Hugh Gaitskell was leader of the Labour Party from 1955, after just ten years in Parliament. He fought the 1955 general election but was defeated by Harold Macmillan’s Conservatives by a margin of 49.7 to 46.4 per cent of the popular vote. Labour was expected to have won that election, and Gaitskell faced criticism afterwards. This culminated in two leadership challenges, but he defeated both Harold Wilson in 1960 (by 166 votes to eighty-one) and Anthony Greenwood in 1961 (by 171 votes to fifty-nine). Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, aged fifty-six. Brian Brivati argues that assessing Gaitskell against the statecraft criteria would leave him judged as a failure. However, this overlooks the other ways in which he provided leadership. This chapter argues that Gaitskell, like Blair, was a bold party reformer who sought to change the party’s position on Clause IV, nuclear disarmament, and membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). He was a leader who sought to teach and lead the electorate with his political philosophy, rather than treating the Labour Party as a vote-maximising machine. The challenges he faced in doing so mirror the challenges more contemporary party leaders have faced, too.

• • •

The purpose of this volume is to assess leadership. Who was theff best leader of the Labour Party in its history? The model presented in the introduction asks for an assessment of leaders across perfectly defensible variables of winning electoral strategy, governing competence, party management, political argument hegemony, and bending the rules of the game. Gaitskell comprehensively lost the only election he fought as leader, so he never governed the country, though he governed the party in such a way as to ensure that, for most of his leadership, a large faction of it fought against his every idea and proposal, purely because they came from him. He lost the argument on revising Clause IV and was heavily defeated at conference on unilateral nuclear disarmament. He never held the state, so he never got to change the constitution. On any rational model of leadership of the Labour Party, he was a failure, and should thus appear towards the bottom end of the league tables so beloved by political scientists, who like to see the world through their regression analysis. But this conclusion depends, in part, on what you mean by ‘the Labour Party’ and what you really mean by ‘leadership’. Before considering Gaitskell in the light of these two ideas, we need to look at the major moments in Gaitskell’s leadership of the Labour Party, and what relevance, if any, his leadership personality and political philosophy have for judging the leaderships of the Labour Party today.

Hugh Gaitskell chose the Labour Party; he was not born into it. He was also widely considered to be an unlikely leader of it. Gaitskell was born at Campden Hill in Kensington, and later lived in Onslow Gardens, South Kensington – which, even in those days, were considered prestigious addresses. His father had joined the Indian Civil Service straight from Oxford and served his career in Burma, where Hugh, the youngest of three children, spent time, until he was sent back to the UK to start school. His father died, however, when Hugh was nine, and his mother remarried and returned to Burma. Thereafter, the young Hugh Gaitskell, who was known as Sam, passed most school holidays with his older brother Arthur, or with other relatives.

His preparatory school was Lynams, also known as the Dragon School, in Oxford. It mostly took the sons of professional people and Oxford dons, and was remarkable for its liberal approach to learning, and what we might today call ‘life skills’. The head (the ‘Skipper’) dressed like a merchant seaman, wore a red tie, and was an early socialist who had broadened the school’s roll to include the sons of Oxford tradesmen.333

The atmosphere at Lynams was free and easy; dress was unconventional; games were not compulsory – though Sam loved learning to box and play tennis and rugby.334 The boys were also allowed the freedom to travel into town on their bicycles. It was even the case that girls were brought in to teach ‘courtesy’ and manners to the very young men the school was educating.

It is often claimed that Gaitskell’s socialism was a product of the general strike in 1926, but his friend, the poet John Betjeman, once wrote that Gaitskell’s views took shape during his time at the Dragon School. ‘This is where I first became a socialist,’ Gaitskell said one day, many years later, as he was passing a small parade of shops where the boys had bought their sweets. It was in an area of Oxford that contrasted starkly with the affluent, detached, Gothic Revival houses elsewhere in the city, and, for the first time, he was made aware that some people were not as well-off as others.335 In spite of this, Betjeman did not consider Gaitskell a politically minded person until much later in his life.

After Lynams, Gaitskell attended Winchester School and then New College, Oxford, to study the recently established Honours degree – philosophy, politics and economics (PPE). Winchester was critical in shaping Gaitskell’s character, but Oxford made more of an impact in terms of his politics. To be a Wykehamist was to have ‘a blend of intellectual arrogance and conventional good manners’.336 But it was at Oxford, in the winter of 1924–25, where Gaitskell met Maurice Bowra, then dean of Wadham. According to Bowra, Gaitskell had a lively taste for food, drink and uninhibited conversation, and was on affectionate terms with a wide circle of friends, including ‘some highly attractive and intelligent girls’,337 and another undergraduate – W. H. Auden. ‘I was surprised that I had not heard more,’ Bowra wrote after Gaitskell’s death. ‘He was eighteen years old, slim, curly haired and fresh-coloured, and had not yet developed any of the prominent features that were to delight caricaturists in his later years.’

At this stage, however, Gaitskell was ‘no more remarkable’ as a student than many of his clever contemporaries.338 He had very little interest in the philosophy element of PPE, but was extremely engaged and challenging when it came to politics and economics.

For most of this period, Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister. Britain was a highly divided society and seemed likely to remain so. The peace in 1918 had produced unemployment, overcrowding, the dole and the Poor Law. Gaitskell was repelled by Baldwin and his complacency, and outraged by the poor social conditions of the post-war years. He read Marx, going through a very brief Marxist phase in 1931,339 but, by 1934, he did not consider it a solution (‘too mechanical to be right and too inhuman to deserve any devotion’),340 and was certainly not a Christian socialist. Indeed, Gaitskell had abandoned Christianity at school, finding its ethics too vague and too subjective to lead to practical political outcomes.

Gaitskell’s main political guidance came from G. D. H. Cole, an early Fabian who arrived at Oxford as a reader in economics in 1924. Cole’s socialism was a call to arms for Gaitskell. It answered his questions and pointed the way forwards. It also gave him an intellectual framework and self-confidence, which meant he was never afraid to discuss political matters with those who held different views to his own. He threw himself into the 1926 general strike, however, and it was then that politics took centre stage for him. He always described it as the chief turning-point in his life; from now on, he declared, ‘my future is with the working class’.341

After Oxford, Gaitskell worked briefly for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) in Nottinghamshire, and then took a teaching post at University College London. In London, he played an active role in the Cole Group – which continued for thirty years, and which Margaret Cole describes as ‘forming the climate of Labour opinion’ – and he also came to the notice of Hugh Dalton, Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland.

Gaitskell made one failed attempt to get elected to Parliament at the 1935 general election, and then, in 1938, he moved to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where he headed the department for political economy. When war broke out, he worked as a civil servant in Hugh Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, and then at the board of trade, which gave him invaluable experience of government. In 1945, he was selected for the seat of Leeds South, and won it in the subsequent landslide with a majority of more than 10,000.

After only two years on the back benches, he was promoted to junior minister at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, largely as a result of the influence of Dalton. In 1950, at the request of Stafford Cripps, he became Minister for Economic Affairs. Roy Jenkins described him over this period as ‘quietly competent’.342 When Cripps stepped down due to ill health, Gaitskell, aged only forty-four, was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Jim Callaghan commented to Gaitskell at the time: ‘There is no one else. That is a remarkable tribute.’343

This period was marked by a number of crises. First, Gaitskell had to find funding for the Korean War, which was vastly expensive and required savings from other departments. In his first Budget, he ran into difficulties when he introduced charges for spectacles and dentures on the NHS. It led to a direct confrontation with Aneurin Bevan. Neither would give way and Bevan resigned, along with Harold Wilson. It revealed – as the Prime Minister Clement Attlee said afterwards – Gaitskell’s strength of character.344

Following Labour’s defeat in 1951, Gaitskell attempted to get himself elected to the NEC. This was no easy feat. Bevan’s views were on the ascendancy among the constituencies, but Gaitskell was never one to flinch from a fight. As Roy Jenkins wrote: ‘He disliked the noise, but he never kept away from the place where the guns were firing loudest.’ Gaitskell confronted the ‘snarling’ party conference and was defeated – the first of many tricky, ill-tempered encounters with the party – but, two years later, he challenged Bevan for party treasurer and won. The trade unions had decided Gaitskell was a man with whom they could work. By 1955, he had acquired a hold on the party, moving from a ‘desiccated calculating machine’ – as Bevan had described him, Attlee and Wilson345 – to a politician with strongly declared political beliefs.346

In 1955, following the retirement of Clement Attlee, Gaitskell successfully challenged both Bevan and Herbert Morrison to become leader of the party. As Jenkins commented, he did so ‘at a time when formidable rivals were thicker on the ground than they are today’.347 The first crisis he faced as leader was Suez. He stood back and observed events, and then realised the way the tide was running. He mounted an impassioned opposition to the government’s threat of force, and took the Labour Party and many others with him. He was mocked in the House for his stand, but he had won respect.

Jenkins described Gaitskell’s period of leadership as an ‘adventurous one in Labour Party history’: he fundamentally believed that leading meant making his mind up.

In 1959, with the Conservative government in disarray, it appeared Labour would win the election. Gaitskell was buoyant and confident, but it was not to be. The Labour Party became divided. The familiar picture emerged of moderates and those on the ideological left. A vote on the abolition of Clause IV was lost, but, subtly, the party began to move in his direction – until, that is, the vote on unilateralism took place in 1960 at the Scarborough conference. Gaitskell lost and became, for a time, a wounded leader, but, typically, he did not accept the defeat. He mobilised a grass-roots campaign, and the decision was reversed at the following conference. Harold Wilson challenged him for the leadership in November 1960, and lost by a ratio of 2:1. Gaitskell’s position was confirmed. Throughout that winter he delivered speech after speech, and seemed in the best of health, dominant in the party and reasonably popular in the country. At the 1962 conference, he delivered his verdict on British membership of the EEC – he resoundingly rejected it, and thereby built a significant bridge to the left of the party.348

It was mid-December 1962 when Gaitskell first became ill. Initially, it was diagnosed as a chest infection and then viral pneumonia. He was discharged from hospital over Christmas, but, a few days later, he was moved to the Middlesex Hospital for tests. His condition became more serious, and he died at 9.12 p.m. on Friday 18 January 1963.

When Gaitskell had sat down at the end of his speech to the Labour Party conference in 1962, he was the dominant personality in British politics. His speech had forcefully opposed UK membership of the EEC and had united the Labour Party behind his leadership. He had eclipsed, for the first time, the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. It was the apex of his political career. But 108 days later, he was dead.

There had been key moments on the road to that speech. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Gaitskell combined brilliantly with his arch political rival Nye Bevan to dissect the government’s duplicity. Many in the British establishment never forgave him for that. After being heavily defeated in the 1959 election, he came out against Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution and against unilateral nuclear disarmament. At the conference of 1960, he was defeated on both fronts. However, he then reversed the unilateralist vote at the conference in 1961 and went on to bring unity through his stance on the EEC. His official biographer, Philip Williams, wrote that Gaitskell had finally come to terms with the Labour Party. That phrase is key to understanding Gaitskell as leader of the Labour Party, and it highlights the core question of how to lead the Labour Party, or, indeed, how to lead any reforming political party of what used to be called the left.

When I first published my biography of Gaitskell in 1996,349 some reviewers criticised me for likening Tony Blair to Gaitskell. While acknowledging that there are limits to the comparison, the comparing of the two still offers a good prism for considering Gaitskell as leader and understanding the challenge of leading the Labour Party. Moreover, the turn of the millennium has made the dialogue between Gaitskellite revisionism in the 1950s and the Blair–Brown modernisation project even more interesting. This comparison also throws light on the challenges faced by Ed Miliband. In short, the Blair–Brown project highlighted important structural constraints on the Labour Party in power, when it is led from the right. These constraints would have been much the same for a Gaitskellite government, and were very much in evidence in the opposition that Gaitskell encountered to his own modernising project. After a significant period of Labour in power, one of the central questions of Labour Party studies in the 1980s and much of the 1990s has been answered. The question was: how does Labour win? The answer: by becoming as flexible in the pursuit of power as the Conservative Party. The question for the future is whether or not it is possible to lead the Labour Party to victory from a centre-left position, which does not follow the Conservative path to electoral victory.

The Conservative path to power has often, though not always, historically been through placing the gaining and holding of power at the centre of their political project. In this respect, there are clear comparisons between Gaitskell and Gaitskellite revisionism and the Blair–Brown project. Perhaps there are also marked contrasts with the leadership of Ed Miliband. Under Blair, the Labour Party abandoned any pretence of being interested in using progressive taxation for the redistribution of wealth as distinct from controlling consumer demand. The long-running battles over public ownership, which were for so long central to Labour’s ideological direction, now appear to have been no more than bickering over inessentials, and a profound confusion of means and ends. Moreover, the other long-running internal battle over the global position of Britain, expressed either in a desire to see Britain dominant through political leadership (Atlanticism and multilateralism) or through moral leadership (unilateralism), appear to have been complacent and delusional about Britain’s developing position in the world. The essence of Labour’s victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005 was the abandonment of the notion that economic intervention was superior to market allocation as a means of managing the economy. The central faith of Hugh Gaitskell’s life was that economics mattered and that planning was capable of correcting market failure. In both these respects, he agreed much more with all his major political opponents during his own lifetime than he would do with the contemporary generation of leaders of the Labour Party. However, on another level, the contemporary state of British politics would have given him a temporary pause for reflection, and a certain enjoyment – though, here too, the great distances that the Labour Party and the world have travelled would quickly become apparent (more so if Gaitskell had ever formed a government).

The present and the recent past suggest two ways to think about what a Gaitskell government might have been like. They must be thought about with all the caveats that counter-factual history demands. The two dimensions are: public service delivery, and the special relationship with the US.

On public-service delivery, Gaitskell was an early critic of nationalisation, and he famously imposed the first charges on the NHS. He would, in turn, have had no problem with deficit reduction. He would have faced the problem that plagued the Wilson government: how to make the mixed economy deliver. The Blair–Brown governments hit the same structural problems. If the market is not to be the solution to the delivery problem, then what is? Gaitskell had a public-sector workforce that retained a strong sense of the value of public service – but he still faced the problem of motivating the service providers. By the time of his death, Gaitskell lacked convincing answers to the question of how planning would deliver what people wanted.

The second constraint concerns the relationship between a revisionist leader and the party. This would have come into focus for Gaitskell – as it did for Blair – over the special relationship. Williams judged that, in 1962, Gaitskell had finally come to terms with the Labour Party. Michael Foot, reviewing Williams, picked up the point and articulated the left’s problem with Hugh:

Foot catches something here: that the self-image of Labour Party members was not reflected back at them by Gaitskell’s realist Atlanticism. Anti-Americanism was already widespread in the 1950s; today it is almost universal on the left. Blair suffered the same problem when he articulated his support for the democracies’ war against terror, because it connected him to the US. This is not – and was not in the 1950s – an appeal to logic: it is – and was – an emotional response that demands compliance to an oddly Stalinist view of the world, in which America is the evil villain. There was nothing Gaitskell could do in the 1950s and ’60s to shake people in the Labour Party out of this hysterical, emotion-driven anti-Americanism, and there was nothing Blair could do in his day either. In both cases, this ensured their leadership would always be contested. Their failure to be mere demagogues, pandering to the anti-Americanism of the crowd, cost them both dearly. It is why Miliband’s Labour Party did not have a foreign policy.

When Hugh Gaitskell found out that he was going to replace Stafford Cripps as the next Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1950, he told William Armstrong – the Chancellor’s private secretary – that politics in Britain would gradually become a competition over competence. It would resemble the politics of the United States, and the Labour Party would evolve into a British version of the American Democratic Party. Despite a superficial continuity, the detail of the ideological underpinning of that convergence would have given him equal pause. For Gaitskell in the 1950s, the special relationship was based on the unity of the democracies against the communist world; but the differences between Britain and America remained real, because it was the Labour Party that set the terms of the political debate in the UK, and it was collectivism that set the context within which politics would take place. The party political battle, he firmly believed, would be fought out on the ground prepared by the Labour Party: an interventionist state; a progressive tax system designed to redistribute wealth in the name of greater equality; public ownership of a substantial section of British industry; a global military; and a strategic role as key partner to the US in the anti-communist western alliance.

Labour’s ideological position now seems to have developed into something that is neither based on Gaitskell’s collectivist faith nor on a full-blown endorsement of neo-liberalism. Labour’s third position comprises, roughly, an acceptance of the broad direction of the management of the economy, including complete acceptance of the defeat and irrelevance of public ownership as a form of planning desirable to correct market failure or necessary to promote equality. At the same time, it is a partial rejection of Conservative definitions of austerity and sovereignty. At the heart of Gaitskell’s socialism was a belief in equality, and faith that the Labour Party contained the people best able to promote equality through the effective management of the economy, coupled with a deep patriotism: a conviction that Britain was a great country with a global role to play. In the decade after his conversation with Armstrong, Gaitskell fought hard for these principles. With hindsight, his long battles seem slightly unreal. It is difficult to now understand the bitterness that characterised them, and the language in which they were conducted – its emphasis on planning, intervention and social ownership make it seem to belong to a much earlier epoch. The vehemence of the argument between the left and the right of the Labour Party over the extent of public ownership seems quaint – a debate from many decades ago. The 1957 ‘Industry and Society’ policy statement condemned the private sector for its inefficiency and waste, arguing the best way of distributing goods and services was by planning.

The politics Gaitskell espoused is now primarily only of historical interest. The argument in the 1950s was entirely within the terms of collectivism. Gaitskell believed that Labour should govern because the party understood modern economics better than the Conservatives and because modern collectivist economics would solve the problem of distribution. He did not believe in the efficacy of markets; he believed in planning. His opponents within the party went further. In the debate on Clause IV in 1959, Nye Bevan stated that Britain faced an economic challenge from countries that were ‘at long last able to reap the material fruits of economic planning and public ownership’. Top of his list was Russia: do not worry about the USA or Germany with their market economies, he said, worry about the command economies. A few years later, Harold Wilson evoked the white heat of technological revolution, so that Britain could keep up with the material and scientific advances of the Soviet Union.351 But deep in these debates was the belief that there was a key to the successful running of the economy, and that economists held that key. If Gaitskell wanted to dismiss someone, one of his favourite lines was that they were not much good at economics. Faith in the efficacy of the state and in the rightness of the aim of equality permeated political debate then. This faith in economics, in the professional politician, is actually highly characteristic of the Labour Party today. It is based on the idea that you can lead and teach the electorate, and the electorate will follow you.

The contemporary Labour Party leadership does not operate in the intellectual environment it has shaped, nor does it believe it has the economic answers to contemporary questions: in essence, they are still ‘playing catch-up’ to a revolution in political economy, instigated by the right. Miliband struggled to find some new way of articulating his endorsement of much of the new economic settlement in the reduced state of the coalition. Collectivism is largely a dead political idea, planning is no longer seen as economically relevant, and the market mechanism is seen as the economic ‘truth’, despite the many bailouts of banks and so on. The economic ambitions of the contemporary Labour Party are modest. The emphasis of a Gaitskell government would have been, in the spirit of the times, economically interventionist. The shadow of the Attlee governments fell over Gaitskell’s years as leader, for the achievement of those years underpinned his faith in what he was doing. The contemporary Labour Party operates in the shadow of the Thatcher revolution and the financial crash. In the long run, historians may well judge the Thatcher revolution to have been partial and limited in scope, but to have achieved one, not inconsiderable, shift: the Labour Party abandoned equality as an objective and, in doing so, now resembles the ‘historic’ Labour Party founded in 1900 in name alone. In all these respects, the differences between the party of Gaitskell and that of Miliband tended to be more profound than the continuities, but similarities in their styles of leadership are evident.

Gaitskell would have resembled Thatcher in some ways: his dedication to work, his clarity of objectives and his pedantic attention to detail would have ‘given him many of the strengths and the weaknesses of a Thatcher-style premier’. However, the leader he resembled more, as John Campbell has pointed out, was the Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath. They shared that mid-century technocratic love of the machinery of state and, in Gaitskell’s case, the mechanics of economic policy. They shared a positivist faith in the ability to find solutions to human problems. Gaitskell might not have been able to bend to the wind of industrial militancy in the way Heath did, but then the context would have been different. There is clearly a vast, though contested, difference in context of the UK economy today from that of the 1950s. Much of the underlying argument for the shift away from nationalisation, use of progressive taxation, support for universal benefits and so on comes from the notion of the global economy. Though the impact of this global economy, particularly the free and instantaneous movement of capital, is contested and frequently used as a political cover for inaction, nevertheless it would be ludicrous to argue that the Labour Party should, or could, have stayed still in 1963, or indeed that Gaitskell’s own beliefs would not have changed and evolved had he lived. However, similarities of approach between Miliband and Gaitskell do exist. They share modernising instincts – and, of course, Gaitskell tried and failed to ditch Clause IV in favour of a new statement of aims: he was the first moderniser. One of Miliband’s great political heroes was the moderniser, revisionist and champion of Gaitskell, Tony Crosland. The style of the two leaders also invites comparison.

When Jean Monnet tried to convince Gaitskell that Britain should join the European Union, he failed. After hours arguing, Monnet finally said, ‘You must have faith.’

Gaitskell replied, ‘I do not believe in faith, I believe in reason.’352

One can imagine Miliband making the same response, and many of his speeches were reasoned expositions, reminiscent of Gaitskell. It seems that he also had that Gaitskellite passion to change the terms of political discourse.

Gaitskell was an intriguing human being, who expressed, in the conflict between his public and private lives, a central dilemma – some would say crisis – of masculinity. He tried throughout his life to maintain the separation of the personal and the political, and the gap between the dry, Wykehamist minister and the warm, passionate friend and lover was the central paradox of his life. Occasionally the barriers were breached, and his intense feelings flooded into the political sphere with electrifying effect, but more often the two were kept strictly apart. This sense of self and conflict is very common among male politicians: the number of what we might call integrated personalities in politics is actually very small. Indeed, the search for love that drove Gaitskell in his private life was connected to the forcefulness that propelled him in public life, although the surprising thing is not that Gaitskell was a divided self, but that others around him (such as Nye Bevan) were so much more of a piece. To account for this conflict requires an understanding of the culture and class from which Gaitskell came. However, what is striking about contemporary politicians such as Gordon Brown and Ed Balls is the extent to which psychological conflict remains a part of politicians’ make-up. The politicians of today did not grow up in the social and emotional world of Edwardian Britain, yet they seem to echo the kind of tortured self reflected in aspects of Gaitskell’s character – also the defining characteristic of some of his contemporaries, especially Eden and Macmillan.

Gaitskell embodied a strand of British politics now extinct. He never stopped struggling with his upbringing, his class and, finally, the constraints of the public life he had chosen. Initially he sought ways of escaping his background by rebelling against it; later he rebelled against the constraints his political life had placed on his ability to have fun, by making a point of having it. Personally, this seeking out of fun took the form of a love of food, alcohol, jazz and dancing. At times, the intensity of his pleasure-seeking could draw criticism, and the closeness of his relationship with women – such as his lover Ann Fleming – provoked some to question his commitment to the working class. However, more often people remarked on his capacity for friendship, and his extraordinarily warm private persona. Politically, every time it appeared he had found his level, he transcended it, confounding people’s expectations. He slowly resolved a number of deep-rooted private battles – for instance, between the demands of the Wykehamist code, summed up by Crossman,353 and his deep emotional needs – and he seemed to be on the threshold of fulfilling a life of intense hard work when he died suddenly.

At the beginning of this chapter, the questions of what might be meant by the Labour Party and by its leadership were asked. The votes on unilateralism, Clause IV and Europe illustrate the different answers one might give to these questions. There are, in the end, two political propositions, and therefore two kinds of leadership.

There is the proposition that says: ‘This is what I believe in, now follow me.’ In this political model, the job of leaders is to persuade their party, and then the electorate, that what they believe is right; that how they see the world is how the world actually works; that their economic approach is the right one.

The second proposition says: ‘Tell us what you want and we will try to give it to you.’ In this political model, the ideology and manifesto of a party is adapted to the times and context in which the party is operating. Both are kinds of leadership.

The other question is: what is the Labour Party? Either the Labour Party is an idea about the way the world should be, or the Labour Party is a vote-maximising machine in pursuit of power. Most leaders of Labour who win elections believe the party is a machine – they ask people what they want and try to give it to them – Ramsay MacDonald, Tony Blair (on domestic policy) and Harold Wilson are perhaps the best examples, but Attlee was very much the same. The key difference for Attlee was that the people and the dominant ideas of political economy were, for that brief moment, absolutely in tune with the idea of the Labour Party. If they had not been, Attlee would have simply done something else. Neil Kinnock tried very hard to maximise the votes for Labour and so win power. It is only Gaitskell who, though hoping that Labour was a vote-maximising machine, also believed that the electorate should follow him, rather than he follow the electorate – which is why, for many, Gaitskell was the last great democratic socialist leader of the Labour Party.

333 John Betjeman in William Rodgers ed., Hugh Gaitskell 1906–1963, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p. 15.

334 Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell, London, Richard Cohen Books, 1996, p. 6.

335 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 16.

336 Brivati, op. cit., p. 8.

337 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 19 seq.

338 Ibid., p. 20.

339 Brivati, op. cit., p. 31.

340 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 23.

341 Brivati, op. cit., p. 17.

342 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 117.

343 Brivati, op. cit., p. 104.

344 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 150.

345 Tribune rally at the Labour Party conference, 29 September 1954 – Bevan was referring to a type of leader rather than an individual. See Brivati, op. cit., p. 198.

346 Rodgers, op. cit., p. 117.

347 Ibid., p. 116.

348 Brivati, op. cit., pp. 349–75, 404–31.

349 Ibid.

350 Michael Foot in The Guardian, reproduced in Michael Foot, Loyalists and Loners, London, Faber & Faber, 2011.

351 Brivati, op. cit., p. 342.

352 Brivati, op. cit., p. 412.

353 Brivati, op. cit., p. 8.