Neil Kinnock was party leader from 1983 to 1992. Martin Westlake argues that defeat in two consecutive general elections masked his great achievements in saving, and then reforming, the party, and taking it towards office under difficult circumstances. Kinnock inherited a disillusioned and divided party, and had to deal with the threat of the SDP and a Conservative government emboldened on the back of victory in the Falklands War. By March 1990, not only had Kinnock maintained Labour as the main party of opposition and withstood leadership challenges, but the party looked set for office – only for events, most notably the change in Conservative leadership (itself a sort of backhanded compliment), to turn against him.
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Neil Kinnock’s UK political career430 can be divided into four periods. The first was his south Wales political apprenticeship. He was born on 28 March 1942 in Tredegar – a coal and iron town – as the only child of a former miner father and a district nurse mother, who were determined that he should escape manual labour. Tredegar was Nye Bevan’s constituency, and the young Kinnock, whose parents were staunch Labour voters, was imbued with the romantic and political lore of the Welsh mining community. At fourteen, Kinnock started talking politics with a local miner and Labour councillor Bill Harry, and this led him into a discussion group and early Labour Party membership. He won a place at Cardiff University to study industrial relations and history, and was active in the university debating society, the student union, the socialist society and the anti-apartheid movement. Early on, he met his future wife, fellow student Glenys Parry (an activist with impeccable Labour pedigree). In 1965, Kinnock was elected president of Cardiff University’s student union on a reformist ticket. In 1966, he became a tutor organiser for the WEA and, together with Glenys, was a passionate member of the young Bevanites. Chance, design, and his already evident oratorical powers combined to land him selection to the super-safe Labour seat of Bedwellty, which he won with a 22,729-vote majority in the June 1970 general election, aged twenty-eight.
The second period in Kinnock’s political development was his time as a young Westminster backbencher and ‘left-wing firebrand’. The high number of written questions he tabled in 1970–74 attests to the frustrations of opposition back-bench life, but, once Harold Wilson had led the party back into government in 1974, Kinnock, critical of the managerialism that Wilson and later Callaghan’s small majorities imposed upon their administrations, consolidated his left-wing credentials. He was a member of the Tribune Group, and, as an early member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, was supportive of calls to widen the franchise for the election of party leader. With the exception of a brief period as Michael Foot’s private parliamentary secretary, Kinnock steered clear of the traditional political career ladder, winning his spurs as a robustly independent backbencher who opposed membership of the then EEC and Welsh devolution. The 1 March 1979 Welsh devolution referendum result (a resounding defeat for the Labour government’s proposal) was a vindication of Kinnock’s principled position, and such campaigns ‘at last began to prove his capacity for the grind of politics’.431 During this period, Kinnock, an increasingly charismatic and witty orator, also honed his speaking and journalistic skills. A ready and frequent speaker at grass-roots events, and liked by the unions, Kinnock was soon being identified as a rising star within the party. In 1978, at the age of thirty-six, he was elected to the NEC.
The third period began with the 3 May 1979 general election, which saw Labour ousted by a 5.2 per cent swing to the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservatives (the largest swing since 1945). Kinnock always saw this, and not the crushing 9 June 1983 result, as the crucial turning point. The acute political sense he had developed told him that the 1979 result was more than a simple swing of the electoral pendulum. A sea change was occurring. It was ‘put up or shut up time’.432 On 18 June, he was appointed shadow education spokesman. His decision to stand for election to the Cabinet signalled a breaking of ranks with the left. A rousing October party conference speech consolidated Kinnock’s popularity in the party. But, significantly, he was also ‘starting to speak as though he might one day be in government’.433 Over the next four years, as the fractious Bennite left and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy embarked on a very public fratricidal struggle, Kinnock became increasingly critical of what he generally called ‘impossibilism’: ‘It was almost as if sections of the party measured the purity of their socialism by the distance they could put between it and the minds of the British people.’434 On 26 March 1981, in reaction to what they saw as Labour’s increasingly suicidal leftward leanings and ungovernability, the ‘gang of four’ – two of them sitting MPs – founded the SDP. On 2 April 1981, as if confirming their impression, Tony Benn announced that he would be challenging the incumbent deputy leader of the party, Denis Healey. Kinnock, arguing that this was a harmful error, decided he could not support Benn’s bid. He and fifteen others abstained in the second round, narrowly depriving Benn of victory. It was a turning point in the party’s history and consolidated Kinnock’s status as a potential candidate for leadership. One other significant, though less public, development occurred in this period, too. In February 1981, Kinnock took on his first full-time research assistant – Charles Clarke. Until then a ‘gregarious loner’, Kinnock rapidly developed a close, symbiotic relationship with Clarke, and the result was a powerful political pairing. Indeed, Clarke became the linchpin of the modernising movement.435
Over the next two years, the party’s internecine warfare continued. Meanwhile, a successful conclusion to the 1982 Falklands War and an economic recovery boosted the popularity of the Conservative Party and its leader. Thatcher called a general election for 9 June 1983. Labour’s notorious manifesto and a confused and incompetent campaign led Labour to a crushing defeat. The Labour vote fell by over 3,000,000 from 1979, and the party lost sixty seats. Ominously, although it received considerably fewer seats, the SDP–Liberal alliance polled only a few hundred thousand votes behind Labour and gained over 25 per cent of the popular vote – the largest such percentage for any third party since the 1923 general election. Michael Foot resigned as leader, and Kinnock – young, radical, popular, principled, loyal, on the reasonable left, backed strongly by the unions and untainted by office in the discredited 1974–79 government – became the favourite to succeed him. On 2 October 1983, Kinnock was elected leader, taking 71.3 per cent of votes cast. The unsuccessful centre-right leadership candidate Roy Hattersley meanwhile saw off a strong challenge from Michael Meacher to be elected deputy leader, creating a ‘dream ticket’. Thus, the fourth period of Kinnock’s career began, ending with him standing down eight years and nine months later, on 18 July 1992. In retrospect, in addition to his innate political gifts, the essential qualities that got Kinnock to the leadership position were those with which his parents had imbued him, and which proved essential in the years to follow – principles, loyalty, duty, conscientiousness, and the sheer grind of hard work. Looking back, he described his decision to stand for the leadership as ‘almost like being called up. What I believed in and wanted to thrive was in peril and I had to do what I had to do to try to defend it.’436
As Table 15.1 shows, in purely electoral terms, much progress was made under Kinnock’s leadership. In 1987, Labour increased its share of the vote by 3.2 per cent from 1983, winning an additional twenty seats while the Conservatives lost twenty-one. In 1992, the party increased its share of the vote by a further 3.6 per cent from 1987, winning an additional forty-two seats while the Conservatives lost forty. Nevertheless, put starkly, the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock fought and lost two general elections. According to a literal definition of statecraft – ‘The art of winning elections and achieving a necessary semblance of governing competence in office’437 – Kinnock failed.
| Date | Seats | Change | UK vote share (per cent) | Votes (millions) |
9 June 1983 |
Con 397 Lab 209 Lib/SDP 23 |
+58 -60 +12 |
42.4 27.6 25.4 |
13.0 8.5 7.8 |
11 June 1987 |
Con 376 Lab 229 Lib/SDP 22 |
-21 +20 -1 |
42.3 30.8 22.6 |
13.8 10.0 7.3 |
9 April 1992 |
Con 336 Lab 271 Lib Dem 20 |
-40 +42 -2 |
41.9 34.4 17.8 |
14.1 11.6 6.0 |
Source: Author, compiled from Rallings and Thrasher, British Electoral Facts (2006), pp. 50–53.
However, despite his own self-deprecating judgement on his achievements as leader, Kinnock manifestly did not fail, for his success cannot only be measured in terms of general elections won. Kinnock’s successes include: the disappearance of the SDP from the table in 1992; the 3,100,000 additional votes won between 1983 and 1992; the Conservative Party’s decision to eject its most successful leader ever in 1990; and, above all, the figures in the same rows and columns for 1997. For, as Tony Blair himself asserted at the party conference in September of that year: ‘The mantle of Prime Minister was never his, but I know that, without him, it would never have been mine.’438 Clearly, to argue and explain this requires an adapted version of Bulpitt’s definition. The sticking point would appear to be (general) elections won, but in terms of the other key statecraft tasks set out in Chapter 2, Kinnock achieved considerable success, and arguably could qualify as a great leader in terms of any overall evaluation. In particular, from the shambolic, fratricidal lows of the 1979–83 period: his leadership brought ‘a sense of governing competence among the electorate’; he ‘managed his party’ with great skill and patience; he ‘won the battles of ideas on key policy issues’; and he toiled long and hard to drive through ‘constitutional changes’ within the party that collectively made it easier to lead and to elect. Even with regard to the fifth key task – ‘developing a winning electoral strategy’ – it could be argued that this was precisely what Kinnock successfully did. Indeed, in their 1999 analysis of the 1997 Labour landslide, Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimer argued that ‘in 1997, Labour would probably have won under Kinnock’.439 Thus, to cater for the specificities of Neil Kinnock’s leadership, the definition of statecraft should be extended to include: first, the maintenance of Labour as the main party of opposition; and, second, the maintenance of leadership in order to complete and consolidate the reform processes necessary for the winning of subsequent elections.
Context is fundamental in evaluating Kinnock’s leadership, beginning with the party’s 1983 circumstances. An inept, suicidal campaign had resulted in its lowest share of the vote since 1918 and its reduction to just 209 MPs. The party Kinnock inherited had embraced shibboleths such as unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the EEC, large-scale nationalisation, and the go-it-alone concept of an Alternative Economic Strategy (though, of course, some of these Kinnock had embraced himself). The party had been humiliated and demoralised. Its organisational and presentational skills had been disastrous. Worse, while still far from looking like an alternative government, the Liberal–SDP alliance had begun to look worryingly like an alternative opposition. There was a real prospect of the Labour Party becoming marginalised – a shrinking party of declining areas and populations. For any new leader, this would already have been a uniquely challenging inheritance. Moreover, there was an enemy within: the left-wing ‘impossibilism’ that Kinnock had bemoaned in the 1979–83 period had coalesced around a proscribed Trotskyist entryist group, Militant Tendency, which had, in particular, come to dominate Liverpool city council. Elected as a reasonable modernist from the left of the party, Kinnock had to steer a delicate course between two competing considerations in order to get the party back to the all-important centre ground on which the sort of parliamentary majorities he aspired to are always built. On the one hand, far-left antics and excesses could only drive more votes out of the party towards the Jenkinsite SD P, thus further splitting the left and confirming the Conservatives in power. On the other, too rapid and obvious an espousal of the more reasonable policies he knew were necessary would lay his leadership open to accusations of opportunism and selling out. Above all, further schism had to be avoided.
As if this were not enough, in his first years as leader, Kinnock – a miner’s son and a staunch trade unionist – had to contend with the painful distraction of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. It frittered away his ‘honeymoon period’, made him seem weak and indecisive, confirmed prejudices on both sides of the divide, and reinforced the image of Labour as being out of date. It also simultaneously obscured and symbolised a deeper development that Kinnock had first sensed in 1979 – the socio-economic sea change that was taking place in the British electorate. As Philip Gould put it, the party in 1983 had ‘failed to understand that the old working class was becoming a new middle class’.440
Lastly, Kinnock had to face a ‘novelty in British politics’:441 a post-Falklands-emboldened Conservative government with a coherent and radical political re-ordering project. This was predicated on the socio-economic sea change already under way, which included the dismantling of much of the post-war consensus, and which, in no small part because of the split opposition, was confident of commanding majorities at successive elections. As Kinnock started his uphill quest towards the centre ground, the objective was being shifted further from his grasp; from the collective to the individual, from the state to the market, from the ‘nanny state’ to de-regulation.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the circumstances under which Kinnock took up the challenge of party leadership could hardly have been less favourable. The ‘governing context’, in statecraft terms, was absolutely foul.
Having witnessed the follies of the 1979–83 period up close, Kinnock had already largely diagnosed the party’s ills, and was increasingly determined to develop a game plan and stick to it. At a policy level, he would gradually shift the party away from its more extreme manifesto commitments, with a view to broadening and deepening the party’s appeal, thus enabling it to appear as a viable alternative governing party. On EEC membership, Kinnock had already begun to soften the party’s stance, even before he was elected leader, aware that the June 1984 European elections would represent his, and the party’s, first national electoral test since the 1983 meltdown (in the event, Labour took fifteen seats away from the Conservatives). Another early initiative was to change the party’s policy on council house sales. Retrospectively, Kinnock divided such policy changes into three categories: those possible without encountering major resistance (the party’s position regarding the EEC and council house sales, for example); those that could probably be changed with ‘greater effort and the right timing’ (for instance, antagonism towards trade union ballots and the general policy on nationalisation); and those with ‘particularly deep roots that were, in themselves, benchmarks of political disposition within the Labour Party’ (chief among which was the issue of nuclear disarmament).442
At a party level, he had to take on, and beat, Militant Tendency for three reasons, all necessitating delicate manoeuvring. First, the strong message to the broader electorate was that the leadership was bent on rejecting extremism. There was, thus, no alternative to winning the fight, no matter how tedious and agonising the process. Also, second, to those on the right still within the party, his decision to take on Militant gave them heart and good reason to stay. For them, Kinnock’s famous 1985 Bournemouth speech was (and remains) a famous rallying cry. The third objective was to detach the soft left from the extremists, enabling it to coalesce with the centre and centre-right of the party. The longer-term objective of these policy and party objectives was to make the SDP unnecessary, attract back those who had despaired in 1983, and hence build towards an electoral majority.
All of this was work best done – indeed, perhaps only possible – in opposition, but it also required cultural and structural changes. Kinnock transformed Labour’s management team through such key appointments as that of Larry Whitty as general secretary of the party and Peter Mandelson as head of communications. He already had a strong relationship with his ‘chief fixer’ Charles Clarke, and was able to attract other bright talents such as Patricia Hewitt, creating an able, loyal, reformist team that symbolised the leadership’s intentions. He sought structural changes – such as an early form of ‘one member, one vote’ (OMOV), enabling him to appeal to a broader and more balanced party constituency – and joint policy committees, intended to render the party more manageable and coherent. He professionalised the party by concentrating far more on communication and polling skills, leading to the 1986 formation of the shadow Communications Agency, and the more systematic use of communications and polling experts such as Mandelson, Philip Gould and Peter Kellner. He gradually centralised power in the leader’s office and sought to construct a stable working majority on the NEC. He brought on a generation of able Labour parliamentarians who would not only act cohesively in opposition, but could convincingly appear to be the backbone of a future Labour administration.
Collectively, this set of reforms represented a massive task to be carried out over a limited period of time and with a radical government rapidly shifting the electoral centre ground. Worse, Kinnock had to contend with a number of restraints.
First was the ‘supertanker problem’443 of inertia within the party. The change regarding council house sales, for example, took two years. In addition to those against change on principle, parts of the party were suspicious of, or sceptical about, the need for reform. As leader, Kinnock had to constantly explain, win over or reassure.
The burden of the past was a second important constraint. The paradoxical conservatism of the party and the labour movement was evident in the fierce loyalty towards symbols and traditions (singing ‘The Red Flag’, for example). As someone from the left, a miner’s son and a quintessential party man, Kinnock had the advantage of working from within, but, equally, was vulnerable to charges of betrayal in a way that, say, a middle-class lawyer such as Tony Blair would not have been.
A third restraint, considered above, was the continued internal division and risk of schism, with the Liberal–SDP alliance simultaneously a potent threat and an obstruction on the path to the middle ground.
A fourth was the presence of repeated distractions – the worst being the miners’ strike. Others included ‘black sections’ and the antics of ‘loony left’ local councils, which sapped energy and momentum and wasted precious time.
A fifth was the simple fact that: ‘There was no traditional or institutional means within the party for the shadow Cabinet or PLP to instigate such changes.’444
Lastly, Kinnock was restrained by a consideration instinctively felt by all reformist leaders – defeat on any central issue could not be contemplated, therefore success had to be certain before any issue could be pressed to a decisive phase. The patient construction of majorities for reform took energy and time. The latter ran out on 11 May 1987, when Margaret Thatcher announced she would call a general election for 11 June.
Though he would not have sniffed at a victory (and, at one stage during the campaign, the Tories were clearly rattled), Kinnock had always assumed he would probably need to play a ‘two-innings match’.445 The party’s primary aim in the 1987 general election was to see off the Liberal–SDP alliance threat and to re-establish itself as the main, progressive, centre-left alternative to the Conservatives. In this, it was successful. Kinnock had not only ‘saved Labour from self-destruction’,446 but he had reasserted its role as the main opposition party. He had, through patient and skilful party management and constitutional change, won significant battles of ideas on key policy issues, and created a sense of governing competence. In this widened approach to assessing a party leader, the 1983–87 Kinnock was a highly successful leader – indeed, he was regarded during the campaign as being his party’s major asset.447
That the 1987 general election was lost did not come as a surprise; after all, Labour went into the election facing a Tory lead of more than ten points. But the scale of Thatcher’s victory, running counter to the sense of progress created by a slick and successful Labour campaign, was unexpected. The Conservatives focused on lower taxes, a strong economy, and defence (Kinnock, and Labour, were meanwhile still saddled with unilateral disarmament – a major campaign weakness). The Tories emphasised that unemployment had fallen below three million for the first time since 1981 and inflation was at its lowest level for some twenty years (4 per cent). The tabloid media strongly supported the Conservatives, particularly The Sun, which ran anti-Labour articles with headlines such as: ‘Why I’m Backing Kinnock, by Joseph Stalin’. The Conservatives were returned to government, having suffered a net loss of only twenty-one seats, leaving them with 376 MPs. Labour returned only 229 MPs to Westminster. This was the Conservatives’ third consecutive electoral victory. A Labour parliamentary majority still seemed a depressingly long way off.
Kinnock was determined to use this catalytic experience to good advantage. It enabled him to argue that nothing short of a complete overhaul of the party’s policies would do if democratic socialism was ‘to be as attractive, as beckoning and as useful to the relatively affluent and the relatively secure as it is to the less fortunate in our society’.448 He therefore decided on a comprehensive policy review, pushed through seven policy review groups – each shadowed by a member of Kinnock’s staff. In 1988, to Kinnock’s chagrin, Tony Benn challenged him for the leadership (and Eric Heffer and John Prescott challenged Roy Hattersley for the deputy leadership). He saw the challenges as unwelcome distractions and reminders of Labour’s recent fractious past. In retrospect, however, they served Kinnock’s statecraft objectives. The crushing defeats of the challengers (Kinnock won 88.6 per cent; Hattersley 66.8 per cent) consolidated Kinnock’s leadership, gave a very clear message that the far left was finished as a serious force, and effectively provided the leader with a mandate to proceed unchallenged with the policy review process.
The combination of the 1987 defeat, the 1988 victory, and, in parallel, the 1986 Reykjavik Summit and the subsequent 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at last gave Kinnock, much aided by Gerald Kaufman, his shadow foreign affairs spokesman, the possibility of gradually jettisoning the party’s unilateralist stance. The NEC finally approved the switch, by seventeen votes to eight (an unthinkable majority in 1983), and the new multilateral defence policy was subsequently approved by the party conference on 2 October 1989. In abandoning its unilateral policy, the party had removed a major vote-loser, but it had also opened itself up to charges of opportunism. Kinnock believed: ‘It was a risk that had to be taken. Not changing policy would have been wrong and tantamount to suicide.’449 The move was a perfect example of good statecraft.
Another example of Kinnock’s statecraft strategy was the way in which, in the post-1988 period, he steered his party into support for the European single market, attenuated by a strong social Europe, support for membership of the ERM, and, by 1991, the principle of economic and monetary union. The presence of Jacques Delors, as a powerful European Commission president, helped Kinnock as he shepherded the Labour Party into the European social democratic mainstream.
The policy review documents – the fruit of eighteen months’ work – were published in May 1989, under the title ‘Meet the Challenge, Make the Change’. ‘Meet the Challenge’ was hailed as one of the most comprehensive sets of proposals ever assembled mid-term by a British political party, and was an enduring testament to Kinnock’s leadership and statecraft. It was his energy more than anything that had driven the process forward.450 The progress made was reflected in Labour’s strong showing in the 15 June 1989 European elections. Labour overtook the Conservatives for the first time in any election since October 1974, and for the first time ever in a European election, winning thirteen more seats (forty-five to thirty-two). Two further policy documents were subsequently published: ‘Looking to the Future’ (May 1990) was essentially a mini-manifesto, but it notably included a commitment to the European ERM; ‘Opportunity Britain’ (May 1991) was a repackaged policy review. By 1990, the Kinnock-reformed Labour Party looked like a potential government in waiting. Therein lay the rub: in retrospect, the party and its leader had peaked too soon.
The introduction of the poll tax had badly damaged the Conservative government’s support and Thatcher’s popularity. Kinnock, at last, overtook Thatcher in the voters’ estimation as the leader best equipped to be Prime Minister. Opinion polls had, in any case, consistently shown that she was less popular than her party, but polls in September 1990 reported that Labour had established a 14 per cent lead over the Conservatives. By November, the Tories had been trailing Labour for eighteen months. Already in 1989, Thatcher had been challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by a little-known back-bench MP, Sir Anthony Meyer. In March 1990, Labour won its best by-election victory for fifty years, overturning a 14,000 Tory majority to take Mid Staffordshire. On 1 November 1990, Geoffrey Howe – the last remaining member of Thatcher’s original 1979 Cabinet – resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister. Michael Heseltine subsequently challenged for leadership. On 22 November, Margaret Thatcher announced her intention to resign, and, five days later, John Major was elected as the new Conservative Party leader, thus becoming Prime Minister.
Put very succinctly, the Tories had shot Labour and Kinnock’s fox, and now the political terrain began to shift in damaging ways. The fact that Major was a new leader made Kinnock look an old one. The style Kinnock had evolved to match Thatcher’s combativeness was inappropriate to Major’s consensual and modest style. Major had his own working-class pedigree. He used his authority as a new leader to end some of the Conservatives’ most unpopular policies, including the poll tax. The August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait left Kinnock with no option but to give full support for the allied action. As John Major noted: Thatcher’s surprise announcement, on 8 October 1990, about joining the ERM removed a key difference between the parties in their approach to the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Having known only the negative state of opposition since 1979, and wounded by three successive electoral defeats, Labour’s psychological and material resources were now at a low ebb – the need to be on a constant electoral footing was pushing the party into debt. In 1990, Kinnock became the longest-serving opposition leader of the twentieth century, and the strain was beginning to tell. Philip Gould recalled: ‘Neil was exhausted by constantly attempting to hold together a party threatening to fracture if he moved too far and too fast, and by the need to look restrained and “respectable” for the press and the public.’452
I reflected on how frustrating the conflict must be for him. Before I became Prime Minister, Labour were well ahead in the opinion polls, but my election had turned them around. Now, when he must have wished to sink his teeth into a new Prime Minister, he was forced to support him. Nonetheless, despite a dissenting minority in his party, he did so and rose enormously in my estimation. Neil Kinnock was an old-fashioned patriot.451
A vicious spiral of self-fulfilling prophecies then set in. Doubts about the party’s ability to win the next general election led to preparations for the aftermath and the inevitable succession, which, in turn, badly undermined the party’s ability to win. Tensions with his shadow Chancellor and probable successor John Smith, particularly with regard to the party’s Achilles’ heel (tax), further distracted the party from the cohesiveness it needed in order to fight effectively. It was not all doom and gloom, but Kinnock’s personal high points of 1987 and 1990 seemed increasingly far away.
On 9 April 1992, the Conservatives won their fourth consecutive general election victory. The scale of the Conservative victory was remarkable: 336 seats to Labour’s 271 – John Major’s Conservatives had polled a massive 14,000,000 votes. On 18 July 1992, Neil Kinnock stood down as leader.
If this analysis were to have finished on 22 November 1990, then, in statecraft terms, Kinnock would surely have been adjudged a highly successful leader. As George Lucas wrote: ‘Kinnock’s reputation is tainted by the tortuous 1991–92 period, when he was already spiritually denuded by the years of private combat and public degradation. His main triumphs were already performed.’453 With great courage and energy, through sheer effort and patience, and with considerable personal sacrifice, he had measured up to and vanquished the threat within (Militant Tendency and the far left) and the threat without (the SDP and the Liberal–SDP alliance). He had also successfully reasserted Labour as the main opposition party, and – through his evident electability and the success of his policy and structural reforms – had scared the Conservatives into getting rid of their most successful leader, although, as expected, he did lose one general election while dragging the party back from the depths to which it had plumbed in 1983.
In Schlesinger’s ranking system (which rated leaders as ‘Great’, ‘Near Great’, ‘Average’, ‘Below Average’ or ‘Failure’), Kinnock was surely a ‘Near-Great’, if not ‘Great’, leader.454 In Theakston and Gill’s terms,455 Kinnock demonstrated brilliant leadership skills and sound judgement, and was ‘good in a crisis’. If, following Hennessy,456 presiding over substantial change is a key indicator of successful leadership, then Kinnock was a resounding success – somebody who had made his own political weather, notwithstanding the socio-economic cyclone through which he was navigating his party. His success as a reformer paired with his ultimate inability to win elections is a graphic illustration of Buller and James’s contention that leaders can be both a success and a failure.457 But the nuance referred to above raises other questions. To whom, if we wish to evaluate him in such terms, should we compare Kinnock? Should it be all party leaders? Or all leaders of the opposition? Or Labour leaders of the opposition (see Table 15.2 below)? What about reforming party leaders?
If a Venn diagram were to be drawn of all of these categories (from 1937 onwards, when the position of Leader of the Opposition became statutory) then Kinnock would figure in the central common ground, together with only Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Nobody else.
| Leader/period in office | Opposition periods | General elections fought | Results (won/lost) |
| Clement Attlee 20yr,2m | 25 October 1935 – 22 May 1940 23 May 1945 – 26 July 1945 26 October 1951 – 25 November 1955 |
1945, 1950, 1951, 1955 | W2, L2 |
| Hugh Gaitskell 7yr,1m | 14 December 1955 - 18 January 1963 | 1959 | L1 |
| Harold Wilson 13yr,2m | 14 February 1963 – 15 October 1964 19 June 1970 – 3 March 1974 |
1964, 1966, 1970, 1974 (x2) W4, | L1 |
| James Callaghan 4yr,7m | 4 May 1979 – 9 November 1980 | 1979 | L1 |
| Michael Foot 2yr,11m | 10 November 1980 – 1 October 1983 | 1983 | L1 |
| Neil Kinnock 8yr,9m | 2 October 1983 – 17 July 1992 | 1987, 1992 | L2 |
| John Smith 1yr, 10m | 18 July 1992 – 12 May 1994 | ||
| Tony Blair 12yr,11m | 21 July 1994 – 1 May 1997 | 1997, 2001, 2005 | W3 |
| Ed Miliband 4yr,7m | 25 September 2010 – 8 May 2015 | 2015 | L1 |
The value of Kinnock’s leadership can be measured through responses to other questions. Was there anybody else who was seriously prepared to take on the reform/modernisation task in 1983? Could somebody else have done it, even at a later date? Was anybody better equipped to do it? Could somebody else have done it quicker? The answer to all of these questions is clearly ‘no’. Only Kinnock, the incumbent reformer, could have been empowered enough through the 1987 defeat to take the modernisation process still further. A more subtle question would be to consider whether Kinnock was such a good leader precisely because he was a (reformist) Leader of the Opposition. The combination of skills and qualities that he brought to the task was certainly unique. These included his oratorical skills, his political courage, his readiness to engage in debate and suasion, his loyalty, his passion and sheer energy levels, his ability to attract and work with talent,459 his ability to work with his enemies (for as long, at least, as they were good for the cause), and the fact that he came from the left. The reverse of that coin is to ask whether Kinnock would have made a good Prime Minister. Certainly, his subsequent performances as a commissioner and vice-president of the European Commission demonstrated that he was at ease with complicated briefs and high responsibilities. He would surely have been up to the job.
The post-1990 relative decline and the 9 April 1992 electoral defeat muddy the picture. Of course, Kinnock continued to strive with every sinew for victory, but there are at least two theories that argue that this second defeat was, paradoxically, part of that overall picture. The first considers how: ‘Sometimes the political process throws up leaders who identify a need for radical change, use their position of power to bring about that change, but thereafter seem unable to benefit from the change themselves.’460 Such leaders of transition are necessarily associated with a particular phase of the regime:
They are associated to such an extent that it is felt that the completion of the transition process and the emergence of a genuinely new regime necessarily involves going beyond the leader of the transition himself. In order for the transition to be consummated, the leaders of transition must be rejected and abandoned. After all, they are tainted by their provenance from the old world and are therefore unsuited to take the regime into the brave new world.461
Accordingly, it was only through his defeat and subsequent resignation that the leader’s reforms could be fully consolidated. Such leaders, incidentally, always act with reference to a set of higher moral values – the amount of suffering and vilification that Kinnock was prepared to go through would otherwise have seemed irrational. Here is his own description of the democratic loyalist’s logic:
Certainly for me, it was one thing after the other, but you keep going because of the cause with a capital ‘C’, and the cause is always to try to address the present and build for the future. That’s why you are in democratic politics in the first place.462
The leader of transition theory may be considered post hoc rationalisation, but, by 1997, Tony Blair – coming after Kinnock and Smith – seemed light years away from 1983, although, in fact, he was first elected as an MP in that general election, and therefore also fought on the basis of ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
A second theory argues that, although it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time, Labour, and possibly Kinnock himself, was lucky to lose the 1992 general election. As Ross McKibbin has put it: ‘By 1992, Labour had largely recovered the ground lost since 1979, though Kinnock never got much credit for this. Labour owes one other debt to him: he lost the 1992 election – one of the few pieces of genuine good luck the Labour Party has ever had.’463 Space precludes a proper examination of this argument – bound up in complicated speculation about what Labour might have done within the ERM if it had come to power.464 Put simply, on 8 October 1991, the Conservatives, at Thatcher’s insistence, took sterling into the ERM at a unilaterally declared ‘macho’ parity of 2.95DM – an act that led directly to Black Wednesday, when the Conservative government was forced to withdraw the pound from the ERM, simultaneously blowing an estimated £3.4 billion of Treasury reserves and its reputation as the party of reliable economic governance.465 Arguably, it was the loss of that reputation, more than anything else, that cleared the way for Labour’s victory in 1997. This is, in any case, post hoc rationalisation – Kinnock may have had doubts about whether the 1992 general election could be won, but he certainly didn’t set out to lose it.
This account has sought to evaluate Kinnock’s leadership using an adapted version of the statecraft approach. It has concentrated, therefore, on the aspects of his leadership that Bulpitt and, later, Buller and James (see Chapter 2) considered important. It has thus, inevitably, neglected aspects that might, given another approach, be considered of greater relevance. For example: his relationship with the media and treatment by the tabloid press; the way his leadership ‘evoked strange snobberies that have now largely disappeared from British life’;466 his Welshness as a target of prejudice; the way his increasing pragmatism allegedly suffocated democratic debate within the party; the – almost certainly erroneous – ‘Kinnock blew it’ schools of thought; the related ‘one more heave’ school of thought; his alleged aversion, post-reform, to the development of a new progressive ideology; and, at least partly in consequence, arguments that his reforms led almost inevitably led to a ‘New Labour’ party and to Blair administrations with many aspects of which he felt uncomfortable.467
However, the statecraft analysis raises another question. If Kinnock committed errors of judgement towards the end of his time as leader, these were relatively benign. His 1992 loss had more to do with the way the world suddenly changed around him, rather than with gross errors on his part. The real problem was that he had scared the Conservatives into removing the person who had effectively become his best electoral asset – Margaret Thatcher. Enoch Powell once remarked that all political careers end in failure. Is it possible, then, to evaluate Margaret Thatcher’s leadership up to, but before, the introduction of the poll tax? Or Tony Blair’s up to, but before, the invasion of Iraq? Or Neil Kinnock’s up to the March 1990 Mid Staffordshire by-election? In any case, Kinnock’s failures, in statecraft terms, were clearly lesser – at the most, sins of omission rather than commission.
In conclusion, an adapted version of the statecraft approach is a useful tool in better evaluating the record of a Labour leader who never won a general election but whose work in ‘permanent opposition’468 was vital for the three general election victories that were to follow. He was, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset, himself and his circumstances. If Kinnock was lucky in rising to the leadership in the way he did, he was unlucky in rising to the leadership when he did. Surely, in qualitative terms, of all the Labour leaders who were never Prime Minister (Henderson, Lansbury, Gaitskell, Foot, Smith and Miliband), Kinnock achieved the most by far. As argued elsewhere, he was a leader of transition, and a loyalist reformer.469 Which is why, some eight years after his resignation, when he was presented, in a very different context, with another ‘mission impossible’, it came as no surprise that he accomplished this new, equally thankless, but nonetheless heroic task with loyalty, duty, conscientiousness, hard work and, ultimately, aplomb.470 But that was another – the next – story.
430 His subsequent career as a member, and then vice-president, of the European Commission, and his time as chairman of the British Council are not considered here.
431 Robert Harris, The Making of Neil Kinnock, London, Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 106.
432 Neil Kinnock on Kinnock: The Inside Story, London Weekend Television, 1992.
433 David Owen, Time to Declare, London, Michael Joseph, 1991, pp. 430–31.
434 Neil Kinnock, ‘Reforming the Labour Party’, Contemporary Record, 8(3), winter 1994, p. 535.
435 Martin Westlake, Kinnock: The Biography, London, Little, Brown, 2001, pp. 202–3.
436 Kinnock: The Inside Story, 1992.
437 Jim Bulpitt, ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft’, Political Studies, 34(1), 1986, p. 21.
438 Tony Blair’s leader’s speech at Labour Party conference in Brighton, 30 September 1997, accessed 9 January 2014 (http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/
speech-archive.htm?speech=203).
439 Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimer, Explaining Labour’s Landslides, London, Politico’s, 1999, pp. 88–91.
440 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, London, Little, Brown, 1998, p. 4.
441 Dennis Kavanagh, The Reordering of British Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 171–93.
442 Kinnock, op. cit., p. 540.
443 Eileen Jones, Neil Kinnock, London, Robert Hale Ltd, 1994, p. 114.
444 Jones, op. cit., p. 114.
445 Kinnock, op. cit., p. 543.
446 Philip Stephens, ‘New Image for the New Left’, Financial Times, 31 October–1 November 1998.
447 Patrick Wintour, ‘Labour’s Search for a Lasting Unity’ (1992) in David McKie ed., The Election, A Voter’s Guide, London, Fourth Estate, 2000, p. 28.
448 Neil Kinnock, quoted in Andy McSmith, Faces of Labour, London, Verso, 1996, p. 66.
449 Neil Kinnock, private interview with the author, 23 December 1998.
450 Jon Sopel, Tony Blair: The Moderniser, London, Little, Brown, 1995, p. 180.
451 John Major, The Autobiography, London, HarperCollins, 1999.
452 Philip Gould, op. cit., p. 103.
453 George Lucas, ‘A goldfish full of piranhas’, Independent on Sunday, 9 December 2001.
454 Joseph Schlesinger Snr, ‘The US presidents: What makes a President great? Or a failure? The verdict of history provides some answers’, Life, XXV, pp. 65–74. This is a nuance that raises the question as to whether politicians can only be great leaders if they enter into government, or, further, govern during wars.
455 Theakston and Gill, op. cit., 2006.
456 Peter Hennessy, op. cit.
457 Buller and James, op. cit., 2012, p. 536.
458 Not including the short interregnums of Herbert Morrison (November–December 1955), George Brown (January–February 1963), Margaret Beckett (May–July 1994), and Harriet Harman (May–September 2010). Also note that James Callaghan and Gordon Brown came to the Labour Party leadership and the prime ministership without having served as Leader of the Opposition and/or leader of the Party. Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Foot had all served in government. Kinnock, Smith, Blair and Miliband had not.
459 Until 1981, ‘Kinnock’ largely meant the man and his wife alone (one of the great political partnerships). Thereafter, it meant Kinnock and Glenys (with their young family and her teaching job), Charles Clarke, and a gradually widening team of sympathisers and supporters who believed in him and were determined to see his project through. The close-knit nature of these relationships would lead ultimately to charges of tribalism that Kinnock hotly denied. From his point of view, he had put the party’s electoral capacity above all else. Loyalty to the cause was thereafter the watch word.
460 Martin Westlake, ‘Neil Kinnock, Loyalist Reformer’, in Martin Westlake ed., Leaders of Transition, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. xiii.
461 Westlake, op. cit., 2000, p. 170.
462 Neil Kinnock, ‘Opportunity Knocks’ interview in Holyrood Magazine, 3 November 2013.
463 Ross McKibbin, ‘Why the Tories Lost’, London Review of Books, 19(13), 1997.
464 For a detailed discussion, see Westlake, 2001, pp. 503–4.
465 Labour planned to request a revaluation of sterling within the ERM immediately after it had won power.
466 Ross McKibbin, ‘The Luck of the Tories’, London Review of Books, 24(5), 7 March 2002, pp. 8–9.
467 McKibbin, ibid.
468 McKibbin, ibid.
469 Martin Westlake, ‘Neil Kinnock 1983-92’, in Jefferys, op. cit., 1999; Westlake, op. cit., 2000.
470 Hussein Kassim, ‘The Kinnock Reforms in Perspective: Why Reforming the Commission is an Heroic, But Thankless, Task’, Public Policy and Administration, 19(3), autumn 2004; Hussein Kassim, ‘“Mission impossible”, but mission accomplished: the Kinnock reforms and the European Commission’, Journal of European Public Policy, 15(5), August 2008, pp. 648–68.