Our type of Labourism ain’t popular any more. The young ’uns and some of the punters find us too wishy-washy. We’re not fashionable. Whereas Trotskyism, Marxism, Leninism and every other revolutionary ‘ism’ are the ‘in’ things. At least amongst local activists.
David Pinner, There’ll Always Be an England (1984)
My father said, ‘I have worked and slaved and fought to join the middle classes, Adrian, and now I’m here I don’t want my son admiring proles and revolutionaries.’
Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984)
I have forgotten precisely what brand of MP old Guthrie was; he was either right-wing Labour or left-wing Conservative until, in the end, he gave up politics and joined the SDP. He was dedicated to the middle of the road.
John Mortimer, Rumpole’s Last Case (1987)
‘It was not a happy period.’ James Callaghan’s assessment of the aftermath of Labour’s comprehensive defeat in the 1979 election was one of the great understatements of modern political history. In fact for the entirety of Thatcher’s first term, the main opposition party seemed more interested in fighting within itself than in challenging the government’s policies, and the self-inflicted wounds that resulted were to take years to heal.
The problems dated back more than a decade and were rooted in a lack of trust between the parliamentary party and a large swathe of the membership. The 1974–79 government, led first by Harold Wilson and then by Callaghan, had failed, in the eyes of many activists, to implement the more radical proposals adopted by the annual conference and, worse yet, had been obliged to make cuts in public spending in exchange for that loan facility from the International Monetary Fund. All Labour governments, it was argued, had drifted to the right when in power, jettisoning socialism wherever possible, and now the time had come to ensure that it never happened again. The attitude was summed up in the words of Harry Perkins, the left-wing hero of Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup: ‘Serves us bloody right,’ he reflects. ‘We offer the electorate a choice between two Tory parties and they choose the real one. Now we find ourselves back in the wilderness for five years and the country’s going down the plughole.’
Accordingly, a series of reforms were proposed that would bind the parliamentary party and a future Labour government, should such an entity ever materialize. First, the leader should no longer be selected by MPs alone, but by the membership of the entire movement. Second, every MP should face a reselection procedure in between each general election, to ensure that they remained answerable and acceptable to their local party. And third, the manifesto should be drawn up by the party’s governing body, the national executive committee (NEC), rather than by the somewhat haphazard process previously used, in which the leader exercised the ultimate authority. There were other suggestions, including that all personal aides and researchers used by members of the shadow cabinet should be employed directly by the party, and that there should be no more Labour peers created, but it was the three primary demands that formed the centrepiece of the internal reforms and that were to dominate the party in the immediate wake of election defeat. This was, its supporters insisted, a move to a more democratic party, liberated from the vacillations of the parliamentary leadership, who had always sought the easiest option.
It also represented a profound reinterpretation of the party structure as it had emerged in mainstream British politics. Erstwhile Conservative cabinet minister Ian Gilmour pointed out that by convention in Britain ‘consensus politicians have recognized that, under our unusual system which normally gives the whole of the executive and the control of the legislature to one party even if it has won only a minority of the votes, the winning party does not have carte blanche to do whatever its extremists may happen to want.’ His criticism was primarily directed at Margaret Thatcher’s espousal of ‘conviction’ politics, but it applied equally to the restless left of the Labour Party. For the intention of the reformers was to shift the balance of power away from the leader and the MPs, towards the annual conference and the NEC. And as such, it naturally attracted the suspicions of MPs, who jealously guarded their independence and their status as representatives of their constituents, subscribing (when the whips allowed them) to the argument that Edmund Burke had famously put in 1774 to his electorate: ‘Your representative owes you not his industry alone, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving, you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’ The moves now afoot challenged that presumption at its core, seeking instead to make MPs in effect delegates of their local parties, a demand that had been rejected as far back as 1902 by Keir Hardie, in the dawn of the Labour Party.
Perhaps just as importantly, since even MPs have human hopes and fears, the reselection proposal threatened a large number of them with the prospect of being made unemployed, a fact which Tony Benn, while campaigning for the changes, sometimes appreciated: ‘I suppose like everyone else in Britain today they are worried about their jobs and I must take that very seriously.’ And the idea of stopping any future Labour peerages was hardly welcome news to those who sought a secure and comfortable retirement from the Commons.
Benn was now in a unique position, exempted from the left’s attacks on the previous government, despite having been a leading member of it, because he spoke more clearly than anyone of the need for reforms. He had emerged during the 1970s as the most persuasive and charismatic leader of the left for two decades, charming, funny and impassioned, as adept in the television studio as he was at mass rallies, and his growing popularity was the source of some concern. ‘The big event in the Labour Party in the early ’80s was the prospect that Mr Benn would become leader, which caused mild hysteria not only amongst the right-wing media but also amongst the establishment of the Labour Party,’ reflected Chris Mullin, some years later. ‘It wasn’t the worry that we would become unelectable, it was the worry that we would indeed be electable.’ Having served as industry secretary under Wilson and having found his proposals for industrial reform blocked, Benn’s dissatisfaction – together with his ability to tell the story from the inside – chimed with those thousands of activists who felt cheated by the leadership, so that although he had not originated the demands for change, they became identified almost entirely with him.
The principles behind the reform proposals were agreed at an NEC meeting in July 1979, to be put to the conference that autumn. The Labour establishment was not slow to recognize the danger, even if it was not entirely sure how to respond. ‘Having lost the last general election, the Labour Party is now hard at work preparing to lose the next,’ wrote Terence Lancaster in the Daily Mirror, warning that if the choice of leader was to be left to conference, ‘Tony Benn would ride to an easy victory.’ In an editorial headlined LABOUR: THE ROAD TO OBLIVION, the same paper spelt out the ultimate fear that the left’s proposals on internal democracy could produce a situation where the party ‘will split in two. And a split could keep the Tories in power for a generation.’ Less friendly commentators came to the same conclusion at the autumn conference; Benn, wrote the Daily Mail, had ‘planted a time-bomb which could still explode and split Labour’s left wing from a new social democratic and liberal party’.
That conference was a public relations disaster for the Labour Party, setting a pattern that was to become very familiar over the next few years. The surviving MPs, fewer in number than they had been for twenty years, sat in a single ramped block, under continual attack from the rostrum and even from the platform. ‘I feel like a defendant in a People’s Court,’ commented one, and there was little that week to dispel the impression. ‘I come not to praise Callaghan but to bury him,’ announced Ron Hayward, the party’s general secretary, to enthusiastic cheers. He proceeded to analyse what had gone wrong: ‘Why was there a winter of discontent? The reason was that, for good or ill, the cabinet supported by the MPs ignored congress and conference decisions. It was as simple as that.’ A succession of speakers followed the same direction, blaming the parliamentary party for all that had gone wrong and insisting that, if only the wisdom of the conference had been heeded, things would have been well. The sustained fury that was unleashed that week upon the hapless MPs was unprecedented in mainstream British politics and did more damage to the party’s image than anything since Callaghan had returned from Guadeloupe in the midst of the winter of discontent to enquire – in the words put in his mouth by the Sun – ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
‘There is no guarantee of even the politest and mildest form of applause for those who oppose the left,’ noted one contemporary account. ‘It is not only deference but some of the ordinary conventions of public debate that have gone.’ In vain did Michael Foot try to explain that ‘It is easy to say that all you have to do is to obey conference’s decisions. Sometimes conference asks for contradictory things.’ No one was listening. Nor did they pay much attention to Denis Healey as, recognizing that now was not the time for his brand of pragmatic politics, he shrugged off the entire experience: ‘I hope next year when you have got the bad blood of the election disappointment out of your system, we will concentrate on building a party which will get back for our movement the millions of voters we have lost not to the Communist Party, not to the militant groups, but to the Tories and Liberals.’
Despite all the heat and fervour, the conference failed to provide the necessary majorities on the issues of the leadership elections and the manifesto (‘We’ll come back next year and put it right,’ Benn promised his diary), but did accept the call for mandatory reselection of MPs, the consequence of which, as he rightly noted, was that there were now ‘635 vacancies for candidates in the next parliament’.
While the argument over party reforms continued, the left was simultaneously opening a second front, aimed at winning the party to a much more radical raft of policies. A special conference at Wembley in May 1980 approved a document, Peace, Jobs, Freedom, that spelt out a new direction for the party: in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community, and advocating an alternative economic policy that was based on extending nationalization of industry and on import controls (there was, for example, to be a complete ban on the importation of cars). This new set of socialist shibboleths became known on the left simply as ‘the policies’, a phrase so common that it was spoken as though capitalized: The Policies. Again the tone of the conference was far from fraternal. When Healey went up to speak, he was accompanied by chants of ‘Out! Out! Out!’ while Terry Fields, a delegate from Liverpool and a member of the Trotskyist group Militant, spelt out the divisions that were opening up: ‘To the weak-hearted, the traitors and the cowards I say: “Get out of our movement. There is no place in it for you.” ’
He was not alone in reaching such a conclusion. It was in the aftermath of the Wembley conference, and particularly in response to its anti-Europeanism, that the first real stirrings were heard publicly of the split that the newspapers had warned about the previous year. Former cabinet ministers David Owen (who had been booed and hissed when he spoke on defence), Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers issued a joint statement insisting ‘There are some of us who will not accept a choice between socialism and Europe.’ The gang of three, as they swiftly became known, followed up with an open letter identifying the key areas of difference between them and emerging party policy: membership of the EEC, membership of NATO, parliamentary democracy and the mixed economy.
Of the gang of three, the leading figure turned out to be Owen, a politician who sometimes gave the impression of having been designed by a computer program. A handsome, articulate hospital registrar who turned to politics, he became foreign secretary at an unusually young age and appeared destined for even higher glories, but somehow he didn’t quite seem right in some indefinable way. His attempts at sound bites, for example – forever urging the need to be ‘tough but tender’ while avoiding ‘fudge and mudge’ – never resonated and weren’t adopted by anyone else. He seldom made an appearance in which he didn’t have to raise his hand to brush back hair that had casually tumbled across his concerned, slightly frowning forehead; it was so familiar a gesture that one would be forgiven for thinking it was deliberate. And his reputation for arrogance, for not being a team-player, would haunt him through his whole career. ‘He is always trying to look the part of a future PM and not succeeding and is totally humourless,’ was the conclusion of museum director Roy Strong, while Denis Healey was more forthright: ‘The good fairies gave the young doctor almost everything: thick dark locks, matinee idol features, a lightning intelligence – unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a shit.’
Shirley Williams, on the other hand, was dishevelled, honest and human, as well as being that rarest of creatures, a genuinely popular politician. And Rodgers, despite having been transport secretary under Callaghan, was virtually unknown to the electorate: renowned and respected as a great organizer by his colleagues, but little seen in public. Together these three represented the next generation of social democrats, a wing of the party that had provided leadership for many years but now found itself fighting rearguard actions against the advance of the left.
Despite this emergence of an opposition to Benn, the moves towards reform continued apace; the month after Wembley, an internal commission of inquiry accepted the principle of the leader being chosen by an electoral college, comprising the parliamentary party, the trade unions, the constituency parties and the affiliated socialist societies. The battle-lines were by now very clearly drawn. The gang of three were the most visible opponents of Benn, but they were by no means without support in the parliamentary ranks, as he noted in July 1980: ‘I am fed up with the right-wing leaders of the PLP: they don’t agree with the party on defence, on economic policy, on the Common Market, on cruise missiles, on wages, and it can’t go on for much longer.’
The problem for those who wanted to see a fight back on behalf of the parliamentarians was that the older leaders of the party’s right wing were conspicuous by their inactivity. Callaghan was looking exhausted by his time in government (‘a shadow of his former self,’ said a Daily Mail editorial in 1980), and should have resigned as leader after the election defeat to allow his heir presumptive, Denis Healey, to take over, but he remained ‘in the vain hope that some of the bitterness would have drained away’. He also offered a cricketing metaphor, saying that he was staying ‘to take the shine off the ball’ for Healey, to which the latter was later to respond that he ‘not only took the shine off the ball, but ripped away the leather as well’.
Healey was, for the wider electorate, the obvious man to take Labour into the new decade. A member of the Communist Party in his student days, and a veteran of the Second World War (serving with particular distinction in the Anzio landings of 1944), he was now firmly on the social democratic wing of the party. He had been chancellor right through the last government and was known for his commitment to the redistribution of wealth, as seen in his tax-raising budgets, as well as for his forthright views on national defence. His colleagues saw him as a bruiser who only just stopped short of physical assault when disputes got heated, but for the public the perception was shaped by the portrayal of him by the television impressionist Mike Yarwood: all bristly eyebrows and a tendency to dismiss opponents with the putdown ‘Silly Billy’. He never actually said any such thing (except in jokey imitation of Yarwood), but he did have a remarkable ability to produce colourfully original phrases that resonated in the popular imagination; when, for example, he wished to reply to critics of his spending cuts in 1976, denouncing them for failing to face up to reality, it was not enough to say that they were out of their minds, rather: ‘They must be out of their tiny Chinese minds.’ Quite what that meant, except for its hint of Maoism, was uncertain, but it was striking enough that it stuck.
But after five difficult years at the exchequer, Healey too was evidently in need of a period of recovery after the 1979 election. ‘I was glad to take things a little more easily,’ he wrote of the period, though he did find time to publish a well received book of photography. Meanwhile the trade union leaders, who traditionally supported the leadership, had been so alienated by Callaghan’s attempt in 1978–79 to impose a pay restraint policy against their wishes that, for now at least, they found themselves more inclined to side with the left, who had opposed that policy from the outset; they too were seduced by the idea of having greater control over the parliamentary party.
In the absence of the senior right-wing figures, it was Benn who was making all the running. ‘In those exhilarating years Tony seemed to be everywhere,’ remembered Ken Livingstone, then the Labour leader of the Greater London Council. ‘Audiences of hundreds and often thousands listened as he analyzed, examined, predicted and gave confidence that we could achieve socialism.’ Like so many others, he found Benn’s energy electrifying: ‘Not only did every speech seem to produce a new idea or policy but each one was crafted with a care and a beauty the movement had not heard since the death of Nye Bevan.’
It wasn’t a view universally shared. At the annual conference in 1980 Benn delivered one of his best-known speeches (‘a competent, “prime ministerial”-type speech,’ he thought), calling for an incoming Labour government to push through immediate legislation on the extension of industrial democracy and public ownership, the return of all powers from Europe and – to facilitate these moves – the abolition of the House of Lords, the latter to be achieved by the creation of a thousand new peers, who would then commit mass political suicide. ‘This was cloud cuckoo land,’ snorted Owen, but the reception in the hall was rapturous. ‘He tells them in effect that given the faith and the will-power it will all be quite easy,’ reflected Lord Longford, unhappily. ‘Those who have served with him in two governments know all too well that things are not remotely like that. They cannot believe he is unaware of his own gross over-simplification. Hence the antagonism amongst the MPs is directed not only against the policies but against the man.’ Longford himself had briefly been one of those colleagues, serving with Benn in Harold Wilson’s first government, though he was by now a long way out of touch with what had become of the Labour Party.
This question of the personal animosity that Benn sometimes inspired was a major factor in how he was perceived. From his position, it was an irrelevancy – personality counted for much less than The Policies or the issues (‘the ishoos’ as they were sometimes mockingly known, in a nod to his slightly impeded delivery) – and his view became orthodoxy on the left: ‘Personality clashes and the conflict of competing ambitions are a thin mask over the developing economic and social forces to which individual politicians respond,’ wrote Livingstone. But there were many supporters who couldn’t separate Benn’s personal charm and appeal, his ever-enthusiastic optimism, from the message he was conveying. And, on the other side, there were opponents who simply wouldn’t accept this reductionist position: ‘Politics is about personalities and how we behave as personalities, and whether our actions point to comradeship,’ argued the future foreign secretary Jack Straw, who had been elected as a Labour MP in 1979. For the press, which was almost universally hostile, it was Benn’s calm, unflustered discussion of the issues that caused ever greater irritation: ‘Though his tongue speaks with sweet reason, he has the mind of a ranter and the eyes of a fanatic,’ fretted the Daily Express.
Some of the same distaste and fear was directed at the ranks of activists (as opposed to those who were simply party members) that could be glimpsed over Benn’s shoulder. Long ago Sidney Webb, who had co-written the party’s constitution, had claimed that constituency parties ‘were frequently unrepresentative groups of nonentities dominated by fanatics, cranks and extremists’, and that assessment was primarily why they had never been given power within the movement. Now they were determined to rectify the situation.
‘We must not be afraid to challenge openly authoritarianism, dogma or the threat posed by the elitism of the activists,’ declared Owen in a speech in January 1980, but for many the problem was simply staying awake long enough to do any such challenging. The new breed of activist tended to be young, without family commitments, often without work commitments, and with an almost insatiable desire to attend political meetings, the longer the better: ‘Some of us go to meetings every night of the week,’ boasted a delegate to the Labour conference, with a hint of hostility towards those who couldn’t keep up. ‘We used to have a lot of old people come to meetings,’ explained Jim Evans, a Labour councillor in Islington, north London. ‘The middle-class student types just laughed at them and mocked them, and so they stopped coming. In the old days we had meetings and then went off to the pub afterwards. These new people started coming in with sandwiches and flasks and the meetings went on until two or three in the morning.’ The issue of class was a recurring theme in the complaints of the older Labour figures: ‘It almost seemed as if this Seventies generation were bitter that they too had not had the opportunity of suffering real poverty and hardship like we did, but had only been able to study it at university,’ scoffed Nottinghamshire MP, Joe Ashton. His colleague Austin Mitchell was similarly scornful, talking about ‘power without responsibility, now the prerogative of activists as well as harlots’.
This, the Labour right complained, was the truth of the ‘active not passive democracy’ that Benn and his supporters wished to introduce into the party: handing over power not to the people, nor even to the mass membership, but to the ultra-committed activists who, like the labourers in the vineyard toiling all day, resented any suggestion that humble members of the electorate, arriving late in the afternoon, should be given equal consideration. To make things worse, the annual subscription to become a member of the Labour Party rose sharply, from £1.20 in 1979 to £5.00 two years later, though of course discounts were available for the unemployed. It was perhaps not entirely surprising that the membership figures fell, though this was also part of a longer trend: having reached a peak of 700,000 in 1972, individual membership had fallen below 300,000 fifteen years later. And as the party machine shrank, so too did its claim to be representative.
That 1980 conference, with his ‘thousand peers’ speech, was a triumph for Benn, the highest point in his attempt to transform the party. In particular, the conference finally agreed that in future the leader would be chosen not by the MPs, but by an electoral college, though it failed to agree the composition of that body. Instead another special conference at Wembley was to be held, this time in January 1981 (making four national conferences in twenty-one months – a dream come true for activists). But before that could happen, and a new system could be adopted, Callaghan pre-empted the entire process by announcing that he was, eventually, going to resign as leader, allowing one last election to be staged under the old rules.
As far as the general public was concerned, there was just one serious candidature, that of Denis Healey who, according to the opinion polls, enjoyed the support of around 70 per cent of the nation. Tony Benn, the only man with sufficient support inside the party to mount a real challenge on behalf of the activists (a survey of constituency chairmen showed him leading Healey), was effectively precluded from standing, since the left felt that holding the election was inappropriate in the circumstances, and that it would be more legitimate to wait till the new system were in place. There was also the problem that Benn didn’t stand a chance of winning over sufficient numbers of MPs to avoid humiliation. Instead Michael Foot, the deputy leader and the veteran hero of the left, even if his reputation had been somewhat tarnished by his enthusiastic support for Callaghan’s government, threw his hat in the ring. Two other challengers, John Silkin and Peter Shore, were rapidly disposed of, and in November 1980, Foot beat Healey in the final ballot by a margin of 139 votes to 129. So unexpected was the result that the Guardian journalists Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, who were busily writing a biography of Healey in the sure and certain hope of his election, suddenly had to shift to writing one of Foot instead.
The surprise was occasioned partly because Foot was self-evidently not the real choice of the MPs (it was assumed they had voted for the left option in the hope of a quiet life), partly because he was the least popular candidate amongst the wider public, and partly because he had been such a determined backbencher for so long – he had only accepted a frontbench job after nearly thirty years in the Commons. But mostly Foot’s elevation was unexpected because he simply didn’t look like a leader for the modern world; he was, in the words of novelist Mark Lawson, ‘an elderly Byron enthusiast whose barber and tailor apparently cared little for the new religion of media beauty’. In his day he had been a fine journalist and an accomplished orator, but that day was a long way distant by now, and apart from romantic nostalgia, it wasn’t entirely clear what his appeal to the electorate was supposed to be. He was a year younger than Callaghan, but looked considerably older, and his image was hardly helped when, two days after his election, he fell down some stairs in the Commons and broke his ankle, ensuring that his first week as leader ended with him appearing on crutches at prime minister’s questions. Nor was his authority enhanced by a poll that month demonstrating the public’s belief that Benn was as powerful a figure in the country as was Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor of the exchequer: Foot might have been the leader, but people suspected the presence of a back-seat driver.
And if the danger from the left were not sufficient, there was also to the right of him the lurking threat of Roy Jenkins. A distinguished former home secretary and chancellor, and hero of the liberal left for his social reforms in the 1960s, Jenkins had left parliament in 1977 to become president of the European Commission, a job he was scheduled to leave in January 1981. In anticipation of his return to Britain, he began to make his considerable presence felt, calling in two key speeches for the introduction of proportional representation and for the creation of a radical centre party, even while admitting that such a venture might be a disaster. ‘The experimental plane may well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway,’ he explained, using an image aimed at capturing the imagination of cartoonists. ‘But the reverse could occur and the experimental plane could soar in the sky.’ It was a courageous and risky strategy, but it was perhaps his only real way back from Europe, as Jim Hacker jokingly pointed out in the sitcom Yes, Minister when rejecting the idea of becoming an EEC commissioner: ‘It’s curtains as far as British politics is concerned. It’s worse than a peerage. Absolute failure, total failure. You’re reduced to forming a new party if you ever want to get back.’
Hacker wasn’t the only one to mock. Jenkins’s inability to pronounce the letter ‘r’ led to him being almost universally known as Woy, while his fondness for good wine and his grand manner, seemingly so far removed from his origins in a South Wales mining family, made him an easy target for ridicule. Fleet Street’s finest duly obliged (‘a much loved gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us,’ wrote Frank Johnson), while he was known in European circles as Le Roi Jean Quinze, but perhaps the most authoritative summary came from Harold Wilson: ‘He was born old.’ Jenkins had long been a figure of real weight and experience, and the idea that the prince over the water might join forces with the gang of three brought a new dimension to the threat they presented. Or, from another perspective, it would simply add the March Hare to complete the cast of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that had been assembled by Owen.
Even with Benn and Jenkins loitering in the wings, Foot’s unlikely promotion from understudy to leading player was not immediately seen as being a completely hopeless cause. He had inherited a party that felt like it might split at any moment, but he had at least done so when the prime minister was so unpopular that many were prepared willingly to suspend their disbelief. ‘There has always been something rather engaging about this character with his shabby clothes and his unkempt (though recently trimmed) hair. Foot is a kindly, friendly man.’ That was the perhaps surprising verdict of the Sun, which went on to promise: ‘If he demonstrates his firm resolve to keep the Labour Party on the path of parliamentary democracy; if he makes clear his intention to turn it once more into a respectable and responsible force in politics; then he will find the Sun in his corner.’ (It was a considerably more enthusiastic greeting than Ronald Reagan had received in the paper on being elected US president the previous week: ‘He is not an inspiring figure.’)
When therefore the Labour tribes gathered at Wembley in January 1981, the last time that many would meet in allegedly fraternal circumstances, it was under a new leader, albeit one who followed Callaghan’s recent example and made no attempt to exert any leadership. The atmosphere was described by Lord Longford: ‘The flavour of the conference was more assertively proletarian even than usual. Many, perhaps half, of the delegates could not have passed as working class at any time in their adult lives. Yet whenever the proletarian note was struck, it was the winner.’ There was an element of ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ about his observations, but there was too more than a hint of truth.
The debate was essentially over the composition of the electoral college, though first the delegates had to dismiss the right’s call for a simple one-member, one-vote ballot of the party. David Owen pointed out that no other socialist party in Europe was dominated by the block vote of trades unions in the same way that Labour was, and argued that ‘to allow the block vote to choose the future prime minister is an outrage. It is a disgrace and this conference ought not to accept it.’ The system of the block vote, in which a union delegation cast the agglomerated votes of all their members who had paid the political levy to the Labour Party (or rather an approximation of that number of members, since the accounting system was far from perfect), had been attracting considerable hostility ever since union leaders had begun to side on a regular basis with the left against the parliamentary leadership. It was clearly an undemocratic nonsense, with the millions of union votes cast easily outweighing those of the constituency membership, let alone those of the MPs, who existed in this context only as individual members, and its sheer inefficiency was amply on display at Wembley.
The proposal that finally won the day called for the votes in the electoral college to be split between unions, MPs and constituency parties in the proportion of 40-30-30. This was the favoured formula of the left, but its success was the result not of conspiracy or lobbying but of pure cock-up, winning through only because the delegation from the engineering union, the AUEW, failed to vote for the option that they – and the leadership – favoured, giving 50 per cent to the MPs, with the remainder split between unions and constituencies. The fact that the unions ended up with the largest proportion of the votes, but only because they themselves had made such a pig’s ear of the process, did little to inspire confidence in the future operation of the much-vaunted college.
The conference had been held on a Saturday. On the Sunday the gang of four (as Owen, Williams and Rodgers, now joined by Jenkins, had become known) stole the media headlines by issuing what was instantly nicknamed the Limehouse Declaration, since it was first proclaimed at Owen’s house in London’s Docklands. ‘The calamitous outcome of the Labour Party Wembley conference demands a new start in British politics,’ it opened, and it concluded: ‘We recognize that for those people who have given much of their lives to the Labour Party, the choice that lies ahead will be deeply painful. But we believe that the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced.’ In between came a statement of broad principles – a mixed economy, membership of the EEC and of NATO, decentralized decision-making, egalitarianism and the elimination of poverty – none of which was particularly new.
But then novelty was not really a requirement. The call for a new party (albeit in the thinly disguised, and obviously temporary, form of a body called the Council for Social Democracy) was intended to appeal first and foremost to disaffected Labour members, seeking an honourable way out of a party they feared had been taken over by extremists. What was needed was not new policies, but an unashamed reclaiming of the past, the promise of, as academic Ralf Dahrendorf put it, ‘a better yesterday’. The claim was that the social democrats had not changed, it was the Labour Party. When Owen was urged to replicate Hugh Gaitskell’s 1960 determination to ‘fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love’, he shrugged: ‘It also needs to be said that you can compromise and compromise and compromise again and destroy the party you love.’
The Limehouse Declaration was subsequently published as an advert in the Guardian, accompanied by a list of a hundred supporters, including academics, ex-cabinet ministers, figures from the arts and – the sole trade union leader – Frank Chapple of the electricians. That the Guardian was the chosen vehicle for the advert was no accident; it was the one paper that was most easily identified with the initiative, though there were discussions at a senior level at the Daily Mirror about whether to back the venture, and Rupert Murdoch was later to tell Andrew Neil, his newly appointed editor of the Sunday Times, that ‘I could tolerate it supporting the SDP’ if Neil so wished (he didn’t). Even The Times in an unexpected leader, written by departing editor William Rees-Mogg, offered some endorsement, with the suggestion that Shirley Williams would make a fine prime minister. The praise here was tempered by the paper’s view of her as a ‘somewhat indecisive woman, of middling intellectual attainments and mistaken views’, but it did celebrate her innate courtesy and her ability to communicate: ‘Mrs Williams talks to the British people in their own accents, sometimes muddled, often courageous, always human and always kind.’ Other parts of the media were also encouraging, particularly since it was Labour that was likely to suffer from the birth of a new centre-left party.
Finally, two months after Wembley, the party itself was launched with thirteen MPs, though neither Jenkins nor Williams was at that stage in the Commons. It was christened the Social Democratic Party, the other founder-members having rejected Jenkins’s suggestions that it be called the Democrats or the Radicals (the latter would surely have been a mistake, given his speech impediment). The launch itself was a triumph of marketing, as indeed it needed to be since there were as yet no policies to trumpet. Adverts appeared under the slogan ‘The SDP – the country’s waited long enough’, and asked would-be members to phone in with their credit cards, a novelty at the time. (Unlike Labour, there wasn’t a fixed subscription, but there was a suggested donation of nine pounds.) Thousands of applicants responded instantly, bearing out the confident predictions made the previous year by psephologists Ivor Crewe and Anthony King – for the gang of three had done their homework – about the party’s prospects. Alongside ex-Labour members, there were large numbers of people who had previously not been a member of any political party, but who were now filled with enthusiasm and were, in a strange way, passionate about a party that seemed almost designed not to arouse passion. Repelled in equal part by what was perceived to be the sheer violence of the rival Thatcherite and Bennite remedies for the nation’s woes, the early adherents of the SDP sensed that this was a new dawn for decency, a crusade for common sense. ‘I refuse to acknowledge class barriers,’ proclaimed Barry (Timothy Spall) in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. ‘That’s the tragedy of this country, you know, the bloody polarization of the classes. That’s why I joined the SDP, you know, mate – it’s the party of the future, that is.’
For the more cynical, the impression was that it was all a bit too nice, the political equivalent of comfort food, albeit washed down with an agreeable Burgundy. The Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, never very enthusiastic about anything that bore the taint of liberalism, suggested a Make Your Own Centre Party book: ‘It lists the basic essentials: a good supply of cardboard in various thicknesses, glue, cold rice pudding (see your local cold rice pudding stockist), moderation and, most important of all, meaningless verbiage.’ On television Not the Nine O’Clock News was soon featuring a parody of an SDP party political broadcast with Rowan Atkinson reading a fairytale as though on Jackanory, while in reality one of Jackanory’s favourite presenters wasn’t much impressed, Kenneth Williams deciding that ‘they’re all worthy one feels, but terribly dull.’ (In his memoirs Owen was to echo that verdict: ‘Our policy development in those early days can best be described as worthy.’) At a time when politics was becoming increasingly polarized, the SDP’s progress down the middle of the road did run the risk of being a little boring; its publication on nuclear arms policy was titled Negotiate and Survive and may well have contained perfectly sensible proposals, but it lacked both the make-do-and-mend optimism of the official pamphlet, Protect and Survive, from which it took its title, and the campaigning spirit of E.P. Thompson’s anti-nuclear riposte, Protest and Survive.
On a personal level, as the Limehouse Declaration had said, the emergence of the SDP from within Labour was for many a ‘deeply painful’ experience, though much more so for those who left than for those who remained. ‘The sadness was mainly manufactured,’ wrote Austin Mitchell, who might have been, but wasn’t, tempted to jump ship. ‘The break was not a great party split like 1931 but a public relations event. Real feelings were deader. The mood was one of inevitability, as if a formal decision long taken was merely being ratified.’ Even so, he experienced the bitterness that comes with civil war as members of his own constituency party defected. The situation was covered in Sue Townsend’s fictional chronicle of the era, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, as the diarist finds trouble at his girlfriend’s house: ‘Pandora’s parents have had a massive row. They are sleeping in separate bedrooms. Pandora’s mother has joined the SDP and Pandora’s father is staying loyal to the Labour Party.’ The following day he reveals in awe: ‘Pandora’s father has come out of the closet and admitted that he is a Bennite.’ As Mole reflects, ‘It is a sad day when families are split asunder by politics.’
The fact that it was Pandora’s and not Adrian’s family who were thus divided indicated perhaps the greatest of the SDP’s problems. As Sun columnist Jon Akass, pointed out: ‘the SDP remains a party that is visibly middle class. They are a posh lot. They can argue that they are not posh at all, that they have impeccable working-class origins, but they are betrayed by the clothes they stand in and by their accents.’ Party politics in Britain had always had their roots in cohesive class-blocks, and the omens were not good for parties that bucked the trend.
Even so, the initial success of the venture was extraordinary. Opinion polls gave the SDP, at first alone and then in combination with the Liberal Party (the two parties became known as the SDP-Liberal Alliance or, more commonly, the Alliance), consistently strong leads right through 1981. Indeed the problem became one of managing expectations at a time of astonishing performances in a string of parliamentary by-elections. The first came in July in the rock-solid Labour seat of Warrington (even in the disastrous year of 1979 the party had scored over 60 per cent of the vote) and was tailor-made for Williams, but her inexplicable decision not to enter the contest left an opening for Jenkins, who came a narrow second and hugely enhanced his reputation – now not merely a thinker, but a fighter. If the result were repeated across the country, predicted an overheated BBC computer, there would be a Liberal/SDP government with 501 seats in the House of Commons, while Labour would be reduced to 113 MPs and there would be just one Tory remaining. In November Williams made her move, taking nearly half the vote in a by-election in Crosby, a safe Tory seat, and returning to the Commons in triumph. In between Warrington and Crosby came Croydon North-West, where the local Liberals insisted on fielding their own candidate, and still saw the unknown Bill Pitt win on a swing of 29.5 per cent. And then, finally, in March 1982 Jenkins won at the second attempt, becoming MP for Glasgow Hillhead.
So febrile and heated had the times become that at the Liberal assembly in Llandudno in the autumn of 1981, the party’s leader David Steel ended his speech with a peroration that he never quite lived down: ‘I have the good fortune to be the first Liberal leader for over half a century who is able to say to you at the end of our annual assembly: go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!’ As Owen noted drily in his memoirs: ‘The Llandudno air was so intoxicating that not even the hardened pressmen at the conference laughed.’ Unfortunately for the Liberals, Not the Nine O’Clock News did laugh, replaying the speech but cutting from Steel, as the applause and cheering mounted, to a shot of massed ranks of gurgling toddlers, as though they were his audience.
Owen’s sarcasm hints at the tensions that lay behind the scenes as the SDP built ever-closer links with the Liberals, but at the time, little of this was in the public domain, remaining backstage as the poll triumphs continued. By June 1982 the SDP in the Commons had risen to an all-time high of thirty MPs, with a steady stream of defectors having swollen the ranks, some of them those threatened with deselection by their constituency parties. David Pinner’s novel There’ll Always Be an England caught something of the pressures of the period, with a Labour MP under attack from a Trotskyist activist in his local party and toying with the idea of leaving, even though he claimed to understand the motivations of his opponents: ‘communism only gains control over the minds of the young if the society they live in is diseased – as our society is. For wherever there is inequality, people will search for extreme solutions. So all these budding Trots and Marxist-Leninists are only the symptom of the disease.’
There were, though, nagging worries about the SDP’s prospects, primarily the fact that few of the Labour converts were frontline politicians – Bryan Magee and George Cunningham were well respected figures, but in terms of public standing they could hardly claim to rank alongside, say, Roy Hattersley or Merlyn Rees, let alone Callaghan and Healey. There was too the failure to make inroads into the government benches: Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler was a founder member of the new party, becoming the first Conservative MP to cross the floor in 75 years, but not one of his colleagues followed him, despite his own predictions that ‘up to six’ Tory MPs would do so. Had the SDP been able to attract both Hattersley and perhaps Peter Walker, the longer-term outlook would have been much more positive.
As the Alliance bandwagon moved smoothly up through the gears, Labour renewed its squabbling in the slow lane, this time over who should occupy the seat next to the driver. After the Wembley conference, the Daily Mirror had told its readers: ‘Another loser was Denis Healey. He will surely be challenged for his post as deputy leader. And under the new formula he will probably be defeated.’ On 1 April 1981 (the detail of it being April Fool’s Day didn’t go unnoticed by the media) Tony Benn duly announced that he would indeed be standing against Healey for the deputy leadership. ‘The timing could not be more unhappy from Labour’s point of view,’ noted the Daily Mail, trying hard to keep itself from chortling, as it pointed out that the first opinion poll since the launch of SDP showed the new party in the lead.
The deputy leadership of the Labour Party had never been much of a job. It gave the incumbent a seat on the NEC, but little else, even in terms of status, and although Clement Attlee and Michael Foot went on to become leader, there had been many more who had never made the transition: Nye Bevan, George Brown and Roy Jenkins amongst them. Healey had become the deputy pretty much by default (he quoted an American vice-president saying the job was worth nothing more than ‘a pitcherfull of warm spit’), but now found himself engaged in a struggle for the soul and future of the party, so symbolic were the stakes being played for. Healey himself predicted that a victory for Benn would cause half the shadow cabinet to resign and several unions to disaffiliate from the party, a not implausible scenario. It was hard to dispute Benn’s argument that there was little point in having created the electoral college if it was never to be used, but the timing and manner of the election did little for the party’s standing amongst the public.
The campaign was, to start with, ridiculously long – nearly six months – and its conduct was hardly an advertisement for a democratic party aspiring to be the government of the country. The reception accorded to Healey at mass meetings, in particular a rally against unemployment in Birmingham towards the end of the campaign, was shameful, with him being so heavily barracked that he was unable to speak. ‘The orgy of intolerance must have cost Labour a million votes,’ wrote Roy Hattersley, adding that the behaviour of Benn supporters who had drifted in from outside the party ‘would not have been out of place at a Nuremburg rally’. Foot was similarly scathing, saying it was ‘a piece of planned hooliganism, a disgrace to the traditions of free speech for which the Labour movement has always stood.’ The presence of television news cameras to capture the event only exacerbated the issue.
Hattersley’s point about Benn’s campaign attracting support from beyond the party was perfectly correct. The myriad far left groups, now overwhelmingly Trotskyist, had become ever more visible during the leftward drift of Labour, and for the most part they came together to throw what weight they had behind Benn, despite a long tradition of reserving their greatest venom for each other (as caricatured in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, where the leader of the People’s Front of Judea explains that ‘the only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front’). Even those who stood outside the Labour Party saw a victory for Benn as a victory for the left more generally and thus a step towards a socialist Britain.
Those six months also saw a severe ratcheting up of the media rhetoric against Benn, and nowhere more so than in the pages of the country’s most popular newspaper, the Sun. ‘If he wins, then it’s goodbye to the Labour Party we have known for more than 80 years,’ ran one report. ‘A cross on the ballot for a party which has Benn waiting in the wings for its top job is a cross for the bleak and cold regimes of Eastern Europe and for a government on their model,’ claimed another. And all of it was encapsulated in the headline: MR BENN – IS HE MAD OR A KILLER? When the paper’s political editor, Walter Terry, was challenged by the journalist Mark Hollingsworth on whether he really believed Benn was mad, he was less equivocal: ‘Yes, I think Benn is mad and a lot of Labour people agree with me.’ He was correct in at least the second half of his statement, for it was not just the press that was making the running; Denis Healey too was happy to join in, suggesting that Benn was in favour of the ‘sort of People’s Democracy the Russians set up in Eastern Europe after the war’. None of it was very edifying.
Two left-wing comedy writers were later to record their impressions of the campaign. From inside the party, John O’Farrell saw it as an adolescent disorder: ‘The Labour Party rank and file regarded its leadership in the same way that I regarded my parents, and would not miss an opportunity to embarrass them.’ From outside, Mark Steel, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, was even more sceptical, commenting on the union block votes cast in favour of Benn: ‘If those figures had represented the real level of support for Benn’s ideas, what an exciting time it would have been. But whenever there was a ballot amongst all union members, it went overwhelmingly to Healey. In opinion polls, Healey led Benn by 72 per cent to 20 per cent.’
Steel was right to point to the lack of any widespread support for Benn. For while he had the overwhelming endorsement of the activists, these were by definition a small and self-appointed group, not dissimilar to the Elect in Calvinism. It would have been more impressive if Benn could similarly attract the support of rank-and-file trade unionists, but here the evidence was less convincing: ballots in unions representing public sector (NUPE), print (NATSOPA) and post office (POEU) workers all went in favour of Healey. So too did a poll of the Transport and General Workers Union, the largest of the block votes, with one executive officer suggesting that perhaps personalities did matter after all: ‘The fact is that many of our members simply don’t like the way Mr Benn has campaigned. He has turned the Labour Party upside down in order to get himself elected deputy leader. Many of our members have reacted to that, not because they don’t like his policies.’ A significant feature in those unions who did ballot their members (there was no requirement so to do) was that women were less likely to support Benn than were men.
When the election was held at the conference in September 1981, the TGWU actually backed John Silkin, the doomed third candidate, in the initial ballot, before then switching its vote to Benn. It wasn’t quite enough, and Healey won the second and final ballot by a margin of just under 1 per cent (‘by an eyebrow,’ he said, in reference to the bushy growths that had formed the basis of Mike Yarwood’s impression of him for so many years). The crucial factor, it was quickly agreed, was the behaviour of a handful of left MPs who had voted for Silkin and then abstained on the second ballot. And chief amongst them was Neil Kinnock, the coming man in the next generation who had, some felt, a vested interest in marginalizing Benn to ensure his own advance. The actions of those MPs were bitterly denounced by others on the left (‘traitors’ snapped Margaret Beckett, who would herself one day become deputy leader), and Kinnock was allegedly assaulted by one of Benn’s supporters, though he managed to find a suitable quip for the whole experience: ‘It’s been a hell of a year, this past week.’
Benn was, as ever, full of positive thinking: ‘It was a victory because from the very beginning right through to the end – and we are nowhere near the end – we have won the argument,’ he told a meeting that evening. He even presented an optimistic face to his diary, but deep down he must have known that he was deluding himself. And, as the tide began to turn against him in the party, he was to suffer a rare loss of composure. When nine MPs who had voted for Healey subsequently defected to the SDP, he had a moment of madness and announced to the press that he was now the de facto deputy leader of the party. He had to be reminded of his own dictum by a left-wing colleague, Dennis Skinner: ‘we are concerned with policy on behalf of the people we represent, and it is not about individuals.’ In any event, it wasn’t much of an argument; by the same token, Healey could now claim to be leader, since several future defectors had allegedly voted for Foot the previous year in an attempt to scupper the party’s fortunes. (So expected was this tactic, even at the time, that David Owen and Bill Rodgers had taken care to show their completed ballot papers to others to prove that they’d voted honourably for Healey.)
Although the deputy leadership election caught all the coverage, the 1981 conference also saw some other straws in the wind. The left won a vote in support of unilateral nuclear disarmament, but was defeated on a motion to withdraw from NATO, and lost several key seats on the NEC to right-wingers. It was even reported that moves were afoot to remove Benn from his powerful position as chair of the NEC home policy committee, though in the event he was to remain for another year. Most significantly, the party enjoyed an immediate poll boost as a reward for making the right decision about the deputy leader; a survey for Thames TV showed Labour on 36 per cent, the Tories on 30 per cent, and the Alliance starting to fade on 29 per cent. The possibility of a serious recovery was now on the cards, if only Labour could avoid any further self-inflicted wounds. Unfortunately, it couldn’t.
Part of the problem was Foot’s inability to handle public relations. At a trivial, but sadly memorable, level this was manifest in his appearance at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday in November 1981, where the leaders of the main political parties were to lay wreaths. As they left for the ceremony, David Steel said to Foot, ‘You’re not going to wear that coat, are you?’ and Foot replied, ‘What’s wrong with it? My wife just bought it last week.’ Indeed, there was nothing inherently wrong with the garment (‘That’s a smart sensible coat for a day like this,’ the Queen Mother told him), but it was incongruous in the context of the state’s most solemn occasion, and particularly so when the media decided to say he was wearing a donkey jacket. Actually it was a dark blue-green overcoat, more akin to a duffle-coat than to a donkey jacket, but the terminology stuck, as did the alleged slight to the nation’s war dead. In an outbreak of mockery from which Foot never recovered, Fleet Street nicknamed him Worzel Gummidge, after the scarecrow played by Jon Pertwee in a popular children’s television series, and the Daily Mail ran a feature titled DRESS YOUR OWN MICHAEL FOOT, which included a cut-out paper doll of the Labour leader, complete with scruffy clothes, CND badge and flat cap. Of such things were politics now made, though Foot was unable to see why anyone cared. Even when his wife, Jill Craigie, persuaded him to have a haircut and buy a new suit, he was still capable of inadvertently undermining her efforts; ‘I sat next to him on the front bench,’ recalled Austin Mitchell, ‘and looked down to see odd socks.’
Shortly after the donkey jacket episode, the BBC screened an adaptation of John le Carré’s spy novel Smiley’s People, in which George Smiley (played by Alec Guinness) comes out of retirement to deal with one last case of an agent who has been found shot dead. And as Smiley stumbled frailly round Hampstead Heath, where the killing occurred, trying to find clues that will make sense of what has happened to his world, many viewers couldn’t help but be reminded of Foot, the most famous real-life denizen of the Heath. When one of the young turks who have replaced Smiley at the Circus suggests that the dead man was ‘potty’, George snaps back: ‘He was loyal and honourable. In a shifting world, he held fast. So, yes, maybe he was potty.’ Like Smiley, Foot looked like a leftover from another age, a time when presentation meant nothing and integrity everything. In itself, that was an admirable attribute, and one of the key reasons why he was so cherished within the party, even if it didn’t play very well in the media. Much worse tended to result when he decided to assert his authority, almost invariably picking the wrong issue and the wrong approach.
In December 1981 James Wellbeloved, a former Labour MP who had defected to the SDP, asked Margaret Thatcher during prime minister’s questions about the adoption by Bermondsey Labour Party of the hitherto unknown Peter Tatchell as its parliamentary candidate. To the surprise of both sides of the House, Foot seized the opportunity to make his own statement: ‘The individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party and, so far as I am concerned, never will be endorsed.’ The phrasing was puzzling – Tatchell clearly was a member of the party – and led some to speculate that Foot had got confused with either Peter Taaffe or Tariq Ali, two veteran figures of the revolutionary left, but he later clarified that he had meant to say ‘candidate’ not ‘member’. It also emerged later that he had been given notice the day before of Wellbeloved’s intended question, thus removing the possibility that it was all off-the-cuff and of no great significance.
Tatchell’s offence had been an article in the left journal London Labour Briefing, in which he had argued: ‘We must look to new, more militant forms of extra-parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the government’s right to rule.’ When asked to elaborate, he commented, ‘I am referring to mass peaceful protest, such as the People’s March for Jobs,’ but that reassurance was evidently insufficient for Foot: ‘Parliamentary democracy is at stake,’ he warned Labour MPs, in a characteristically wild exaggeration. ‘There can be no wavering on that.’
It was hard to see quite what all the fuss was about. Foot had himself addressed the March for Jobs (an unsuccessful attempt to reignite the fire of the 1930s hunger marches), the TUC’s day of action had been overtly political, and in April 1981 a hundred Labour MPs had abandoned the Commons chamber to stage a demonstration outside the department of employment. Extra-parliamentary activity had always been a strong feature of the Labour Party, and Tatchell was not noticeably upping the ante. Nor, however, was he the kind of candidate with whom much of the old Labour Party felt instinctive sympathy; a young sociology graduate who had left Australia to avoid conscription, he had been active in campaigning for gay rights, on women’s issues and against the Vietnamese War. Simply having written his article in London Labour Briefing, a journal associated with Ken Livingstone’s trendy new left that now controlled the Greater London Council, was sufficient to damn him in many people’s eyes, including those of Bob Mellish, the sitting MP for Bermondsey.
The Bermondsey party was typical of many constituency branches in places where Labour had been in power for decades. At its peak it could claim over 3,000 members, but that had been in the 1930s; by the time Tatchell joined, membership had fallen to under 400, and there was growing impatience with Mellish, who had served as an MP since 1946 and was due to retire. The fact that he had accepted a job on the London Docklands Development Corporation, a body whose very existence the Labour Party opposed, did him no favours, and the split locally was between Mellish and the activists, a microcosm of the wider struggles in the party, with Tatchell a popular and well supported figure. But Foot’s intervention – effectively turning the issue into a vote of confidence in his leadership – was sufficient to persuade the NEC to overturn Tatchell’s candidature: it would be ‘an electoral disaster’, Foot said, in what could only be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Mellish subsequently left the party, threatening to resign as an MP and force a by-election if Tatchell was re-selected in a new vote, and then when Tatchell was indeed duly re-selected as the candidate, Foot was obliged to climb down, having damaged his already fragile authority still further by his wavering, and having done everything he could to ensure that the coming by-election would be as difficult as possible for Labour.
Or perhaps not quite everything yet. The day before the by-election, in March 1983, the NEC spent the whole day expelling from the party five members of the editorial board of the Trotskyist newspaper Militant. Nobody who knew anything about the British left could possibly have mistaken Tatchell for a Trotskyist, but that hadn’t stopped Fleet Street from bracketing him with Militant, and the foolishness of giving hostile newspapers an opportunity to run stories about Labour extremism on the day of a by-election was a token of the sheer incompetence being displayed by the party’s leadership.
And the papers were indeed hostile, to an unprecedented degree. The attacks that Benn had endured in 1981 were now visited upon ‘Red Pete’, though this time with a virulently anti-gay angle. Since Tatchell was not at this stage publicly out as a homosexual, and no concrete evidence of his sexuality could be found, the stories were delivered with sufficient innuendo to avoid libel actions, while leaving readers in no doubt about their subtext: he was ‘a rather exotic Australian canary who sings some odd songs,’ said the Daily Express, knowingly. At its most innocuous this was manifested in the regular press descriptions of his clothing, with the implication that only a homosexual would be so fastidious about his wardrobe: he had ‘a male model’s flair with clothes,’ nudged the Daily Mail, while the Daily Telegraph pointed to his ‘wide leather belt atop trendy cord jeans and two-tone wine and beige laced shoes.’ Coming from the same sources that had made an issue of Foot’s scruffiness, this focus on Tatchell’s neat attire suggested that those on the left were in something of a no-win situation.
Following fifteen months of abject coverage, much of it to the discredit of Fleet Street and all of it stemming from Foot’s original outburst in parliament, the by-election result was worse even than could have been expected. The Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, representing the Alliance, won on a 50 per cent swing, though even he was later to apologize for the sheer nastiness of the campaign against Tatchell.
Coming so soon before an expected general election, the result gave a boost at a crucial moment to the Alliance parties, whose fortunes had been in decline. And taking a working-class London seat from Labour went some way towards countering the mocking claims that the Alliance was a middle-class hobbyhorse. Other indications, however, simply reinforced that prejudice. For the 1983 general election, the twinned parties ran a series of open meetings under the title Ask the Alliance, demonstrating little save that they had the support of the cream of up-market quiz-show hosts: the meetings were chaired by Bamber Gascoigne from University Challenge, Magnus Magnusson from Mastermind and Steve Race from My Music, together with Ludovic Kennedy of the highbrow review show Did You See? It seemed something approaching parody when the prominent SDP member Richard Attenborough, having just directed the 1982 film Gandhi, made the outlandish claim that, had the opportunity only been available to him, the Mahatma would surely have voted SDP. (In the 1987 election the Sun picked up on this concept and employed a medium to reveal the voting intentions of other historical figures: Henry VIII and Boadicea went Tory, Stalin was a Labour supporter, while Keir Hardie had defected in death to the SDP. Genghis Khan, though, was a ‘don’t know’.)
Bermondsey was just about the last chance for Michael Foot’s Labour to indulge the addiction to political self-harm that had characterized the party since the 1979 election. With a second national defeat now inevitable, rival factions began to seek out who might be held to account for the coming catastrophe. The left blamed a pusillanimous leadership, while the right blamed the left, and, though both sides were agreed that the SDP were largely responsible for keeping Thatcher in power, there was no agreement over who was responsible for their emergence. (‘He’s created the SDP single-handed,’ said Kinnock of Benn.)
But if blame were to be apportioned, it should surely have been laid at the door of the party’s MPs. Given one last opportunity in November 1980 to choose a leader, they threw it away in panic, turning their collective back on Denis Healey, the one man who could have led them to victory, and opting instead for the candidate who they thought their constituency activists would prefer, Michael Foot. Their fear was that if Healey won, he would be challenged under the new rules by Benn, and a bloody civil war would ensue. That, of course, is precisely what happened, except that it was the deputy leadership that was at stake; the conflict that haunted the MPs’ dreams could scarcely have been more unpleasant. And with Healey at the helm, it is unlikely that the SDP would have come into existence. That fact, together with the likelihood that Healey would have fought harder to get a larger share of the electoral college reserved for MPs, would almost certainly have ensured a defeat for Benn, the continuing dominance of the polls by Labour, and a probable victory for a Healey-led party at the next general election. (Norman Tebbit admitted that private polling for the Conservatives showed that the situation could have been retrieved as late as 1983: ‘If Healey had been the leader or if he were to replace Foot before a 1984 election it would be touch and go’.) Even many on the left were to later recognize the mistake they’d made; Eric Heffer, the self-proclaimed proletarian MP for Liverpool Walton, who voted for Foot ‘on an interim basis until the new leadership electoral college was in being when Tony Benn could stand’, was later to exclaim: ‘What fools we were not to vote for Denis!’
But the Parliamentary Labour Party had a crisis of self-confidence that led to political paralysis. Seeking to drift with the tide, it simply sank. It didn’t believe in the party, it didn’t believe in its leader, it didn’t even believe in itself. Ken Livingstone recorded a member of the shadow cabinet telling him, ‘If I woke up tomorrow and found we had won the election, I’d leave the country.’ This state of funk wasn’t simply attributable to the fear of being deselected, for it applied equally to Labour members in the Lords: ‘Collectively we are so terrified of raising our heads above the parapet, for fear of unspecified retribution,’ lamented Lord Longford in 1981. Normally, when threatened with losing their seats, MPs tend to look at changing their leader, but the disaster of 1979 had been so bad, and the subsequent events so horrible, that few believed it could get any worse. It could, and it did.