What Hugh Gaitskell did not do is instructive

Learning from the past is less glamorous than learning from other countries, because the latter can be leveraged into trips to the United States or Scandinavia, while the former entails nothing more exotic than a jaunt down to the local library, but it is, on the whole, rather more helpful for politicians to learn from their own country than it is to learn from another.

Consider the Britain of December 1955, when Hugh Gaitskell succeeded Clement Attlee to the leadership of the Labour party. The most popular of the great authors was Jane Austen, the nation’s children were hooked on Westerns imported from the US, and almost everybody was terrified that West Indians were taking their homes and their jobs. In December 2013, Jane Austen is set for the £10 note, the nation’s children are hooked on superheroes imported from the US, and everybody – even West Indians – is terrified that eastern Europeans are taking their homes and their jobs. Talking about winning over the Britain of 1955 will do a lot more for Labour than learning the lessons of François Hollande, Bill de Blasio or Birgitte Nyborg, not least because the third of these three is fictional.

Gaitskell’s untimely death has probably done more for his reputation than any number of sympathetic biographies. Having taken office after one heavy defeat, he led the party into another unexpected and equally heavy loss four years later.  He died less than a year before the 1964 election, which Labour was also expected to win comfortably. Despite the fact that only three Labour leaders have won a parliamentary majority, it is a simple enough task for the dead. So John Smith – architect of the disastrous 1992 budget – lives on as a nailed-on general election winner, and Gaitskell – who had already lost an election in 1959 – would have achieved a bigger majority than the wafer-thin one enjoyed by Harold Wilson.

A more likely outcome would have been a confirmation of the pattern of British politics: that losers tend to lose again. Consider Neil Kinnock’s record after 1987: fought one, lost one. Then look at Ken Livingstone’s after 2008: fought won, lost one.  The only person to come back from defeat and win, Edward Heath, could not keep the lights on and had a final record of fought three, won one. So the likely destiny for Gaitskell in 1964, as Alec Douglas-Home turned around flagging Tory fortunes, was defeat, not landslide. A better question for Ed Miliband now is not: what did Gaitskell do; but: what did Gaitskell not do?

Gaitskell’s big mistake was in not going far enough. When he became leader, he quickly recognised that the high watermark for big nationalisations had passed, that the party’s decision-making processes – which shut individual trade unionists out of the conference floor and shut everyone out of the leadership race – were out of date, and that Labour needed to embrace the materialism of the 1950s in order to have any hope of governing in the 1960s. But it took until the defeat of 1959 for him to begin to really address these big problems, and, even then, his record was one of failure and retreat, pulling out of reforming Clause IV because he feared he might be defeated, and delivering a strongly Eurosceptic speech for the benefit of the conference floor.

The lesson in 2013 is clear: to do what you believe, rather than to do what you can get away with. The voters tend to spot the difference.

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