This chapter is an edited transcript of an interview with Neil Kinnock504 to understand his path towards becoming leader, the challenges that he faced, and whether he thinks that the statecraft approach is a useful framework for assessing leaders. Neil Kinnock describes his journey towards becoming leader as being more the result of lucky circumstances than his own grand design. He argues that the statecraft framework is a fair method because it is objective. He suggests that he had some successes in making the Labour Party electable, especially given the difficult challenges he faced managing the party, but that his failure to provide an overall narrative for government was a major mistake, and prevented him from winning office. Kinnock then considers the characteristics leaders need in order to be successful.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE ROAD TO BECOMING LEADER

TOBY JAMES: Going back to the beginning, in some ways – when you won the Labour Party nomination to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Bedwellty in June 1969, what were your aspirations and what did you want to achieve?

 

NEIL KINNOCK: I suppose that you have to go back a little bit further. I was born and brought up in industrial south Wales, and became ‘political’ by the time that I was about twelve or thirteen. This was simply because my family experience, and what I had witnessed in other people’s homes, made me want to make things better. By the time that I was twelve or thirteen, although it would not have appeared in this precise syntax at the time, I realised that, in order to make things better, you had to work with other people and you had to get organised. So I joined the Labour Party, courtesy of the local branch secretary Billy Harry, who was our county councillor. He allowed me to join on 1 January 1957, three months before I was fifteen, so I was illegitimately in the Labour Party.

What did I mean by making things better? I could see poverty. Of course, things were gigantically better than they had been, even ten years before then – let alone twenty years before then. But there was poverty, illness that occurred particularly among people who’d had a poor upbringing, shortages of food, people permanently cold, and people with too little schooling. Around the area, I could see ugliness imposed upon beauty, and considered that all these things could and should be put aside. There was also the inspiration of Aneurin Bevan, who was our Member of Parliament, and who I saw performing compellingly in public several times, even if I only met him a couple of times.

That’s the way I became political and that’s why I joined the Labour Party. But there was no personal aspiration in it. There was an ambition to secure change, and collective means was the only route available for doing that. I didn’t think in terms of running for any sort of office, other than chairman of the Young Socialists, until I went to university. That was meat and drink. I buggered up my degree in the course of doing it, but we had two general elections in 1964 and 1966. I worked my butt off for Jim Callaghan, who I liked very much. He had a real fondness for me, but an even greater fondness for Glenys, who, by that time, was my regular girlfriend.

The opportunity of student politics was an opportunity for organisation. I became chairman of the socialist society, and then president of the union. But the student politics was a sideline. The greatest opportunity was the recruitment and mobilisation of people to whom I had very easy access. We recruited a hell of a lot – we had a very big socialist society – and had a really big impact on the election in Cardiff South East and then in Cardiff North in 1966. That brought home to me the fact that I was articulate, that I could represent other people and could get elected.

Then, after I graduated, I found the dream job, which was to be a tutor organiser at the WEA. Even then, the idea of getting selected for a seat was remote. I would not have said that it was absent – because other people kept on talking about it – but it was barely a light above the horizon. And, in any case, I was very happily married; we had a nice house; Glenys and I had jobs that we absolutely loved. But, in the very nature of WEA, I was doing shop stewards’ classes and getting round the valleys, so it was not long before people were saying to me: ‘You should fight this seat next time.’

Anyway, the great moment really came at an executive committee meeting in my own constituency of Bedwellty,505 where I was the minutes secretary (the lowest form of representative life). The sitting MP, who I thought was in his late fifties, but turned out to be in his late sixties, announced under ‘any other business’ that he was not going to run for the next election. That was in January 1969.

I went down to the pub with the boys and Glenys and said: ‘Right – who are we going to run?’ And they said: ‘You, you silly sod! Of course it is going to be you!’ So that was it. I can’t say that my real ambition to be a Member of Parliament was born then, but it was only then that it became tangible. I was twenty-seven and I knew that I was going to have an uphill struggle with the selection for this seat – a 22,000 majority and a very established old guard. In the end, I won the nomination by two votes. And, a year later, courtesy of the electorate, there I was in Parliament.

Ambition after that? Not much, really – being a Member of Parliament was real fulfilment. Maybe it was because I was elected at the time of Labour’s defeat, but the idea of being on the front bench, especially given my political disposition (which was the Tribune-ite, Bevanite, Footite left), really didn’t feature at all. Maybe it should have. Maybe I would have made some changes to stances that I took. It probably would have been the wrong thing to do in terms of authenticity and being true to myself, but it would have caused fewer bumps in subsequent years. If you calculate like that, though, you’re a careerist pain in the bum – and there were enough of those kinds of people among my contemporaries in the PLP at the time.

It wasn’t until after the 1974 election, when we got a Labour government unexpectedly and I was asked to be an opening speaker in the debate on the Queen’s Speech, that it occurred to me that I was wearing a no. 12 shirt, and, whenever Wilson got the chance, he was going to offer me a place in the government. Even that didn’t initially occur to me – it was said to me by others. Leo Abse, George Thomas, Stan Orme, were among the people who said: ‘Oh, he’s got you marked.’

Glenys and I were then invited to dinner at 10 Downing Street with Lee Kuan Yew and Jeremy Thorpe. We joked, Glenys and I, that it was so Wilson could check whether I knew which knife and fork to pick up. After that, I made several challenges against the government, especially on public expenditure, and, after Wilson’s time, on devolution. This blotted my copybook, so the idea of being on the front bench faded further into the background. I was very glad about that, because I was a member of the select committee on nationalised industries, and campaigns of various kinds.

When Jim Callaghan was elected leader, he offered me a ministerial post on two occasions. But, by that stage, with Denis Healey’s public expenditure plans and devolution really looming larger, it would have been dishonest of me to have taken the position in those circumstances, when I disagreed with the leadership on both of these major issues. I explained to Jim that it just would not have been sustainable and he could find somebody who was going to be more dependable. So he got Bob Cryer. [Laughter]

That was that, apart from getting elected to the party NEC in 1978, until we lost the 1979 election. Jim Callaghan gave me the education portfolio, even though I was the runner-up in the shadow Cabinet elections, at which point, I fortunately encountered the Rt Reverend Charles Clarke.

NEIL KINNOCK: Exactly. Teddy Taylor just scraped home by a couple of hundred votes and against us! That was how long ago it was.

Jim Callaghan didn’t resign in Blackpool in October – he left it a couple of months. I then spoke to Michael Foot about him running, and showed him my score sheet – which I had checked with Phil Whitehead (said to be on the right of the party, but an excellent man) – to demonstrate that, on his absolutely best day, he was definitely going to lose by nine. Philip had him losing by eight. We had gone through the list separately and together. I told Michael and he said: ‘Phough! That’s bloody good news! Let’s go and have a drink!’ He didn’t want to be leader.

But Ian Mikardo, Clive Jenkins, Jack Jones and Hughy Scanlon prevailed on him. Over a weekend, he’d changed his mind. He came back from giving a lecture on Swift in Dublin, and they were waiting for him when he got home. Of course, Jill (his wife) was always in favour of him doing it. So he ran. I called him and said: ‘You know, Michael, I’m actually against you running. I think that that’s your view as well, but I understand the reasons why you’re running – so I’ll manage your campaign.’ That I did, and told a lot of fibs in order to get quite unlikely people to vote for him.

Michael won the leadership election, but, after a year, he was having the most difficult of times. The party was abominable. The Social Democrats had been formed and it was bloody dreadful. I’ll never forget. We were in an Indian restaurant in Newport on a Friday night, after the general committee, with Barry Moore, Gwyn Evans and Tommy Williams. Barry actually said: ‘You’re going to have to sort this out, you know?’ I said: ‘It’s going to take a lot of people to do that.’ He said: ‘No, when Michael goes, you’ve got to go for the leadership.’

I can’t say that I hadn’t thought about it. People like Don Concannon, from the right wing of the party, with whom I had lived for nearly two years in Belsize Park, had suggested it to me. I thought: ‘OK, this is going to be it.’ Within weeks, Charles and I talked about it. This would have been late 1981, after the crazy conference at which Benn ran against Healey for the deputy leadership. So that was when I took the decision. Looking around, it occurred to me that the only alternative that could have given me real problems was John Smith. But, as the months of party turmoil went on, it was obvious that John could not have done it, and didn’t want to.

Michael announced that he was standing down as leader a couple of days after the 1983 election. Clive Jenkins of the ASTMS phoned me while I was on the radio talking about the result. He said that he was going to announce that afternoon that his union was nominating me. I then had to scramble to phone Michael to say what was happening. I asked Clive to delay it for a couple of days for decency’s sake. Michael said: ‘There is no need for that!’

We – Charles, mainly – then came up with the stunningly brilliant idea of running for the leadership and the deputy leadership, and getting Roy Hattersley to do the same. Roy was initially reluctant to run for the deputy leadership, but, fortunately, Dave Hill persuaded him, so the whole process was a great deal smoother than it otherwise would have been. I actually think that Roy did marginally better in the leadership election, because he demonstrated this generosity of spirit and desire for unity – maybe I did, as well. Nonetheless, we had a very substantial mandate, which we would have liked to have exploited. But along came Arthur Scargill! Then, the months until mid-1985, after the miners’ strike ended, were pure hell.

That is the full story. So, if you take Shakespeare literally and think of being leader of the Labour Party as ‘greatness’, it was not so much thrust upon me, but there was not really an alternative who could do the necessary job in prevailing conditions. I have since reflected that, just a few years before I became leader of the Labour Party (at forty-one years of age), Tony Benn had been politically sane, Shirley Williams was there, Anthony Crosland hadn’t died and Denis Healey was four years younger. If Denis Healey had not got older (and he seemed to get older fast, it has to be said), Benn hadn’t gone politically crazy, Shirley hadn’t defected and Crosland hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have even had to think about becoming leader. In the absence of those, there was no alternative.

 

CHARLES CLARKE: I remember that, even as late as the morning of polling day in 1983, Gwyn Evans came up to you and said that he’d spoken to a bookmaker who had very good odds on you being the Labour leader. Gwyn said that he was going to mortgage his house and put the whole of its value on you becoming leader. You completely lost your temper with him because you thought that you couldn’t be responsible for him losing his house. This was mostly because, even at that late stage, you were not sure that you’d be a candidate.

NEIL KINNOCK: I said to him: ‘Listen! What if I were killed in a bloody car crash?!’ And he said: ‘Well, the bet would have been off then.’

I gave him a list of other reasons and he was not entirely persuaded. And then, on 13 July, I did turn the car over, and survived – by a miracle. The next day Gwyn phoned me and said: ‘Jesus Christ! I am glad I didn’t bloody bet on you!’

The idea of aspiration, therefore, really dawned with me on 2 October 1983. My aspiration then was to win the election and therefore to become Labour Prime Minister. You can’t get to be a Member of Parliament at the age of twenty-eight without ambition. I am not saying that I’m ambition-free or without aspiration. The idea that politics is a ladder, and once you have got on one rung, you climb onto the next, exists, and it is very strong. But, perhaps because of a lack of aspiration or confidence, I never thought in terms of those ladders. I had a series of political ladders falling on me and, somehow, came out with only dust on my shoulders.

REFLECTIONS ON ASSESSING PARTY LEADERS, STATECRAFT THEORY AND HIS OWN LEADERSHIP

TOBY JAMES:You eventually became leader. But by what criteria do you think we should evaluate contemporary party leaders in Britain?

NEIL KINNOCK:I think they should be evaluated, in no particular order, in terms of their quality of leadership and in terms of the benefits they derive for their party, their country and the economy.

Obviously, those leaders who were only in opposition – including the Tory leaders who came and went in quick succession, Ashdown, and myself – can’t be judged in terms of what economic impact they had. The main judgement of those who did not become Prime Minister has to be in terms of what they did for their party. However, I suppose the benefits that they offered to the country by providing, or by not providing, serious alternatives to government, and securing, or not securing, a changed attitude among the public towards their party should be taken into consideration.

TOBY JAMES: The framework that we have used in the book is the statecraft approach. This assesses leaders in terms of whether they win elections and are seen as competent in office. Do you think that this is a fair approach?

NEIL KINNOCK: It is. I think that it’s a fair method because it’s objective, and you have boiled it down to absolutely essential judgements. You can always tag on one or two if they occur to you subsequently, but I think that those criteria are fair and illuminating. It is no good them just being fair – they have to reveal insights, as well. But they are objective and they can be generally applied.

TOBY JAMES: Statecraft theory, with its focus on winning elections, was originally put forward because it was thought that the pressures of Westminster politics are such that if leaders don’t win elections and demonstrate competence, leaders aren’t leaders for long. Is that something that you personally have found or something you think other leaders have faced?

NEIL KINNOCK: In the end, it’s about winning elections. There are contributing factors, but, in the end, they are covered broadly by the statecraft criteria. Nothing replaces winning elections.

Cameron has now, with his ‘I’m going before 2020’ stuff, opened a leadership succession race, and it is quite beyond me why he did that, because he didn’t win a majority in 2010. If he’d even had a majority of two – or even if he’d been so substantially the biggest single party, but slightly short of a majority, and had had week-by-week arrangements with the Liberals or other parties – he would have been forgiven by the Tory right. But the fact that he didn’t win in 2010 by quite a street, and then felt obliged – under the influence of Osborne – to have a dependable majority by aligning himself with the Liberals, was an unavoidable strategic error, simply by the numbers. The arithmetic really counts. He’s had an unsteady premiership, which was the hand he was dealt, but he made it work by being the appeasement Prime Minister. Cameron has never seriously tried to manage his party, and now, with his resignation notice, he’s making a pre-emptive strike against insurgency and a coup.

Ill discipline is uncharacteristic of the British Conservative Party – historically one of the most electorally successful parties in western democracies. But, because of the nature of Thatcher’s departure, that started to crumble. Major just about held it together despite ‘the bastards’. Then they went through the period of weak leadership. After that, they got Cameron, and voted for him because he looked the likeliest one to win in circumstances where the Tories were sick and tired and furious at losing. He then got the degree of support that any Conservative leader can expect from the right-wing press, and he got some quietude – even from the rampaging nutters in his party – through appeasement and the desire to win again. That’s how he became the leader – but he felt that he had to mollify them from day one, and has carried on doing so.

TOBY JAMES: Describe the pressures you felt yourself in 1987, after not winning the election.

NEIL KINNOCK: We won the campaign in ’87. In the wake of ’87, more people in the party, including some in the NEC, at last began to learn the lesson of defeat. It took them a hell of a long time. It wasn’t for lack of tuition – I preached it; Charles did; Bryan Gould did. All kinds of sensible people who wanted a Labour government for all sorts of good reasons said: ‘Without unity there is no victory.’ Eventually, enough additional people, in the wake of ’87, swung round, some of them quite sharply, to support a different approach. At that point, there was no question of any challenge to my leadership. This was because people expected us to lose, because our campaign was better than anticipated, and because we beat the Social Democrat–Liberal alliance into third place, and were therefore still Her Majesty’s Opposition, having gained about a couple of dozen seats.

A leadership challenge came a year later. It wasn’t very assertive but it had to be beaten down. I was assisted in beating it down, of course, eventually – and inadvertently – by Tony Benn, and his stupidity in running against me. Even without him doing that, I think those attempting to topple me would have been beaten off. There weren’t many, they didn’t have the balls to do it openly and they didn’t have a credible alternative. There was still a lot of the job to be done, especially in policy terms, and they knew that whatever talents he had – and they were considerable – John Smith couldn’t do the slog of party management that was vital. So there wasn’t a serious challenge. There would have been had I hung about in ’92, but the idea of staying on longer than a few transitional weeks was so bloody abominable to me I couldn’t have done it.

CHARLES CLARKE: After the event, I felt that, in 1991, there was a more serious effort by John Smith than I personally had appreciated at the time. Roy Hattersley said that to me after the 1992 election, and I had always asserted that there was no challenge. However, I came to the view afterwards that there was a more co-ordinated effort immediately before the 1992 election.

NEIL KINNOCK: That’s right, I discovered that too. Only one guy said it out loud and that – I’m told – was Barry Sheerman. Apparently he said it in New York, and I got a report back from there. Donald Dewar was the moving spirit in trying to encourage Smith to run, and there were a couple of others around. I think the couple of others may have included Gordon Brown, and maybe Tony Blair at the margins – but at the distant margins. As the election approached, John Smith didn’t have it – and knew he didn’t have it. It’s as simple as that, and they didn’t have anybody else.

TOBY JAMES: So, turning to the five functions of the statecraft model, what would you say are the difficulties you faced in developing a winning electoral strategy over the course of those two elections?

NEIL KINNOCK: Well, I inherited a party in 1983 that gave every impression that it didn’t actually want to win! I’ve rationalised it since and, in the same way as the Democrats in the USA and the Social Democrats in Germany can win gubernatorial or Länder elections, we were having gigantic success in winning council elections, and elements in the party were pretty happy to settle for that – just as they are in the States and just as they are in Germany. There is a political mentality that wants to win, but only on its own terms, and it believes that the electorate will eventually come to their senses. That certainly was a substantial body of opinion in the Labour Party, certainly in its leadership echelons, at regional and national level – certainly in the NEC. They held the view that we had an extreme government that was oppressive, exploitative, poverty-generating, unemployment-generating and, ‘eventually, the proletariat will reject it’ – which, of course, was bloody nonsense. That mentality existed. If I had to give a short description of the challenge facing us, that would be it – people who would rather pass a conference resolution or gain an NEC seat than make the effort to win a general election.

It started to change after ’83. I continually made the argument: ‘You joined this party voluntarily because you had beliefs and principles. It is your duty not to betray the people who depend on us for a better country and emancipation.’ I didn’t have much difficulty in convincing the rank and file, but, for those who were part of the self-righteous, self-indulgent priesthood, it meant severely adjusting, if not completely changing, their religion. That was the tough bit.

To go through the statecraft criteria, I would put ‘manage the party’ as objective number one. Divided, irresolute and self-obsessed parties have no appeal to the electorate. That’s illustrated by my history, and it’s illustrated by the history of David Cameron’s election as leader in 2005. It is absolutely essential in order to offer a coherent set of policies and a convincing manifesto to the electorate. If you fall short in that, people are not listening. Full stop. They will vote out of loyalty, but there are never enough loyalists to win an election and there are never going to be.

Managing the party can therefore contribute to a reputation for competence. The Labour Party’s reputation for competence in 1983 was nil. This was despite the fact that, in my shadow Cabinet, I had people of proven and manifest competence. Even those who hadn’t been ministers, people knew they were bloody good. Those who had been ministers included, for instance, Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman: all very good at their jobs; all with, for any rational person, decent reputations. Bryan Gould and Robin Cook were others who exuded competence, even though they had never been ministers. Not all were perfect, but you can’t go out and buy them off the shelf, can you?

In opposition, of course, you never get a chance to run the economy, so you aren’t judged on running the economy, but you are judged on the credibility of your economic policies. In ’87, that didn’t exist. In ’92 it did exist. I think, however, that it was weakened more than it need have been by what turned out to be very bad timing in the presentation of economic policy. If we had taken months longer to put near-final detail to the country, we would have had those months for advocacy and rebuttal. That was my view. John Smith, who was shadow Chancellor, disagreed, and I didn’t want to risk a really big public bust-up with him, so it didn’t happen.

The final announcements were, therefore, delayed, and, by the election, we had three and a half weeks for advocacy and rebuttal, instead of six or seven months. I think that made a difference. I am not blaming John for losing the election – there are many factors in addition to that, including public perceptions of me – but that’s certainly one of them. It meant, however, that we didn’t develop for ourselves the reputation of credible economic competence that was there to be had with the right effort and timing. The detail was right and our sums added up very effectively.

Coming after that, the criterion of ‘win the battle of ideas on key policy issues’ is vital and very much mixed in with the idea of economic competence. I don’t think that I or my colleagues – but certainly I – sought to really fight the battle of ideas. That was partly because I didn’t sufficiently believe in the significance of doing so. I should have believed in that more, especially since, as it turned out, I had eight years to play with. From the start, we thought that winning was going to take ‘a two-innings match’ – and I should have taken the ‘ideas bat’ to the crease. Looking at it subsequently, I’m inclined to think that, after the leadership election 2010, the Labour leadership knew they had four and a half years in which to build interest and reputation. And, like us, they didn’t. That is one of the reasons we have difficulties now. This is not a mistake that Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and their associates made. From July 1994, or certainly from conference 1994, they started to build a narrative. They knew that they had two or three years to do it, and they did it – helped, as they will acknowledge, by deep Tory weaknesses. I didn’t do it, and I think that was, in the end, something I paid the price for.

TOBY JAMES: A narrative for the party, or a narrative for a particular policy?

NEIL KINNOCK: A narrative of our approach to the electorate, our approach to appealing to voters, our approach to winning elections, getting full understanding of the meaning and purpose of our policies. Put together this would have meant that we faithfully presented our view of what Britain could be for itself and in the world. A narrative that, by repetition and the proper choice of language, would have won people over.

The only time that I think I really did this was, ironically, in the 1985 Bournemouth speech. All the coverage came from the ‘Militant mauling’, but I’d spent the first half of the speech talking about ‘the enabling state’. It was the idea the state is an instrument – no more and no less – and that, in stupid and corrupt hands, it will be stupid and corrupt; in honest and generous hands, it will be honest and generous. ‘For us, it must be a servant state, at the disposal of the people.’ Damn it, even the FT has picked that up since.

As people reflected on that, they thought: ‘Bloody hell, we have Kinnock’s version of social democracy.’ Some people, like Norman Buchan, said: ‘You’ve got to make that speech again, because this is where the battle is.’ Either because of lack of time, lack of imagination, lack of intelligence, lack of patience – maybe all of that – I didn’t do it. If I had sustained that, stepped over the fact that all of the attention on that speech came from the attack on Militant, and reasserted the idea again and again and again and again – with illustrations from real life – it would have worked.

So, we didn’t properly engage in the battle of ideas. In the shadow Cabinet, only Roy Hattersley was conscious all the time that we needed to do so. There were people outside of the shadow Cabinet who emphasised it, but only Roy thought it was vital. I should have started doing that straight away from ’83. There was the huge interruption of the miners’ strike, of course. But, even then, we should have started producing a narrative. Even after ’87, we should have learned the lesson that we needed to beat the Tories in part by presenting a broad, appealing, social democratic or democratic socialist alternative to the woman who was doing such damage to our country. We didn’t do it; we just didn’t do it. A couple of stabs at it, but nothing more than that.

Now, I think that it is absolutely crucial. But it has to start from day one if it is going to be effective. Blair understood it and Cameron understood it. The narrative that Cameron chose was ‘compassionate Conservatism’. Bull, utter bull, of course. But it didn’t matter, because what he had to do was change the appeal of the brand, and he strove to do that. It involved quite a lot of theatricality and superficiality, but that comes naturally to him because he is a PR man. He would have done even worse in 2010 if he hadn’t got that idea going, lodged in enough minds.

Attlee had a narrative supported by his personality, without even thinking about it. It wasn’t a conscious development – because, back then, nobody thought in those terms, not only in the Labour Party. I guess the first person to do it in modern politics was Harold Macmillan. Heath did it with ‘Selsdon’ policies, and then had to abandon it, to his credit, because he realised that it was completely up the bloody creek. Thatcher did it under the guidance of Keith Joseph from day one; even when people derided it. That was because she was prepared to be, unusually for a Tory, an ideologue. In a sense, you’ve got to win the battle of ideas and set out a narrative without being an ideologue, so that you can genuinely secure an understanding of, and credit for, being a conviction politician, without being seen as mad. It goes back to Tawney: ‘The Labour Party must prove that its idealism is not madness and its realism is not torpor.’ I understood that then; I understand it now. But I didn’t bloody act on it in terms of winning ideas.

TOBY JAMES: The statecraft criteria hadn’t been developed when you first became party leader. But when you look back now, were these the tasks that you were trying to achieve? Were you thinking, for example, ‘I need show that we are competent on the economy’?

NEIL KINNOCK: I should have known it, in any case, whether someone had defined this criterion academically or not.

One of the things that a leader needs is intelligence – political intelligence – which is what we call ‘nous’. Nous in ’83 told Charles and myself just that. When we set out my manifesto for the leadership of the party in ’83, we knew we couldn’t be utterly honest, so we had to dilute the kind of changes to policy and disposition we wanted to make – notably on Europe and one or two other basic things, like council house sales.

We had enough nous to know that change had to come, but it also had to be presented in language that would not be frightening to the electorate, i.e. the Labour Party. I should have thought in those terms on 2 October 1983, when I was elected leader. The work we needed was the presentation of our ideas on policy and convictions in a way that wouldn’t frighten the party into stasis or schism, or – more importantly – alarm the electorate into rejecting us.

Maybe I did think of that, but, having the constant dilemma of having a party that was so distant from the electorate, including people who actually cherished that distance, meant that, if you appealed, even in modest and convincing terms, to the party, you were going to get caricatured by the press, and therefore misunderstood by the electorate. If you went straight for the electorate, then you were going to get serious frictions and distractions in the party. Even when we established real managerial and political control over the party and made the big changes in the crucial areas of policy by the late ’80s, I still had to get up at the Labour Party conference and say something like: ‘Comrades, one day this conference will be faced with the choice between two versions of socialism, I look forward to that day. In the meantime, we have to manage capitalism better than they do.’ And even that elementary realism was rejected by people who accused me of having ‘electionitis’. I pleaded guilty, I said, because, without election, we are not capable of giving any help to the people we are supposed to be in politics to represent. In the mid-’80s, if I had spoken in those terms to the Labour Party in conference or anywhere else, there would have been not just reservation, but active opposition, and that wouldn’t have helped us at all. I was happy to have confrontation, but the party couldn’t afford chronic division. Here was the perpetual dilemma. I don’t offer it as an excuse; it is the historic reality, that’s all. There is damn all we can do about it now – all the blood has flowed under the bridge. But it must never be repeated by a Labour Party that understands the vital importance of realism and unity.

Even then, I should have been able to find the vocabulary, and I identified some salient objectives that I could gradually use to convince those in the party who were resistant to it. In numerical terms, those putting up resistance were never a majority in the party. It’s just that they had the positions in which they could make a difference, whether it be secretary of a constituency party or member of the national executive. Greater speed would have brought greater division – and ‘Labour split again’ is a lethal headline. That was always the dilemma, and it ensured agonisingly slow progress for our changes.

 

CHARLES CLARKE: I do think you’re slightly unfair on yourself in all this. I think that the negative problems we had to sort out, such as the miners’ strike, were very substantial.

I agree with the guilty plea for myself as well, for not focusing on the ideas of the wider population. I think that’s true, but I think you’re overstating it. I think that the problems we faced were a serious mitigation and we still had a serious problem.

I agree with your point on the timing of the shadow Budget. I remember a meeting in a restaurant in 1992, where it became clear that John really wasn’t signed up to this way of thinking. You were so keen – rightly, in my opinion – to avoid a drama.

The criticism I would make, which I don’t often make publicly, is that I think neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown were ready to commit to the modernisation process in those last two or three years before ’92. They would attend the shadow Cabinet meetings, but not really get involved – neither of them – to work together with us. I never really understood that, and I’ve never really put it to either of them in a serious way. You were doing too much on your own in wanting to do this and it wasn’t entirely your fault.

NEIL KINNOCK: That was true. I mean the people I could really, really depend upon in all the twists and turns were Jack Cunningham, Robin Cook, Gerald Kaufman and Bryan Gould. I don’t even remember Gordon speaking up in terms of an initiative in shadow Cabinet. I remember Tony a couple of times, but otherwise those two were silent partners really. A couple of other people fortunately distinguished themselves with absolutely solid support, coming up with ideas and answers to problems, instead of just bloody problems.

CHARLES CLARKE: It wasn’t their job fundamentally, but it’s another reason why you should be less hard on yourself…

NEIL KINNOCK: It is a reason, I guess. The basic point is, however, that being leader is a lonely job. If you assiduously try to make it less lonely, you will be accused of cronyism – even when the ambition is certainly not to make a cadre, but to try to ensure genuine sharing of decision-making and the invitation of ideas. Charles and others in my office – like John Eatwell, John Newbigin, Sue, Jan and Kay – all reduced that isolation in my case.

But unless somebody is extremely lucky – I mean seriously bloody struck with good fortune – it is very difficult to avoid the loneliness, which means a burden of work and focus that, even for geniuses – and I never claimed to be one of those – is very hard. My office team of Stakhanovites was terrific, but obviously that’s not the equivalent of having a squad of senior politicians pulling with you.

TOBY JAMES: You spoke about some of the challenges you were facing, particularly from the others. In general terms, are the challenges more difficult for Labour or Conservative leaders?

NEIL KINNOCK: I think, indubitably, Labour, because of the nature of the party – especially in times of change. The Conservative Party, for most of its history, has been pragmatic to the point of oily in its ability to give the impression of handling the shifts and alterations in times, challenges and public attitudes. The Labour Party has gone through the birth of quins every time it has become apparent that a big societal or political change is on. It rarely happens suddenly, of course. It is almost always evolutionary. Getting the party to adapt its behaviour, thinking, attitude, discipline, clarity of objectives and policies to the changes taking place around them, I think, is much more difficult in Labour than it is in the Conservatives. That might be changing with the Tories now, as they succumb to right-wing populism that looks flexible but is actually political arthritis.

TOBY JAMES: One statecraft task that you have not mentioned is constitutional management…

NEIL KINNOCK: When I first entered Parliament in 1970, the question of the constitutional implications of a policy or strategy wouldn’t have been asked. Now, you’ve got to ask it. This is a new idea in British politics – certainly since Ireland in the 1920s or, to a lesser extent, Europe in the ’70s. It should be one of the test questions for leaders: is what you are about to do in this innocuous Green Paper going to eventually lead to an absolute car crash?

I give a central example:

In the 1970s, frightened by a couple of SNP by-election wins, Labour developed a London-based reaction to a situation that had a hell of a lot to do with pit closures and incomes policies, and nothing at all to do with secession – as I pointed out at the time. Devolution was then conceived. It was the wrong response to the wrong question. We are going to get badly battered, devastatingly battered, in Scotland in the 2015 election, because nobody asked the constitutional question in 1997 – when the current system was established – without posing or answering the real political question about Scotland, Wales, England and the UK. The guy who answered it was Nye Bevan. In In Place of Fear507 in 1952, he said: ‘I have no time for the statesmen who constantly want to design constitutions. The constitutions are the clothes on the economic and political reality: they are there because of the political and economic reality.’ If everybody had remembered that, and I quoted it repeatedly back in the ’79 referendum, then they would have said: ‘Wait a minute; should we not deal with the economic and political reality instead of going to the tailor’s to try to find the cheapest suit of clothes to cover it?’

ON THE CHARACTERISTICS THAT SUCCESSFUL LEADERS NEED

TOBY JAMES: So what are those characteristics that a leader needs? You mentioned political nous. What else?

 

NEIL KINNOCK: Intelligence – you can’t have a stupid leader, but we’ve had a few.

You need, as I said earlier, political nous – ‘political intelligence’ – to understand the terrain, the nature of the enemy, the strengths and weaknesses of your own forces, how to build the former and how to diminish the latter. But you also need basic intelligence – insights, comprehension, and creativity too. Leadership is not for dull people, particularly in a democracy. Totalitarian thugs can, and do, get away with it, of course.

You need courage. You’re isolated as a leader, so if you’re a cowardly leader as well, it must be absolute bloody hell. The temptation to appease and make friends with people and ideas you detest… ‘A coward dies a thousand deaths; a brave man only one.’ And that’s fundamentally true in politics, which is, as Clausewitz said, war by another means.

You need calmness. This is a characteristic that I didn’t have, and still haven’t got. I had a form of calmness that, under fire, meant I could be cool. It is when the shooting stopped that I lost my cool. One of the great qualities of Ed Miliband is that he is not cold, but he is calm. I used to think it was his one contribution to the thespian art, but, unlike Tony, there is no actor in Ed Miliband. Over the past four years, I have seen that he really is cool in various testing situations. As long as it doesn’t disable you, or interfere with your necessary speed of reaction, it is a real quality.

Obviously, you need calmness more under fire than you do otherwise, but it is better if you have it in general. The polling question that is often posed on the issue of calmness is: would you be good in a crisis? I would have been bloody good in a crisis because I don’t flap, but, hopefully, crises wouldn’t have occurred more than once a day!

Tony generally had aplomb – that terrific self-confidence and a readiness to consult a tiny number of people (not the hangers-on), who had insights and would be candid with him. As Charles knows, I think one of the most basic attributes of any reasonable leader is to insist to their staff that they are told the bad news, especially before it occurs, if at all manageable. The good news will look after itself; it’s the bad news that you need to know. And if people know that you will react to bad news rationally, then they are more likely to give you the bad news honestly. I think Tony encouraged people to give him the bad news without throwing a fit, whereas Gordon – when they eventually worked up the courage to give him the bad news – would apparently be furious. That’s not a strength. So, I put quite a premium on calmness in difficulty, and it’s even better if it’s a more general characteristic.

Empathy is important in leaders. The Italian word for what I want to describe is simpatico, but we haven’t really got an equivalent in the English language. I mean there are great leaders – certainly, in my view, the greatest Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was bereft of simpatico, but made up for it in being absolutely straight and candid with everybody, great and small. He had the advantage of being head of the Labour Party in very tough times – much of it in very testing circumstances during the war before he became Prime Minister – so his whole life had been training for that, unconsciously. So, I think that maybe there are different kinds of empathy. There is a kind of empathy that makes people know that you want to understand and respect them, but you’re not going to patronise them. That’s a kind of empathy. There can even be an empathy of fear, although that’s very dubious and, of course, very fragile. There can be an empathy of plainness, of manifest directness, which means that what you’re getting back from the leader can be bruising, but it is the genuine article and for grown-ups – that says a lot. It means that the leader may be coruscating, but he’s treating you and your honesty with respect.

504 This interview took place in Fielden House, Little College Street, London, on Friday 24 March 2015.

505 In 1983, it became the parliamentary constituency of Islwyn.

506 Teddy Taylor won the Southend East by-election on 13 March 1980 by 430 votes, with a 13 per cent swing against the Conservatives.

507 Nye Bevan, In Place of Fear, London, Heinemann, 1952.