Old Labour’s Lost King
The story of modern British political life has, so far, thrown up a high proportion of nuts, or at least of unsettled people with something to prove. John Smith was not a nut. After Neil Kinnock gave up in despair following Major’s victory in 1992, he was replaced by a placid, secure, self-certain Scottish lawyer with a very boring name. Today almost everyone has an interest in writing John Smith out of the history books. For the Blairites, he was the timid, grey background for the heroic drama of modernization about to unfold. For those who loved Kinnock, he was the election-losing Shadow Chancellor. For the Tories, he was an embarrassingly good parliamentary inquisitor. In politics, predictions about what will happen a month ahead are dangerous but though Smith died of a heart attack in 1994, three years ahead of an election, it is fairly safe to suggest that, after the tarnishing years of the mid-nineties, he would have become Prime Minister. Had he done so, Britain would have had a traditionalist social democratic government, much closer to those of continental Europe, and our history would have been different.
Smith came from a family of herring fishermen on the West Coast of Scotland and, though bald as a coot himself, was the son of a bristly small town headmaster known as Hairy Smith. Labour-supporting from his earliest days, bright and self-assured, he got his real political education at Glasgow University, part of a generation of brilliant student debaters from all parties who would go on to dominate Scottish politics. Back in the early sixties, Glasgow University Labour Club was a hotbed not of radicals, but of Gaitskell-supporting moderates. It was a position Smith never wavered from, as he rose through politics as one of the brightest stars of the Scottish party, and then through government under Wilson and Callaghan as a junior minister dealing with the oil industry and devolution before entering the cabinet just in time as President of the Board of Trade, its youngest member at forty.
In Opposition, he managed to keep at arm’s length from the worst of the in-fighting (he and Tony Benn liked one another, despite their very different views, after working together at the Energy Department) and eventually became Kinnock’s shadow chancellor. He was a good lawyer and a brilliantly forensic parliamentary operator. This won him acclaim in the Westminster village even if, in Thatcher’s England, he was spotted as a tax-raising corporatist socialist of the old school. One letter he got briskly informed him: ‘You’ll not get my BT shares yet, you bald, owl-looking Scottish bastard. Go back to Scotland and let that other twit Kinnock go back to Wales.’ Smith came from a somewhat old-fashioned Christian egalitarian background which put him naturally out of sympathy with the materialist, pleasure-orientated and aspirational culture that had grown so vigorously in Thatcherite England. Just before he became leader he told a newspaper he believed above all in education because ‘it opens the doors of the imagination, breaks down class barriers and frees people. In our family…money was looked down on and education was revered. I am still slightly contemptuous of money.’ This could not in all honesty be said of the man who replaced him.
Smith was never personally close to Kinnock, but scrupulously loyal. A convivial (not drunken) workaholic who ate too much, he nevertheless succeeded him by an overwhelming vote in 1992. By then he had with great good luck survived a major heart attack and taken up hill walking. The Sun, not always a good guide to the future, greeted his triumph with the eerily accurate and predictive headline: ‘He’s fat, he’s fifty-three, he’s had a heart attack and he’s taking on a stress-loaded job.’
Though Smith swiftly advanced the careers of the brightest younger stars, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they swiftly became depressed by his style of leadership. He did not believe Labour needed to be transformed, merely improved. He was reluctant at first to take on the party over issues such as one-person, one-vote internal democracy. He had an instantaneous dislike of the Mephistopheles of the modernizers, Peter Mandelson, which may have been tinged with Scottish Presbyterian homophobia. Blair, Brown and Mandelson thought Smith was smug and idle. He on the other hand was equally sure they were making too much fuss and that Labour could regain power with something of its traditional spirit. A little-known newspaper journalist called Alastair Campbell divided the party into two camps, the ‘frantics’, led by Brown, Blair and Jack Straw, and the ‘long-gamers’, led by Smith. At one point Blair was contemplating leaving politics, so despairing was he of Smith’s leadership. He should, he reflected, have stuck to the law, where his elder brother was doing so well. What was there in politics for him?
Smith died of a second heart attack on 12 May 1994. After the initial shock and grieving had finished, Labour moved rapidly away from his legacy. There is, however, one part of the Smith agenda which survived intact and is a big influence on the shape of Britain today. As the minister who had struggled to achieve devolution for Scotland in the dark years of 1978-9 he remained a passionate supporter of the ‘unfinished business’ of establishing a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. With his friend Donald Dewar he had committed Labour so utterly to the idea in Opposition that Blair, no particular fan of devolution, found this one part of old Labour’s agenda that stuck and had to be implemented later.