electoral college that would operate every year as part of the conference. Although the principle of an electoral college was accepted, however, there was still disagreement about its precise structure and composition. Several options were considered and voted on: After two ballots, the choice before the delegates was reduced to the proposals from the GMWU [or NUGMW] (PLP 50 per cent, unions and [CLPs] 25 per cent each) and USDAW [Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers] (unions 40 per cent, PLP and [CLPs] 30 per cent each). In the third ballot the USDAW proposal was carried by 3.4 million votes to 2.9 million, largely by accident. The 161

Choosing party leaders AUEW [Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers] delegation had been instructed to support only a formula that gave the PLP more than half the votes, and thus they abstained in the final ballot rather than back the GMWU proposal that gave the MPs only half the votes. As a consequence of their abstention, a formula was adopted that gave the MPs less than half the votes. Thus the PLP had lost the battle to retain the exclusive right to elect the Leader and had been given a smaller share of the Electoral College votes than they [had] wished, or might have expected, or could have achieved. (Punnett, 1992: 102)

Although debate about its composition continued, the Electoral College functioned throughout the 1980s with the same structure that had emerged in such bizarre and controversial circumstances in January 1981. In the next section, we explain how the new system worked in practice. The Electoral College rules The rules of the Electoral College were contained in Standing Order Five of Labour’s constitution and specified that the party’s leader and deputy leader would be elected separately at its annual conference. When Labour was in opposition, the procedure would come into effect every year. When in office, it would be initiated only if a two-thirds majority of delegates requested it through a card vote. Candidates had to be MPs and attend the conference. Any candidate who failed to do so would be deemed to have withdrawn, unless he or she had first written to the party Secretary and provided a satisfactory explanation for their absence (Punnett, 1992: 106–7). Candidates could be nominated by another MP, or by a CLP, trade union or other affiliated organisation. The rules themselves did not specify a closing date for nominations, but in practice this was normally fixed at three months ahead of the annual meeting of the Electoral College. Nominations needed the consent of the nominee and the support of a fixed percentage of the PLP. Initially, this was set at 5 per cent, but was increased to 20 per cent after the contests for leader and deputy leader in 1988. In the PLP section, every Labour MP (and, after 1991, MEP) was entitled to one vote in each ballot. In the CLP section, each CLP also had one vote, regardless of the number of its members. In the affiliates’ section, however, a trade union’s share of the votes was determined by how many of its members had paid the political levy to the Labour Party, on a ratio of one vote for every thousand members. As Punnett notes, there were ‘vast differences’ between trade unions in this respect: ‘In 1992, the four largest trade unions 162

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together accounted for almost two-thirds of the votes in the trade union section, while the four smallest unions collectively accounted for less than 1 per cent’ (1992: 107). The votes cast in each section were distributed among the candidates as percentages of that section’s share of the total Electoral College votes. These percentages were based on the number of actual votes, not of those who were entitled to do so. To win, a candidate required an overall majority of the votes. The result would be revealed in detail, with the votes cast by each MP, CLP, trade union and affiliated organisation being made public (Punnett, 1992: 108). The Electoral College in practice As shown in Table 5.1, although the rules allowed elections for the posts of leader and deputy leader to take place every year, in practice only twelve (of a possible sixty) contests were held between 1981 and 2010. As discussed in Chapter 4, the competitiveness of a leadership contest can be measured in three ways: the number of candidates it attracts, the number of ballots required to produce an outcome and the winner’s percentage share of the votes in the final ballot. As Table 5.1 shows, Electoral College contests for the leadership and deputy leadership were relatively non-competitive in each of these respects. For the most part, they attracted only two or three candidates and the contest for leader in 2007 only attracted one. On five occasions, the winner received over two-thirds of the votes cast and on three others close to Table 5.1  Labour Party leadership and deputy leadership elections, 1981–2010 Year

Post contested

Context

No. of candidates

Winner

Winner’s share of final vote (%)

1981 1983 1983 1988 1988 1992 1992 1994 1994 2007 2007 2010

Deputy leader Leader Deputy leader Leader Deputy leader Leader Deputy leader Leader Deputy leader Leader Deputy leader Leader

Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Opposition Government Government Opposition

3 4 4 2 3 2 3 3 2 1 6 5

Healey Kinnock Hattersley Kinnock Hattersley Smith Beckett Blair Prescott Brown Harman Ed Miliband

50.4 71.3 67.3 88.6 66.8 91.0 57.3 57.0 56.5 N/A 50.4 50.7

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60 per cent. The three closest contests in this respect were those for the deputy leadership in 2007, the leadership in 2010 and, as we discuss in the following section, the deputy leadership in 1981. Healey versus Benn: the deputy leadership election of 1981 In April 1981, less than three months after the Electoral College had been established, Benn announced that he would challenge Healey for the deputy leadership. The contest received a degree of attention, both within the party and outside, that was out of all proportion to the significance of the post of deputy leader in normal circumstances. As Heppell notes, however, these were not normal circumstances: Upon the decision of the Electoral College much would rest. The fear for Labour centrists was that if Benn were to emerge victorious [this] would act as a catalyst [for] a wave of further defections to the SDP. That Healey won and not Benn was to be a major ‘turning point’ not only in the history of the Labour Party, but also [of] the SDP. (Heppell, 2010a: 91)

Foot had tried to persuade Benn not to stand, but to no avail. On 24 March, he had warned him that such a contest would ‘lacerate’ the party, be ‘deeply divisive’, ‘ruin’ the party conference and make it ‘much harder’ for Labour to win the next general election. It would, Foot had told him, be ‘very much to your credit if you decide not to stand’, to which Benn had replied, ‘I am sure I will be clobbered if I stand, but I don’t think that is really the issue.’ Healey, he reminded Foot, ‘wasn’t elected by anybody, he was just allowed in unopposed, and so there is a genuine vacancy for the deputy leadership’ (Benn,  1996:  512). After a protracted and increasingly rancorous campaign, the result was announced at the party conference in September, by which time Labour had lost seventeen percentage points in the opinion polls (Hayter, 2005: 21). The result of the first ballot was inconclusive. In the PLP section, Healey received 51 per cent of the votes cast, Silkin (who, as noted in Chapter 4, had previously stood for the leadership in 1980), 26.5 per cent and Benn 22.4 per cent. In the trade union section, the outcome was broadly the same: Healey 61.7 per cent, Silkin 22.2 per cent and Benn 16 per cent. In the CLP section, Benn received 78.3 per cent, Healey 17.9 per cent and Silkin 3.8 per cent. The total figures for each candidate were Healey 45.4 per cent, Benn 36.6 per cent and Silkin 18 per cent. As the candidate with the fewest votes, Silkin was therefore 164

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eliminated from the contest. In the second ballot, Healey received almost twothirds (65.9 per cent and 62.5 per cent) of the votes in the PLP and trade union sections. In the CLP section, however, Benn received an overwhelming 81.1 per cent. The aggregate figures were Healey 50.4 per cent to Benn’s 49.6 per cent. Hence, the deputy leadership of the party, and arguably much more besides, had been decided by a whisker: less than one per cent of the total Electoral College votes (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 24; Shore, 1993: 144; Silkin, 1987: 41–56). According to one of Healey’s supporters, by defeating Benn’s challenge, albeit by the narrowest of margins, he had ‘saved the Labour Party’ (Radice, 2004: 52). A crucial factor in Healey’s victory and Benn’s defeat was the decision of some left-wing MPs, notably Kinnock, to abstain in the second ballot. By initiating a challenge, but failing to win the contest, Benn had changed the dynamics of the left-right split in the party. His challenge led to a fragmentation of the left and galvanised the hitherto disorganised right (Heppell, 2010a: 94–9). The contest also produced contradictory and uncomfortable results, in terms of how the Electoral College, in the first test of the new system, had worked in practice. Although Healey had won the contest, he had not secured a majority in all three sections of the Electoral College and the massive levels of support for Benn within the CLP section were deemed to be problematic. There had also been a complete lack of consistency in terms of how the CLP and trade union sections had allocated their votes. CLPs which had balloted their full membership had tended to back Healey over Benn, but few of them actually did so. Where they had relied, as many did, on General Management Committees (GMCs) to allocate their votes instead, this had helped Benn. Trade union consultations with their members had been equally inadequate (Heppell, 2010a: 99–100). The TGWU delegation cast its entire 1.25 million votes (8 per cent of the Electoral College) for Benn, despite having no mandate from its members to do so. Had it voted in accordance with its members’ wishes through consultations, Healey would have received 57.5 per cent to Benn’s 42.5 per cent (instead of 50.4 and 49.6 per cent respectively) of the total Electoral College votes (Hayter, 2005: 18). As Healey later recalled: Although I had just survived Benn’s challenge, the nature of the campaign and the shameless ballot rigging by the trade unions were fully covered [in the] press and [on] television. They did the Labour Party enormous and lasting damage. We dropped from a majority of ten per cent in the opinion polls in March, to level pegging with the Conservatives in October. (Healy, 1989: 484) 165

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As Heppell notes, the contest, and the way the new system had operated in practice, undermined perceptions of party unity and leadership credibility, and this proved to be ‘a significant contributing factor’ in Labour’s shattering general election defeat in June 1983 (2010a: 100). From Foot to Kinnock That Labour would lose the 1983 general election, and Foot step down as leader shortly thereafter, had been widely expected, both inside and outside the party. In the ensuing leadership contest, there were four candidates: Hattersley, Kinnock, Eric Heffer and Shore. Most of the shadow cabinet supported Hattersley. He was clearly within the party’s social democratic tradition and had held various ministerial portfolios in the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Kinnock, by contrast, had no ministerial experience of any kind, having served only as shadow secretary of state for education and science for the previous four years. In the absence of Benn, who had lost his seat in the general election, Heffer elected to stand as the candidate of the hard left. Unlike Hattersley or Kinnock, he did not have a substantial constituency within the party, nor did he enjoy a strong personal following among its activists to match that of Benn, so was unlikely to garner significant support from the three party sections that comprised the Electoral College. As he later admitted, ‘I knew from the outset that I did not stand a cat in hell’s chance of winning but I wanted to use the campaign as a platform for our socialist programme’ (Heffer, 1986: 42–3). In his autobiography, published in 1991, he wrote that he ‘had never had any illusions about standing. It was a political decision to put down a marker for the future of leftwing policies’ (Heffer, 1991: 203). Of the four candidates, Shore gained the least from his decision to stand. This was partly because of his modest performance in the previous leadership election in 1980. As we noted in Chapter 4, Foot had initially encouraged Shore to stand in that contest but had then failed to inform Shore in advance of his decision to do so himself. Interviewed in 1992, Shore called his leadership bid in 1983 ‘a token nomination. I didn’t have the slightest expectation or hope of actually winning’. Although he had strongly opposed the establishment of the Electoral College in 1981, he ‘nevertheless stood under it because I simply wanted to have the opportunity of putting forward a different sort of programme’ (Stark, 1996: 100). Foot had originally planned to announce his intention to step down on 15 June, three days after the general election, thereby allowing his successor 166

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to be chosen at the party conference in October. Before Foot’s decision could be announced or any candidates had even declared, however, the general secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS), Clive Jenkins, asked Kinnock if he would accept its nomination for the leadership, to which Kinnock agreed. Jenkins promptly issued a press release that Foot was standing down and that the ASTMS was backing Kinnock (Jenkins, 1990: 210–12). Hence, within sixty hours of the party’s general election defeat, ‘Foot’s decision to resign had been announced, Kinnock’s candidature was in the open and he had the declared support of ASTMS with its 147,000 Electoral College votes’ (Westlake, 2001: 218). Other union leaders followed suit and promised Kinnock their support. Together, they had 1.25 million votes, which constituted 8 per cent of the Electoral College (Drower, 1994: 74). By 27 June, Kinnock enjoyed the backing of trade unions with a combined membership of 3.8 million, two million more than those supporting Hattersley. Hence, within little more than a week, Kinnock had ‘all but won’ (Westlake, 2001: 218). The belief that Kinnock’s momentum was unstoppable influenced the contest for the deputy leadership and led to the emergence of a deal in which Kinnock and Hattersley would stand for both posts, and each agree to serve under the other. As Drucker (1984: 284–5) notes, ‘the immediate effect of the announcement of this “dream ticket” was the intended one of demonstrating the proximity and mutual respect of the two [leading] candidates, and the acceptability of each to the other’s team. Had either Healey or, more emphatically, Benn stood, no such arrangement would have been possible.’ As Heppell explains: Before the momentum shifted to Kinnock, Hattersley had intended to run for the leadership, with Gerald Kaufman running as deputy as part of a Solidarity [Group] leadership ticket. The fear for the right was that not only would Hattersley be defeated by Kinnock for the leadership, but that Kaufman would [also] be defeated by the new left candidate, Meacher. (Heppell, 2010a: 104)

A Kinnock-Meacher leadership ticket was as unattractive to Kinnock himself as it was to the right. This would immobilise Kinnock as leader and any efforts to unite the party. There was a high degree of suspicion surrounding Meacher and his close alliance with Benn. Whereas Heffer was destined to be comprehensively defeated in the election for leader, there was ‘a real prospect that Meacher could win, or do well in, the deputy leadership contest’ (Heppell, 2010a: 104). 167

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The result of the leadership contest was a foregone conclusion. Kinnock secured overwhelming majorities (72.6 per cent and 91.6 per cent respectively) in the trade union and CLP sections of the Electoral College. Although he failed to secure a majority of the votes cast in the PLP section (49.3 per cent), he had a significant lead over Hattersley (26.1 per cent). Having secured 71.3 per cent to Hattersley’s 19.3 per cent of the total Electoral College votes, he was declared the winner and removed from the contest for deputy leader. In that contest, Hattersley secured majorities in all three sections (88.1 per cent in the trade union section, 55.7 per cent of the PLP and 51 per cent of CLPs). Meacher, the runner-up, secured 11.8 per cent, 29.4 per cent and 47.8 per cent respectively. In aggregate terms, Hattersley secured a comfortably victory, having received more than two-thirds (67.3 per cent to Meacher’s 27.9 per cent) of the votes of the Electoral College as a whole. Interviewed in 1993, Kinnock and Hattersley recalled that Kinnock’s election as leader was largely due to the state in which the Labour Party continued to find itself in 1983 (Stark, 1996: 129). It was the result, Kinnock observed, of the party ‘looking for someone [who] could bring about a recovery’ following its devastating defeat in the general election of that year. Hattersley, for his part, accepted that, given their different strengths, the party made the correct decision: I do believe Neil was probably the right leader for the time. I have no illusions about who would have made the better Prime Minister, but that wasn’t the task. The task was to build the foundations of a viable Labour Party. I think he did that rather more successfully than I would have done it, because the Party trusted him in a way [that] it wouldn’t have trusted me. I think if I had tried to do what Neil did I would have split the Party wide open. (Stark, 1996: 129)

As in the previous leadership contest of 1980, internal concerns were dominant and Kinnock’s soft-left background and refusal to serve in the Wilson and Callaghan governments made him far more acceptable than Hattersley to the party as a whole (Stark, 1996: 129). In normal circumstances, Hattersley’s ministerial and cabinet experience would have been an advantage; especially against a candidate with no such experience. The circumstances of 1983, however, meant that Kinnock was better positioned than Hattersley both to preserve unity and create the impression of a fresh start for the party (Heppell, 2010a: 108). In contrast to Hattersley, he was not tainted by association with the Wilson and Callaghan governments. As Harris observes, his repeated and documented opposition to the policies of that period had won him popularity in the party, given him a power base and ultimately ‘left Kinnock with clean hands, while his 168

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main rivals for the leadership were, in the eyes of many, irretrievably sullied by their association with a period of failure’ (1984: 77). As Heppell (2010a: 109) notes, four other significant factors explain how and why Kinnock secured the Labour leadership in 1983. The first is the Benn factor. Had Benn been able to stand, the left-wing vote would have split between the soft left for Kinnock and the hard left for Benn. In this scenario, Hattersley, as the leading candidate of the right, would have been the chief beneficiary (Drower, 1994: 74). In the absence of Benn, and with Heffer seen as a far less credible candidate, Kinnock and his team were able to maximise his appeal to the left by arguing that a vote for Kinnock would protect the policy  and constitutional changes that had been won by the left since 1979. Kinnock was also widely seen at the time as broadly supportive of the current policies of the left, notably its position on unilateralism. At the same time, Kinnock could also present himself as the acceptable face of the left when seeking support from the centre and right. His abstention in the second ballot which had prevented Benn from securing the deputy leadership in 1981 was critical in this context (Heppell, 2010a: 109). In so doing, Kinnock had gained respect from the party’s centre and right as someone who could be ‘relied upon to protect the interests of the Labour establishment and stand up to the left when it really counted’ (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 36). Hence, when seeking support from the centre and right of the party in 1983, he could argue that, due to his left-wing background and political base, he was better positioned than Hattersley to ‘shift the Party back to the right than was his openly right-wing rival’ (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 36). Second, Kinnock conducted a more astute and longer-term campaign than Hattersley. As noted above, he was fortunate in that Benn was unable to stand, but he also reaped the rewards of constantly visiting and speaking to CLPs between late 1981 and the general election of 1983 (Heppell, 2010a: 110). He was described as being ‘near absent’ from Parliament throughout 1982 and spent only two days of the three-week 1983 general election campaign in London, as he barnstormed his way around over 100 CLPs (Westlake, 2001: 205–6). Third, like Reginald Maudling in the first formal campaign for the Conservative leadership in 1965, Hattersley was less adept than his opponent was in adapting to his party’s new selection procedures. As he admitted in an interview in 1993, ‘I just went on doing my usual things: speaking in the House of Commons, not really focusing on what needed to be done. I think I was actually operating a strategy which was right for an election in the parliamentary Party’ (Stark, 1996: 114). Kinnock, for his part, had ‘a better understanding of 169

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the new realities. He installed a computer at his Commons office, allowing him to monitor polls and results in the [CLPs] and unions’ (Stark, 1996: 114). Fourth, Hattersley struggled to secure support from trade union leaders, many of whom believed he had ‘failed to provide sufficient strength in the fight against the Bennite ascendancy in the previous Parliament’ (Heppell, 2010a: 111). Kinnock, by contrast, was able to obtain endorsements from union leaders aligned to the right, who felt that he was ‘someone that they could do business with’ (Hayter, 2005: 25). The snowballing of votes pledged to Kinnock by union leaders before the campaign had formally begun made him an immediate front-runner and the knowledge that he would secure majorities in both the trade union and CLP sections of the Electoral College ‘significantly aided his chances of increasing his support base within the PLP’ (Heppell, 2010a: 111). As Harris (1984: 221) notes, ‘few ambitious MPs were eager to be seen to be voting against the man who would probably be Leader for the next decade.’ As we noted above, the Healey-Benn deputy leadership contest of 1981 had highlighted two main problems with the new electoral college system. The first was that although Healey won, he did so by the narrowest of margins and was overwhelmingly defeated in the CLP section. The second was that there had been a complete lack of clarity and consistency in how the CLP and trade union sections had allocated and cast their votes. The 1983 Electoral College managed to avoid the first of these problems, but not the second. In the contest for leader, Kinnock secured overwhelming majorities in the CLP and trade union sections and also had a significant lead over Hattersley in the PLP section. In the contest for deputy leader, it was feared that although Hattersley might win the contest overall, Meacher would secure a majority of the votes in the CLP section, albeit with no expectation that he would be able to secure the level of support that Benn had received two years before (Heppell, 2010a: 112). Had this occurred, it would have raised doubts about Hattersley’s mandate as deputy leader and hence the prospect of a challenge to his position, either by Meacher again or by Benn, should he return to the House of Commons, in 1984 (Drucker, 1984: 284). In the event, this problem was avoided, and both Kinnock and Hattersley received mandates from all three sections of the Electoral College. As Heppell explains, however, the comparison with 1981 is not entirely valid: The Healey-Benn contest occurred in isolation, while the Hattersley-Meacher contest has to be viewed within the context of the leadership contest itself and Hattersley’s participation within that. The establishment of the Electoral College had given the deputy leadership a greater degree of importance than had previously been the case within Labour politics. Although historically the post 170

From Healey to Miliband had been subject to election by a parliamentary ballot, many new leaders had tried to bind the Party together by asking their defeated rival to assume the deputy leadership  … The Electoral College precluded such methods, as the democratisation agenda deliberately sought to preclude the leader from having such ­patronage. (Heppell, 2010a: 112)

Thus, the new procedures had opened up the potential for one group of candidates to stand for the leadership and an entirely different group to seek the deputy leadership, thereby ‘depriving the Party of a chance of reconciliation, as well as the services of a well thought of and well known candidate who had stood for, and lost, the leadership race’ (Drucker, 1984: 284). Initially, this scenario had seemed possible in 1983, with Kinnock, Hattersley, Shore and Heffer contesting the leadership and Meacher, Kaufman, Denzil Davies and Gwyneth Dunwoody the deputy leadership. The dream ticket, in which Kinnock and Hattersley agreed to stand for both posts and Kaufman agreed to withdraw from the deputy leadership contest, effectively circumnavigated the new procedures that had been designed to prevent the leader deciding, as in the past, who should serve as deputy leader. Its effect, as intended, was to increase the probability of the runner-up in the contest for leader (Hattersley) being elected as deputy leader and to place the other candidates for the post in a tactical bind: The knowledge that Kinnock was likely to win the leadership and that he wanted Hattersley as his deputy meant that Meacher, the leading alternative to Hattersley, was campaigning to create an outcome that the new Leader did not want to have imposed on him. By presenting Kinnock-Hattersley as a unity ticket (despite their known policy differences), this meant that by default Meacher was campaigning against a perception that Kinnock-Meacher was a disunity ticket. (Heppell, 2010a: 113)

The second problem highlighted by the Benn-Healey deputy leadership contest of 1981 had been that the methods used to determine how the votes were allocated and cast in the CLP and trade union sections of the Electoral College had lacked clarity and consistency. Despite the election of the Kinnock-Hattersley dream ticket, this problem was, once again, evident in the Electoral College of 1983. In the CLP section, various procedures were used, ranging from branch meetings and ballots of party members to relying on GMCs to allocate their votes instead. In 1981, Healey had been heavily defeated by Benn in this section, as GMCs ‘tended to be hotbeds of Bennism’ and a high proportion of CLPs had used GMCs to cast their votes over members’ consultation (Heppell, 2010a: 113). Where the members were consulted, Healey had performed better. 171

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In 1983, Hattersley won a majority of the votes, albeit a small one, in the CLP section. This may have reflected a shift in mood within the CLPs themselves or the perceived weaknesses of Meacher as a candidate in 1983 compared to Benn two years before (Heppell, 2010a: 113). Alternatively, it may have been partly because more CLPs chose to ballot their members in 1983 than in 1981. This was likely to favour Hattersley, as it had Healey in 1981, and work against Meacher (Hayter, 2005: 27). In the trade union section, there was chaotic diversity in the procedures used to determine how the votes should be allocated, as there had been in 1981. Some unions allowed their executives to nominate candidates due to lack of time, but consulted their members more widely prior to the actual vote. Others did not nominate any candidate, so as not to pre-empt their members’ ballot. Some, including the Post Office Engineering Union (POEU), consulted every member individually before casting their votes. In other cases, the decision was left to the union’s delegation to the Labour Party Conference, whether by reporting the actual numbers voting or, more often than not, by block voting (Drucker, 1984: 113–14). Kinnock secured the Labour leadership convincingly in 1983. At the time of his election, he was widely seen as a candidate of the old or soft left (Heppell, 2010a: 114). Interviewed in 1993, Margaret Beckett saw the contest of 1983 as confirmation of her hopes at the time that the Electoral College would encourage the election of a left-wing leader. It was ‘always my view’, she recalled, that it ‘was probably the change in the procedures that enabled Neil to become leader at that early age’ (Stark, 1996: 34). While the advocates of democratisation had originally believed that the extension of the voting franchise beyond the PLP would make the party leader more accountable to the wider Labour movement, however, ‘the flip side of a landslide victory across all three sections of the Electoral College was that an elected leader had conferred upon them unparalleled levels of political authority. Kinnock could claim to represent the whole Labour movement in a way that his predecessors could not’ (Heppell, 2010a: 114). This gave him a decisive mandate that he would use in a manner that dismayed many on the left who had voted him into office (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 43). As leader, he shifted the party to the right and conducted a radical overhaul of its organisation, image and policies. Unilateralism and  large-scale nationalisation were dropped, along with Labour’s previous hostility towards the EEC. In order to strengthen the authority of the leadership and to stamp out the disunity and extremism he attributed to the hard left, he would reassert the supremacy of the PLP in policy development, regain control 172

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over the NEC and expel members of the Militant Tendency (Shaw, 1994: 29–30). To achieve this, he turned his back on the left-wing positions he had adopted as a backbench parliamentary rebel in the 1970s (Heppell, 2010a: 115). Kinnock versus Benn: The leadership challenge of 1988 During the first phase of Kinnock’s leadership from 1983 to 1987, the pace of modernisation was relatively slow and the process of reforming the party stalled during the miners’ strike of 1984–5 and the internal battle with the Militant Tendency in 1985–6. Kinnock’s conduct during these two crises angered the new left and culminated in a challenge to his leadership by Benn in 1988. The ensuing contest dominated the politics of the Labour Party throughout that year. It would result in a humiliating defeat for Benn and appeared to signal the terminal decline of the party’s hard left (Heppell, 2010a: 117). By the time of the 1987 general election, Kinnock’s conduct as leader had alienated the new left, but many of Labour’s policies remained unpopular with the British electorate. Examples included its approach to industrial relations and continued commitment to nationalisation and unilateral nuclear disarmament. The 1987 general election campaign was widely commended for its professionalism, but another significant defeat to the Conservatives, and a mere 31.7 per cent of the vote, suggested that the process of modernisation needed to be extended further (Heppell, 2010a: 120). As Butler and Kavanagh observed, ‘For all the moderation of the leadership and the manifesto, the Labour Party in 1987 was still widely perceived as committed to high taxation, untrustworthy on defence, unreliable on inflation, and beholden to the unions’ (1992: 45). To counteract these perceptions, the 1987 party conference endorsed a proposal to evaluate the entire spectrum of Labour Party policy. The Policy Review process that followed would dominate the 1987 Parliament and helped to create the politics of New Labour (Heppell, 2010a: 120; Shaw, 1994: 81–107; Hay, 1994, 1999; Heffernan, 1999). Following Benn’s return to the House of Commons in 1984, there was a concern that he might seek to initiate a challenge to Kinnock’s leadership. The Policy Review process that began in the autumn of 1987 would provide the catalyst for his challenge the following year. By then, however, Benn’s personal credibility, and that of the new left in general, had been significantly eroded and many of his erstwhile supporters, including Meacher, Ken Coates, Stuart Holland and Frances Morrell, had begun to review their own political positions and adopt a less confrontational attitude towards the leadership (Heppell, 173

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2010a: 121–2). By the time the Policy Review had begun, Benn himself was widely regarded as a spent force and a dinosaur of the new left (Butler and Kavanagh, 1992: 48; Adams, 1992: 453). Despite such perceptions, Benn remained an ambitious politician and ‘reacted to the erosion of support and the distancing of friends with no compromise, or admission of defeat. He set about building a power structure elsewhere which would keep the flame burning’ (Adams, 1992: 445). The new structure around which he aimed to retain the influence of the hard left was the Campaign Group, which had been set up in 1981 and consisted of MPs who had stayed loyal to Benn when he had challenged Healey for the deputy leadership. The focus of the Campaign Group and the new left was to dispute the underlying assumptions of the Policy Review process. They viewed the exercise with suspicion, fearing that such revisionism would mean Labour would abandon its historic commitment to transform society (Heppell, 2010a: 122). In March 1988, the NEC met to endorse Aims and Values, a statement identifying the broad intentions of the Policy Review. After a heated discussion, the Campaign Group agreed, by a majority of two to one, that Benn should challenge Kinnock for the leadership. The decision was strongly opposed by some members of the group, including Beckett, Jo Richardson and Clare Short, all of whom resigned in protest. Benn’s challenge for the leadership, Short claimed, was ‘not the way to change the Labour Party. This contest will be a complete waste of time and energy. It’s sort of old-fashioned’ (Brown, 1997: 183). Four female members of the Group – Beckett, Richardson, Short and Joan Walley, who also resigned – argued that politics ‘should not be about the leader, which was an outdated, macho approach to public life’ (Adams, 1992: 454). Benn rejected such criticisms. Interviewed in 1993, he recalled that his motivation in standing was simply to ‘offer the Party another way forward’ (Stark, 1996: 92). In declaring his candidature in March 1988, he explained that it was designed to ‘strengthen, encourage and unite public opposition to the [Conservative] government; to promote and advocate realistic programmes of policies to bring peace and jobs, and to put forward clear arguments for democracy and socialism and win majority public support for them’ (Punnett, 1990: 184). From the outset, Benn ‘knew perfectly well he had no chance of winning or even running Kinnock close’ (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 102). Instead, he and his supporters were attempting merely to ‘stall and blunt the Policy Review process and undermine Kinnock; strengthen the base of the left, and aid the chances of a left wing candidate being successful in a future leadership election’ (Heppell, 2010a: 124). In response, Kinnock stated that Benn’s challenge would 174

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‘end in massive defeat for those who have put their self-indulgence above the interests of the Party’ (Adams, 1992: 454). Clearly annoyed, as he had been in 1981 when Benn challenged Healey for the deputy leadership, he ‘denounced the use of the Party’s democratic machinery by Benn and Heffer’, who stood as Benn’s running mate by challenging Hattersley for the deputy leadership, as an ‘outrageous distraction’ which would ‘not be forgiven’ (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 102). Heffer’s decision to stand as Benn’s running mate also provided John Prescott with a justification to challenge Hattersley for the deputy leadership, something he had been contemplating since the general election. Concerned about the party’s declining membership and its potential impact on Labour’s future electoral prospects, Prescott wanted to change the role of the deputy leader from merely supporting the leader to assuming responsibility for campaigning, the implication being that he would be better suited than Hattersley to undertake this task (Heppell, 2010a: 125). In January 1988, two months before Benn announced his decision to stand, a furious argument broke out between Kinnock and Prescott, in which Kinnock accused Prescott of causing divisions and of putting his personal vanity and ambition ahead of the interests of the party. Prescott denied this and insisted that his only concern was the role of the deputy leader. If this were redefined along the lines he had suggested, and the party given an opportunity to vote on it at the 1988 annual conference, he promised not to stand. As he later recalled, ‘Kinnock’s real worry was that Tony Benn would stand for Leader. That would really have divided the Party. So [my] coming along and wanting a deputy leadership contest was making things worse, according to him. I said Benn would stand, whether I stood for deputy or not’ (Prescott, 2008: 160). When the Benn-Heffer challenge was formally announced in March 1988, this allowed Prescott to renege on an agreement he had apparently reached with Kinnock in January and challenge Hattersley for the deputy leadership after all (Drower, 1994: 231). Kinnock, for his part, was conscious of the fact that Benn’s challenge was being seen as an internal party referendum on the Policy Review and anticipated that there could be many votes against Hattersley that would serve as warning shots against his style of leadership. Accordingly, he decided that the best strategy would be for him and Hattersley to combine their campaigns. A photo session was organised at which he and Hattersley publicly signed each other’s nomination papers. ‘I will be voting for Roy Hattersley as Deputy Leader,’ Kinnock declared. ‘As far as I am concerned, there are no other tickets’ (Drower, 1994: 232–3). A complicating factor, however, was that Hattersley 175

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himself was not strongly committed to continuing as deputy leader (Heppell, 2010a: 126). According to John Smith’s biographer, Mark Stuart, Hattersley tried to persuade Smith to take over his job, but Smith declined on the grounds that he saw the deputy leadership as a ‘kiss of death’ and ‘didn’t want to be associated with that [Kinnock’s] leadership’. Therefore, Hattersley had no choice but to ‘stick with it, and make sure he was not defeated by Prescott’ (Stuart, 2005: 148). Otherwise, Kinnock would have resigned (Hattersley, 1995: 291). In the event, the dream ticket of Kinnock and Hattersley was overwhelmingly re-elected by the Electoral College at the party’s annual conference in October. Kinnock received 88.6 per cent of the votes of the Electoral College: 82.8 per cent of PLP votes, 80.4 per cent of CLP votes and 99.2 per cent of votes cast in the trade union section. Hattersley, for his part, received two-thirds (66.8 per cent) of the total Electoral College votes: 57.9 of PLP votes, 60.4 per cent of CLP votes and 78.3 per cent of trade union votes. Prescott, the runner-up, received 24 per cent of PLP votes, 26.2 per cent of CLP votes and 21.6 per cent of trade union votes, or 23.7 per cent overall. Heffer received 18.1 per cent of PLP votes, 13.5 per cent of CLP votes and 0.2 per cent of trade union votes, or 9.5 per cent overall, which was broadly similar to Benn’s return (17.2 per cent of PLP votes, 19.6 per cent of CLP votes and 0.8 per cent of trade union votes, or 11.4 per cent overall) in the contest for leader. As Benn’s biographer notes, no one (Benn included) had expected his challenge to succeed, but the scale of his defeat was shocking. He had used the leadership campaign to put his message across, and it had been ‘decisively rejected’ (Adams, 1992: 455). Prior to the contest, the threshold for nominations to allow a formal challenge to the incumbent leader had stood at 5 per cent of the PLP. The negative reaction to Benn’s challenge resulted in an amendment being passed that increased it to 20 per cent. As Heppell notes, Benn’s challenge was intended to signal the enduring significance of the new left and, in so doing, enhance the possibility of it mounting a more successful leadership challenge in future. It completely failed, however, from both a short- and long-term point of view: Benn was tactically and strategically inept in his challenge. If a challenge from the old right had been initiated by a credible figure such as Smith, Kinnock would have found this far more problematic to withstand than a challenge from the discredited and marginalised new left. The fear amongst many within the Labour movement about Benn and the new left would ensure that Kinnock would secure a landslide victory. Although Kinnock attempted to make the contest a referendum on the Policy Review, the result was as much a condemnation of Benn and 176

From Healey to Miliband the new left as it was [an endorsement of] Kinnock as Leader and a potential Prime Minister. (Heppell, 2010a: 130)

By initiating a challenge, but losing so comprehensively, Benn merely refreshed and renewed the mandate to lead (and change) the party that Kinnock wanted and needed, and thereby ensured that his position was stronger after the contest than it had been before (Heppell, 2010: 130). Following the contest, Kinnock claimed that his victory gave him the opportunity to lead the party as he chose (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992: 103). The Policy Review that followed, however, would reveal an ongoing debate between an interventionist, neo-­Keynesian approach to economic policy led by Bryan Gould on the one hand, and a more market-orientated one favoured by Smith on the other (Jones, 1996: 126). From Kinnock to Smith The sheer scale of Kinnock’s re-election appeared to rule out the possibility of a more serious challenge to his leadership from Smith (or, conceivably, Gould) before the next general election. In October 1988, shortly after the party conference, Smith suffered a major heart attack and speculation that he would challenge Kinnock in 1989 ended thereafter. As Smith focused on his recovery, debate on the leadership subsided in the 1989 and 1990 period. The narrowing of Labour’s lead in the opinion polls that occurred after Major replaced Thatcher in November 1990, and the fact that the two parties were running neck and neck by mid-1991, led to renewed speculation about the leadership as the 1987 Parliament drew to a close (Heppell, 2010a: 139). In January 1992, the idea of copying what the Australian Labour Party did in 1983, when it replaced William Hayden with Bob Hawke shortly before the general election of that year, was floated in senior Labour circles. By then, however, it was too late. Kinnock would not resign, Smith would not challenge him and there was insufficient time to activate the Electoral College prior to the general election (Stuart, 2005: 199). For much of the 1988–92 period, it was widely assumed that if Labour were to lose the next general election, Kinnock would resign, a leadership election would follow, and Smith and Gould would be the leading candidates of the right and left for the succession (Heppell, 2010a: 139). On 12 April, three days after the party’s fourth consecutive general election defeat to the Conservatives, Kinnock announced his resignation. Most senior party figures anticipated that he would remain in post until the autumn, when the 177

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Electoral College would convene at Labour’s annual conference. This would allow the party a prolonged period, between April and October, to reflect on the reasons for its defeat. There was, therefore, considerable opposition when Kinnock and Hattersley, who had also confirmed his decision to step down, suggested that the NEC should attempt to complete the succession process by the end of June (Alderman and Carter, 1993: 50). This was seen by some as an attempt to bounce the party into accepting the overwhelming favourite, Smith. Unsurprisingly, Gould’s supporters were prominent among those who argued that the Electoral College should decide the outcome at the party conference in October. This would allow more time for Smith to make a mistake and for Gould, who presented himself as the party’s ideas man, to put his case across (Punnett, 1992: 114). The premise of a nod-and-a-wink succession to elect Smith and Beckett, who it was widely assumed Smith wanted as his deputy, was also challenged by Prescott in a television interview on 19 April. ‘What the election seems to have been based on’, he complained, ‘is the idea that we can get two candidates [Smith and Beckett]  and perhaps have no need for any election at all. People are getting angry about it, particularly in the constituency ­parties … that somehow it is being settled before even the MPs have met’ (Brown, 1997: 209). The belief that Smith was bound to win was reinforced by the conduct of trade union leaders in the immediate aftermath of the general election. Even before Kinnock had announced his resignation, the general secretary of the General Municipal Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union (GMB), John Edmonds, appeared to offer his union’s backing to Smith by stating on the BBC’s On the Record that there was ‘one name on everybody’s lips’ (Rentoul, 2001: 186). Following Edmonds’ intervention, three other trade unions, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), the TGWU and the Electoral, Electronic Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU) also declared support for Smith. Together, these four unions constituted at least one fifth of the total Electoral College votes. Therefore, it appeared that a combination of Kinnock’s determination to resign quickly and the union barons’ desire to see a swift shoe-in for Smith would lead to ‘a very precipitous leadership contest, or perhaps no contest at all’ (Stuart, 2005: 224, 225–6). On 14 April, Kinnock attended a meeting of the party’s NEC and put the case for a specially convened meeting of the Electoral College to be held on 27 June. This, he believed, would allow the PLP to hold shadow cabinet elections and enable the newly elected leader to allocate shadow cabinet portfolios before the parliamentary recess (Heppell, 2010a: 141). This would establish Labour 178

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quickly as an effective opposition, which was vital given the Major government’s modest parliamentary majority and economic problems. Otherwise, the party would lack effective leadership and a clear political direction. A six-month interregnum, he argued, was impractical, as he himself could not preside over the urgently needed post-mortem on Labour’s general election defeat. This, Kinnock believed, could only be done effectively by a new leader (Alderman and Carter, 1993: 50). Finally, the election of his successor would occur three weeks later than he had wanted. Having rejected June as too early, and September as too late, the NEC endorsed a compromise. A specially convened meeting of the Electoral College would be held on 18 July (Heppell, 2010a: 141–2). As noted above, Benn’s challenge in 1988 had led to an amendment in the rules of the Electoral College, whereby the threshold for candidates seeking nomination had been increased from 5 per cent to 20 per cent of the PLP. With 271 Labour MPs in the new Parliament, prospective candidates needed the support of fifty-five members of the newly elected PLP. In the contest for leader, three prospective candidates sought nominations from their parliamentary colleagues: Smith, Gould and Ken Livingstone, the new left former leader of the Greater London Council (GLC). In the contest for deputy leader, it was clear that Prescott would stand, as he had done in 1988. There was considerable speculation about Gould’s decision to seek nominations for both the leadership and the deputy leadership, and about Beckett’s intentions. At first, she had appeared reluctant to stand, but was encouraged to do so by Smith’s campaign team. Smith had indicated to Beckett that he wanted an alternative to Prescott and, more importantly, Gould as his deputy, and the knowledge that she was his preferred candidate further encouraged her stand (Heppell, 2010a: 142). Smith was particularly keen to avoid being saddled with Gould, as their differences over Europe and personal animosity were too great (Rentoul, 2001: 181). At the outset, there was considerable debate as to whether Gould would secure the nominations required to enter the contest for leader and a SmithBeckett walkover appeared a real possibility (Punnett, 1992: 113). Indeed, as Gould later recalled, Kinnock had strongly advised him not to stand against Smith on the Sunday (12 April) after the general election. ‘Smithy has got it all sewn up’, Kinnock had told him. ‘You’ll get only a fraction of the vote. Better to let him have it. He won’t last the course. It’s important that you’re there to pick up the pieces’ (Gould, 1995: 253). As Gould noted, ‘I don’t know whether, by saying that John would not last the course, he meant that John would run into political or health problems. I have no doubt that his advice was well intentioned and it certainly proved to be remarkably prescient’ (Gould, 179

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1995: 253–4). Gould ignored Kinnock’s advice and that of his campaign manager, David Blunkett, who recommended he should focus his energies on the deputy leadership contest alone (Rentoul, 2001: 186). He was determined not to concede the leadership to Smith without a contest (Gould, 1995: 258). He knew he could not win, but stood primarily because he felt it was vital that the party should have a choice. Interviewed in 1992, he recalled that, having served in the shadow cabinet for several years, he welcomed the opportunity to ‘put before the Party some different views’, especially on economic policy, which, as the shadow chancellor, Smith was responsible for (Stark, 1996: 94). During the campaign, he sought to emphasise his centre-left credentials, in contrast to Smith’s centre-right stance on most issues. As Punnett noted, however, this was the ‘first Labour leadership contest since at least the 1930s in which there was no clear choice between candidates who were unambiguously from the “left” and “right” of the party. The differences that emerged between Smith and Gould were largely in the style and tone in which they expressed broadly similar views’ (1992: 114). At the close of nominations on 28 April, Smith had the backing of 162 MPs, which represented 60 per cent of the PLP. Gould had secured the support of only three other members of the shadow cabinet and, with just sixty-three nominations, trailed Smith by almost 100 MPs (Heppell, 2010a: 145). Livingstone, with thirteen nominations, was eliminated, as expected. In the contest for deputy leader, Beckett led the field with eighty-nine nominations. Gould received sixtynine nominations, Prescott sixty-four and Bernie Grant fifteen. Hence Grant, as expected, was eliminated. Twelve per cent of the PLP, including Kinnock, declined to nominate any of the potential candidates (Punnett, 1992: 113). When the Electoral College convened on 18 July, the result of the leadership contest was a foregone conclusion. Smith received an overwhelming 91 per cent of the total Electoral College votes. He also obtained the deputy leader he wanted, as Beckett comfortably defeated Prescott and Gould. As Heppell notes: For Gould the whole process had been a humiliation. Against Smith, he secured only nine per cent overall; and his performance within the CLPs [2.3 per cent] and the trade union section [3.7 per cent] was lamentable. His support base within the PLP at 22 per cent was only marginally higher than Benn [had] secured 4 years earlier when challenging Kinnock who … used all the advantages that incumbency provides … Gould also suffered the humiliation of coming last in the deputy leadership contest on 14.6 per cent. Beckett won a significant victory, with her overall return of 57 per cent, only slightly down [on] the return secured by Hattersley in 1983. (Heppell, 2010a: 145) 180

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Prescott, for his part, secured a slightly better return (28 per cent) than he had when challenging Hattersley in 1988. He attributed his defeat to the fact that Smith had preferred Beckett as his deputy and his view that many within the Labour movement wanted the post to be held by a woman (Heppell, 2010a: 145). Two years later, they would contest it again, with a different outcome. Gould’s decision to contest both posts had been something of a gamble and was subsequently seen as a significant tactical error, as it was interpreted as ‘an admission that he expected to be defeated for the leadership, thereby diminishing [his] credibility in his campaign for that post’ (Alderman and Carter, 1993: 53). Given that the result was a foregone conclusion, arguably the most intriguing aspect of the process that elected Smith in 1992 was the procedures through which the CLP and trade union sections of the Electoral College cast their votes. As Heppell (2010a: 146) observes, Smith performed particularly well in the CLPs. The sheer scale of his support (97.7 per cent of the votes) was surprising, given that the CLPs had been the bastion of left-wing sentiment, and the bedrock of Benn’s support when he had challenged Healey for the deputy leadership in 1981. As Shore noted, there had been ‘a genuine shift of sentiment away from the left in the latter Kinnock years, but undoubtedly the main factor was the introduction [in 1989] of new rules in the CLPs that gave to all individual members the right to vote for the Leader – a decision previously left to the activists on the General Management Committees’ (1993: 176). Although both Smith and Gould had applauded the mandatory use of OMOV in the CLPs, almost every other aspect of the 1992 Electoral College came under attack: The new nomination threshold was widely considered to be too high. For some time it appeared that only Smith would be able to win the necessary 20 per cent support of MPs and would, therefore, be elected unopposed. It was generally felt that the rules should not make it so difficult to have a contested election, especially when the leadership was vacant. Both Smith and Gould said they favoured ­reducing the threshold for future elections. (Stark, 1996: 61)

During the contest, Kinnock, Smith and Gould had all indicated their dissatisfaction with the continued existence of the trade union block vote (Punnett, 1993: 270; Cronin, 2004: 334). As Heppell notes, the system was ‘clearly not democratic’ (2010a: 147). As in 1981, 1983 and 1988, the procedures used to allocate votes in the trade union section lacked clarity and consistency. It was left to individual unions to decide how to allocate and cast their votes, as the party’s rules did not prescribe a specific procedure. As in previous Electoral 181

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College contests, a wide range of methods were used, including a decision at a union’s annual conference, branch ballots, workplace ballots and full postal ballots (Alderman and Carter, 1993: 61–2). Given the inconsistencies, it was hardly surprising that a survey of 5,000 Labour party members conducted during the contest found that 81 per cent supported replacing the Electoral College with OMOV for future leadership elections (Stark, 1996: 61). From Smith to Blair While not regarded as a moderniser, one of Smith’s most important contributions as leader was the introduction of OMOV in the selection of the party’s leader and deputy leader. Initially, Smith was cautious and did not seek any reform at the party’s 1992 annual conference. Instead, the NEC established a review group whose purpose was to examine the relationship between the party and the trade unions (Stark, 1996: 61). Smith, however, had made it clear during the leadership campaign of 1992 what his preference was regarding the future composition of the Electoral College. He wanted to eliminate the participation of trade unions altogether and proposed a fifty-fifty formula in which the votes in future leadership and deputy leadership elections would be divided equally between the PLP and CLPs. As Stark notes, this provoked considerable opposition among union leaders: As in 1979–81, the 1992–3 debate saw its share of surprising shifts of position. For example, in May 1992 John Edmonds, the leader of the GMB union and a strong supporter of Smith’s leadership candidacy, said the [trade] union vote in the Electoral College was ‘not power we should sensibly have’. By May 1993, however, Edmonds had emerged as the leading opponent of Smith’s reform efforts. More strikingly, Beckett, Smith’s own deputy, offered only vague support for the proposed reforms. (Stark, 1996: 62)

Faced with the prospect of a damaging defeat at the 1993 party conference, Smith and the shadow cabinet proposed a compromise, in which the PLP, CLPs and trade unions would each receive one-third of the total Electoral College votes (Heppell, 2010a: 156). Within this new formula, however, block voting would be abolished and replaced by a postal ballot of levy payers, on the basis of one levy payer, one vote (Quinn, 2004: 343). In return, the unions would be expected to adopt OMOV in the selection of parliamentary candidates (Stark, 1996: 61–2). Securing the passage of this compromise would dominate the party conference in 1993. The new Electoral College formula passed relatively easily, but Smith only managed to secure the passage of the proposed 182

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reform of parliamentary candidate selection by a small margin. The intervention of Prescott, who delivered arguably ‘the speech of his life’, was crucial in this respect (Brown, 1997: 221). Prescott was commended for his loyalty to Smith, and this would be a critical factor in securing him the deputy leadership less than a year later (Heppell, 2010a: 157). Under Smith’s leadership, Labour opened up a solid opinion poll lead over the Conservatives and it appeared that its prolonged period of opposition since 1983 was finally coming to an end. Following Britain’s enforced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in September 1992, Smith could chastise Prime Minister John Major and the Conservative Party for both their continuing ideological divisions over Europe and their economic incompetence (Heppell, 2010a: 153). Smith himself was increasingly seen as a prime minister in waiting. Tragically, it was not to be. On 12 May 1994, Smith suffered a further heart attack and died. He was fifty-five. Smith’s death provoked an outpouring of public grief, both inside and outside the party, and parallels were drawn with that of Hugh Gaitskell in January 1963, when it appeared that he, like Smith, had also been on the verge of becoming Britain’s next prime ­minister (Alderman and Carter, 1995: 438). As noted above, the Electoral College that would determine Smith’s successor was significantly different to the one that had elected him in 1992. In addition to the reweighting of the votes allocated to each section of the Electoral College and the introduction of OMOV, another significant amendment had been introduced in 1993. In an attempt to ensure a genuine contest in the event of a vacancy for the leadership, it was decided that the threshold for nominations should be reduced from 20 per cent to 12.5 per cent of the PLP, although the 20 per cent threshold would remain in the event of a challenge to the incumbent. Following Smith’s death, there was considerable media speculation about possible candidates for the succession. Among the names mentioned in this context were Livingstone, Davies, Cunningham and Robin Cook. However, none of them entered the contest, having failed to secure sufficient nominations or withdrawn. When nominations closed on 16 June, there were three candidates: the party’s acting leader Beckett, shadow employment secretary Prescott and shadow home secretary Blair. Two candidates, Beckett and Prescott, sought the deputy leadership, as they had in 1992. As acting leader following Smith’s death, Beckett was widely commended for her performance. In the contest for the succession, however, she faced a tactical dilemma. The momentum behind Blair was such that it was highly unlikely she would be able to defeat him. Beckett also had a mandate as the party’s elected 183

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deputy leader that was technically unaffected by the vacancy for the leadership (Heppell, 2010a: 159). Given her ‘calm and organised’ performance as acting leader, it would have been difficult for anyone to challenge her directly for the deputy leadership (Prescott, 2008: 184; Alderman and Carter, 1995: 442–3). In the event, she decided to vacate the deputy leadership and stand for both posts. Becket’s ambition to lead the party on a permanent basis was backed by strong encouragement to contest the leadership from within the PLP (Heppell, 2010a: 160). As Prescott later recalled, Beckett’s decision to stand for both the leadership and the deputy leadership encouraged him to do the same: I offered Margaret a deal. She was obviously going to stand for leader, having been doing the job, so I said I would only stand for deputy if she didn’t stand for deputy and leader. A woman and a man at the top seemed a good idea. But Margaret declined. She decided to stand for both positions, [for] deputy as some form of insurance I’m sure … So, I [also] decided to stand for both positions. (Prescott, 2008: 184)

The decision of Beckett and Prescott to stand for both posts reflected the fact that although neither expected to defeat Blair for the leadership, failure to stand for it would give the other an advantage in the contest for deputy leader. Their decision to stand against each other in the contest for leader, however, arguably undermined whatever small chance the old or soft left might have had, by splitting the non-moderniser (i.e. anti-Blair) vote in two (Heppell, 2010a: 160). Blair’s close friend and fellow moderniser Gordon Brown announced on 1 June that he would not to stand, thereby giving Blair a clear run at the leadership, confirming Blair’s status as the front-runner and reinforcing the view, which had gained increasing momentum since Smith’s death two weeks before, that he was the runaway favourite (Stark, 1996: 94–5; Alderman and Carter, 1995: 440–1; Heppell, 2010a: 160–6; Blair, 2010: 64–74; Brown, 2018: 94–101). When nominations closed on 16 June, Blair’s status as the overwhelming favourite was duly confirmed. As expected, he comfortably led the field, having secured 154 nominations from the PLP. Prescott had received forty-six and Beckett fortytwo. For the deputy leadership, Beckett had secured the most nominations, with 106 to Prescott’s 101. As in 1983, 1988 and 1992, the campaign generated little excitement or enthusiasm, as it was clear that the outcome was once again a foregone conclusion. The only issues of significance would be the size of Blair’s victory and the breakdown of results in the three sections of the Electoral College (Heppell, 2010a: 166). He received 57 per cent of the total Electoral College votes, Prescott 24.1 per cent and Beckett 18.9 per cent. In the PLP section, Blair received 184

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60.5 per cent of the votes and in the CLP section 58.2 per cent. In the trade union section, he received 52.3 per cent. Although this was a smaller majority than he had received in the PLP and CLP sections, it represented a significant victory over Prescott (28.4 per cent) and Beckett (19.3 per cent) respectively. Unsurprisingly, the turnout was highest in the PLP section (98.8 per cent). In the CLP section, more than two-thirds (69.1 per cent) of party members voted on the basis of OMOV for the first time. In the trade union section, however, less than a fifth (19.5 per cent) of union levy-payers had voted. Hence, based on his share of the votes in each section of the Electoral College and the percentage who had actually voted, Blair’s mandate from the PLP and CLP sections appeared to be far stronger than from trade union members. As Alderman and Carter explain, the low participation rates of the latter were attributed to ­various factors: [Not] all unions possessed centralised registers of their members and there was also a large number of ballot papers spoilt through levy-payers omitting to tick the box indicating that they subscribed to Labour Party principles and were not members of any other party. Some 150,000 levy-payers were disenfranchised because their unions … declared that they could not afford to conduct national ballots … Overall, the turnout was widely regarded as indicating a low level of interest in the Labour Party. (Alderman and Carter, 1995: 449)

As in 1992, the likely outcome of the contest for leader again influenced that for the deputy leadership. In 1992, Beckett’s prospects of securing the deputy leadership had benefitted from the fact that she was the preferred candidate of Smith. In 1994, her prospects of doing so suffered because she was not the preferred candidate of Blair (Heppell, 2010a: 166–7). In the event, with Blair’s support and more backing than Beckett from their shadow cabinet colleagues, Prescott finally secured the deputy leadership at the third attempt, having failed to do so in 1988 and 1992, securing 53.7 per cent of PLP votes, 59.4 per cent of CLP votes, 56.6 per cent of the votes of union members and 56.5 per cent of the votes of the Electoral College as a whole. This was partly because Prescott’s campaign was more focused than that of his opponent: Her ambition sharpened by having officially assumed the leadership on Smith’s death, Beckett’s determination to be regarded as a serious candidate for the leadership led her to pay less attention to the deputy leadership campaign. In this and other ways she conveyed the impression that she regarded the deputy’s post as a poor consolation prize. Moreover, her reluctance to commit herself to serving in a Blair Shadow Cabinet, were she to lose both contests, was interpreted by some as petulance. Prescott, on the other hand, happily discussed his ambitions and 185

Choosing party leaders plans for both posts. The contrast between the two operated to his advantage. (Alderman and Carter, 1995: 447)

Although the result was a foregone conclusion, a further intriguing aspect of the leadership contest of 1994 was how the new Electoral College performed. As we noted earlier in this chapter, the power of the block vote in the trade union section had allowed union leaders to shape the trajectory of previous contests, notably in 1983 and 1992. In the Electoral College of 1994, this no longer applied. With the block vote removed, unions were responsible for balloting their members. Hence, as Heppell notes, their role in the formative stages of the contest was significantly different than in 1983 and 1992: Then Kinnock and Smith were front runners partly because of the known support of significant trade union leaders. In 1994 the reason why Blair was immediately perceived to be the front runner was because he was assumed to be the most electorally attractive. Many trade union leaders were reluctant to endorse Blair as they had reservations about his modernising views on the links between the Party and the unions. However, on the other hand, the knowledge that Blair was a strong candidate amongst trade union members put trade union leaders in a tactical bind. They feared that with the voting patterns of each trade union being published, their authority would be undermined were the figures to reveal that a majority of their members had rejected their recommendations. (Heppell, 2010a: 168)

As GMB general secretary Edmonds explained, union leaders were ‘confused and demoralised. They might not have liked Blair personally, but there was no concerted effort to stop him, because it became very obvious to us after John Smith’s death that he was going to win’. Brown’s withdrawal from the contest, he recalled, ‘indicated this even more strongly. What else could we do? Most of us thought Labour could not win under Prescott. I tried to hold it together for Margaret Beckett but it didn’t make any difference’ (Seldon, 2004: 197). As Heppell (2010a: 169) notes, the leadership contest of 1994 was of immense importance to the ideological trajectory of the party. Previous leadership elections had been perceived as contests between candidates identified with the left and right, with Kinnock being seen as a candidate of the (soft) left in 1983 and the centre (right) in 1988. The leadership election of 1994, Heppell argues, was the first to be contested by a candidate (i.e. Blair) of the party’s new right: It was a triumph for the modernisers and a reflection of the importance of timing and context in politics. The timing was crucial. After a decade and a half in opposition Labour was willing to align itself to the pragmatism of Blair and his focus on the importance of electability rather than ideological purity. The context was 186

From Healey to Miliband also crucial. The [OMOV] reforms of 1993 made the Electoral College more hospitable terrain [for] a candidate like Blair, rather than the block voting dominated Electoral College of 1981 to 1993. (Heppell, 2010a: 169)

As noted above, Kinnock was elected in 1983 principally because, while lacking Hattersley’s ministerial experience, he was seen as the better unity candidate and hence far more acceptable than Hattersley to the party as a whole. In 1988, he was re-elected, as he was seen as far superior to Benn in terms of acceptability, electability and competence. In 1992, Smith was seen as the strongest candidate, again on all three criteria (Stark, 1996: 129–31). As Stark notes, this was also true of Blair in 1994: It was a sign of Labour’s evolution that the ‘moderniser’, Tony Blair, was a less divisive figure than the ‘traditionalists’, Margaret Beckett and John Prescott [and] that none of the three candidates evoked the same kind of animosity that Foot, Healey or Hattersley had in the early 1980s. Much of the focus during the contest was on Blair’s tremendous electoral appeal. Polls showed that the public liked Blair far more than Beckett, Prescott, Major or Smith. Not everyone agreed with Blair’s favoured policies, but no one within the Party raised doubts about his a­ bility to serve as Prime Minister. (Stark, 1996: 131)

As Cronin (2004: 380) notes, Blair emerged from the contest with his reputation enhanced, a solid mandate, his powerful rival (Brown) firmly a member of the team, a loyal deputy (Prescott) with a following of his own and without having compromised on the key issues of the modernisers’ agenda. From coronation to close encounters Blair led the Labour Party to three general election victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005, before agreeing to step down the following summer after a meeting with Brown in September 2006. In so doing, however, he refused to give Brown a guarantee that he would endorse him for the succession or try to prevent anyone else from standing (Rawnsley, 2010: 401). In his valedictory speech to the party conference a few weeks later, Blair acknowledged that New Labour ‘would never have happened, and three election victories would never have been secured, without Gordon Brown’ (Seldon, 2007: 496). Although most of the attention was focused on Brown, there was also considerable media speculation about who, if anyone, might be able and willing to stop him from becoming the next party leader and prime minister. Between September 2006 and May 2007, two former cabinet ministers, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn, and three current cabinet ministers, John Reid, Alan Johnson and David Miliband, 187

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were mentioned in this context (Heppell, 2010a: 185–7). By early May, however, it was clear that none of them would stand and Blair finally endorsed Brown as his successor. On 10 May, Blair formally announced his intention to resign as Prime Minister and no other candidate was able to reach the nomination threshold of forty-five Labour MPs. Hence, at the close of nominations a week later, Brown was the only candidate for the succession, having received 313 nominations from the PLP. Accordingly, he was elected unopposed, although his formal appointment would only be confirmed after a special convention on 24 June. Three days later, on 27 June 2007, Blair resigned and Brown became prime minister and party leader. Following Brown’s coronation, the attention of the media focused on the contest for the deputy leadership, now vacant after Prescott’s decision, announced at the party conference the previous September, to stand down at the same time that Blair relinquished the leadership. The knowledge that the election for the leadership was likely to involve few candidates, perhaps only one, contributed to an unusually large field. Six candidates emerged: International Development Secretary Hilary Benn; the party chairman, Hazel Blears; the Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain; Justice Minister Harriet Harman; Education Secretary Johnson, and backbench MP Jon Cruddas. When the result was announced on 24 June, Harman emerged as the winner, narrowly defeating Johnson with 50.4 per cent of the Electoral College votes to Johnson’s 49.6 per cent. Although Johnson remained throughout the preferred candidate of the party’s MPs and MEPs, as he had been at the close of nominations, Harman succeeded in more than halving Johnson’s advantage in the PLP section in the final round and secured victory by extending her already solid lead over Johnson (and the other four candidates) among party members (Denham and Dorey, 2007: 532–3). During the campaign, Johnson, who had been widely regarded as the favourite at the outset, had defended the New Labour agenda, rejecting calls for higher taxes and cautioning against what he called the ‘politics of envy’. He had also insisted that he had no regrets about having supported the invasion of Iraq and would vote the same way again in similar circumstances. Harman, by contrast, unequivocally expressed her regret at having supported military action at the time of the invasion and called for an official acknowledgement that the war had been a mistake (Denham and Dorey, 2007: 529). Given that the result was so close, adopting a more conciliatory tone on the most contentious (and widely reported) issue of the campaign might have helped Johnson secure crucial votes and potentially win the contest (Heppell, 2010a: 189). As the Guardian’s political correspondent observed the day after her election was 188

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announced, Harman had done so as the grassroots choice for deputy leader: she was the first choice of more party members than any other and kept her lead as other candidates dropped out in subsequent rounds (Wintour, 2007). As Denham and Dorey note: Explicit and significant differences over policy between the candidates were (relatively) few and far between. A partial exception to this was the issue of Iraq … Harman was the second choice of Cruddas’s supporters among Labour MPs and Party members, and both groups of electors followed Cruddas’s lead in voting for Harman (the only other candidate to say during the campaign that the Government should apologise to the country for its policy of invading Iraq) once Cruddas himself was out of the equation. On the BBC’s Newsnight special, Harman and Cruddas had indicated that they would vote for each other were they not standing themselves; ultimately, Cruddas was able to ‘deliver’ his supporters, in Parliament and in the country, to Harman, suggesting that the issue of Iraq played a pivotal (and perhaps decisive) role in the outcome. (Denham and Dorey, 2007: 534)

Certainly, both candidates, Harman and Cruddas, made clear their regrets over the Iraq war, while Cruddas ‘doubtless attracted considerable support from Labour’s trade union affiliates by virtue of his campaign emphasis on employment rights’ (Denham and Dorey, 2007: 535). Both had also attacked ‘excessive’ salaries and city bonuses, called for more political action to tackle income inequality, and were critical of private sector involvement in the NHS. Conceivably, Harman also gained additional support from the feminist element of her campaign, in which she called for more family-friendly policies, including legally enshrined flexible working, and alluded to the potential electoral dividend to the party of having the balanced ticket of a male (Brown) as prime minister and party leader and a female (herself) as deputy leader (Denham and Dorey, 2007: 535). Following Brown’s coronation and the close encounter that resulted in Harman’s election as deputy leader in 2007, the Electoral College was used for the last time three years later, in the leadership contest that followed Labour’s defeat in the general election of 2010 (Dorey and Denham, 2011; Jobson and Wickham-Jones, 2011; Hasan and Macintyre, 2012: 191–254; Quinn, 2012: 64–82; Pemberton and Wickham-Jones, 2013; Bale, 2015: 7–29). The general election had produced a hung Parliament in which the Conservatives had emerged as the largest party and, as the different parties looked for ways to form a coalition government, it became apparent that Brown’s continuation as Prime Minister was a major obstacle to Labour’s chances of reaching an 189

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agreement with the Liberal Democrats. To facilitate this, Brown announced he would resign as party leader, with immediate effect. A leadership contest would be held to determine his successor, with the result to be announced at the party conference in September. In the meantime, Harman took over as acting leader. Ultimately, Brown’s move failed, as the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government and, after thirteen years in office, the party returned to the opposition. The leadership contest that followed was therefore ‘destined to become a post-mortem of the Labour government’ (Quinn, 2012: 65). As we have discussed earlier in this chapter, Electoral College contests for the Labour leadership between 1983 and 2007 had been relatively non-competitive. Most had attracted only two or three candidates and whenever a new Labour leader had been chosen, the favourite and front-runner had gone on to win. In 2007, Brown had been elected without a contest. On three other occasions, including Benn’s unsuccessful challenge to Kinnock in 1988, the winner’s overall share of the votes had exceeded 70 per cent and, with the exception of Kinnock’s more modest (49.3 per cent) support among Labour MPs in 1983, an equivalent (or greater) proportion in all three sections of the Electoral College. In 1994, Blair had also secured a majority of the votes in all three sections and while his overall share of the vote (57 per cent) had been considerably less than that of Kinnock (71.3 per cent) in 1983 and Smith (91 per cent) in 1992, it was broadly similar to that achieved by Gaitskell (58.8 per cent) in 1955, Wilson (58.3 per cent) in 1963 and Callaghan (56.2 per cent) in 1976, when the decision had rested with the PLP alone (Denham, 2013: 176; see Chapter 5). By contrast, the leadership election of 2010, like the contests for deputy leader in 1981 and 2007, proved to be a close encounter and the most competitive by far since the creation of the Electoral College in 1981. There were five candidates (David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott), but the contest was effectively a two-horse race between the favourite and front-runner, David Miliband, and his younger brother, Ed. Of the two, David was the more experienced, having served as Foreign Secretary under Brown and previously as director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Blair. Both, however, were seen by their parliamentary colleagues as serious candidates. Of the first preferences indicated on their ballot papers, David received 111 votes, while  Ed secured eighty-four. After four months of campaigning, Ed prevailed by the narrowest of margins (50.7 per cent to David’s 49.3 per cent). David remained throughout the first choice of the PLP (53.4 per cent to Ed’s 46.6 per cent) and party members (54.4 per cent to Ed’s 45.6 per cent). 190

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However, a combination of Ed’s far greater support in the trade union section (59.8 per cent to David’s 40.2 per cent) and the larger number of second preference votes he received in both the PLP and CLP sections proved decisive (Dorey and Denham, 2011; Jobson and Wickham-Jones, 2011; Quinn, 2012: 64–82). According to the opinion polls, David Miliband was seen as the strongest of the five candidates in terms of both electability and competence, and either he or Ed Miliband would have been acceptable on ideological grounds to the PLP and party members. David Miliband, however, was clearly not acceptable to the leaders of any of the three largest trade unions affiliated to the party (the GMB, Unison and Unite), who made a number of significant interventions during the campaign, as union leaders had also done in previous Electoral College contests for the leadership, notably in 1983 and 1992. Hence, of the two leading candidates, Ed Miliband was more acceptable than David Miliband to the Electoral College as a whole. As Pemberton and Wickham-Jones explain: Union voting was notably at odds with voting in the other two sections, not least because union members were heavily influenced by their leaderships in the context of an increasingly concentrated movement dominated by a few super unions. The result was the election of a Leader who was not the first choice of either the parliamentary Party or of Party members and whose legitimacy was therefore immediately in question. (Pemberton and Wickham-Jones. 2013: 729)

Manifestly, they conclude, the Labour leadership contest of 2010 raised ‘significant questions about the practical viability and normative desirability of the Electoral College’ (Pemberton and Wickham-Jones, 2013: 729). As we explain in Chapter 6, these questions would be addressed, with unexpected consequences, under Ed Miliband’s leadership between 2010 and 2015.

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6

The Labour leadership election(s) of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn is a seasoned campaigner, a passionate democratic socialist, and appears dedicated to the causes he believes in. Throughout his political career on the backbenches, he has pursued his interests largely detached from the complexities of Westminster politics. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s, he sought to promote what he saw as peaceful campaigns across the Middle East, South Africa, and also civil rights in the United Kingdom, among others. He was a strong voice against post-9/11 military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has continued to call for peaceful solutions in Libya, Syria, and a more balanced dialogue with Iran. As a consequence of this focus, he was never regarded as a serious contender for a position at the frontline of British politics. However, through a process of changes to the leadership selection rules following Labour’s return to opposition in 2010, a door was opened by which a contender from the left of the party could be in a competitive position for the leadership. Those changes were precipitated by the Falkirk scandal, and the need for the incumbent leader, Ed Miliband, to demonstrate he was willing to reform the relationship between Labour and the trade unions. The leadership race that followed Labour’s 2015 electoral defeat reshaped the nature of Labour politics. Corbyn was successfully nominated by some members of the PLP and over the course of the campaign, he galvanised his existing supporters, inspired new ones, and spoke a language the Labour Party had not heard since the 1970s. This was the language of democratic socialism, nationalisation, economic planning and, most importantly, state intervention to save industries. It was enough to present a new message of hope to a selectorate (a party affiliated group such as the membership or organisations who select the Party leader through an internal electoral process) tired of the politics of compromise and austerity. Indeed, it was enough to win Corbyn the leadership, 192

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and with it begin a new era in Labour Party politics which this chapter will evaluate. It is important to note, however that ‘Corbyn had been propelled to the leadership at the behest of an increasingly hard left membership’ and that ‘the membership was more concerned with ideological purity and control over the party, as opposed to the compromises necessary to win power’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). Changing the rule book – the leadership selection process The Labour Party has enjoyed a long relationship with the trade unions since its formation (Johnson, 2017). The relationship has been mutually beneficial insomuch as the unions and their members gained a voice at the heart of the party. Equally, some high-profile Labour representatives – such as Alan Johnson – were drawn from the trade union movement, bringing with them unique and valuable insights into the concerns of workers. Furthermore, unions financed the Labour Party as a political body. This has, in part, enabled Labour to function as a political party since 1906, and to promote the ideals of collective bargaining, collective action and opposition to the policies of the Conservatives. As such, it can justly be described as a close-knit, vital relationship. Moreover, ‘since the creation of an Electoral College in 1980, the Labour Party has opted to involve the extra-parliamentary membership in its leadership contests, but this has often revealed a tension between the preferences of Labour MPs, and those of the extra-parliamentary members in the constituency parties and affiliated trade unions’ (Dorey and Denham, 2016). This tension has continually led subsequent leaders to amend the leadership rules in order to show they are capable of modernising the party. This was again an issue for Ed Miliband. Indeed, under Miliband the relationship between the party and the unions again became fraught with difficulties for the party leader. On an individual basis, this was because he was perceived to have been selected by the trade union vote in 2010, thus creating the sense that he owed them a debt of gratitude. There was the risk that opponents to his leadership both within Labour and outside may seek to gain political capital from this as a way of showing misplaced loyalties. To counter this perception, Miliband was compelled to demonstrate more than most that he was not in the pocket of the unions. A significant issue arose in 2012 that enabled Miliband to begin a process to reform the relationship. Like previous reforms, it focused on the leadership selection process. 193

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The Falkirk controversy The sitting MP for the Falkirk constituency, Eric Joyce resigned in 2012 from the Labour Party following a series of drunken incidents and violence in the Commons’ Sports and Social Club bar (BBC, 2012). No charges were brought and he remained an MP, although he decided not to stand for re-election in 2015. The selection process for a candidate to replace him would trigger a series of competing interests that would ultimately lead to legal action. At the time of his resignation, Joyce’s local constituency had 100 members (Joyce, 2013). The local shop steward, Stephen Deans was the Chair of Unite in Scotland and also the Chair of the Falkirk West CLP. Following Joyce’s resignation, Deans began a process of recruitment to draw in sympathetic members who may be more inclined to support a nominee backed by Unite. Deans focused on the local Ineos Grangemouth Refinery, where Unite had been a key player in resolving a pension dispute in 2008 and therefore the union was more likely to find supportive. The recruitment campaign was highly effective and in a short time, the membership of Falkirk West increased to over 200 members (Wintour, 2013), thereby gifting the union a significant voice in the process of selecting an alternative candidate. In response, Joyce wrote that the local CLP office was being flooded by Unite members, prompting the union to threaten legal action (Joyce, 2013). Documents from the local Unite office highlighted the success of this recruitment strategy: ‘We have recruited well over 100 Unite members to the party in a constituency with less than 200 members. Fifty-seven came from a response to a text message alone, [and] followed up face to face. A collective effort locally, but led and inspired by the potential candidate’ (BBC, 2013b). This demonstrates that Unite had found a degree of success in garnering support for  its preferred candidate, Karie Murphy. Despite this, there were concerns over the democratic integrity of the strategy given it appeared to be targeted at hard left-leaning groups outside of Labour’s traditional membership and the means Unite was using to grow the membership of the constituency office. Ultimately, concerns over the process were referred to the National Executive for an investigation on the grounds that it appeared that Unite was engaging in inappropriate tactics (Wintour, 2013). The NEC concluded that the process needed further investigation. This was also in part precipitated by the accusation that Unite was paying the membership fees of the new members en bloc. Joyce criticised Unite, saying ‘the amateur, hubristic and irresponsible actions 194

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of a small number of Unite officials at the top of the organisation will require some rules to be changed to prevent another Falkirk’ ( Joyce, 2013). As a consequence of the investigation, Murphy withdrew from the selection process. Deans described the allegations and subsequent investigation as an attack by a ‘Blairite rump’ and that it represented an ‘attack on the work Unite has been doing in the constituency to recruit its members into the Labour Party’ (Aitken, 2013). The framing of the attack is key to understanding the continuing resentment towards the so-called Blairites and their ideological impact upon the party. Despite this, the Labour Party Central Office implemented special measures to suspend the selection process by taking direct control of the CLP (BBC, 2013c). The NEC investigation had found ‘sufficient evidence to raise concern about the legitimacy of members qualifying to participate in the selection of a Westminster candidate’ (BBC, 2013c). This conclusion halted Unite’s bid to affect the selection process and called for an alternative process. Moreover, the NEC ruled that those who joined after Joyce announced his intention to resign would not be able to participate in the selection process. Murphy and Deans were suspended from the Labour Party, thereby prompting Unite’s general secretary Len McCluskey to argue in a letter to members that ‘the rights of Falkirk CLP members [were] being ignored’ and that ‘Unite is being subjected to a behind-the-scenes smear campaign’ (BBC, 2013d). As the scandal gained national prominence, so did the need for the leader to take direct action. As such, Miliband referred the NEC report to Police Scotland, following which Conservative MP Henry Smith contacted the chief constable to call for an investigation, suggesting that Unite had committed fraud (BBC, 2013e). The police, however, concluded that ‘there are insufficient grounds to support a criminal investigation at this time’ (BBC, 2013f). Still, the optics were deeply problematic for a party seeking to win an election. Falkirk represented something of a sea-change moment in candidate selection. It also raised broader questions over the relationship between the unions and the Labour Party. Arguably, the incident highlighted the modernisers’ fear that union members could be used to select parliamentarians via the back door. For example, Lord Peter Mandelson argued at a Progress conference in 2013 that Miliband was ‘storing up danger for himself and for a future Labour government over Parliamentary selections’ (Wintour, 2013) unless the relationship was examined again. Indeed, according to the Guardian, some senior party figures and a former minister had called for Labour to break its link with the unions entirely as a consequence of this controversy (Watt and Syal, 2013). 195

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Politically, this left Miliband in a problematic position. He was unable to disregard the controversy as a local difficulty because it had escalated into the national spotlight and caused disruption within the party. As such, a process of renewal would be necessary. Reforming the relationship between the party and the unions had historically been fraught by controversy, as seen in Gaitskell’s attempts in 1959, Kinnock’s in 1984, Smith’s in 1993, and Blair’s in 1995 (see Thorpe, 2008). It was also close to the election, so there was little appetite for a protracted debate about the relationship. However, Miliband needed to demonstrate that he understood and responded to the Falkirk controversy. Breaking the link entirely would have dire consequences for the Labour Party, not least because of the money which is given to the party, but also because of the longstanding relationship between the two. Needless to say Labour benefits from income from other sources, however breaking the link entirely was never a realistic option. Yet, changes to the process by which the unions contribute towards the selection of the leader were likely. To begin this process, Miliband asked Ray Collins (the former general secretary of the Labour Party) to recommend reforms to how the Labour Party functioned internally (Collins, 2014). The subsequent report recommended the abolition of the Electoral College in favour of a true OMOV system giving members of the PLP, CLPs and unions an equal say in who became the new leader (Collins,  2014). This would reduce the perception of excessive union power in the selection of the leader. In addition to this, registered supporters would be encouraged to pay a small fee in order to cast a vote in the leadership election. This would enable non-party members who were sympathetic to Labour’s agenda to have a say in the democratic process. A candidate would need to secure over 50 per cent of the total vote in order to be declared the winner after a process of elimination through an alternative vote system (Collins, 2014). Trade union members would also be able to opt in to the political levy (rather than opt out). This ensured that the unions would still have a close relationship with the Labour Party, without the perception of undue influence over the winning candidate. The new leader would also benefit from not appearing to be in the pockets of the unions. Moreover, candidates would also need the support of at least 15 per cent of the parliamentary party in order to be nominated, thereby giving MPs the role of gatekeeper (Collins, 2014). This also sought to ensure the new leader would have their support. These reforms were intended to address ongoing questions about Labour’s relationship with the unions following the Falkirk controversy and also to make 196

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the Labour Party’s leadership selection process more democratic. The reforms would need to be ratified by a special conference, which it did in March 2014 with 86 per cent of conference delegates supporting them, including Blair and the wife of John Smith, Elizabeth, who was made a Baroness in 1995 for her public service (Bale, 2015: 218). As such, while Miliband’s reforms have since come under subsequent criticism (New Statesman, 2015a), it is important to note the level of support the new rules enjoyed at the party conference. More generally, while Miliband had sought to demonstrate the electability of the party under the label of One Nation Labour, it ultimately failed to galvanise the electorate. In the 2015 general election, Labour lost twenty-six seats, with a swing of only 1.6 per cent towards it (BBC, 2015a). As had become the tradition since Kinnock, Miliband resigned shortly afterwards, initiating a leadership election under Collins’ new rules. Those rules would produce an outcome that neither Miliband nor the rest of the PLP expected. The challengers for the leadership Following Miliband’s resignation, Harman became acting leader and presided over the leadership election. She also simultaneously announced her intention to stand down from the deputy leadership when a new leader was appointed (Wintour and Mason, 2015a). Given Labour had only 232 MPs, the number of nominations required to stand was at thirty-five. Again there were rumours about a number of potential candidates who eventually did not stand. These included Abbott, Stella Creasy, Tristram Hunt, Alan Johnson, David Lammy, John McDonnell, Alison McGovern and Owen Smith (Crerar, 2015; Hayward, 2015; BBC, 2015a; Morning Star, 2015; Bartlett, 2015; Smith, 2015). Both Chuka Umunna and Lammy began the process of seeking a support base, but ultimately withdrew from the contest. This demonstrates the wealth of talented leaders in the Labour Party who, for a variety of reasons, believed their talents would be best applied elsewhere. The front-runner among the parliamentarians was Burnham, who secured sixty-eight nominations, while Yvette Cooper got fifty-nine. Liz Kendall picked up forty-one nominations and Corbyn got thirty-six, the fewest nominations (Payne, 2015). This indicates the level of support each candidate could expect if they won. The parliamentary party’s backing represents the depth of support a leader has in the Commons, thereby enabling the PLP to hold the government of the day to account. Moreover, it is also the talent pool from which a leader draws most of their administration, therefore it is vital for both the PLP and the 197

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broader party to unite behind the leader to showcase their leadership competence to the electorate. There was a clear ideological split emerging among the candidates, with Burnham and Cooper occupying the classic Croslandite social-democratic camp, while Kendall occupied a more revisionist social-democratic perspective mostly associated with Blair (Wintour, 2015). In contrast to the other candidates, Corbyn was seen as coming from the more traditional left of the party, closely associated with Benn (Wheeler, 2016). This is significant as this wing of the party had largely been in retreat since 1983. It is also important to remember that Corbyn’s participation in the leadership election was seen as merely a way of broadening the debate to ensure left-wing perspectives were heard, while the discourse would still be dominated by the social democrats (Helm and Boffey, 2015). In the media, Burnham was described as the figure most likely ‘to unite the Party and win back power’ (Coogan, 2015) and a candidate who ‘listens to party members and the public’ (Tomlinson, 2015). Cooper was commended by the press for her hard work in the local constituencies during the campaign (Howard, 2015). Kendall was described by the Sun as ‘the only player they have’ and that she was the candidate the Conservatives ‘feared the most’ (Stone, 2015a; Liddle, 2015). The reaction to Corbyn’s nomination from the media was more  critical, with many such as Liz Kendall saying Corbyn’s election ‘would be a disaster’ (Sparrow, 2015). Still, Owen Jones argued in the Guardian that  Corbyn ‘offers a coherent, inspiring and, crucially, a hopeful vision’ (Jones, 2015). In order to understand why each candidate drew the responses they did, it would be useful to briefly outline some of the positions and arguments they put forward. Andy Burnham Burnham’s case to be made the new leader was predicated upon his belief that the party needed to ‘rediscover the beating heart of Labour’ (Beattie, 2015). To do that he sought to emphasise three areas of domestic policy – education, a national care service and the welfare state. These areas were likely to appeal to the selectorate as they reflected core social democratic ideas tied to egalitarian aspirations. In terms of education, he pledged to end the ‘growing market of free schools and academies’ that had accelerated under the Cameron-led coalition government and were likely to continue under the new majority Conservative 198

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government. This went beyond the 2015 election manifesto, which had simply pledged to end new free schools and academies while leaving the existing schools untouched. Fundamentally, he argued that he wanted ‘true parity between academic and technical education’ and that he would ‘restore a local role in overseeing schools’ (Watt and Perraudin, 2015). In terms of a national care service, Burnham pledged to pursue a policy he had proposed in 2010 to integrate social care into the NHS. He promised to brave ‘difficult headlines’ by raising more revenue through taxes to fund the change and said that Labour should not fear the reaction of the ‘Tory Press’ (BBC, 2015b). The objective of the policy was to ensure that ‘everybody is asked to make a contribution according to their means’ in order to ensure ‘everybody has peace of mind of knowing that all their care needs, and those of their family, are covered’ (BBC, 2015b). As a broad aspiration this reflected Burnham’s longstanding commitment to social care as a universal right for all that should be funded through taxation on par with other forms of social welfare. His position on welfare was highlighted during the passage of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill in July 2015. Critics such as the Chief Executive of Barnardos, Javed Khan, argued that the bill represented a ‘Pandora’s box for Britain’s poorest families’ because it allowed the benefits cap to be reduced while also pledging £12bn in welfare cuts (Khan, 2015). Harman, as the acting leader, instructed the PLP to abstain, prompting criticism that the strategy ‘underlines Labour moral and intellectual bankruptcy’ (Guttenplan, 2015). In the shadow cabinet, Burnham argued that Labour should instead table an amendment to the bill, which it did. However, when this failed in the Commons, Burnham abstained on the passage of the bill (Segalov, 2015). For Labour activists, this represented a major decision point, which Burnham later argued most likely cost him the leadership election (Grice, 2015). Indeed, while Burnham can be seen as something of a classic social democrat, he was unable to galvanise the selectorate and by abstaining on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill appeared to lack some of the principles he sought to demonstrate during the campaign. Yvette Cooper Cooper was, according to the Guardian, ‘best placed’ to offer a clear and strong uniting vision for the Labour Party while also having an exceptional range of experience (Guardian, 2015a). Indeed, she was described as ‘steadfast, consistently challenging George Osborne on economic terrain’, and given that the need to provide strong opposition is a vital skill for the leadership, this placed 199

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her in a strong position within the campaign (Guardian, 2015a). Moreover, Cooper had not bought into the 2010–15 coalition government’s narrative that Labour had caused the 2008 financial crash. She instead highlighted the role of the deregulated global economy and the sub-prime mortgage market in the US. Furthermore, the issue of gender played to her advantage. Labour had never elected a female party leader, and given that Tom Watson appeared to be the frontrunner for the deputy leadership (against Creasy, Angela Eagle, Caroline Flint and Ben Bradshaw), it was important that female voices be heard. With Kendall unlikely to win according to opinion polls, Cooper argued she represented the best opportunity to for female representation. She was also described by the Guardian as a ‘down to earth feminist’ who could appeal across the ideological and gender divide by highlighting the damage austerity had caused, especially to women (Guardian, 2015a). As a campaign strategy, Cooper initially appeared cautious, preferring to target voters’ second preferences (Howard, 2015). However, over the course of the summer, she became more outspoken in highlighting her experience as minister of state for housing and planning, chief secretary to the treasury, secretary of state for work and pensions, shadow foreign secretary and shadow home secretary (New Statesman, 2015b). By doing so, she was able to demonstrate her skills and awareness of major issues relating to social welfare, finance, foreign policy, and home affairs. Indeed, she was well positioned to advocate policies in areas such as universal childcare, combatting terrorism, civil rights and social housing. During the campaign, she also promoted policies likely to garner the support of the selectorate in area such as the economy (introduction of the 50p income tax rate); social care (introduction of a living wage) and housing (building over half a million new houses). Cooper was a highly experienced candidate and appeared convincing in debates and other appearances during the campaign. Overall, Cooper represented a classic social-democratic perspective informed by social justice and egalitarianism. She also presented an opportunity to demonstrate Labour’s commitment to gender equality. Furthermore, she was a candidate that the Conservatives would find formidable. Indeed, the New Statesman argued that ‘history teaches that even the strongest governments can unravel with remarkable speed, which is why Labour must be in a position to offer a credible alternative. The best hope of it being able to do so, in the present circumstances, is the election of Yvette Cooper’ (2015b). This was a strong endorsement of Cooper’s skills and abilities as a prospective leader. Moreover, unlike Burnham, she voted against the Welfare Reform and Work 200

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Bill, allowing her to demonstrate her commitment to the values she argued would make her an effective leader. Liz Kendall Kendall was the least experienced of the candidates, having been elected as an MP only in 2010. Under Miliband, she served as a shadow junior health minister and later shadow minister for care and older people (BBC, 2011; Parliament. uk, 2018). In terms of the development of Labour thought, she contributed to the Purple Book in which she argued for greater attention to the education of young children (Kendall, 2011). As such she was considered one of Labour’s new stars on the third way revisionist right. Kendall was broadly described as the Blairite candidate in the leadership election given her sympathies for continuing the modernisation agenda, although she rejected the description (Guardian, 2015b). She also rejected the more leftleaning arguments of Burnham and Cooper by seeking to argue that Labour needed to appeal to Conservative voters in order to survive. She argued that under Miliband Labour had ‘far too little’ to say to middle-class voters and that the party needed a ‘rethink about who we are and what we’re for’ (Shipman, 2015). To achieve this, she suggested that Labour needed ‘fundamental reform’ which ‘is essential to the future survival of our party’ (Riley-Smith, 2015). For many within the Labour movement this suggested a further abandonment of core principles that made the Labour Party essentially social democratic and an even more distant relationship with the trade unions. For supporters, however, this was a necessary approach to renewal which would enable Labour to unseat the Conservatives electorally. The strategy was predicated upon her argument that voters rejected leftwing arguments and values. Indeed, she argued that ‘we decided the British public had shifted to the left because we wished it to be so’ (Mason, 2015). She also rejected Miliband’s arguments that Labour did not overspend, that the energy price freeze was ‘undeliverable’, that tuition fees should not be cut and that Labour should not reject free schools as an ideological point (Mason, 2015). This placed her at odds with the broader direction of the other candidates who sought progressive reform in these areas. Moreover, she argued that ‘there is no point saying you believe in economic responsibility and being careful with taxpayers money if public services are a reform-free zone’ (Wintour and Mason, 2015b). For Kendall, the public sector needed to be reformed in order to reduce waste while seeking to protect vital services. 201

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Moreover, she also unnerved the party with her argument that it did not ‘have a god-given right to exist’ (Mason, 2015). The premise of her argument was that Labour needed to be relevant in order to attract the support of those who voted for the Conservatives. Indeed, she rejected the notion that, despite losing in 2015, Labour’s policies were electorally convincing, saying ‘lots of people told me they couldn’t see Ed as prime minister. But we didn’t lose because of his personality. We lost because of our politics’ (Mason, 2015). This was a dramatic argument that challenged the very existence of the Labour Party and the premise of social democratic policies. Indeed, such perspectives appeared to have more in common with a liberal approach to economics and a reduced role for the state in the provision of universal standards and services. Given the climate of the leadership election, it proved unconvincing. In summation, the three candidates described above were nominated for the leadership by the PLP out of a belief that old arguments and appeals would still resonate with the selectorate. Under the Electoral College system, the voters would have been restricted to the parliamentary party, the affiliated unions and long-standing party members. With that selectorate, one of the three described above may well have secured the leadership. Indeed, ‘Corbyn would have been unable to win had this remained in place’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). However, these candidates failed to consider the ramifications of the Collins review and the broadening of the selectorate to include affiliated members. This injected an entirely new dynamic which hitherto had not been a major factor – the left-wing vote that went well beyond the confines of the Labour Party. As in the coming sections show, Corbyn’s nomination did far more than widen the debate within the party. The political philosophy and activism of Jeremy Corbyn Corbyn’s nomination was, according to some who put his name forward, meant simply to broaden the debate within the leadership election and to ensure a traditional socialist voice was heard (and defeated) among the conventional social democratic discourse of the other contenders (Cox and Coyle, 2016). Under the previous selection process this may have been a valid strategy (as seen in 2010 when Abbott was included for the debate and subsequently defeated), however with the broadened electorate following the changes to the leadership selection rules it was far riskier than initially appreciated, in part because a galvanising voice from the socialist left would solicit support from across the entire left including those who were outside of the party. As Roe-Crines, Jeffery 202

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and Heppell (2018) note ‘the development of these new leadership election rules created the opportunity for a revolt of the grassroots that was not as feasible under the previous Electoral College system’. Put simply, those who had been disaffected by the various modernisations since 1983 would be afforded an opportunity to cast a vote in the leadership election which may lead to a ‘factory reset’ of the party. Such members of the disaffected left included those who abandoned the party because of Blair’s changes to Clause Four, the Iraq War, and the general sense that Labour was no longer prepared to challenge the economic assumptions of a capitalist economy. In Corbyn’s party, the so called disaffected would be afforded an opportunity to shift the ideological direction of the Labour Party and with it, the broader political climate in British politics. To some extent, it could be argued that Corbyn has – since becoming leader – been broadly successful at this, however the general election defeat in 2019 strongly suggests otherwise given his failure to lead Labour to victory for a second time. In any case, in order to understand how and why he represented this shift, it would be fortuitous to briefly look at his political background. By doing so, it would be possible to identify his ideological beliefs thereby demonstrating his appeal outside of the Labour Party as well as to some within it. The political philosophy of Jeremy Corbyn As a fundamental point, Corbyn considers himself to be a ‘democratic socialist’ (Calamur, 2015). As an ideology, this seeks a combination of political and industrial democracy as well as state ownership of the wealth generated by corporations (Busky, 2000). As a core point, democratic socialists argue that capitalism as a concept is fundamentally flawed because it deprives the workers of the benefits that come from their labour. For democratic socialists, capitalism is a state of exploitation before liberation through the seizure of capital. Capitalism also runs contrary to the democratic socialist ideals of equality, liberty and solidarity within a collectivist economy. This would necessitate an industrial strategy predicated upon a strong democratic voice for workers through the trade union movement. This philosophy is distinct from the more authoritarian interpretations of socialism because of the emphasis placed upon democratic process. Indeed, democratic expression and representation of the workers is a fundamental element of Corbyn’s philosophy and those who seek to promote it. Yet, some would argue that ‘the adjective democratic 203

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is added by democratic socialists to attempt to distinguish themselves from Communists who also call themselves socialists’ (Busky, 2000). Despite this distinction, Corbyn’s understanding of socialism is predicated upon empowerment through direct democracy. Democratic socialism is also distinct from social democracy because of the abandonment of capitalism. While social democrats such as Crosland argued that ‘the most characteristic features of capitalism have disappeared’ (Crosland, 1956), democratic socialists believe this is a misunderstanding of how capitalism had changed. Put simply, capitalism cannot be tamed because the central tenet of capitalism is the selfish individual. That selfishness promotes individual wealth and property at the expense of the collective. By positioning himself within this interpretation of socialism, Corbyn cast himself as a truly transformative figure who aims not simply to tweak the social injustices of capitalism, but rather to replace it with a collectivist and democratic society.  This put Corbyn outside the tradition of all other post-war Labour leaders,  each of  whom had been compelled to work within the c­apitalist framework. The political activism of Jeremy Corbyn It would now be worth briefly considering how Corbyn has translated this philosophy into his political activism. Put simply, his longstanding commitments to social justice and peace can be found in his early developmental years. Indeed, his parents (David Corbyn and Naomi Josling) were peace campaigners who met in the 1930s during a meeting to express support for the Spanish Republic during the Civil War (Verkaik, 2018). They also participated in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. Growing up in this environment instilled a spirit of activism within the young Corbyn to promote peace and cooperation where possible (Prince, 2016). It also embedded a deep distrust of the far-right and of the relationship between extreme conservatism and fascism. As a child, he was schooled at Adams Grammar School where he became a fully active member of the Young Socialists, the local Labour Party and the League Against Cruel Sports. Although he left school with less than impressive grades, this did nothing to dampen his activist nature, which he carried forward by joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1966. This demonstrates how Corbyn became involved in activist politics and developed a longstanding reputation for challenging the establishment (Shropshire Star, 2015). 204

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Indeed, the pillars of the conservative establishment were hostile to Corbyn’s democratic socialism and so he often found himself in opposition to those ­seeking to defend it those pillars. This was partly seen during his brief tenure as a student of higher education. In 1971, Corbyn joined a degree programme in trade union studies at North London Polytechnic, however he left shortly after starting the course, following substantial disagreements over the curriculum (Mount, 2015). Instead, he became an organiser in the National Union of Public Employees where he was encouraged by Tony Benn ‘to produce a blueprint for workers control of British Leyland’ (Corbyn, 2014). This ultimately came to nothing following a cabinet reshuffle which saw Benn change his ministerial role. In 1974, however Corbyn was elected to the Haringey Council, where he remained until becoming an MP in 1983 (Intelligence Unit, 1974). As a councillor, he maintained his activism for peace and solidarity. He was also chosen by his constituency to  be a delegate to the Labour conference in 1978, where he successfully moved a motion that dentists should be employed by the NHS (Labour Party, 1978). Given Corbyn’s growing profile within the movement, he was given the responsibility of running the local party’s general election campaign in 1979. During that campaign, he organised events and canvassing which positioned him well within the local party. It also afforded him with a voice to articulate his conception of democratic socialism and to promote a social role for the state. It is also interesting to note that he was an active enthusiast of Benn’s campaign to push for internal reform of the party constitution and that he participated in Benn’s deputy leadership bid in 1981 (Parliamentary Profile Services, 2004). He also courted a degree of controversy during these early years. For example, he was a keen supporter of the former International Marxist Group member Tariq Ali and of his attempt to join the Labour Party (Martin, 1981). The National Executive ruled that Ali was unacceptable, however Corbyn overruled this saying ‘so far as we are concerned … he’s a member of the party and he’ll be issued with a card’ (Martin, 1981). True to his word, when Corbyn became the Chair of the constituency party, Ali was given a membership card, which was followed by a vote of the local party by seventeen to fourteen that Ali’s membership should be ‘up to and including the point of disbandment of the party’ (Guardian, 1982). This demonstrates Corbyn’s zeal as a supporter of some who the party may consider to be unorthodox.

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Jeremy Corbyn: MP for Islington North These early experiences put him in a strong position to be nominated as the candidate for the 1983 general election. The incumbent Labour MP, Michael O’Halloran joined the SDP in 1981 following his dissatisfaction with the hard left within the Islington North constituency office (Dalyell, 1999). This included debates over deselection of MPs, by which O’Halloran felt threatened. However, he later left the SDP to stand as an independent Labour candidate. Ultimately, he came fourth place in the general election with only eleven per cent of the vote. Corbyn was elected to the seat, which he continues to hold at the time of writing. As an elected MP he became an active member of the socialist Campaign Group and he also began writing a weekly column for the Morning Star. He used his column to promote the causes close to his heart, which included campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Indeed, he argued that there was ‘no socialism without gay liberation’ (Wheeler, 2016). He also used the column to promote greater worker equality, a peaceful foreign policy and a more cooperative approach to domestic and international conflict. Alongside this he also used his position as an MP to voice his opposition to apartheid in South Africa, serving on the National Executive of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (Bennett, 2016). Corbyn was also a strong supporter of the miners during the 1984–85 industrial action and he invited striking miners to the Commons (who shouted ‘coal not dole’ from the public gallery) (Wheeler, 2016). He was also strongly opposed to the introduction of the Poll Tax (Community Charge) (Benn, 2013), which he demonstrated by refusing to pay (thereby risking imprisonment when he appeared in court in 1991) (Prince, 2015). He was also a member of the Parliamentary Trade Union Group where he promoted the interests of a number of unions including UNISON, Unite, and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (Mullin, 2016). Moreover, he chaired a number of other groups including the All Party Group on the Chagos Islands and the All Party Group on Latin America, and was the all-party vice-chair of the Human Rights group (Mullin, 2016). It is evident that as an MP, Corbyn was highly active for the causes he believed in. Indeed, he positioned himself well to be a strong voice of opposition to all who appeared supportive of the status quo and to promote causes that increased the profile of social justice. Despite this, Corbyn courted controversy for his role in (northern) Irish politics. He argued that he wanted to initiate a dialogue with Sinn Féin, which 206

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he did by inviting Gerry Adams and his entourage to Westminster three weeks after the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984 (Swinford, 2015). Needless to say Corbyn was later criticised for saying he ‘never met the IRA’, however this was later clarified to mean that ‘he met them in their capacity as activists within  Sinn Féin’ (Ashmore, 2017). This distinction, however remained controversial. As part of his campaigns for justice, he also became a vocal advocate for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, whose convictions were subsequently overturned (Callaghan, 1993). It is worth noting that as a result of his activities, MI5 opened a file on Corbyn in 1990 as they believed he was ‘deemed to be subversive’ and that he may ‘undermine Parliamentary democracy’ (Dixon and McCann, 2017). Despite this, he later supported the Northern Irish peace process and voted for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 saying he hoped for ‘peace, hope and reconciliation in Ireland in the future’ (Worrall, 2017). However, Corbyn’s profile as a peace campaigner would come into sharp focus following the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the subsequent so-called War on Terror. To demonstrate his opposition to the war(s), he helped to organise protests in London and beyond, where he spoke passionately against military action in the Middle East. Indeed, as a member of the Stop the War c­ oalition, he argued that ‘I find it deeply distasteful that the British Prime Minister can use the medieval powers of the royal prerogative to send young men and women to die, to kill civilians and for Iraqis to die’ (Snowden, 2016). This attack on Blair demonstrates the contempt Corbyn held for Blair’s approach to the war, and the style of party management that the Prime Minister had adopted. Alongside this he also argued against the war in principle, and argued strongly that ‘it will set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression and the misery of future generations’ (Snowden, 2016). This was a dire warning that Blair’s approach would result in decades of conflict that resulted from his imprudence. Corbyn also believed that the action was reckless and without justification from the intelligence services. Ultimately, Corbyn’s prediction of destabilisation would prove accurate with the ongoing conflicts in the region leaving Iraq, Syria, and Libya exposed to extremist groups such as Islamic State. Such was the sense of ongoing discontent with the manner by which the Iraq War was initiated that Corbyn joined with the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru in calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the war. The Iraq War became a defining issue for Corbyn, and his activism is often connected to his conduct during the war and afterwards. 207

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He was elected chair of the Stop the War coalition in 2011. He would, however, stand down from the position following his election as Labour leader. In the years running up to the 2015 general election, Corbyn also voiced his opposition to austerity. To do this he sought to apply pressure on Miliband to be stronger in his condemnation of the coalition government’s fiscal policies and to be more vocal on social justice issues. He also argued that the railways should be returned to public ownership and that trade union rights should be strengthened (BBC, 2015c). These spoke to his longstanding commitments to a stronger role for the state in economic management with an emphasis on social justice. However, Miliband was less vocal than Corbyn would have liked. As such Corbyn’s nomination for the party leadership in 2015 offered something different from Burnham, Cooper and Kendall. While his competitors for the leadership offered continuity, with the same debates over economic management, Corbyn offered an entirely different approach to conceptualising political, social and economic issues. His nomination for the leadership would do far more than simply broaden the debate beyond the centre-left. Rather, it would shatter the assumptions about what constitutes an effective candidate by commentators such as Stark (1996), while simultaneously galvanising the left beyond Labour thereby creating a new movement that revolved around his democratic socialist philosophy. As Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell (2018) argue, ‘the Stark criteria appear to be invalidated by the election of Corbyn. As a habitual rebel across a range of policy issues over many decades, any attempt to demand loyalty to him from his parliamentary colleagues will look hypocritical, whilst his electability and competence have also been widely questioned’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). The 2015 Labour leadership election This was an unusual leadership election, although at the start there was little indication of the drama that was ahead. The nominations for the leadership election opened on June 9 and closed on June 15. In that short time, it appeared as through Corbyn would be unsuccessful in securing the required number to appear on the ballot. There was a concern among the social democrats that if a left-leaning voice was not on the ballot, it would appear as though the process was too ideologically narrow, which could harm the new leader (Wintour and Mason, 2015c). Moreover, there was also a need to once again defeat the left wing candidate (regardless of who it was) in order to reaffirm Labour’s centrist values and ability to extend a hand to those with 208

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conservative leanings. Consequently, at the last moment, Corbyn was included in the process in order to widen the debate (Hope, 2015). It is important to note that ‘their calculation was that it was cost free to allow a symbolic left wing candidate to proceed as it was inconceivable that Corbyn would win’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). Needless to say, the moderates had fundamentally misunderstood the impact that Collins’ rule changes would have on the process, or the danger in nominating a seasoned campaigner like Corbyn simply to widen the debate. Indeed, Frank Field later reflected that ‘I told Jeremy I would nominate him because I wanted the wider debate – we have not got that wider debate – but I also said I would not be voting for him. It is such a disappointment’ (Hope, 2015). Beckett later reflected that she ‘felt like a moron’ (BBC, 2015d) for nominating Corbyn for this reason given the assumption was that he would suffer the same fate as Abbott in 2010. By nominating Corbyn, they ‘created the split electoral mandate between the PLP and the extra-parliamentary party that has been so damaging’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). Despite the motivations for nominating Corbyn, his participation within the leadership election would shift the assumed narrative away from the social democrats. This also challenges some of the assumptions Stark (1996) made about leadership selection, given it was highly unlikely that Corbyn would fit into his criteria. Stark (1996) identified three key criteria for leadership selection – acceptability, electability and competence. Corbyn failed each of these tests. Put simply, he was unacceptable to the majority of the PLP and a sizable portion of social democratic members. As Dorey and Denham argue, by nominating a leadership candidate who does not have the support of the MPs, the party ‘runs the serious risk that [the membership] will vote for a leadership candidate who is neither supported by the Party’s MPs, nor popular among voters in general, thus rendering the party virtually unelectable: ideologically pure, but politically impotent’ (Dorey and Denham, 2016). His ability to appeal electorally outside of his democratic socialist base was open to question, thereby challenging his electability. Indeed, despite holding the same seat since 1983, his ability to appeal outside of a narrowly defined electoral context had been untested. This raised questions about his broader appeal and his ability to either increase the number of Labour MPs or lead the party to victory in a general election. Indeed, this would become the basis of much of the opposition to Corbyn in the PLP after September 2015. Finally his competence at the time of the leadership election was an untested, given he had not served in a (shadow) ministerial position since becoming an 209

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MP. As discussed above, Corbyn had not been called upon by any previous Labour leader to take on ministerial office, because he preferred to focus on causes outside of Westminster. Despite these points, he was elected to the leadership. This represented a sea change in the assumptions about the skills that a candidate needs to demonstrate in order to be elected leader. He did this by energising the hard left in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for Burnham, Cooper or Kendall to represent an effective challenge. This is because Corbyn spoke to large crowds of disaffected former (and current) Labour voters who wanted to see a reinvigorated movement. Because of his techniques, it can be concluded that the significance of the parliamentary party has been reduced even further in the campaign process. Corbyn’s appeal can be attributed to his opposition to austerity, his style of presentation being vastly different to the more polished approaches of Burnham, Cooper and Kendall, and to the fact that he represented a very clear and distinctive break from the Conservatives. On each of these points, he presented a clear message and persona. His democratic socialism represented something fresh to an audience-base that was looking for an alternative approach to public spending cuts and a reduction in public services. This allowed him to connect with audiences through hustings, which grew in size dramatically over the course of the summer. Corbyn would also eschew the dirty tricks approach to campaigning. He preferred to keep his arguments on issues of moral conviction rather than resorting to personal attacks on his opponents. This enabled him to present himself as a more conciliatory figure. Corbyn also benefitted from the attacks of opponents such as Blair, who said that those whose heart is with Corbyn should ‘get a transplant’ (Wintour and Watt, 2015). This helped Corbyn because it allowed him to distance himself further from New Labour and its supporters, while framing them as hostile to genuine change and himself as a compassionate democratic socialist who opposed the austerity policies figures such as Kendall advocated. An example of his effective campaign approach can be found in Corbyn’s address to the crowd in Liverpool in early August 2015. The event drew a crowd of over 2,000 in a room designed for less than half that number (Roe-Crines, 2015a). Moreover, the crowd was addressed by figures such as Tony Mulhearn, a prominent member of the Militant Tendency and later the Socialist Party. This demonstrates Corbyn’s ability and eagerness to appeal to left-wing ­supporters outside of the confines of the Labour Party. 210

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Mulhearn energised the audience before Corbyn spoke about the problems of massive inequalities in society that emerged from economic liberalism and the austere policies of the Cameron government. He also set out his aspirations for a more socially just society which ensured the audience was highly receptive to his argument. Indeed, he contrasted this with the growth of inequality and poverty which he attributed to the policies that George Osborne had followed as chancellor. Corbyn presented himself as an anti-establishment figure with the aim of challenging the so-called Westminster elite. He also framed his anti-establishment positions in contrast to the elite within the Labour Party that had dominated party thinking throughout the New Labour and Miliband periods. This approach enabled him to cast Burnham and Cooper as part of the similar orthodox school of thought because of their participation in those administrations, and frame Kendall as someone who believed those ideas need to be accelerated. By doing so, Corbyn was able to outline an alternative vision, distinct from both social democracy and conservatism. Put simply, Corbyn’s opponents represented a single mindset of failed ideas (as evidenced by the 2008 financial crash and Labour’s electoral defeats)  while he presented a new vision that had hitherto been discarded as economically impractical and electorally hazardous by the modernisers since 1983. Given Corbyn’s ability to appeal to a support base using techniques disregarded by Stark (1996), it is possible to conclude that his election represented a truly dramatic shift in the assumptions about leadership elections. Media commentators used the term ‘Corbynmania’ to represent the extent to which his support base was energised (Roe, 2017). He also benefitted from the use of social media platforms such as Twitter and a growing sense that the momentum favoured Corbyn’s campaign. Given the youthful nature of Corbyn’s supporters, social media played a significant role in disseminating his message beyond the venues where he was speaking. This ensured his message travelled to supportive audiences across the country. As discussed in the above example from Liverpool, social media images and videos showed large crowds of cheering supporters which galvanised supporters on social media across the UK. It also enabled supporters to co-ordinate their efforts across the country, share discussions conduct Twitter ‘voodoo’ polls to create a narrative of support and share campaign tactics (Elgot, 2015). Put simply, this was a campaign to which his opponents were ill-equipped to respond. The appearance of spontaneity also gave it a sense of credibility that Corbyn had truly created a new left movement that would continue when he became leader. 211

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Corbyn also benefitted from a broader emergent narrative of support from six major unions. For example, given supplementary nominations remained open, UNISON and Unite both supported Corbyn’s leadership despite expectations that Burnham would be their chosen candidate (Sky News, 2015; BBC 2015e). Despite the abolition of the block vote, these endorsements from union leaders would encourage individual trade union members to support Corbyn in the ballot. Moreover, Corbyn also enjoyed the support of 152 CLPs (New Statesman, 2015c), which was the largest number of any other candidate. Finally, affiliated members would be able to vote in the campaign provided they signed up by 12 August (Quinn, 2016: 763). Each of these helped Corbyn construct his anti-establishment challenge for the leadership, thereby benefitting from a ­support base to which none of his competitors were able to appeal. Ultimately, ballots were sent out to 550,000 voters (BBC, 2015f). It would be facile to suggest that all of these supported Corbyn, but it would be equally disingenuous to argue that it did not represent a significant influx of left-wing supporters who were energised by Corbyn’s campaign. It would also be simplistic to suggest that Corbyn only benefitted from the influx and/or affiliated members. Indeed, many longstanding Labour members who supported the party during the Blair/Brown/Miliband years also felt enthused by Corbyn and lent him their support. Although as Dorey and Denham argue, it is important to remember that ‘many of these extra-parliamentary new recruits who supported Corbyn had not even voted for Labour in the 2015 general election’ (2016). There were also questions over the motivations of those indicating support for the party. MPs questioned whether Corbyn’s support base represented an entryist incursion of the hard left and the extent to which they truly supported Labour as a social democratic party. There was also the question of Conservative members becoming affiliate supporters in order to vote for Corbyn and thereby, in their eyes, make Labour unelectable. The Conservatives viewed Corbyn as ‘an atavistic throwback to the Bennite Left of the 1980s’ which was a view ‘shared by many of his critics in the Labour Party itself, particularly the Blairites’ (Dorey and Denham, 2016). This view aimed to connect the sense of renewal offered by Corbyn with the defeats and divisions of the Foot period. It is important to note that given Labour had lost in 2010 and 2015 on platforms that accepted the Conservative narratives surrounding the global financial crisis, these narratives were unlikely to prove effective in harming Corbyn’s leadership bid. Fundamentally, however, the issues of possible incursion from unsympathetic quarters raised questions about the democratic legitimacy of the process. 212

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In response to these issues, Labour began screening those who registered in order to ensure the electorate was as legitimate as possible. Ultimately, 3,000 of those who registered were excluded from the process (Wintour and Watt, 2015). The leadership election turnout was 76.3 per cent, with 81.3 per cent of those votes being cast online (BBC, 2015f). In total 422,871 votes were cast (BBC, 2015f). The alternative vote system meant whoever secured over 50 per cent first would become the new leader, with the candidate with the fewest votes being eliminated until the winner could be declared. The results of the vote were. Corbyn won the leadership in the first round with a resounding demonstration of support from each of the three components of the selectorate. Only party members gave him less than 50 per cent on the first round, however each of his opponents received no more than 22.7 per cent each in that category. The result indicates not only the depth of support for Corbyn, but also the broad rejection of Burnham and Cooper’s continuity with mainstream approaches to the economy and social policy and a complete rejection of Kendall’s arguments that third way revisionism of the New Labour era needed to be extended. Rather, the result can be seen as a reflection on Corbyn’s ‘ordinariness’ (Dorey and Denham, 2016). This enabled him to construct a persona that was different not only to his immediate opponents in the leadership race, but also to the orthodox way of thinking that had gripped Labour since 1983. Kinnock’s Policy Review, Smith’s reforms, Blair’s renewal of Clause Four, Brown’s acceptance of neoliberal economics, and even Miliband’s One Nation Labour had appeared to push collective ideals out of the mindset of Labour’s elite. Corbyn rejected those modernisations, and by doing so was able to present an authentic character on a wide platform that transformed him into a reluctant celebrity (Dorey  and Denham, 2016). As noted by Roe-Crines, ‘Corbyn’s victory represents an ideological break with the renewal strategies of Gaitskell, Wilson, Kinnock, Smith, Blair, Brown, and Miliband. Whilst the previous leaders had, Table 6.1  Results of the 2015 Labour Party leadership election Candidate

Party members

Registered supporters

Affiliated supporters

Total

Jeremy Corbyn Andy Burnham Yvette Cooper Liz Kendall

122,751 (49.6%)   55,698 (22.7%)   54,470 (22.2%)   13,601 (5.5%)

88,449 (83.8%)   6,160 (5.8%)   8,415 (8%)   2,574 (2.4%)

41,217 (57.6%) 18,604 (26%)   9,043 (12.6%)   2,682 (3.8%)

59.5% 19% 17% 4.5%

Source: BBC, 2015f.

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to varying degrees, accepted the need to appeal to centrist “conservative” voters, Corbyn’s leadership offers a more authentic re-embrace of a socialist analysis of the failures of capitalism’ (Roe-Crines, 2015b). A year of Jeremy Corbyn How Corbyn would lead the Labour Party was a matter of some speculation. Having set out his anti-establishment credentials throughout the course of his political career and during the leadership election, his transition to an office traditionally reserved for more experienced candidates was a matter of some anticipation. ‘On becoming leader in September 2015, Corbyn was immediately plunged into a sustained dispute with the PLP over how he managed the party. However, this remained mostly behind closed doors until the dismissal of Hilary Benn from the Shadow Cabinet’ (Roe-Crines, 2017: 27). The first public test of his skills would be displayed at Prime Minister’s Questions. Here Corbyn had made clear his intention to move beyond socalled Punch and Judy politics and instead put the concerns of Labour Party members directly to the prime minister (James and Bagley, 2015). He did this by soliciting questions which he would then read out at the opposition despatch box. Of the 40,000 suggested questions, he was able to ask six, thus ensuring those he selected reflected the points he wanted to make. Moreover, as party leader, he also had to deliver a speech to the annual Labour Party conference. Traditionally this was an opportunity for the leader to articulate their renewal strategy and to project an image of leadership competence. This was the arena where Wilson had articulated Scientific Socialism, where Kinnock delivered his modernisation speech in 1985, where Smith had changed the leadership rules, where Blair pushed for reforms to Clause Four and the launch of New Labour, and where Miliband set out what he meant by One Nation Labour. Consequently, this would be a key moment for Corbyn in establishing himself not simply as the leader of his supporters, but rather as the leader of the entire party and broader movement. In his speech, he argued that he wanted to create a ‘kinder politics, a more caring society’ and that he wanted to ‘challenge austerity’ (BBC, 2015g). The speechwriter, Richard Heller later indicated that much of Corbyn’s speech had been based on a blog written in 2011 and that large sections of it had been originally written for but cut out from Miliband’s conference speeches (BBC, 2015g). Yet, it gave an insight into how Corbyn viewed the Labour Party and how he intended on reforming it. 214

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Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet was a mix of those who supported him and members of the social democratic wing of the party. It is interesting to note that Kendall was not offered a position, despite this having been an issue during the leadership election. This suggests that reaching out to the third way revisionist wing of the Labour Party was a step too far for Corbyn. Instead he made McDonnell the shadow Chancellor, Burnham the shadow home secretary, Benn the shadow foreign secretary and Eagle the shadow first secretary of state. Abbott, Heidi Alexander and Lisa Nandy also joined the shadow cabinet, tilting the gender balance in favour of women. Despite this, however most senior party roles were still occupied by men. This careful ideological balance did not last. It was broken following a series of events that followed the attacks on Paris by the Islamic State in November 2015 (Wilkinson, 2015). Corbyn favoured seeking a political settlement with Islamic State, which the majority considered impractical given their indiscriminate and violent nature. Corbyn believed this could be achieved by ending the Syrian civil war, while Cameron favoured building a coalition for military intervention against Islamic State (McTague, 2015). Ultimately, Corbyn argued that Labour would ‘consider the proposals the Government brings forward’ (McTague, 2015) before coming to a position on military action. Given Corbyn’s record, it was highly likely his position would remain unchanged. In the event, Cameron set out his proposals for intervention to Parliament. Benn was very sympathetic to the proposals the government outlined, saying they were ‘compelling’ (Watt and Wintour, 2015). As shadow foreign secretary, his opinion carried considerable weight in the debate. In contrast, Corbyn sent a letter to MPs saying he would not support action against the Islamic State. In the letter he argued ‘I do not believe the current proposal for air strikes in Syria will protect our security and therefore cannot support it’ (BBC, 2015h). Corbyn also argued that how MPs voted would be a decision for him as leader to take, however he later reluctantly backed down and agreed to a free vote (Wintour and Mason, 2015d). In the debate, Benn spoke for Labour in the Commons in response to the case outlined for military intervention. When addressing the PLP, he instructed MPs to remember that: as a party we have always been defined by our internationalism. We believe we have a responsibility one to another. We never have and we never should walk by on the other side of the road. We are faced by fascists—not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this Chamber tonight and all the people we represent. They hold us in contempt. 215

Choosing party leaders They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy—the means by which we will make our decision tonight—in contempt. What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. It is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists, trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It is why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. My view is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria. (Hansard, 2015)

This was a strong message, pointing out that Labour’s history is one of fighting fascism, rather than seeking a settlement. Ultimately, sixty-six Labour MPs agreed with Benn and voted to support military intervention (including Watson), while the remainder of the PLP either backed Corbyn or abstained (BBC, 2015h). Benn’s speech was not a challenge to Corbyn’s leadership, but it was a challenge for the leader’s authority. Such was the impact of the speech that speculation began to emerge about how Corbyn would respond to it. Given Parliament was set to break for the Christmas holiday, it would not be until January when the response came. This took the form of a shadow cabinet reshuffle. Michael Dugher, Pat McFadden, Jonathan Reynolds, Stephen Doughty and Kevan Jones left Corbyn’s cabinet. Benn, however remained as shadow foreign secretary. It was to be a shortterm reprieve; he was dismissed in June 2016 when he argued ‘there is no confidence in our ability to win the next election, which may come much sooner than expected, if Jeremy continues as leader’ (O’Neil, 2016). Benn’s dismissal led to the subsequent resignations of a further eight shadow cabinet members including Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Chris Bryant, Smith, John Healey and Charles Falconer. This represented a key moment of growing discontent towards Corbyn’s leadership style and his ability to manage the party. Indeed, ‘this evidence of division has led pundits and commentators to argue that Labour is fatally divided, and that such divisions risk splintering the Party’ (Roe-Crines, 2015b). It did not, however hamper his popularity among his core supporters within the Momentum group (a hard-left faction within the Labour Party). It did, however alienate him further from the parliamentary party. But the main test of his leadership would be the fallout from the vote on whether the UK should remain within the European Union. As is well documented, the UK held a referendum on its membership of the European Union on 6 June 2016. Corbyn had been a longstanding opponent of UK’s membership of the Common Market (and its subsequent incarnations) 216

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since the UK joined under the Heath administration. As Hickson and Miles note, Corbyn ‘was closely associated with the Alternative Economic Strategy and the Labour Left’s Eurosceptic position more generally’ (2018). Corbyn opposed the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, and supported the proposal for UK withdrawal in 2011 (Stone, 2015b; Public Whip, 2008). He was also a longstanding critic of the EU, especially over the handling of the Greek financial crisis in 2015 which he described as ‘brutal’ (Wilson, 2016). In July 2015 when justifying his case for potentially campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, he argued that ‘the EU … knowingly, deliberately maintains a number of tax havens and tax evasion posts around the continent – Luxembourg, Monaco and a number of others – and has this strange relationship with Switzerland which allows a lot of European companies to outsource their profits to Switzerland where tax rates are very low’ (Corbyn, 2015). However, he ultimately reversed these positions to campaign for the UK to remain in the EU. Despite this he remained sceptical about the UK remaining in the EU during the referendum campaign saying he was ‘seven, or seven and a half’ in favour of the EU (BBC, 2016c). Corbyn’s hesitation to campaign fully was also criticised after the result of the referendum was known. The Chair of the Labour In For Britain campaign, Phil Watson, argued that ‘he decided to go on holiday in the middle of the campaign. [He] did not visit the Labour heartlands of the north-east and raised esoteric issues such as TTIP which had no resonance on the doorstep’ (Asthana, 2016). Alan Johnson also argued that it felt as though Corbyn’s office was ‘working against the rest of the party and had conflicting objectives’ (Hughes, 2016). These are damning criticisms of Corbyn’s performance and actions during the campaign. John Curtice, however, asserts that the result of the referendum was due to factors outside of Corbyn’s control. He suggests that ‘in truth, there is little evidence that Mr Corbyn’s campaigning efforts – or those of any other Labour politician – made much difference either way to the willingness of Labour supporters to vote for remain’ (Curtice, 2016a). This reduces Corbyn’s level of significance in the outcome of the referendum. Indeed, Curtice also notes that ‘it is also open to doubt whether many of the working-class “left behind” voters that formed the core of leave support would have responded to such efforts’ and that ‘if the finger of blame for Remain’s defeat is to be pointed anywhere it is better directed at the prime minister rather than Corbyn. David Cameron failed to bring his party with him at all, and in the event that simply proved too much of a handicap for the pro-EU camp to overcome’ (Curtice, 2016a). For Curtice, the failure of the Remain campaign can be attributed more to Cameron’s 217

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inability to appeal to Conservative remainers, who instead may have found the arguments of Boris Johnson and Gove more appealing. However, the assumption that Corbyn’s campaign was responsible for the outcome of the referendum was too strong for his opponents to resist and by the end of June 2016, over thirty shadow cabinet members had resigned in solidarity with Benn’s attempts to compel Corbyn to stand down. This led to a major reshuffle that saw Corbyn bring his core supporters in to senior positions. These included Abbott, who became shadow health secretary, and Emily Thornberry, who moved to shadow the foreign secretary. Pat Glass, Clive Lewis, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Kate Osamor and Cat Smith were among those who joined the shadow cabinet. Yet this would not halt the sense of anger that was directed towards Corbyn for his apparently ineffective contributions to the Remain campaign. Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey tabled a vote of no confidence because the EU referendum ‘has been a tumultuous referendum which has been a test of leadership … Jeremy has failed that test’ (Anushka and Syal, 2016). The vote of no confidence was held on 28 June, which Corbyn lost 172 votes to forty (BBC, 2016d). The vote was a damning indictment of his leadership, however Corbyn responded saying that ‘I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60 per cent of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today’s vote by MPs has no constitutional legitimacy. We are a democratic party, with a clear constitution. Our people need Labour Party members, trade unionists and MPs to unite behind my leadership at a critical time for our country’ (Corbyn, 2016a). Despite this, discussions among high-profile members of the PLP continued about how best to proceed. Those discussions would ultimately lead to a challenge and another leadership election. Indeed, his opponents within the PLP remained convinced that Corbyn could be removed if the right candidate was found. This was yet another tactical error which would distract the party at a time when the Conservatives were recoiling from their own post-EU referendum fall out. A challenge for the leadership The 2016 leadership challenge should be viewed as the end result of growing discontent within the PLP towards Corbyn over the first year of his leadership. His leadership style had been a disruptive factor within Labour’s claims to unity, while simultaneously appearing disinterested in the conventions of building an effective statecraft strategy. This was evident through his management 218

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of the shadow cabinet, the response to the Syria vote, the January reshuffle, and his inability to weigh the ideological imbalances across the PLP and beyond. Put simply, Corbyn’s management of the shadow cabinet, failure to balance competing interests and appearance of being unwilling voice in the Remain campaign had created a situation where MPs were considering launching the second leadership challenge in Labour’s history (the first being by Benn against Kinnock in 1988). Needless to say, following the vote of no confidence, Corbyn continued to refuse to stand down. Indeed, for Corbyn this became a matter of principle, given that he saw himself as the candidate selected by the party members rather than simply the PLP. This meant he was able to claim a support base outside Parliament that gave him an authentic voice as the representative of left-wing perspectives. Furthermore, given the vote was simply a consultancy ballot, it held no compulsion for the leader to act on the outcome, despite the size of the opposition to him continuing as leader. Indeed, this meant that the vote was largely a symbolic act of defiance against Corbyn, which he interpreted as a minority view of party members towards his leadership. Rather, Corbyn viewed himself as the leader of the movement rather than simply of the PLP. Still, the PLP did have the authority to set in motion a process that can seek to replace a leader who proves ineffective. Given Corbyn’s performance over the previous year, doubts about his electoral salience and the voices within the party blaming him for failing to galvanise Labour’s Remain supporters, it was felt that he had proven an ineffective leader and that he should be replaced. As such, the process to challenge Corbyn for the leadership was initiated. In order to launch such a challenge, the support of 20 per cent of the PLP was required, which would activate the candidate selection process. The first MP to reach the required number to launch such a challenge was Angela Eagle (BBC, 2016e). She had become critical of Corbyn’s leadership following her departure from the shadow cabinet. Despite this, Eagle hesitated to launch her bid because, following the EU referendum, she believed that ‘Jeremy Corbyn still has time to do the right thing’ (BBC, 2016f) and resign the leadership of his own accord. The expectation that Corbyn would willingly resign failed to take into consideration his view that he was the representative and leader of a broader movement. Corbyn also faced continuing pressure from Alan Johnson, who argued the situation was the result of Corbyn’s ‘inability to take responsibility, demonstrate leadership or give the slightest indication that he is capable of moving beyond 219

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meaningless platitudes’ (BBC, 2016f). This attempted to cast Corbyn as a leader who could neither respond to events in a way that a party leader should, nor construct a renewal strategy that could unite the party. It is also interesting to note that deputy leader Watson blamed McDonnell for Corbyn refusing to resign, saying ‘he has obviously been told to stay by his close ally John McDonnell. They are a team and they have decided they are going to tough this out. So it looks like the Labour Party is heading for some kind of contested election’ (BBC, 2016f). In response to these claims, McDonnell responded by describing those seeking to trigger a leadership election as being ‘like a lynch mob without the rope’ (BBC, 2016f). This is an allusion to the lack of a single credible candidate who could challenge Corbyn, nor a broader strategy to galvanise the movement against the party leader. Needless to say, this was a dire situation for Corbyn and the Labour Party. As the narrative continued to shift towards a challenge being inevitable, those seeking to replace Corbyn found themselves at an impasse. This was because they agreed that a single candidate should go forward to challenge Corbyn, but there was uncertainty about who that should be. Smith had also begun sounding out the prospects of launching a bid for the leadership, but had been told to ‘back off’ by Eagle’s supporters (BBC, 2016f). Eagle launched her bid for the leadership on 11 July 2016, saying ‘Jeremy Corbyn is unable to provide the leadership this huge task needs’ (Vullimy, 2016). Smith also put his name forward for the leadership. He argued that this was because Corbyn was ‘not a leader who can lead us into an election and win for Labour’ (Mason, 2016). For Smith, this was a reflection partly on Corbyn’s performance during the EU referendum, and the manner in which he managed the party. Moreover, he reflected that ‘on July 27 I asked [Corbyn] if he was prepared to see our party split and worse, wanted it to. He offered no answer’ (Smith, 2016). He also suggested that when McDonnell was asked the same question, he ‘shrugged his shoulders and said “if that’s what it takes”’ (Smith, 2016). For Smith, this was indicative of a general disregard for the health and survival of the party and its aims to continue representing the interests of the many. Consequently, he joined Eagle in standing for the leadership, thereby potentially splitting the anti-Corbyn vote. Alongside this were discussions in the NEC about how the election should be conducted and whether Corbyn would need to secure the nominations required or whether he would be automatically on the ballot. This was a significant debate, given that he would be unlikely to secure the required number of nominations from the PLP given that he had lost the vote of no confidence. 220

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The decision would be decided by a secret ballot of NEC members, which subsequently concluded that he should be automatically allowed on the ballot, with eighteen in favour and fourteen against (Crick, 2016). Moreover, the NEC also concluded that only those who had been in the Labour Party for at least six months or more should be allowed to participate in the vote, thereby discounting the 130,000 members that joined the party within that time. This was challenged in the courts, but the decision of the NEC ultimately stood. Moreover, registered supporters would again be able to vote provided they registered within a two-day period and paid £25. Constituency parties would also not be permitted to hold meetings over the course of the election period, however groups such as Momentum and Progress continued to do so (Peston, 2016; Mortimer, 2016). That there were two candidates seeking to challenge Corbyn for the leadership was deeply problematic. This was because the split risked making the oppositional forces appear divided and uncertain. Consequently, there was growing pressure on both Eagle and Smith to rally behind a single candidate in order to galvanise supporters. To decide who it should be, both candidates agreed that the challenger with the fewest nominations on 19 July would withdraw. Ultimately, this favoured Smith, as Eagle had secured twenty fewer nominations. After withdrawing from the campaign, she pledged her support to Smith. She was also commended by Kinnock, who said her decision to challenge Corbyn was ‘a real leadership decision showing her courage, mature judgement and dedication to the party’ (Grice, 2016). By withdrawing in this manner, it was also possible that in the event of a Smith victory, she may see a return to the shadow cabinet in a senior position. After becoming the sole challenger, Smith remarked that ‘Jeremy is owed a debt of gratitude for helping Labour rediscover its radical roots, but we do need a new generation of Labour men and women to take this party forward, to get us ready for government once more’ (Grice, 2016). This argument strove not to condemn Corbyn for his approach to Labour politics, but rather to argue it was necessary in order to get some distance from the recent past, renew around traditional values and move forward by becoming a party of government. Corbyn took an alternative view insomuch as he believed those values were capable of winning an election and that the voters can be convinced of their worth. Corbyn also sought to frame the challenge as an opportunity to engage in a debate with the party, like when he was initially included on the ballot in 2015. Indeed, Smith’s challenge enabled Corbyn to widen the debate to include those opposed to his leadership, thereby affording him with an opportunity to 221

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again subject himself to the vote. In a similar strategy to Kinnock’s in 1988, this would enable him to broaden his mandate and claim further legitimacy in the event that he was successful. Over the course of the campaign, both candidates participated in a series of debates where they would take questions from a studio audience and from each other. However, Corbyn’s campaign refused to participate in debates organised by the Mirror, New Statesman, the Guardian or Channel Four, as it believed they were taking ‘partisan positions against Jeremy’s leadership or campaign’ (Peck, 2016). Instead Corbyn limited himself to debates organised by the Labour Party itself, and by the BBC and Sky News. Smith sought to frame these debates as being about the future ideological trajectory of the party and the extent to which Corbyn’s ideological perspectives would prove electorally convincing. To do this, Smith endeavoured to project an image of leadership competence in the face of division and potential defeats. This was predicated upon the assumption that hard left policies lacked electoral salience, while his own moderate social democratic approach had traditionally proven more convincing. Despite this strategy, Corbyn benefitted from substantial audience support, which was frequently manifested in favour of Corbyn’s arguments and in opposition to Smith’s perspectives. As with the 2015 leadership context, the winner would be the candidate who secured over 50 per cent of the vote first. As there were only two candidates, this would be known in the first round. As with the challenge in 1988, there was an assumption that the incumbent would win and that his hold over the party would be strengthened as a result. This assumption proved to be accurate. With a turnout of 77.6 per cent, Corbyn increased the mandate he secured in 2015 (Pope, 2016). He was able to claim that the party supported his continued leadership in each of the components of the selectorate. It suggested that Smith’s arguments had failed to resonate, while Corbyn was able to claim a renewed vote of confidence from the party that overrode the concerns of the PLP. Following the leadership election, calls for Corbyn to resign fell silent. It is also important to note the importance of Corbyn’s renewed mandate in Table 6.2  Results of the 2016 Labour Party leadership election Candidate

Party members

Registered supporters

Affiliated supporters

Total

Jeremy Corbyn Owen Smith

168,216 (59%) 116,960 (41%)

84,918 (69.9%) 36,599 (30.1%)

60,075 (60.2%) 39,670 (39.8%)

61.8% 38.2%

Source: Pope, 2016.

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terms of Labour’s broader ideological trajectory. It could be argued that in 2015 Corbyn’s election was the result of a unique set of circumstances that resulted from an inadequate selection process. However, his re-election in 2016 suggests that his leadership was an intentional shift in ideological direction which the majority of the party membership and supporters backed. Also, ‘the membership came to view the PLP as “rebels”, who were attempting to subvert internal party democracy in their attempts to force Corbyn to resign, through coordinated resignations from the frontbench and via the confidence motion, and by trying to prevent Corbyn from being on the leadership ballot by arguing that he needed the support of 20 per cent of the PLP before being allowed to participate’ (Roe-Crines, Jeffery and Heppell, 2018). This would prove decisive in how Labour continued to develop as a party. Despite this, the concerns raised by Smith remained very much in the minds of the defeated moderates. Corbyn’s electoral salience remained untested in a general election and his party management skills remained unchanged. The leadership election changed few minds about Corbyn’s prospects as a successful leader – however, the process had delegitimised those concerns in the minds of hard left Labour activists and supporters, thereby triggering a prolonged period of silence within the PLP, which assumed electoral annihilation at the next general election. In that event, it was hoped Corbyn’s resignation would most likely follow, thereby enabling moderates to retake control of the party. The consolidation of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership The 2016 leadership election provided Corbyn with an increased mandate to remain as leader and to take Labour into the next general election, which took place in December 2019. Despite the increased internal mandate, Corbyn and Labour was rejected by the voters, who gifted the Conservatives a majority of 80. In his victory speech, Corbyn called for party unity and said that members needed to stop discussing the leadership question in order to ‘wipe that slate clean from today and get on with the work we’ve got to do as a party’ (Corbyn, 2016b). The work of the party would be to ensure Labour was a potential government in waiting that would be ready to replace the Conservatives. Indeed, Corbyn declared that ‘together, arguing for the real change this country needs, I have no doubt this party can win the next election whenever the Prime Minister decides to call it and form the next government’ (Corbyn, 2016b). Yet here Curtice voiced a note of concern, saying that ‘there is evidently a section of the British public, to be found particularly among younger voters, for 223

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whom the Labour leader does have an appeal; it just does not look like a section that is big enough, on its own at least, to enable Labour to win a general election’ (Curtice, 2016b). Curtice’s argument was that Corbyn’s support base was enough for him to secure and maintain a strong grip over the Labour leadership, however it was unlikely to be sufficient enough to win Labour an overall majority in a UK-wide general election. It could be problematic for Labour’s electoral appeal if Corbyn was able to solicit enough support to remain as leader, but not enough to convince the voters of his prime ministerial credentials. This is similar to the problem that Kinnock faced – despite modernising the party and shaking off Benn’s challenge for the leadership (while the party enjoyed considerable leads in the opinion polls), he was still unable to convince  the voters that he would be a suitable replacement for either Thatcher or Major. In terms of party management, the PLP was far more subdued following the second leadership election. Only when Corbyn used the three-line whip to compel Labour MPs to support the passage of Article 50 on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union did he face a significant problem, with two of his own whips choosing to vote against the bill, while Tulip Saddiq and Jo Stevens resigned in protest. Ultimately, forty-eight Labour MPs defied the whip and voted against the measure, yet this did not have a significant impact upon Corbyn’s position or argument (ITV News, 2017). With regards to electoral appeal, Labour appeared to be on a course for annihilation at the polls. This seemed to be confirmed during the May 2017 local elections, in which the party lost over 380 councillors on a swing of 4 per cent against Labour. The party also lost control of seven councils. The Conservatives secured over 560 new Councillors and a swing of 8 per cent in their favour. The Conservatives also gained control of eleven councils. The Liberal Democrats lost forty-two councillors, but enjoyed a swing of 3 per cent towards them (BBC, 2017a). Moreover, of the six mayoral elections taking place, Labour lost to the Conservatives in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Tees Valley, the West of England, and the West Midlands. Labour won only in the assumed heartlands of Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region (BBC, 2017b). This contributed to the narrative that Labour would perform poorly if Corbyn remained as leader. Despite this, given his support base and renewed mandate, there were few options available to the party other than to allow the narrative to prevail and to prepare for a likely large-scale defeat. The Conservatives were also reflecting on the local election results. They had performed well in the 2015 general election, securing their first overall majority since 1992 under Theresa May’s leadership and they were emboldened by the 224

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results of the local elections and by the continuing divisions within the Labour Party. May had initially ruled out an early election, however on 18 April 2017, she announced that she would call for an early election in order to facilitate a smoother Brexit process in the Commons (Boyle and Maidment, 2017). Put simply, she argued the current composition of the chamber was hindering her attempts to show strength to the EU and that a renewed mandate and an enhanced majority would enable her to apply pressure upon the Brussels negotiators. Given the Fixed Term Parliament Act, May needed the support of the Commons to proceed. Corbyn was joined by Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, in supporting the vote and Parliament was dissolved and a general election scheduled for 8 June 2017 (Parliament.uk, 2017a). During the election campaign, Corbyn galvanised supporters in a similar manner to his leadership bids in large set-piece arenas. As Roe-Crines suggested, ‘Corbyn will need to convince voters that he stands for a fairer economy and a secure role for the state in providing vital public services. To do that he must retain his authenticity by setting out his beliefs in a convincing manner’ (2015b). Corbyn spoke to an audience of over 20,000 at the Wirral Live Festival, he appeared measured and well researched during television debates, and his attire was more prime ministerial (Demianyk, 2017). This is contrasted to May. who hesitated to participate in the debates and addressed smaller audiences that in some cases appeared to be pictured in a way that made them look larger than they were. May’s core message of ‘strong and stable’ was also ridiculed when she appeared uncertain and unconvincing during the televised debates. She was also accused of ‘running away from the debate’ when Amber Rudd stood in for her during a seven-way televised debate (BBC, 2017c). As such, the Conservative leader failed to perform to expectations during the campaign. Despite May’s failure, Corbyn went into the election with the lowest opinion poll ratings of any previous Labour leader. Opinion polls also suggested that May’s calculation that she would secure a substantially increased majority may be valid since Labour appeared to be on course for a substantial defeat (Fisher, Kenny and Shorrocks, 2017). This meant that Corbyn’s future as the leader would come under question if Labour secured fewer seats than it did under Miliband in 2015. It also gave some comfort to Conservatives who were concerned about May’s style of presentation and campaigning. However, these positions were to shift dramatically over the course of the campaign. The Conservative Party manifesto was launched in Halifax, where May pledged that she would lead a ‘mainstream government that would deliver 225

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for mainstream Britain’ (Parker and Pickard, 2017). The manifesto sought to balance the budget by 2025, remove the ban on grammar schools, introduce a means-test for the winter fuel allowance and transform the pension ‘triple lock’ into a ‘double lock’ (Conservatives, 2017). The manifesto also dropped the 2015 pledge to not raise income tax or national insurance, however it did pledge to not raise the value-added tax (VAT). The manifesto alienated core conservatives because of the promises of intervention in industry and the lack of a pledge to cut taxes, while it also alienated progressives by removing the ban on grammar schools and suggesting the possibility of a more relaxed approach to fox hunting. The manifesto was attacked by Osborne for taking a ‘U-turn’ on social-care spending, and by Labour for the so-called dementia tax (Kentish, 2017). The launch of the Conservative manifesto represented a shift in the trajectory of their campaign, while the assumption that the Conservatives would secure a landslide victory began to dissipate. In contrast to the Conservatives, Labour ruled out increases to VAT or income tax, and to national insurance for those earning less than £80,000 per year. The party also pledged to ban junk food advertising, abolish car parking charges at NHS hospitals, invest and additional £7.4 billion annually in the NHS, renationalise the water industry, impose a levy on companies earning over £330,000 per year and re-introduce the 50p rate of tax for those earning over £123,000 per year. Furthermore, McDonnell promised to raise corporation tax from 19 per cent to 26 per cent in order to fund an extra £4.8 billion investment in education. More broadly, Labour sought to build a million new homes by reversing cuts to capital gains tax, to re-nationalise the National Grid, the railways, the water industry and the Royal Mail, to abolish university tuition fees, and to ban fracking (BBC, 2017d; BBC, 2017e; Kuenssberg, 2017; Anushka and Carrell, 2017). The Labour Party galvanised much of the party’s core support base around a radical programme for a socialised economy. However, it did later state that the freeze on social welfare would remain in place (Merrick, 2017). Labour’s opinion poll numbers continued to show a sharp increase, while the Conservatives’ began to decline sharply. As the momentum shifted away from the Conservatives and towards Labour, it was no longer certain that Corbyn would be leading the party to annihilation. While the shift in narrative towards Labour continued, this was not reflected in some of the polls. Indeed, on polling day, Election Calculus, Lord Ashcroft Polling, Elections Etc, the New Statesman, and Britain Elects all gave the Conservatives a projected majority of between twenty-four and eighty-two seats (Baxter, 2017; Ashcroft, 2017; Fisher, Kenny and Shorrocks, 2017; New Statesman, 226

The Labour leadership election(s) of Jeremy Corbyn Table 6.3  Results of the 2017 general election Parties

Seats

Change

Conservative Party Labour Party Scottish National Party Liberal Democrats Plaid Cymru UK Independence Party Others

314 266  34  14   3   0  18

17↓ 34↑ 22↓ 06↑ – 01↓

Source: Parliament.uk, 2017b.

2017; Britain Elects, 2017). The assumption was that Labour would lose a significant number of seats and that Corbyn would resign shortly afterwards. However, only YouGov predicted a hung Parliament with the Conservatives twenty-four seats short of a majority (YouGov, 2017). As events unfolded on election night, YouGov’s prediction turned out to be more accurate. In the event, the Conservatives were twelve seats short of a majority. This result surprised commentators and Labour moderates alike because it entirely defied the narratives that had emerged under both Corbyn and May’s respective leadership. It was assumed that the voters would recoil from Corbyn’s policy platform. Likewise, May’s confidence of an increased majority was proved false. This can partly be explained by the style of campaign each party sought to pursue. Firstly, Corbyn was a seasoned campaigner. He had successfully fought two leadership campaigns in the preceding years. Secondly, he had spent much of his political career campaigning for issues close to his heart. Thirdly, May’s record of campaigning was less than effective. During the EU referendum she had left much of the attempts to convince Conservative activists to support Remain to Cameron, which he failed to do. She also had not campaigned to secure her own position as leader, given the leadership election was restricted to parliamentarians as the other candidates withdrew. Moreover, Corbyn benefitted from a grassroots movement through groups such as Momentum and also within the party itself. Furthermore, during the general election campaign, Corbyn was a visible presence, while May would only be seen at set-piece events with little reach. As such, Corbyn’s natural skills enabled him to successfully lead a campaign that increased the number of Labour MPs. Consequently, the assumption that Corbyn would resign following a general election proved not to be accurate. Indeed, Corbyn’s position has been 227

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strengthened by the election outcome, just as it had after the leadership challenge in 2016. It is important to note however that the true test of leadership is the ability to maintain a united party outside of the campaign period. Corbyn’s failure to unify the Labour Party and project an image of a government in waiting projected an image of indifference to division, whilst being aloof towards major issues such as Brexit. This failure of leadership led to Labour’s worst defeat since the Second World War. A central caveat must be placed here, however, given Corbyn’s poor performance as party leader since 2017. Under Corbyn, Labour became consumed in unresolved scandals relating to sexism, antisemitism and bullying. Given these serious problems, it was impossible for Labour to secure a victory in a general election. It was only May’s poor performance as prime minister on Brexit and other issues which appeared to give Corbyn a realistic prospect of winning. Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Conservative Party contrasts sharply with May’s. He was able to revitalise the Conservative Party by using his campaigning experience to project a clear message over issues such as Brexit, thereby allowing him to secure the largest Conservative majority since 1987. Conclusion Corbyn’s time as head of the Labour Party has, thus far, been characterised by division and hostility towards his leadership. His supporters have also demonstrated hostility towards his opponents. This represents a clear split in the party, which has come to characterise Corbyn’s period as leader. Following his election to the leadership, Corbyn has sought to circumnavigate the authority of the PLP in order to promote his views, while the PLP has sought to challenge his authority as leader of the Labour Party. This was evident in the fallout from his election as leader, in the handling of issues such as the Syria vote, in his role in the vote to leave the European Union, in Smith’s challenge for the leadership and in the assumption that Corbyn would lead Labour to certain defeat in a general election. These assumptions were proven accurate when Corbyn led Labour into a humiliating defeat in December 2019.

228

Conclusion

In this book, we have examined how and why Britain’s two major parties – Conservative and Labour – have chosen their leaders, from their origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively to the present day. As we noted in the Introduction, British parties have employed, generally speaking, four different systems for choosing their leaders: Leaders have been (1) informally selected by party elites or formally elected by (2) the parliamentary party, (3) by a college composed of sections of the party, or (4) by a ballot of party members. In the period since 1963, each major British party has moved from one of these systems to another. (Stark, 1996: 2)

As we explained in Chapters 1 and 2, the Conservative Party used the first of these methods until 1965 and the second thereafter until 1997. Chapter 3 discussed how, in 1998, it introduced a new system in which MPs would initially vote in a series of eliminative and secret ballots until just two candidates remained. These would then proceed to a postal ballot of party members, which would decide the outcome. Chapter 4 detailed how Labour initially used the second method until 1981, when it introduced an electoral college to elect the party’s leader and deputy leader. Chapter 5 described how the electoral college was modified in 1988 and then more substantially in 1993, with the abolition of block voting in both the CLP and trade union sections, and the introduction of OMOV. Chapter 6 dealt with the abolition of the electoral college in 2014 and the pure OMOV system that replaced it, under which the leader and  deputy leader would be elected by party members, and registered and affiliated supporters, each of whom would receive a single vote, with all votes weighted equally. This meant, for example, that members of trade unions affiliated to the party who were not already party members would have to r­ egister as Labour supporters in order to vote. 229

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As well as explaining the rules adopted and used by each party for choosing its leaders, and how and why these have changed over time, this book has also examined how these have affected the conduct of leadership campaigns and the impact of the campaigns on the outcomes of leadership contests. In terms of the  rules, we find (unsurprisingly) that exclusively parliamentary contests in which only MPs were allowed to vote have been shorter, less expensive to organise and attracted less extensive coverage in the national news media than those in which extra-parliamentary groups (a party’s affiliated organisations, members, and affiliated and registered supporters) were also entitled to do so, and have either made or had a significant impact on the final decision. With regard to the impact of party leadership campaigns on the outcomes of leadership contests, we referred in the Introduction to the findings of Stark’s study, published in 1996, which concludes that: While the rules do affect some of the general characteristics of leadership campaigns, each system is sufficiently flexible to allow candidates to decide how active or restrained their campaigning will be. Leadership campaigns seem only to influence the outcome of a contest if MPs are electing the leader; rank-and-file party members appear to be far less susceptible than MPs to being swayed by campaign tactics. (Stark, 1996: 7)

Of the 16 leadership campaigns involving the five major British parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal, SDP and Liberal Democrat) between 1963 and 1994, Stark’s study finds that a vote swing of sufficient size to change the outcome of a contest occurred in only four: Events during three other campaigns had an impact on the margin of victory, though they did not change the result. In nine other cases the campaign did not matter at all. … Easily the most intriguing finding revealed by this analysis is that all four of the campaigns which mattered [1963, 1965, 1975 and 1990] occurred in Conservative leadership contests. In no other party has a campaign influenced a sufficient number of votes to alter the outcome from what it would have been at the start of the contest. … By comparison, only one of Labour’s seven campaigns [1963] even influenced the margin of victory. All four electoral college contests [1983, 1988, 1992 and 1994] have been won by large margins by the candidate who was the clear front-runner at the start of the campaign. (Stark, 1996: 117, 120–1)

Only infrequently, Stark concludes, do leadership campaigns appear to influence a substantial number of votes and campaigns only appear to influence the outcome of a contest if MPs alone are electing the leader. Hence, selection rules, he argues, do not typically determine who becomes a party leader: 230

Conclusion Most likely, only two of the 16 leaders chosen between 1963 and 1994 – Home and Thatcher – would have failed to have been chosen under their party’s alternative selection system. A candidate wins [the] party leadership because he or she is thought to be most capable of enabling the party to fulfil its strategic goals of remaining united [acceptability], winning elections [electability] and implementing policies in government [competence]. (Stark, 1996: 7)

As we have explained in this book, the years that have passed since Stark’s study was published do not invalidate most of its findings for the period in question (1963–94), although its comparison between the two main parties is arguably too simplistic in that the Labour leadership campaign of 1980 may have influenced the votes of a sufficient number of MPs to change the outcome of the contest, whereas the subsequent Conservative campaigns of 1995 and 1997 arguably did not. The period since 2001, however, has produced a number of examples, from both the Conservative and Labour parties, which call into question the assumptions of Stark’s study and its applicability to more recent leadership contests. The Conservative leadership elections of 2001 and 2005 were both won by candidates who were regarded as outsiders at the start of the campaign, and both Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron were elected by party members. Although both candidates would probably have won had the final decision rested with MPs alone, these two examples represent clear exceptions to Stark’s observation that leadership campaigns appear ‘only to influence the outcome of a contest if MPs are electing the leader’. Similarly, the Labour leadership elections of 2010 and 2015 were won by candidates who were widely seen as the second favourite (Miliband) and a rank outsider (Corbyn) respectively when the campaign began. In each case, the campaign clearly changed the outcome of a contest in which the extra-parliamentary party, not MPs alone, were electing the Labour leader and neither of the winning candidates would have been chosen under the party’s previous selection system (successive ballots of MPs and the electoral college respectively). Hence, in both cases, the selection rules helped to determine the outcome of the contest and in 2015 a candidate secured the Labour leadership largely for ideological reasons, not because he was thought to be the candidate most capable of enabling the party to fulfil its strategic goals of remaining united (acceptability), winning elections (electability) and implementing policies in government (competence).

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Index

1922 Committee 12, 17, 31, 44, 50, 81, 97–8, 101–2, 109, 118 Attlee, Clement 131–2, 137–43, 145, 147, 159 Baldwin, Stanley 8–10 Bale, Timothy 75, 123, 189, 197 Barnes, George 133–4 Benn, Tony 23, 148, 150–2, 154, 156, 164–7, 169–77, 179–81, 187, 198, 205, 219, 224 Benn, Hilary 188, 214–16, 218 Blair, Tony 69, 87, 89, 93, 97–9, 182–8, 190, 195–8, 201, 203, 207, 210, 212–14 Brexit 76, 115, 117, 119–20, 122–6, 225, 228 British Leyland 205 British Library 76 Brown, Gordon 184, 186–90, 212–13 Callaghan, James 146–54, 156–7, 159–60, 166, 168, 190, 207 Cameron, David 2, 100, 103–10, 112–14, 128, 211, 215, 217, 227, 231 Chamberlain, Neville 39 Channel Four 222 Churchill, Randolph 24, 27–9 Churchill, Winston 11–15, 19, 24, 39 Corbyn, Jeremy 2, 38, 113, 116, 122, 192–3, 195, 197–8, 202–28, 231 antisemitism, 228 Curtice, Sir John 217, 223–4 Daily Mirror, The 222 Daily Mail, The 138

Daily Telegraph, The 16, 123, 103 Denham, Andrew 1, 106, 188–91, 193, 209, 212–13 Dorey, Peter 23, 48, 55, 75–6, 89, 106, 188–9, 191, 193, 209, 212–13 Douglas-Home, Alec 20, 31 Eden, Anthony 11–17, 20, 39 Eton, 27, 41, 43, 46, 49, 108, 123 European Union 2, 76, 216, 224, 228 Common Market 44–5, 216 EEC 145, 172 Foot, Michael 116, 132–3, 150–9, 164, 166–7, 187, 212 Gaitskell, Hugh 131–2, 140–7, 183, 190, 196, 213 Gamble, Andrew 67 Guardian, The 124, 154, 157, 188, 195, 198–9, 200–1, 205, 222 Hague, William 66, 72–5, 78, 80–2, 84, 86–9, 91, 95, 99–100 Harman, Harriet, 163, 188–90, 197, 199 Hardie, Keir 133–4 Hattersley, Roy 150, 155, 163, 166–72, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 187 Hayton, Richard 96, 113 Healey, Denis 55, 133, 149–57, 159, 163–5, 167, 170–2, 174–5, 181, 187, 216 Heath, Edward 25–6, 29, 41–57, 61, 77–80, 86, 217

253

Index Oxford University 123, 143

Henderson, Arthur 132, 134, 136–7 Heppell, Timothy 1, 66, 75–6, 96–7, 106, 112–13, 132, 146–8, 151, 159, 164–88, 193, 203, 208–9, 223 Heseltine, Michael 59–66, 72, 76–7, 86 Hickson, Kevin 217 Howard, Michael 3, 63–4, 72, 73, 98–103, 128

Panorama 45 Powell, Enoch 24–5, 36, 44, 46, 48, 52 Prescott, John 163, 175–6, 178–81, 183–7 Queen Elizabeth II 13–16, 20, 27 rhetoric (oratory) 41, 55, 67, 95, 105, 107 Roe-Crines, Andrew 113, 132, 157, 193, 202, 208–10, 213–14, 216, 223, 225 Royal Mail 226 Russia 19

Iraq War 97, 188–9, 192, 203, 207 Islamic State 207, 215 Jeffery, David 113, 193, 202, 208–9, 223 Johnson, Boris 2, 109, 117–26, 128, 218, 228

Seldon, Anthony 65, 89, 97, 186–7 Sky News 212, 222 Smith, Iain Duncan 87, 90–9, 101, 103, 113, 127–8 Smith, John 150, 176–87, 190, 196–7, 213–14, 216 South Africa 192, 206 Spectator, The 24, 90, 123 Stark, Leonard 1, 2, 4, 36, 113, 125–7, 129, 132, 150–1, 156, 166, 168–70, 172, 174, 180–2, 184, 187, 208–9, 211, 230–1 statecraft 33, 35, 75, 122, 128, 218 Suez 14–15 Sun, The 198

Kinnock, Neil 154, 157, 163, 165–81, 186–7, 190, 196–7, 213–14, 219, 221–2, 224 Lansbury, George 132, 135, 137–9 Liverpool 210–11, 224 Macdonald, Ramsay 137, 139, 140, 145, 160 Macmillan, Harold 5, 13–24, 26–29, 39, 40, 47, 147 Major, John 42, 58, 61–71, 74–5, 78, 81, 85, 89–90, 93, 99, 111, 177, 179, 183, 187, 224 May, Theresa 2, 95, 103, 107, 109–11, 113–19, 123–4, 128, 224–5, 227–8 Miliband, Ed 159, 163, 190–3, 195–7, 201, 208, 211–14, 225, 231 National Executive Committee 34, 138, 141, 143–4, 150, 156, 161, 173–4, 178–9, 182, 194–5, 205–6, 220–1 National Health Service (NHS) 108, 140, 189, 199, 205, 226 New Statesman 197, 200, 212, 222, 226 Newsnight 155, 189 Norton, (Lord) Philip 7, 9, 49–50, 65

Thatcher, Margaret 4, 28, 41–3, 52–67, 70–1, 74–80, 83, 85–6, 88, 90–1, 93–5, 103–5, 107, 109, 177, 224, 231 Times, The 30, 113–14, 155 Trump, Donald 123 Watson, Tom 200, 216, 220 Wilson, Harold 131–2, 143–9, 151, 153, 156–7, 160, 166, 168, 214

254