John Smith’s legacy 20 years after his death

—Being leader of the Labour party is never an easy task. But it is harder still for those who history has dealt a hand that confronts them with the challenge of radically changing the party.

John Smith became leader just after we had lost our fourth election in a row. Losing national elections had become something the Labour party had got used to and treated as normal. John’s task was to get the party to expect something very different: that it could win power by getting large majorities. That was hard but it was even harder getting the Labour party to understand the changes that it had to make to itself in order to be in a position to win.

The battle for one member one vote was a crucial part of this. John recognised that there was no ducking this. I learned a lot from John during the campaign to win it. He used to get very frustrated when individual egos got in the way of a solution to a political problem. He would despair of age-old Scottish slights that had originated in the mists of ancient antagonisms.

He would bring the best of the Labour party together to try to find a consensual way forward. Being the Labour party it was clear that some people only wanted a solution if it was their own solution and in the end John knew that he had to be the one that would confront these personal egos and take us forward come what may.

He was never going to get consensus around one member one vote. He therefore knew that he had to take on the doubters and defeat them at a vote at conference. John was very good at listening to people expressing their views but at the end of the day he was absolutely sure that, as leader, he had to take the final decision. Having made his decision he then resolutely built a majority behind it.

John had real confidence in ordinary people and he believed that individual members of the party had the right, capacity and will to be involved and make the decisions in the Labour party. That meant that going in to the fateful 1993 party conference he was more confident than most that the vote would be won. This belief in the members of the party transferred itself to the floor of the conference where, for the first time, constituency delegates were canvassed and lobbied and made to feel that their vote counted.

This belief in people outside of the centre of party and government was one of the main wellsprings of John’s belief in devolution. And it was in his work for devolution that I learned from John the relationship between detail and strategy. He was responsible for the devolution bill that failed to get through under Jim Callaghan. More than anyone else he understood the detail of creating devolved administrations within the United Kingdom.

He would often joke with me about his Calvinist background. Given the millions that have been given to the current independence campaign in Scotland from winners of the lottery, John would enjoy the irony of the nationalist proposition, in a country with that Calvinist tradition, being funded by gambling. Alex Salmond would not have relished taking John on in this current debate because John had such a clear passion for a devolved Scotland being a part of a unified UK.

When John died just two years into his leadership, Labour had come to terms with the need, if we were going to win and govern, for radical change in organisation and policy. The rest is history: three election victories with large majorities. The changes that John’s leadership created were the basis for those wins.

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Hilary Armstrong is a member of the House of Lords and was parliamentary private secretary to John Smith

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