Mary Bale has captured the public imagination for her random act of cruelty to animals in a way that Jon Cruddas’s endorsement of David Miliband, what Ed Balls thinks about the deficit, Andy Burnham’s view of the metropolitan elite or Ed Miliband’s support from Unite has failed to do.
I don’t know who is going to win the leadership election. In the 2007 deputy leadership election, a majority of people were convinced that Alan Johnson was going to win. On the day, a national broadcaster announced his victory on the news. I was sitting in the audience in Manchester as the six candidates and their campaign managers came onto the stage. I had arranged with Caroline Flint that she would give a hand signal in advance of the declaration to say who had won. The signal for Harriet Harman was a hand on heart. When Caroline gave the signal I assumed she must have indigestion. When Mike Griffiths announced the result, after four candidates had been eliminated, it was a genuine shock because AJ was the front-runner, according to the media, throughout the contest. His aide Claire Montague, sitting in the row behind the candidates, can be seen on You Tube slumping forward and using the f-word. The only person I met during the contest who tipped Harriet to win was Deborah Mattinson, the Labour pollster, who seems to be right about most things.
Harman’s unexpected victory was down to a block of transfers from Jon Cruddas supporters. In the current leadership election, unless a candidate wins on the first round (unlikely with five candidates) it will again come down to transfers. In 1976, and in 1980, the Labour leadership candidate who got the most first preference votes didn’t win. That could easily happen again next month.
It is almost impossible to call between David and Ed Miliband, because you have to be able to work out who the thousands of people who are voting for Abbott, Burnham or Balls as their first preference will put on their ballot paper in second and third place. Then you have to predict in which order the candidates will be eliminated. So if Burnham goes out first, his transfers will probably go to David Miliband. But if Balls goes out first, his transfers will probably go to Ed Miliband. If you put Diane Abbott first, who do you put second? Could be anyone. Then you have to predict turnout in the three sections of the electoral college. Probably over 80 per cent in the MPs section; probably under 20 per cent in the unions section. There are people in the party who spend their time trying to work this stuff out, with wet towels wrapped around their heads, but I would rather watch a video of a nutter incarcerating a cat in a wheelie bin.
I’m struggling to think of a Labour leadership contest more unclear than this one. Brown was the only candidate. Blair was always going to win. He won with 57 per cent of the total, to Prescott’s 24 per cent, and Beckett’s 19 per cent. John Smith got 91 per cent of the vote to Bryan Gould’s 9 per cent. Kinnock won with 70 per cent of the vote to Hattersley’s 20 per cent; In 1980 Denis Healey won 112 votes to Foot’s 83 in the first round, but Foot won with transfers from supporters of Peter Shore and John Silkin.
Only the 1976 contest to succeed Harold Wilson as leader, and prime minister, contained the same degree of uncertainty. With only MPs voting in those days, Foot got the most votes in the first ballot (90) with Callaghan on 84, Jenkins on 56, Benn on 37, Healey on 30 and Anthony Crosland on just 17. After transfers, though, Callaghan beat Foot 176 to 137.
In the 1981 deputy leadership contest, organised gangs of Trots broke up meetings and prevented Healey from speaking. Healey’s autobiography records how in Cardiff a group of Trots and anarchists tried to stop him speaking (‘whom Tony Benn did nothing to discourage or condemn’). In Birmingham, the Trots were joined by IRA supporters ‘who made it quite impossible’ for Healey to be heard. These scenes, watched by millions on the television news, says Healey, ‘gave the Labour Party a reputation for extremism, violence, hatred and division.’ It puts the odd bit of unpleasantness on Twitter in recent days into perspective.
The new leader, barring the elusive first-round knock-out, will inherit a party whose collective opinion on who the leader should be is all over the place. But there is none of the bitterness and sectarianism of previous contests. An early task will be to win over doubters and soothe the egos of the losing candidates with top jobs in the shadow cabinet (apart from Abbott, who can return to her role as TV personality). The party will unite quickly, because there is a real desire to return to government, unlike in previous eras when ideological purity was more important than compromising with the voters. We don’t have the luxury of sectarianism, no time for the EM-DMs. Then we will have to reach out to the public, and become more interesting than cats in bins.
All this talk of Trots has reminded me of some wise words by Leon Trotsky himself, to which the new Labour leader should pay heed: ‘it is not enough to create a programme, it is necessary for the working class to accept it. But the sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a full stop upon half the task.’