Leading the Labour Party in Opposition must be a nightmare.1
The period from 4 May 1979 to 18 July 1992, when James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock led the Labour Party in opposition, was for each, respectively, one of ‘unrealistic and often malignant factions’, ‘self-inflicted lacerations’ and ‘self-indulgence, vanity, stupidity, introversion’.2 The party was to spend what would be thirteen years out of power very publicly preoccupied with issues that were both chronic and acute. A week after losing office, with an exasperation borne of familiarity, Callaghan confronted Tony Benn: ‘What are these great issues that have to be debated?’ ‘One of them’, Benn replied, ‘is the question of the leadership.’3 It was his contention, and that of many more on the left who felt that the Parliamentary Labour Party had become too far removed from the Labour movement in the country, that there had developed a ‘totally independent parliamentary leadership’.4 With defeat, the left felt that their moment had arrived. For them, the failure of the 1974–79 governments, in both political and electoral terms, held a lesson. As their de facto leader put it: ‘Leadership there must be, but not all from the top.’5
Labour in opposition tends to be defined by its reaction to Labour in power. After 1970, this reaction was cushioned by the party's soon regaining power, albeit precariously; in the ‘long 1980s’ there was no such distraction. Blame could be apportioned. The person at the top may have been the most prominent, but ought not to be the most significant: ‘it doesn't matter who is Leader’, Benn maintained, ‘if the structure of accountability and the policies are right’.6 Nevertheless, leaders there were: as many in the 1980s as there had been in the preceding forty years. Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock have each been the subject of, and in varying ways have subjected themselves to, biographical scrutiny.7 There have been studies of their elections as leader, and of their leaderships, but no comparative assessment of them has been made.8 In offering one, a clearer sense of what leadership was both possible and desirable might better be seen. Most elemental was the very nature of leadership, which can be assessed by considering the ways in which each one of the three became leader of the Labour Party; once leader, each then sought to establish himself – the annual meeting of the Labour movement, the party conference, being central to this. The actual experience of leadership can be appreciated by considering the leadership characteristics of each one, how they managed the party and whether they were seen as effective leaders when viewed by (or, more accurately, when mediated to) the electorate and by the party, both generally and in the form of formal challenges to their position as leader. Finally, their leaderships can be measured, to some extent objectively through demonstrable electoral results, and more subjectively through their own estimations. There is an inherent imbalance in comparing the three, in that they held the office of leader of the opposition, respectively, for 17, 35 and 102 months. Each nevertheless sought to give direction to a party that was defined by collectivism in a period when solidarity was conspicuous by its absence; there was for Callaghan ‘an atmosphere of mistrust and cynicism in which the motives and actions of Party leaders were continually questioned’.9 For all the legitimate concerns about party structures and processes, it was the leader who commanded attention, both at the time and subsequently. Indeed, the perennial ‘best leader who never was’, Denis Healey, would likely have found the challenge to be one that went beyond Labour: the 1980s marked the lowest level of satisfaction with the leadership of governing parties in British history.10 This was one area of national life, at least, where the Labour Party was a full and active contributor.
[F]or all our political lives, the Labour Party has been badly let down by its leaders.11
On becoming leader of the opposition on 4 May 1979, three years, one month and one day after becoming leader of the party, James Callaghan had wanted to stand down. Both of those who turned out to be his immediate successors urged him to stay.12 The general expectation on the day after the general election was that Denis Healey would become leader; indeed, said a generous Michael Foot, (who in 1976 had been elected deputy, having come second to Callaghan in the previous leadership election) a good one.13 As it was, Callaghan endured over a year of increasing impotence as leader in opposition until he resigned in October 1980, having, he hoped, taken the ‘shine off the ball’ for his anointed Healey.14 The problem was, as one future deputy leader put it, that the anointed ‘scared the life out of us’.15 So it was that an unthreatening Foot was prevailed upon to stand against Healey by, most volubly, Clive Jenkins.16 But there was another problem. As Foot's campaign manager, Neil Kinnock, put it: ‘he didn't want to be leader’.17 Peter Shore didn't want him to be leader either: he had expected that Foot would support him.18 Foot's pressganged candidature had multiple significances. A considerable figure in his own right at the beginning of the 1980s, Foot was, more importantly, also not other considerable figures, and not two in particular: in 1980 he was not Healey, and in 1981 he was not Benn. Foot was not only the person most likely to beat either of these two, but was also the candidate most likely to minimise the likelihood of a split, and therefore the leader least likely to be challenged when the electoral college devised for the election of the leader came into being in 1983.19 The impending prospect of Healey as leader proved to be sufficiently scary that Frank Field could inform Foot that ‘a decisive swing has occurred to you over the past few days’.20 Foot won by ten votes in the closest leadership contest since the first in 1922, yet he was held to be the first leader ‘whose candidature was determined by overwhelming popular demand within the party’.21 Even one reliably histrionic Healey supporter admitted that ‘we all verge dangerously near veneration in our regard for you’.22 Healey became Foot's deputy in what was immediately dubbed the ‘coalition leadership’ of a ‘coalition Labour Party.’23
Tony Benn congratulated Foot on ‘a historic victory that will put heart back into the party’.24 The Liberal leader, David Steel, also congratulated Foot: ‘I regard your election as possibly helpful to my Party.’25 The question of whether Healey as leader would have vindicated Steel, and prevented the Social Democrats from leaving the following year is unanswerable, although that has never discouraged its routinely being asked. Roy Jenkins felt that Foot's ‘election cleared the mind’.26 The consciences of some of those who voted for Foot expressly in order to create a reason for themselves thereafter to depart from the party may have been less easily salved.27 At the age of 67 there was always something of the temporary about Foot in his new position (‘an ideal caretaker in a large block of flats on the Earls Court Road’28). After Foot led Labour to its worst performance since 1918 his departure, like his arrival, was expedited and his successor was heralded (by the ever-helpful Clive Jenkins), much to Foot's irritation: such pre-emptory activity meant that he was ‘instantly deprived of the dignified exit’ for which he had hoped.29
Foot's successor was a less likely leader still. If Callaghan had been the most ministerially experienced leader of the party – indeed, of any party – then Kinnock was the least experienced. As a party of government, Labour had never had a leader who had not been a minister, even if the Leader had also been a rebel. Kinnock's early-career recusance included his resignation as Foot's parliamentary private secretary in 1975 and his refusal of office under Callaghan in 1976 in order to remain a backbencher who could be relied upon to rebel. Shore, who in 1983 stood again, to come last again, was briefed on his rival's ‘[l]ack of experience, lack of any economic or defence background, a continuation by other means of the last four years, lightweight against [the Prime Minister], and even against Steel, or [David] Owen’.30 But, as Gerald Kaufman put it, Kinnock was also ‘checklist soft-left’ and had advocated the creation of a ‘broader electorate for Leader’, a development which, Owen told Roy Hattersley, was ‘tailor-made for Kinnock’; Benn went so far as to claim that Kinnock owed him the leadership.31 ‘Your candidature is not relevant’, Callaghan told Shore; ‘It is Kinnock or Hattersley and I must cast my vote accordingly.’32 In the event there was no real contest; as Frank Chapple told Kinnock, it was always ‘in the bag’.33 (Such string pulling inspired Private Eye's ‘Kinnochio’, clattering into life before Clive Jenkins's beaming Geppetto.)34 After three party leadership elections in seven years, Kinnock commenced the longest period as leader of the opposition in history.
Hattersley, who had come second to Kinnock and became his deputy, had thought that the 1980 contest would effectively elect two generations of leader: Foot to be followed by his protégé Kinnock, or Healey by Hattersley.35 The Foot campaign was, perforce, a Kinnock campaign. Kinnock–Hattersley was immediately dubbed the ‘dream ticket’ born of the ‘new realism’; the ‘balanced ticket’ favoured by the ‘mainstream’; and, by the august left, ‘The NIGHTMARE ticket’.36 Despite their differences, Callaghan and Foot had demonstrated that an effective and trusting working relationship was possible, and one thing at least that the three leaders had in common was that none of them publicly criticised the others. Quite the contrary: Callaghan was open about the ‘bed of nails’ he had laid for his successor, a leader inclined to lenience for whom the miserable experience provided a revelation: ‘[o]ne way or another’, Foot stated afterwards, ‘full executive power for the party leadership will have to be re-established’.37
Leadership may not have been sufficient, but it was necessary, and it was central to the left critique of the failure of the Labour Government and to what had to change.38 Viewed from the responsible right, as Austin Mitchell characterised it, ‘[t]o lead was to betray’.39 In 1980 Tribune cited ‘the Leader's production of his own manifesto’ as an example of betrayal, and stated that the demand that ‘joint responsibility for both the successes and failures’ of the leader would be to his advantage.40 That, Callaghan doubted: in the USA the virtual exclusion of congressmen and senators from the nomination process had not proved to be to his friend Jimmy Carter's ‘advantage’.41 By chance, speaking to one of Carter's chief tormentors, William F. Buckley Jr, Benn said that he wanted a leader ‘accountable to the whole party and not simply to the parliamentary faction’ as a means to a party run by the membership rather than the leadership, with much wider consultation between the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose members would have been subject to reselection, and the National Executive (NEC), which would have authority for a manifesto spared from a leader's veto.42 ‘Gladstone used to say in private that what he meant by practical politics was the next election,’ Foot wrote later. ‘The NEC had its eyes firmly fixed – on the next conference.’43 Six party conferences shaped the period.
From the first, there was not merely disagreement but contrariety. ‘Nothing in the history of the Labour Party can be compared’, Shore recalled, ‘in its sheer viciousness, with the Brighton Conference of October 1979.’44 It was perfectly consistent that Benn thought ‘[t]he whole conference has been really friendly’.45 From the platform Frank Allaun, chairman of the conference, and Ron Hayward, general secretary of the party (in a speech that Callaghan thought ‘despicable’), condemned the parliamentary leadership for taking ‘no notice’ of the wider party – a charge that both Foot and Callaghan repudiated.46 A proposal to establish an electoral college to replace the PLP electorate for the leadership was defeated, but defeat was merely deferral; the direction of travel was clear. Callaghan nevertheless managed to secure a commission of enquiry in order, as Benn put it, to ‘delay the democratising process’.47
The commission begat its own conference, at Bishop's Stortford in June 1980. To general astonishment, Callaghan had refused to comment on his own position as this ‘would mean that I would lose all authority’, obviously declining though his authority was by then.48 He despaired at what transpired. If there was to be an electoral college, Callaghan scribbled in his marginalia, ‘then PLP to elect its own leader!’; a 5 per cent threshold for a leadership challenge was ‘dangerous’; as to a manifesto ‘drawn up annually both when the Party is in opposition and in government’, he merely jotted ‘Help!’ When he was told that the manifesto would merely last until the following year's conference, ‘whereupon the whole process would start again’, he again jotted ‘Help!’49 Yet this ‘contrived democracy’ was agreed by the leader at, wrote the Guardian's Peter Jenkins, what ‘may have been his Munich’.50
If Bishop's Stortford was Callaghan's September 1938, then Brecon was, almost, his September 1939. ‘Enough is enough,’ he told the All Wales Rally. ‘I … propose to assume my full responsibility as leader of the party and now put my judgement to all the party on the best way to settle these domestic issues.’51 To gird him, Owen had sent Callaghan a copy of Len Williams's locum general secretary's speech to the Scarborough Conference of October 1960 (‘Nowhere in the Constitution is authority given to the Party Conference to instruct the Parliamentary Labour Party’). ‘[I]t has been my bible for the last 20 years,’ Callaghan assured him, ‘and the wording is engraved on my heart!’52 At what he described as the ‘not exactly pleasant’ Blackpool Conference of October 1980, Callaghan once more sat listening as the leadership was denounced by delegates, one of the most prominent being Patricia Hewitt, for its distance.53 In an ‘apocalyptic speech [which] was wildly cheered’ Benn then condemned the leadership and the government in rhetoric that was as oratorically effective as it was factually misleading.54 The PLP reported, to Callaghan's strong agreement, that ‘the over-riding objection [to the college] is that such an arrangement might produce a Leader who could not maintain the confidence of his colleagues’.55 Mandatory reselection and the principle of the college were agreed, but Callaghan had at least – just – kept control of the manifesto from the NEC. For Labour Weekly, ‘the score between Left and Right was reckoned roughly a draw’.56
‘Conference was pretty beastly as you can imagine,’ Callaghan confided in Harold Lever afterwards, ‘but I do not let it disturb me any more, and I shall take my own decisions.’57 Seven days later he did exactly this. Callaghan had decided to circumvent conference and to dish the college: by his sudden resignation, it would be the PLP that would elect his successor. Callaghan's decision meant that the party was presented with precisely what it had spent eighteen months trying to avoid: a leadership election at the same time as an unresolved row over the electorate.58 This led to the historic Wembley Special Conference on 24 January 1981, which determined the specifics of the college; Foot was by then the leader. Though ostensibly of the left, but foremost a parliamentarian, Foot supported neither reselection nor the college: he did not want ‘right honourable marionettes’.59 The least that he could countenance was 50 per cent of the college being reserved for the PLP, yet what Shore described as his ‘disastrous misjudgement’ in not speaking for this meant that 30 per cent was agreed.60 Among those who resigned from the party were nine peers, on the grounds, inter alia, that the election of the leader should remain in the hands of MPs.61 The left being thus strengthened within the electoral college, the annual conference at Brighton in September 1981 was free to adopt an Alternative Economic Strategy, to go with what was effectively a Bennite ‘Alternative Political Strategy’.
The party that Foot led at least had a memory of power; the ‘disastrous and bankrupt’ estate that he bequeathed in 1983 could boast barely 200 MPs.62 Kinnock's motivation as leader was therefore simple: ‘the party's first duty is to get elected’, to which end ‘the hard and loony left’, he privately claimed, ‘are my only problem’.63 If leadership of the party was the prerequisite for leadership of the country, the country would be stirred by a Labour leader fighting his own, as Hugh Gaitskell had done in 1960. Kinnock challenged the hard and loony left in the same, most public fashion. The calculated drama of the Bournemouth Conference of October 1985 was such that Kinnock's declamatory moment remained undulled, despite featuring in every television or radio documentary about Britain in the 1980s. Members of Militant heckled. Eric Heffer walked out. ‘No Leader in the past’, Benn said of the ensuing ‘witch-hunt’, ‘has ever had the determination to remove a complete section of the Party.’64 The following day Kinnock retrospectively confronted the greatest crisis of his tenure when he attacked the leadership of the miners’ strike: ‘I really enjoyed myself’, Kinnock recalled, ‘hammering Scargill’, in one of two speeches that ensured the conference would invariably be referred to as a turning point.65
I … feel upset and angry at the way you are sometimes treated as Leader.66
One issue for the three leaders was age and the traces of age. Callaghan was frequently described as ‘avuncular’, but that trait was less evident after May 1979 as a certain lassitude compounded the consequences of prolonged high office. Contrary to appearances, Michael Foot was a year younger than Callaghan. He was not the last career rebel to lead the party and, in turn, to hope for discipline; at least in his case, as Callaghan's deputy Foot emphatically had been loyalist rather than a loner. Subsequently, he eloquently expressed how ‘Brother Tony’ differed from him in this fundamental respect. At the time Benn gave Foot cause both to mollify – supporting him as chair of the Home Policy Committee and his return to the shadow cabinet – and to enjoin – disciplining him over committing the party to nationalisation without compensation.67 Demonstrations of authority by Foot were temperamentally uncharacteristic. Distinctly unlike the other two leaders’ – and the worse for it – Foot's public profile was that of the intellectual, the man of letters, prone to placing events in historical, often apparently first-hand context: the Argentinian Junta as another fascist aggressor; mass unemployment as an echo of the Slump; Lord Hailsham as once ‘licking Hitler's jackboots’;68 Militant recalling the Socialist League; the depredations of the scavenger Tory press being those which Clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell too had had to endure; the Prime Minister as Neville Chamberlain redivivus. This served to convey to the viewer, listener or reader that Foot was a leader marked by senescence. Even the potentially normalising effect of a dog was partially negated by its being named after a nineteenth-century statesman.
Visually, Foot was unkempt; aurally, he was prolix. His discourse (‘The sentence he started on Nationwide was still going when I switched on TV Eye three hours later’) was also a political proxy: to avoid causing offence, Foot's nephew Paul said, he became a ‘living parenthesis’.69 Ever conscious of television, Foot's protégé, Kinnock, always appeared immaculate, while retaining the prolixity – and for the same reason. Neil Kinnock could be garrulous and diffuse in the House of Commons, and that mattered, given that he was much more active there than was either of his predecessors (and most of his successors).70 For fear of upsetting people as changes were being made, Kinnock admitted later, ‘I had to flannel’.71 His director of communications, Peter Mandelson, found that the phrase ‘ “Welsh windbag” occurred disturbingly often in the attitudinal research’.72 It was a sign of his inexperience that Kinnock accepted the necessity of being groomed for his new role: a cuttings file of post-war leaders of the opposition was prepared for him, their myriad crises underlined in red.73 His own leadership being constantly audited by polling, Kinnock was told what ‘a leader’, as distinct from ‘a politician’, was, and that the quality on which he consistently polled the highest – being ‘in touch’ with ‘ordinary people’ – was not typical of them: he was informed as to Prime Minister Thatcher's ‘admiration paradox’.74 Latterly bedecked in ersatz regimental (rather than Transport and General Workers’ Union) tie, dark, double-breasted suit and gold-framed spectacles, Kinnock exhibited what even a supportive newspaper described as ‘borrowed gravitas’.75 His difficulty in resisting making a joke had long been noted.76 ‘Prime ministerial, prime ministerial’, he was once overheard (possibly jokingly) saying to himself.77
The process that Kinnock put himself through culminated in 1990, in the mid-term of his second Parliament as leader. The ‘confidential’ Project Liberation was a strategy devised by Kinnock's team: to ‘neutralise deficiency’ against the Prime Minister in regard to his ‘ability’ and ‘strength’; to ‘[w]in new support by exploiting his strengths’, namely pride, empathy and ‘bringing together the nation’; to ‘[l]iberate NK from the shackles of the past’; and to ‘[g]ive NK necessary support to enable him to do this’. Polling revealed that Kinnock's key weaknesses were that he was thought to be ‘too emotional’ and that he did not appeal to women aged over forty-five. He was ‘constrained by a series of boxes’: that of statesman (‘has to behave and perform like a PM at all times’), party (‘has to use language that ensures continuing Party support’) and ‘baggage’ (‘In the past supporting positions and policies he did not necessarily agree with’). Kinnock's core deficiency in ability would be neutralised by demonstrating his effective management of the party and the ejection of ‘sectional interests’; secondarily, it required ‘clear, crisp language and concepts’ and ‘[a]ppropriate use of managerial language’, avoidance of ‘the vernacular and colloquial’ and of ‘overly emotional language and gestures and excessive physical gesticulation’. Peer-group approval (‘endorsement of NK's managerial abilities by industrialists, manager[s] and politicians’) should be prominent. Kinnock's core deficiency in strength would be neutralised by his espousal of a clear sense of direction for Britain and his taking a stand ‘when it mattered’. Neutralising the leader's deficiencies went alongside exploiting his strengths. Core strengths were quality-of-life issues (such as education and health), stirring a sense of pride and patriotism and his appeal as bringing the country together. Alongside ‘running a tight ship’ and managerialism was his appearance on Terry Wogan's BBC1 television show, which would allow ‘the person’ to complement ‘the politician’.78 ‘NK must give a clear sense that he says what he thinks, does what he wants,’ Project Liberation averred: ‘That he is his own man’.
On becoming leader of the opposition Callaghan took the opportunity to return some of his colleagues to the backbenches: ‘I am trying to give new people a little experience during the coming session.’79 In the first shadow cabinet elections since 1973, neither Kinnock nor Eric Heffer was among the twelve elected (Denis Healey was top). However, Kinnock did not exhibit Heffer's ‘fastidiousness’ and accepted a portfolio.80 Given his lack of frontbench experience and that the portfolio was education, a policy area of particular association with Callaghan since 1976, Kinnock's promotion was trebly significant. It was also soon followed by a threat of the sack when he rebelled in a House of Commons vote on nuclear weapons.81 Callaghan disabused a protesting Moss Evans of the notion of freedom of speech: ‘we must have a united team on the Front Bench’.82
Management was harder for Foot, the unity candidate who, from the moment he took over the party leadership, received representations from each side complaining of the other.83 One colleague told him ‘not be too magnanimous to the Right wing for it was this as much as anything which proved the undoing of Harold Wilson’.84 As if to order, and ‘making a last, rather desperate personal gesture’ by offering himself at all, Bill Rodgers requested the defence or industry portfolio. Foot offered him neither, to Rodgers's (and John Roper's) frustration.85 Within three months both had defected to the SDP. The inevitable consequences of reselection and entryism meant that Foot was prevailed upon to defend sitting MPs and disown some prospective ones.86 Tribune drew attention to a leader who had once trumpeted tolerance by reprinting his denunciations of the NEC when it had described the Bevanites as ‘a party within a party’.87 These and other matters provided for interminable NEC meetings at the new party headquarters at Walworth Road (opened by Callaghan in July 1979), bookended by general disorder outside as protestors, pedestrians and journalists scrambled on, and off, the pavement.
Project Liberation acknowledged that Kinnock had been ‘running a tight ship’. He sought and acquired control over campaigns and communications, a strong leader's office, a manageable PLP and a majority on the NEC. Supporters were given key positions. All served to increase the power of the leader, which was essential for the policy changes that would thenceforth be sought. The NEC could then be marginalised by the transfer of responsibilities to the shadow cabinet, and then to the leader's office. But the strength of the leader's office led to complaints from senior colleagues.88 Project Liberation advocated ‘[b]ringing people who work in the organisation together’, but Kinnock's experience was that ‘being leader is a lonely job. If you assiduously try to make it less lonely, you will be accused of cronyism.’89 He set up an ‘advisory’ Leader's Committee, unknown at first to the NEC or shadow cabinet; when the time came to notify them, he said, ‘I want to be able to refer to an established institution.’90
Project Liberation proposed that the leadership would be strengthened by greater direct involvement of members, who would dilute the influence of extra-parliamentary organisations. Thus did One Member One Vote – OMOV – appeal: ‘My view was that if we got it for the selection of MPs, getting it for the leadership would be a very easy stroll.’91 Kinnock's defeat on this issue at the Blackpool Conference of October 1984 was held by those who formed the subsequent New Labour project to be the major setback of his leadership.92 It meant that more ‘calculated means’ would be required ‘to compile majorities’, and thereafter Kinnock felt that he ‘could not afford to be defeated on any major issue’.93 From 1985 he had a solid majority in the PLP, shadow cabinet and NEC. Ken Livingstone found himself elected to an NEC that was run increasingly like the shadow cabinet, where Kinnock ‘continued to bludgeon us into the ground even after winning vote after vote’.94 Kinnock had overseen what Hilary Wainwright described as ‘conservative centralism’, marked by exclusion and ‘by the avoidance of risk’.95 His organisational control was greater than that of any previous Labour leader and meant that he was much more able – and certainly more minded – than Callaghan or Foot to exercise patronage, something else that was abjured by the ‘Alternative Political Strategy’.
The drafting of the manifesto was a less contentious affair in 1987 than it had been in 1979 or 1983. Also, unlike that of 1979, in its published form the manifesto had a cover image; and unlike that of 1983, the image was of the leader, and of only the leader, red rose in lapel, left arm raised to an audience.96 Mandelson admitted that the ‘aims of our campaign had been to build up his stock as a new kind of leader, and in effect to camouflage most of the policy prospectus’.97 The result of the general election was evidence to Kinnock that policy had to take as much notice of the views of the electorate as it did of those of conference, and also that the wider party membership ought to be heard – hence 1988's derided polling exercise, Labour Listens. Kinnock succeeded in convincing conference over public ownership, trade union rights and a somewhat less alternative economic strategy. Defence was predictably the most sensitive issue and, suitably enough, the most opaque.98 The dilemma was that success in changing the policy – such as unilateralism or Europe – would come at the risk of damaging what reputation for consistency he had, or of being too late to carry any conviction; either way, as Roy Hattersley put it, Kinnock would be unelectable either because of the views he always held or because he had changed them.99 The 1987 Policy Review took two years and was endorsed at the Brighton Conference of October 1989; by the Brighton Conference of October 1991 a policy commission had replaced delegate resolutions – with a leader's veto on policy.
Much depended on whether the public could imagine each of the three leaders as Prime Minister. This was less of a challenge for Callaghan. It was a greater one for portraitists. Of the three, Callaghan was the most inscrutable, possessing neither a distinctive accent nor physical characteristics other than the outsize spectacles that had a further distancing effect. Nor was he much easier to caricature. Such representations as he attracted were circumstantial rather than personal: political cartoonists portrayed him as a large frame contorted between left and right (Benn and Healey), or as the moderate front concealing threatening figures, Benn prominent. By the standards of the Sun, Stanley Franklin's representation of Callaghan as Mr Micawber had hardly been personally damning.
The scholar of Swift, however, was nothing less than a gift: Foot was easy to draw and to imitate, being idiosyncratic in both manner and deportment. Within two days of his election, Foot delivered a gift to satirists by breaking his ankle and spending his early leadership hobbling around with his foot in plaster. Cartoonists depicted a dishevelled pensioner in varying states of discombobulation; ten million Sun readers every day saw a dwarfish Foot drawn by cartoonist Stanley Franklin as if he had just been electrocuted. Representations of the leader of the opposition varied from a bonfire guy, to the kindly, demented children's television scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, to a wheelchair-bound geriatric (Nurse: ‘If you want to stay on, nod your head.’).100 Yet the ordure was partly self-applied. His appearance – waving a stick while walking a dog named after a nineteenth-century statesman – was not one that other leaders were to imitate. ‘I am getting more and more concerned that the media should not be given the opportunity of portraying you in an unfavourable light,’ one colleague wrote after Foot's most notorious episode, standing fidgeting and ill-dressed at the Cenotaph on 8 November 1981; the party ‘depends to a very considerable extent on the image which you are personally able to present’.101 The Remembrance Day offence caused to many (until that moment) Labour voters was made clear by his correspondents, among the more moderate of whom was an outerwear manufacturer from Leeds who complained about ‘the adverse effect that your scruffy appearance is having on our duffle coat and donkey jacket trade’.102
Foot subsequently conceded that he should have paid more attention to ‘publicity advisers’.103 The same could not have been said of his successor, who attributed Labour's failures under his own leadership ‘partly [to] the way in which over the years I'd been represented, partly [to] the way I represented myself’.104 Alone of the three, Kinnock was preoccupied by, and sought to shape, representations and receptions of both himself and the party, yet he offered almost as man-sized a target as Foot had done. On the very day of his election, and having just told an entourage of journalists on Brighton beach ‘If you want a real scoop, I'll walk out there, on the water,’ Kinnock presented to posterity his own, sodden gift by falling over in the surf in front of television cameras. Cambrian cultural stereotypes – variations on emotionalism and verbosity – predominated. Gingerism became mainstream. Kinnock's leadership coincided with ITV's Spitting Image, whose millions of viewers were regaled weekly by a loquacious, freckled opportunist. Kinnock's public lapses in judgement – although none, individually, was comparable with Foot's at the Cenotaph – were cumulatively damaging: his intemperate Falklands comment on BBC's Question Time, or calling an MP ‘a jerk’ in the House of Commons.105 As to the depredations of the scavenger Tory press that he had to endure, John Major agreed.106
Such representations mattered because they mattered to Kinnock. Friends thought him to be increasingly driven by fear of failure more than by hope of success; periods of depression were said to be common.107 While Callaghan had admitted to a lack of educational and intellectual self-confidence, Kinnock's education and intelligence were questioned even by his supporters.108 Project Liberation counselled that ‘language [and] concepts’ were important. Alone of the three leaders, Kinnock published his own statements of political principle. His excursions into ideas were not particularly ideational. He highlighted, as he tended to more generally, the self-consciously sanitising prefix ‘democratic’ to socialism, but was not seriously revisionist other than in calling for a ‘third way’ between ‘the old social democracy [and] the new ultra-leftism’.109 Often to the frustration of his office, Kinnock insisted on writing his own speeches, and collected some in a book he entitled Making Our Way. ‘[T]he politics of production’ was the theme of a thin, workaday volume.110
Unlike his deputy, four years a cabinet minister – during which time ‘I had grown some scar tissue’ – Kinnock's lack of extensive front-bench experience meant that he was unprepared for the extent of the attention he would receive.111 After Labour Listens Mandelson urged a tougher mien, even through applying PEET: Personal Effectiveness Enhancement Training.112 The Shadow Communications Agency (SCA) developed a ‘writers’ group’ to ‘sharpen up our lines, help provide gags’.113 Displaying what might have been described as borrowed juvenescence, Kinnock presented the British Rock and Pop Awards, launched a range of T-shirts and appeared in the promotional video for Tracey Ullman's My Guy, a 1984 top-twenty hit in the Netherlands. The most vaunted representation was Hugh Hudson's 1987 party election broadcast, known as ‘Kinnock: the Movie’ and, less commonly but more aptly, ‘Chariots of Kinnock’. So much was invested in it that perhaps for the first time a party television broadcast was advertised in the press: ‘Neil Kinnock. The Complete Picture’.114 An unparalleled example of presidential campaigning, over the course of nearly ten minutes it contained no reference at all to the party, but footage from the Bournemouth speech, and much of the leader's parents, wife and children (‘Use family as symbol of Quality of Life values’, Project Liberation had recommended). SCA activities were set against a background of the party frequently polling ahead of the Conservatives, yet the leader's personal ratings remained worse than those of any other leader of the opposition – with the exception, that is, of his predecessor.
The outcome of these various processes could be determined, although (the 1988 challenge notwithstanding) they were never acted upon: even in the event that electoral defeat was merely likely, Labour leaders had never been unseated, and were almost never challenged. It helped Callaghan that his approval ratings were high – over 60 per cent; Foot's peaked at 49 per cent, but by his last year had slumped to nine.115 In an attempt to arrest the slide, in June 1981 Foot had invited Benn to challenge him as leader. Despite Foot's ‘pleadings’ Benn had instead stood against Healey as deputy, thereby undermining the leader even more than he could have done by challenging him.116 Subsequent speculation about the leadership prompted Benn to pen an open letter to the shadow cabinet requesting ‘each and every member’ publicly to state his or her support for Foot.117 Nevertheless, the leader remained unchallenged despite, according to one journalist, there not being an MP ‘who believed, privately’ that he would be elected Prime Minister.118
The absence of unity was most marked in the public mind by the presence of ‘phantom leaders’ such as Benn and Scargill.119 ‘Presenting Labour in a positive light will be difficult, presenting Kinnock in a positive light much less so,’ felt Philip Gould at the SCA.120 Bob Worcester, the party's pollster, maintained that ‘Kinnock's profile is much more important even than policy.’121 Kinnock was told that the gains he had made in his first months had been lost during the miners’ strike: ‘there is considerable scope for strengthening the image’, a subject he always took seriously.122 Gould recommended repeated, targeted messages established by working groups; Worcester recommended concentrating on, in order: issues, party image and that the ‘party's only serious weakness is Kinnock's inability to be perceived as Prime Minister’.123 Kinnock trailed on strength, decisiveness and international reputation, and his encounters with the Prime Minister in the House of Commons were usually mismatches.
London Labour Briefing denounced Kinnock's ‘marvellous left preaching, vicious careerist practice’; Tribune thought that ‘his career shows disturbing signs of following that path well-worn by ambitious Labour politicians’.124 For Eric Heffer that was precisely the problem. At least ‘Gaitskell was known to be on the right of the Party’; it was Kinnock's ‘past left-wing mantle, now used against others on the left, which creates confusion and makes it easier for the witch-hunt to proceed’.125 Benn always thought that ‘Hattersley would be easier to deal with than Kinnock, just as Healey would have been easier to deal with than Foot’, because Hattersley (and Healey) ‘would appease the left whereas Kinnock would pander to the right’.126 Discontent culminated in 1988 with the first challenge to a leader since 1961. ‘Tilting at Windbags’127 featured Heffer as Sancho Panza to Benn's Don Quixote, the grounds for whose quest were ‘that the leadership is killing the party, diluting policy, centralising power’.128 Hattersley was worried about Heffer's challenge to him; had he lost, Kinnock would have resigned.129 By immediately and publicly supporting the deputy, Kinnock implicitly acknowledged his – and Foot's – mistake in not having done so in 1981.130 Unlike in 1981, Benn's ‘alternative’ merely served to revive and reaffirm the incumbent (it was an ‘extravagant non event’, Alan Tuffin told him).131 Kinnock called it an ‘unnecessary distraction’, but what had once been a distraction was also a mandate.132 Militant had stated that ‘[a]t stake is the future of socialism’.133 Kinnock won 89 per cent of the vote. For London Labour Briefing that merely meant that the ‘1989 Leadership Challenge Starts Now!’134
By raising the nominating threshold from 5 to 20 per cent in 1988, Kinnock then made it harder to force a contest in future: ‘[Benn] delivered himself into my hands.’135 Without obvious competition, 1989–90 turned out to be the party's brightest year in a sepulchral decade. In the Commons a confident Kinnock was sharper, funnier. In June 1989 the results night of the European Parliament elections provided Kinnock with the ‘best hours’ of his leadership.136 Although it was not known at the time, or recognised afterwards, in October 1989 Kinnock precipitated the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson.137 In December The Times named him ‘Politician of the Year’.138 In March 1990 Labour overturned a 14,000-vote Conservative majority in the Mid-Staffordshire by-election. Spirits were high. But the mood was infectious. The Conservative Party was unnerved, and reacted decisively. On 22 November Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned and Kinnock told his office ‘we've just lost our greatest electoral asset’.139 Philip Gould felt this to be the moment that ‘the Kinnock project went into decline’.140 If the public had wanted change, they now had it. The following year, with Labour 5 per cent behind the Conservatives and polls suggesting a 15 per cent boost under a different leader, dissatisfaction had reached the point where senior colleagues encouraged the shadow chancellor, John Smith, to mount a challenge.141 Less than three years after what was Kinnock's emphatic (and should have been his emboldening) re-election, and within one year of his second general election as party leader, once more, and not in the way intended, ‘the Man became the Issue’.142
There must be a willingness once again to trust the leadership.143
‘Who leads the Labour Party?’ Labour Leader asked in 1985, before concluding that it was not the Labour leader.144 The starkest measure of leadership for a party leader is the result of a general election. Labour's defeat in 1979 was hard to pin on its leader, who on polling day led his opponent (by almost double) as to ‘who would make the better Prime Minister’.145 When James Callaghan was the party's candidate, Labour emphasised ‘leadership’; the Conservatives did so only in 1983 when, in tacit assent, Labour did not. In that year, however, Labour advocated, in nuclear disarmament, a policy about which its unilateralist leader cared most, but which, as he was yoked to an equally vociferous multilateralist deputy, served to undermine his authority in a way that might have been predicted. Then, on 25 May, Callaghan publicly disclaimed the party's defence policy and Jim Mortimer, party general secretary, told the press that the Campaign Committee was ‘insistent that Michael Foot is the leader of the party’, an insistence that became a headline, since the identity of the leader had rather been assumed.146
During the 1983 campaign, in his own public meetings Callaghan noted ‘Foot's incapacity as a leader’ as being an issue.147 The leader's natural proclivities were apparent to one observer: ‘Foot, although patently a very nice man, handles objects in the real world as if they ought to be books, and a baby can tell when the pair of encircling hands would rather be holding a copy of Hazlitt's Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.’148 Foot did not adapt to the requirement that campaigning had to be television orientated. Crafting phrases for television news bulletins was not a new discipline, but without applause lines Foot appeared on television speaking at length to a silent audience. After journalists complained that he did not deliver the speeches his team had distributed, Foot read them out, but as he was unable to use a teleprompt, and had bad eyesight, one of the finest orators in post-war politics delivered his perorations hunched over a script.149 A former colleague who had lost his seat told Callaghan: ‘We were told very clearly on the doorstep and in the factories, and ultimately in the ballot box, that the Party had chosen the wrong leader for the wrong reasons.’150 Whatever the reason, it was for Foot ‘a bloody awful result in every stinking way’.151
In the six months before the 1987 election the shadow cabinet, to counterbalance polling about Kinnock being inexperienced and weak, was advised to ‘refer whenever [possible] to Neil Kinnock's first rate Ministerial team’ and to ‘refer regularly’ to Kinnock ‘to build up his leadership’.152 Thus was there an explicitly ‘Presidential-style campaign’.153 The Prime Minister herself said that her party had ‘got to go for Kinnock’, and the Conservative campaign and press made much of fresh ‘phantom leaders’ such as Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant.154 President Reagan's White House administered a calculated personal humiliation to Kinnock when he went to visit the USA in March.155 In May, Kinnock virtually wrapped and delivered his own present to critics by offering an elaboration on defence policy that was characterised as being inspired by Hereward the Wake and the Mujahedeen, and by undermining his shadow chancellor in deviating from a carefully constructed and repeated line about Labour's tax policy.156 ‘I am dismayed that we did not do better,’ Callaghan told Tony Benn after the election, adding, pointedly, that the ‘lesson is that the impressions formed by the electorate over a period of four years cannot be obliterated in four weeks campaigning’.157
Five years later, in 1992, Kinnock was the first Labour leader since Harold Wilson to go into a general election with a hope of winning it. Acknowledging that his personal negatives had not even been neutralised by emphasising the leader, Labour's 1992 campaign placed Kinnock as primus inter pares. A broadcast in the week before polling day focused on the shadow cabinet, and ended with Kinnock behind a desk rather than up a mountain.158 The Conservatives remained convinced that he could not win, as he was neither ‘credible’ nor ‘numerate’159 (not unlike Kinnock's predecessor, who disclosed to him, ‘I am in fact one of the leading world experts on financial and economic affairs, but this has not always been recognised in all quarters’160). Kinnock's last-minute, confidence-betraying equivocation over electoral reform and coalition did not help161 In Sheffield on 1 April 1992, at a rally the significance of which became almost as overstated as the event itself, Kinnock's overexcited manner overshadowed a sober speech. It was to be emblematic.
The three leaders had assumed their mantles in contrasting ways: Kinnock on pebbles, Foot on crutches, Callaghan in Downing Street. One was deemed to be too young, two too old (Labour would not have another leader aged over sixty for thirty-five years). Callaghan was criticised for staying; Kinnock for leaving; Foot, almost, for being. Although the principal charge after losing power in 1979 (even more than in 1970 and 2010) was that the party leadership had become separated from the membership, the three thought the problem to be deeper still. Callaghan felt that ‘we have failed’ in not modernising Labour's philosophy: ‘We have neglected [political] education. We have allowed it to fall into the hands of the militant groups.’162 Kinnock too felt that his major failing was not engaging sufficiently with the ‘battle of ideas’.163 There was more to leadership than party management: Kinnock felt that he had ‘to repeat the mantra of basic purpose’.164 That mantra, like all the best ones, was simple: principles into power. But only the second resounded. Callaghan remained in the House Commons for another parliament before, predictably, going to the House of Lords; Foot remained in the Commons for two parliaments before, equally predictably, becoming the first post-war ex-Labour leader to decline to go to the House of Lords; Kinnock may have felt cause for penitence towards those luminaries whom his younger self had castigated for taking themselves off to the ‘House of Lords or European Commissions’.165
For someone whose public profile was so abiding, representations by and of Callaghan were wanting. Pain may be inferred in his tellingly ending his 1987 autobiography in May 1979. Far from avoiding the subject, the only memoir that Foot ever wrote was of his leadership of the Labour Party in opposition, and he began it by explaining at length why he had not resigned earlier than he did.166 After the 1992 defeat, Kinnock ended his term as abruptly as had Foot, deciding, perhaps with Callaghan's unhappy twilight in mind, that ‘I couldn't take the risk I'd use up a year or more of time that a new Leader would need to get a grip on public attention’. Days later, he was assailed by doubts that that very abruptness might have been his ‘gravest mistake as Labour leader’.167 On the Monday morning following the general election, Kinnock received the first enquiries from publishers and literary agents about his memoirs.168 He resisted (just as he did similarly sudden offers to establish Kinnock Foundations).169 In time, Philip Gould, one of the Project Liberation planners, reflected that the project ‘didn't work because his real self had changed, become older, wiser, different’.170 It was this self-abnegation that Kinnock felt that David Hare, albeit through the best of motives, had definitively misjudged in his The Absence of War, the concluding play in a trilogy that railed against the political mores of contemporary Britain.171 The failure to Liberate was less one of diagnosis, or even prescription, than of timing; the ‘golden hour’ had passed for the person, rather as the 1980s suggested to some that it might also have done so for the party. Kinnock dated his mid-life crisis as lasting from 2 October 1983 to 18 July 1992.172 Yet, far from embracing the dispensations of senior citizenship in the years that followed, in public appearances and in interviews, he flayed his ‘completely unsatisfying’ leadership with an openness and frequency that was almost masochistic.173
By any measure, Callaghan's leadership of the opposition was a failure; Foot's was simultaneously catastrophic and blameless; the panacea of the putative Denis Healey leadership overlooks its probable consequences in preference for its possible benefits (one reason, perhaps for both Harold Wilson and Callaghan, after having voted for Healey in the first round, reportedly voting for Foot in the second).174 Kinnock, by contrast, had either increased the number of seats and vote share in consecutive elections, as only Wilson had done, and increased his party's vote share by more than any leader except Attlee, or merely replaced the votes and seats lost under his predecessor. As Labour leader, in terms of cumulative performance measured by seat change, Kinnock exceeded Wilson, and by vote change exceeded Wilson and Blair; by his own admission, however, ‘in the end, it's about winning elections’.175 Of the three who led the Labour Party, only the latter had the scope to be anything other than reactive, yet the more he made his party electable, the less electable he appeared. After its worst defeat, the party had chosen its youngest, most inexperienced and thereby least tainted leader, but the historical and political context of Labour in the 1980s made his a harder task than that faced by any of his post-war predecessors – or successors. Kinnock was less constrained by the party than they had been, but was more constrained by its past and, in so far as doubts about him existed, its present. None of the major policies that he had supported when he became leader did he support by the time he resigned. For someone once thought of as recklessly spontaneous, Kinnock created a cautious and centralised organisation requiring a leader's office of staffers (one of the most prominent being Patricia Hewitt) who were increasingly praetorian in disposition. Kinnock's reforms were gradually acquired, but acquired they were, through his possessing what the other two leaders had lacked: a solid majority on the NEC. Thereby was an electable party fashioned. Structures were necessary for leadership, after all.
The unrealistic, lacerating and self-indulgent factions of the 1980s that had questioned the pre-eminence of the leader resulted in reforms that served greatly to empower him: the electoral college meant legitimacy, and so authority, and did so by having broadened the basis of his election. That the party thereafter was as disinclined to support its leader as it was to displace him was not the least of the reasons why leading the Labour Party in the 1980s was a nightmare. The party was a collective endeavour, and so there was a suspicion of leaders; but because it was a collective endeavour it would not depose them. Disconnected from the mesmerising effects of office, this tendency was exaggerated (it took the party 110 years to produce a leader who could not maintain the support of his colleagues). The party crises of the 1980s were specific to the ‘betrayal’ of the 1970s, but then the party crises that attended every loss of office were specific. Those of the 1980s were unique in degree, however, and demonstrated for the first time in Labour's period as a party of government that, even if there were many other reasons, an unconvincing leader could be the biggest reason why a voter would not vote for the party. Anyone able to lead the Labour Party in opposition for nine years might have been thought eminently qualified to lead the country, but an effective leader was one who could be envisaged by it as Prime Minister; thirteen years after the introversion began as to whether it mattered who was leader, a concurrence was reached. On 18 July 1992, with 91 per cent of the vote, the party gave the greatest mandate ever received by any leader to one who appeared finally to be what was required, both of the person and of the party. Experienced, self-assured, ‘prime ministerial’; to his Tory opponents an homme sérieux; of the right of the party, although on excellent terms with the left; promising a smaller leader's office, a more open regime; OMOV. At the count, the new leader thanked Kinnock. ‘Our future victory will be built upon the sure foundations he has laid.’ In private, he admitted his admiration for Callaghan, the leader who had promoted him to the cabinet in 1978 to give him experience in preparation for leading the Labour Party. ‘He never had the chance for a full term,’ lamented John Smith.176
1 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 360. The author is grateful to Paul Corthorn, Daniel Larsen, and Andrew Thorpe for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Abbreviations: JCP: James Callaghan Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford); MFP: Michael Foot Papers (People's History Museum, Manchester); NKP: Neil Kinnock Papers (Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge); PSP: Peter Shore Papers (LSE Archives, London); LPAR: Labour Party Annual Report; HCD: House of Commons Debates; HLD: House of Lords Debates.
2 James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), p. 566; Michael Foot, Another Heart and Other Pulses (London: Collins, 1984), p. 13; Neil Kinnock, In Conversation with … Lord Kinnock, Open University, 21 May 2015.
3 Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, ed. Ruth Winstone (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p. 501 [10 May 1979].
4 Tony Benn, The Wilderness Years: 1, BBC2, 3 December 1995; Tony Benn, ‘The Case for a Constitutional Premiership’, Parliamentary Affairs 33 (1980), 7–22.
5 Tony Benn, Arguments for Socialism (London: Penguin, 1980), pp. 178–9.
6 Benn, Diaries, p. 509 [26 May 1979]; cf. Labour Leader, August 1983, p. 3.
7 Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (London: Gollancz, 1994); Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Press, 2007); Robert Harris, The Making of Neil Kinnock (London: Faber & Faber, 1984); Michael Leapman, Kinnock (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987); George Drower, Kinnock (South Woodham Ferrers: Publishing Corporation, 1994); Eileen Jones, Neil Kinnock (London: Hale, 1994); Martin Westlake, Kinnock (London: Little, Brown, 2001); Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 1992); Callaghan, Time and Chance; Foot, Another Heart; Neil Kinnock, ‘Reforming the Labour Party’, Contemporary Record 8 (1994), 535–4; Neil Kinnock: The Lost Leader, BBC2, 5 December 1992; Kinnock: The Inside Story, ITV (1: The Path to Leadership, 17 July 1993; 2: The Enemies Within, 25 July 1993; 3: The Pursuit of Power, 1 August 1993, 4: Victory Denied, 8 August 1993); Neil Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership, the Labour Party and Statecraft Theory’, in Charles Clarke and Toby S. Jones (eds), British Labour Leaders (London: Biteback, 2015), pp. 335–56; Neil Kinnock, Conversations, BBC Parliament, 26 July 2016.
8 Of their election: H. M. Drucker, ‘Changes in the Labour Party Leadership’, Parliamentary Affairs 34 (1981), 369–91; ‘Intra-Party Democracy in Action: The Election of Leader and Deputy Leader by the Labour Party in 1983’, Parliamentary Affairs 37 (1984), 283–300; Leonard P. Stark, Choosing a Leader (London: Macmillan, 1996); Timothy Heppell, Choosing the Labour Leader: Labour Leadership Elections from Wilson to Brown (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); Tim Heppell and Andrew Crines, ‘How Michael Foot Won the Labour Party Leadership’, Political Quarterly 82 (2011), 81–94. Of their leaderships: Peter Shore, Leading the Left (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993); Kevin Jefferys (ed.), Leading Labour from Keir Hardie to Tony Blair (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Martin J. Smith, ‘Neil Kinnock and the Modernisation of the Labour Party’, Contemporary Record 8 (1994), 555–66; Martin Westlake, ‘Neil Kinnock: Loyalist Reformer’, in Martin Westlake (ed.), Leaders of Transition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 103–33; Kenneth O. Morgan ‘United Kingdom: a Comparative Case Study of Labour Prime Ministers Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Blair’, Journal of Legislative Studies 10 (2004), 2–3, 38–52; Charles Clarke and Toby S. Jones (eds), British Labour Leaders (London: Biteback, 2015); Paul Corthorn, ‘Michael Foot as Labour Leader: The Uses of the Past’, in Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds), Making Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in Modern British Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 29–42; Andrew Scott Crines, Michael Foot and the Leadership of the Labour Party (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).
9 Callaghan, Time and Chance, p. 565.
10 Richard Rose, ‘A Crisis of Confidence in British Party Leaders?’, Contemporary Record 9 (1995), 272–93.
11 Tribune, 7 October 1983, p. 1.
12 Callaghan, Time and Chance, p. 565; The Times, 15 October 1980, p. 1; Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership’, p. 339.
13 The Times, 8 September 1980, p. 3; Benn, Diaries, p. 498 [8 May 1979]; Benn, The End of an Era: Diaries 1980–90, ed. Ruth Winstone (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 23 [31 July 1980].
14 Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 466.
15 John Prescott, Prezza (London: Headline, 2008), pp. 142–3.
16 Clive Jenkins, All Against the Collar (London: Methuen, 1990), pp. 188–90.
17 Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership’, p. 340.
18 Jack Straw, Last Man Standing (London: Macmillan, 2012), pp. 138–9.
19 Tribune, 7 November 1980, p. 1; Labour Weekly, 14 November 1980, p. 1.
20 Field to Foot, 24 October 1980, MFP/MF/L1.
21 Labour Weekly, 24 October 1980, p. 3.
22 Andrew Faulds to Foot, 14 November 1980, MFP/MF/L2.
23 The Times, 1 October 1981, p. 4.
24 Benn to Foot, 11 November 1980, MFP/MF/L1.
25 Steel to Foot, 11 November 1980, MFP/MF/L1.
26 Roy Jenkins, European Diary (London: Collins, 1989), pp. 532–3, 645 [1 December 1979, 10 November 1980]; A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 530.
27 Healey, The Time of My Life, p. 477; Roy Hattersley, Who Goes Home? (London: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 225–6.
28 Private Eye, 24 October 1980, p. 15.
29 The Times, 13 June 1983, p. 1; Daily Mail, 13 June 1983, p. 1.
30 [David Cowling], memorandum for Peter Shore, PSP/13/146.
31 Gerald Kaufman, The Wilderness Years, 3: Enter the Rose, BBC2, 17 December 1995; Benn, Diaries, p. 20 [23 June 1980]; Hattersley, Who Goes Home?, p. 221; Benn in The Hugo Young Papers, ed. Ion Trewin (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 211 [7 June 1985].
32 Callaghan to Shore, 22 September 1983, PSP/13/66.
33 Frank Chapple, Sparks Fly (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 191.
34 John Kent, Private Eye, 15 July 1983, p. 15.
35 Hattersley, in Stark, Choosing a Leader, p. 222 n. 58, pp. 134–5.
36 Forward Labour Press Release, 12 July 1983, PSP/13/66; Tribune, 24 June 1983, p. 1.
37 The Times, 25 November 1982, p. 1; COHSE Branch Ballot Candidates’ Election Statements, 7, PSP/13/66; Callaghan, Time and Chance, p. 566; Foot, Another Heart, p. 163.
38 Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1979); David Coates, Labour in Power? (London: Longman, 1980).
39 Austin Mitchell, Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 35.
40 Submission from the Tribune Group of Labour MPs to the Party Commission of Enquiry, May 1980, 2, JCP/56/1784; Martin Flannery to Callaghan, 9 April 1980, JCP/57.
41 Callaghan to Flannery [copy], 17 April 1980, JCP/57.
42 The Firing Line, PBS, 4 September 1980.
43 Foot, Another Heart, p. 162.
44 Shore, Leading the Left, p. 128.
45 Benn, Diaries, p. 546 [4 October 1979].
46 Hattersley, Who Goes Home?, p. 221; LPAR 1979, pp. 168–9, 188–90.
47 LPAR 1979, pp. 213, 227–30; Benn, End of an Era, p. 497.
48 Callaghan, Tribune, 20 June 1980, p. 5; William Rodgers, Fourth Among Equals (London: Politico's, 2000), p. 195.
49 Callaghan notes, PLP meeting 18 June 1980; Commission of Enquiry notes, June 1980, JCP/59/1788.
50 Guardian, 18 June 1980, p. 15; Campaign for Labour Victory, The Future of the Labour Party, February 1980, p. 18.
51 Observer, 6 July 1980, p. 3.
52 Owen to Callaghan, 7 February 1980, JCP/55/1782; Callaghan to Owen [copy], 8 February 1980.
53 LPAR 1980, p. 143; BBC TV conference footage.
54 Edna Healey, Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster (London: Headline Review, 2006), pp. 223–4; Benn, Diaries, p. 32 [10 October 1980]; LPAR 1980, p. 147; note, ‘Tony Benn Speech’, JCP/73; Michael Cocks report, JCP/148; Hattersley, Wilderness Years: 1; Callaghan, Tribune, 13 June 1980, p. 6.
55 Second Report of the Working Party of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and notes, JCP/54/1778.
56 Labour Weekly, 3 October 1980, p. 1.
57 Callaghan to Harold Lever [copy], 8 October 1980, JCP/305; Callaghan to Reg Crook [copy], 8 October 1980, JCP/305.
58 Labour Weekly, 17 October 1980, p. 1.
59 Foot, Parliamentary Committee Meeting Minutes, 3 June 1981, Labour Party Papers, People's History Museum, Manchester.
60 Shore, Leading the Left, p. 142.
61 To Foot, 2 March 1981, MFP/MF/L27/10.
62 Shore, Leading the Left, p. 137.
63 Kinnock, 25 June 1985, 29 February 1984, in Young Papers, ed. Trewin, pp. 214, 201.
64 Benn, Diaries, p. 457 [21 May 1986].
65 Kinnock, 10 October 1985, 2 October 1985, LPAR 1985, pp. 120–9, 153–6; Kinnock, In Conversation.
66 Michael Meacher to Foot, 21 May 1982, MFP/MF/L31/1/4.
67 Michael Foot, Loyalists and Loners (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 107–26; Benn, HCD, 10 November 1981, 12, cols 494–500; Kinnock to R. A. Jones, 30 November 1981, NKP/KNNK/1/3/5.
68 Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1983, p. 14.
69 Clive James, Observer, 29 May 1983, p. 9; Paul Foot, Labour's Old Romantic: A Film Portrait of Michael Foot, BBC2, 19 July 1997.
70 Julian Critchley, Palace of Varieties (London: John Murray, 1989), p. 46; Michael Rush, ‘Engaging with the Enemy: The Parliamentary Participation of Party Leaders’, Parliamentary Affairs 67 (2013), 751–66.
71 Neil Kinnock in, Worst Job in British Politics? The Leader of the Opposition, BBC4, 25 February 2008.
72 New Statesman, 1 April 1988, p. 15.
73 NKP/KNNK/2/1/89.
74 ‘Leadership and Political Leaders: a Presentation to Neil Kinnock’, 18 April 1986, NKP/KNNK/2/1/93.
75 Independent on Sunday, 12 April 1992, p. 26.
76 Gerald Kaufman, 25 January 1984, in Young Papers, ed. Trewin, p. 200; David Hare, Asking Around: Background to the David Hare Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 157–260.
77 Sunday Times, 12 April 1992, p. 13.
78 Project ‘Liberation’ [1990], NKP/KNNK/3/4/1/4.
79 Callaghan to Robert Sheldon [copy], 22 June 1979, JCP/246.
80 Economist, 23 June 1979, p. 25; Daily Mail, 19 June 1979, p. 2.
81 Callaghan to Kinnock [copy], 25 January 1980; Rodgers to Callaghan, 29 January 1980, JCP/54/1778.
82 Callaghan to Evans, [copy] 19 February 1980, JCP/131.
83 MFP MF/L26/33–43.
84 Roy Hughes to Foot, 11 November 1980, MFP/MF/L1.
85 Rodgers, Fourth Among Equals, p. 204; Rodgers to Foot, 27 November 1980, Roper to Foot, 8 December 1980, MFP/MF/L10.
86 MFP/MF/L4; Peter Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey (London: Heretic, 1983), p. 58; Foot, HCD 3 December 1981, 14, col. 398; [Nigel Bowles] to Callaghan, 3 December 1981, JCP/48; Norman Atkinson et al. to Foot, 25 November 1981, MFP/MF/M10/4/2.
87 Tribune, 1 October 1982, p. 1.
88 Robin Cook to Kinnock, 18 July 1985, NKP/KNNK/1/2/3; Hattersley to Kinnock, 17 November 1986, NKP/KNNK/1/2/6; Hattersley to Kinnock, 2 July 1987, NKP/KNNK/1/3/20/1; Clare Short to Kinnock, 3 July 1987, NKP/KNNK/1/2/13.
89 Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership’, p. 352.
90 Draft Introductory remarks to Leader's Committee [January 1988], NKP/KNNK/3/2/5; Kinnock to Ron Todd [Copy], 7 January 1987, NKP/KNNK/3/2/5.
91 Kinnock, in Stark, Choosing a Leader, p. 59.
92 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution (London: Abacus, 2011), p. 40.
93 Kinnock, ‘Reforming the Labour Party’, p. 538.
94 Ken Livingstone, You Can't Say That (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 306.
95 Hilary Wainwright, Labour: A Tale of Two Parties (London: Hogarth, 1987), p. 290.
96 Britain Will Win, Labour Party Manifesto, June 1987.
97 Peter Mandelson, The Third Man (London: HarperPress, 2010), p. 100.
98 Neil Kinnock, in This Week Next Week, BBC1, 5 June 1988.
99 John Smith, in Young Papers, pp. 377–8 [22 April 1993]; John Cole, As it Seemed to Me (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995), p. 227; Hattersley, Wilderness Years: 2, BBC2, 17 December 1995.
100 Private Eye, 11 March 1983, p. 1.
101 Stan Newens to Foot, 21 July 1982, MFP/L31/1/4.
102 R. F. Brown to Foot, 26 November 1981, MFP/L41/1.
103 Foot, Another Heart, p. 159.
104 Kinnock, Lost Leader.
105 To an audience member who heckled that the Prime Minister ‘has got guts’, Kinnock replied ‘And it is a pity that people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green in order to prove it’: The Times, 7 June 1983, p. 1; HCD, 20 November 1991, 199, col. 283.
106 John Major to the Leveson Inquiry, 12 June 2012: An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, Report (2012), House of Commons Reports 780-III, p. 1134.
107 Jan Royall, in Inside Story, 3; Gould, Unfinished Revolution, pp. 87–9; Andy McSmith, John Smith (London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 172; Mandelson, Third Man, p. 130; Hattersley, Who Goes Home?, p. 260.
108 Callaghan, Labour's Last Premier, BBC2, 25 April 1992; Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1989, 13.
109 Neil Kinnock, The Future of Socialism (London: Fabian Society, 1986), p. 1.
110 Kinnock to John Smith [copy], 9 September 1986, NKP/KNNK/1/213; Neil Kinnock, Making Our Way (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. vi; New Statesman, 28 November 1986, p. 23.
111 Hattersley, Who Goes Home?, pp. 286–7.
112 New Statesman, 1 April 1988, p. 15
113 Hewitt to Clarke, 16 November 1986, NKP/KNNK/3/2/5.
114 Sun, 21 May 1987, p. 15.
115 Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1979, p. 2; 19 August 1982, p. 2; 17 February 1983, p. 6; Daily Mail, 14 November 1980, p. 2.
116 Foot, Loyalists and Loners, p. 123.
117 Benn to Shadow Cabinet [copy], 25 February 1983, MFP/M13/1 (‘We are never going to agree about tactics are we’, Kinnock to Benn [copy], 28 February 1983, NKP/KNNK/1/3/5); Giles Radice, Diaries 1980–2001 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 83 [23 February 1983].
118 Anthony Bevins, The Times, 11 June 1983, p. 5.
119 ‘Leadership and Political Leaders: a Presentation to Neil Kinnock’, 18 April 1986, NKP/KNNK/2/1/93.
120 Gould, Unfinished Revolution, p. 69.
121 Worcester, in Young Papers, p. 242 [23 July 1986].
122 Worcester to Kinnock, 24 October 1984, NKP/KNNK/2/1/93; 4 December 1985, NKP/KNNK/2/1/88, Patricia Hewitt to Charles Clarke, December 1985, NKP/KNNK/2/1/89; Gould, Unfinished Revolution, p. 59; Kinnock, 29 February 1984, in Young Papers, p. 202.
123 Worcester, in Young Papers, p. 242 [23 July 1986]; Field to Kinnock, 6 March 1987, NKP/KNNK/1/2/5.
124 London Labour Briefing, July 1983, p. 1; Tribune, 2 September 1983, p. 1.
125 Eric Heffer, Labour's Future (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 75–6.
126 Benn, Diaries, p. 350 [16 May 1984]; Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 269; Healey, Time of My Life, p. 216.
127 ILP Magazine, Summer 1988, 1.
128 Benn, Diaries, p. 540 [23 March 1988]; Vladimir Derer, Voice of the Unions, May 1988, p. 1.
129 Mandelson to Clarke [1988], NKP/KNNK/2/1/115/1; Kinnock, In Conversation.
130 Hattersley, Who Goes Home?, p. 231.
131 Alan Tuffin to Benn [copy], 28 March 1988, Heffer Papers, People's History Museum, Manchester, ESH7/7.
132 Kinnock, 4 October 1988, LPAR 1988, 60; Tribune, 7 October 1988, p. 5.
133 Militant, 1 April 1988, p. 2.
134 Conference Delegates’ Briefing, Friday Blackpool 1988, p. 1.
135 LPAR 1988, pp. 74–6; Kinnock, in Stark, Choosing a Leader, p. 60.
136 Kinnock, In Conversation.
137 Philip Webster, Inside Story (London: William Collins, 2016), pp. 99–100.
138 The Times, 21 December 1989, p. 14.
139 Kinnock, In Conversation.
140 Gould, Unfinished Revolution, p. 94.
141 Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), pp. 49–50; Paddy Ashdown, 14 January 1991, The Ashdown Diaries Volume 1: 1988–1997 (London: Allen Lane, 2000), pp. 107; Bryan Gould, Goodbye to All That (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 239; Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership, p. 345.
142 Independent on Sunday, 22 September 1991, p. 17.
143 Callaghan, Guardian, 3 October 1983, p. 25.
144 Labour Leader, October 1985, p. 1.
145 Daily Telegraph, 3 May 1979, p. 1.
146 Daily Mail, 27 May 1983, p. 8; Tribune, 10 June 1983, pp. 6–7; J. E. Mortimer, A Life on the Left (Lewes: Book Guild, 1998), pp. 384–5.
147 ‘Election ’83 notebook’, JCP/82.
148 Observer, 29 May 1983, p. 9.
149 Sunday Times, 22 May 1983, p. 17.
150 Ken Woolmer to Callaghan, 20 June 1983, JCP/ 82.
151 Foot to George Thomas [copy], 1 July 1983, MFP/ML/10.
152 Hewitt to [Bryan] Gould [copy], 5 December 1986, NKP/KNNK/2/1/89.
153 Hewitt to Clarke, 16 November 1986, NKP/KNNK/3/2/5.
154 David Young, The Enterprise Years (London: Headline, 1990), p. 210; Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 252.
155 Webster, Inside Story, pp. 115–17.
156 In the event of Soviet invasion, Kinnock had advocated resistance, which the Conservative tabloids related to the experience of Afghanistan (even interviewing a member of the Mujahedeen on the feasibility of Kinnock's ‘guerrilla plan’: Daily Mail, 26 May 1987, p. 2) and the eleventh-century resistor to the Normans (Sun, 27 May 1987, pp. 6, 8; 29 May 1987, p. 1); Kevin Barron to Kinnock, 26 August 1987, NKP/KNNK/1/2/2.
157 Callaghan to Benn [copy] 16 June 1987, JCP/188.
158 Party Election Broadcast, BBC1, 2 April 1992.
159 Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), p. 409; Kenneth Baker, The Turbulent Years (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 346–7.
160 Foot to Kinnock, 11 January 1988, NKP/KNNK/1/2/5.
161 Kinnock, 2 April 1992, interview, Robin Day, … But With Respect (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), pp. 273–6; Daily Mail, 17 January 1992, p. 9.
162 Callaghan, in conversation with Shirley Williams, BBC1, 1 November 1979, transcript, JCP/136.
163 Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership’, pp. 346–9.
164 Kinnock, ‘Reforming the Labour Party’, p. 540.
165 Kinnock, ‘Which Way Should Labour Go?’, Political Quarterly 51 (1980), 411–23, at 411.
166 Foot, Another Heart, pp. 13–21.
167 Kinnock to Ben Pimlott [copy], 14 April 1992, NKP/KNNK/3/4/3/1; New Statesman, 17 April 1992, p. 6.
168 NKP/KNNK/3/4/3/5.
169 NKP/KNNK/3/4/3/9.
170 Gould, Unfinished Revolution, p. 142.
171 Financial Times, 18 February 2006, p. 7. The play starred John Thaw as George Jones/Kinnock, on stage, premiering at the National Theatre in 1993, and on screen, in a 1995 BBC adaptation. Hare defended himself against the charge by stating that he had only presented what he had been told by Kinnock's team: Hare, Asking, pp. 157–250.
172 Kinnock, Conversations.
173 Kinnock, in Kinnock: 3 Pursuit of Power, ITV, 31 July 1993.
174 Private Eye, 5 December 1980, p. 4.
175 Kinnock, ‘Neil Kinnock on Leadership’, p. 343.
176 Independent, 19 July 1992, p. 1; Economist, 18 July 1992, p. 34; Daily Telegraph, 18 July 1992, p. 6; Callaghan, HLD, 12 May 1994, p. 1651; The Times, 18 July 1992, p. 16.