The quality of political leadership matters.
Our political leaders are under greater pressure than ever before as their decisions and actions are scrutinised and challenged – instantly and comprehensively. And failure, as with both Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg in 2015, is punished immediately by departure.
The decisions themselves, whether about overall stance, orientation, strategy or policy, are increasingly complex, with long-term implications. Personal behaviour can easily generate public controversy.
And our global interdependence, notably in relation to the economy, means that British political leaders are increasingly constrained in their freedom to act, even when they wish to do so.
It is our political leaders whose overall stance, strategies, decisions and actions, or lack thereof, determine how our society and economy deal with the problems they face in a world that is changing increasingly rapidly.
Of course, leadership is not only about the leaders of political parties and governments; it is also about a wide range of dispersed leadership, both in national and local politics and throughout the country – in business, public services and our communities.
However, the role of national political leadership is central – and has never been more so.
The purpose of this book is to assess the nature of Labour’s political leadership over the period from the party’s foundation until the present day.
We have done that through the lens of the ‘statecraft’ framework, which Toby S. James and Jim Buller set out in Chapter 2, and through my comparison of general election performances, described in Chapter 3. This is brilliantly illuminated by biographies of all Labour’s leaders from Keir Hardie to Ed Miliband. We have erred on the side of inviting authors who were likely to be defenders of their subject, rather than critics, as leadership is a tough role, and we think the leaders deserve the respect of being assessed by authors who have sympathy for their many dilemmas.
Over the period, the challenges and objectives of Labour political leadership have changed dramatically.
Though the Houses of Parliament and the panoply of politics all seem untouched over the decades, the whole context within which politics has been conducted has been utterly transformed. The franchise has been enormously widened, the values of our society are completely different, there have been revolutionary changes in the media, and the world has been globalised. Consequently, the techniques and skills of political leadership have changed, almost beyond recognition.
At the same time, the goals of Labour leadership have been transformed, too. The challenge for the early leaders was simply to get the largest possible voice in Parliament for working people. But since MacDonald, Labour’s first Prime Minister, it has been about leading, or seeking to lead, government and the whole country, not simply advancing the interests of a particular class or section of the population.
The ways in which these goals were pursued, as well as the techniques used, varied dramatically from leader to leader. At every change, the Labour Party had to choose a new political leader who combined both his/her own individual, personal leadership attributes with the general political direction (s)he was likely to follow.
After their elections, the chosen leaders, like the Labour Party itself, had to face profound choices as to the way in which they responded to particular events, as well as the best objective to target, the best strategic course to follow, and the most effective organisation and techniques to use. They were often challenged in their choices and their conduct, from both within and without the party they led. They all had to deal with alternative approaches, and sometimes alternative people, throughout the course of their leadership.
These tests, all in their different circumstances, are vividly described for each leader in the chapters of this book.
The quality of political leadership is insufficiently considered. What the accounts in this book demonstrate is that the overall leadership quality of each leader does matter, together with their personality and vision. Things could have been done differently – perhaps better, perhaps worse – and the outcomes could have been different (though in what precise way perhaps goes too far into the counter-factual).
Some commentators tend to suggest that the quality of a Labour leader, or potential leader, can be reduced to just physical appearance, particular communication skills or personal history. Others may think it simply to be a matter of ideology, political direction, or even a particular policy seen as symbolic.
But this book seeks to encourage the view that the quality of political leadership is not only important in its own right – more important than people sometimes allow – but that this quality needs to be judged widely and across a number of different attributes.
We seek to offer a means of considering the quality of Labour’s political leaders, to suggest that general election performance is a useful means of comparing them, and to urge that the Labour Party, as well as other parties, gives the highest possible consideration to the overall quality of political leadership when choosing its leaders.