At the last five general elections the British public has voted in favour of a prime minister who offers centrism, charisma, competence and confidence. Labour’s response to this has been to replace Ed Miliband with Jeremy Corbyn. For some it may be difficult to know where to begin with that.
Fortunately BiteBack’s edited volumes on British Conservative Leaders and British Labour Leaders offer useful staging posts for discussion. Mixing essays from academics with more journalistic accounts of recent leaders, these are a superbly put together set of analyses which allow leading commentators to (mostly) advocate for their chosen hero. Adopting a so-called ‘statecraft approach’ to leadership – which takes in electoral strategy, governmental competence, party management, winning the argument, and bending the contemporary political terrain – every Tory leader since Robert Peel and every single Labour leader are subject to rigorous analysis. A further such volume exists on the Liberals – and perhaps we may soon need one on the historic ‘other’ leaders running from Joe Chamberlain and Oswald Mosley to Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage.
As it is, perhaps the headline finding here concerns ranking leaders by the cumulative impact they had on their party’s parliamentary position. This certainly brings quirks the editors acknowledge (for example, William Hague and Neil Kinnock outperforming Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Wilson), but it remains a useful way of positioning leaders historically. Can many Labourites really quibble with a bottom five that numbers Ed Miliband, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Ramsay MacDonald and Gordon Brown?
But the truly startling finding for many on the left may arrive when it comes to considering David Cameron – the greatest Conservative success since Britain became a mass democracy. Matthew D’Ancona ably charts the pragmatism of the 2005 Tory establishment in finally ‘smelling the coffee’– to paraphrase pre-revenge mission Michael Ashcroft – and selecting the most likely vehicle to take votes from their direct opponents. Centrism indeed forms the order of the day – in the Tories’ top three leaders since 1918 Cameron is also joined by the moderate Stanley Baldwin; in Labour’s top five Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock and Harold Wilson are prominent. 1906, 1945 and 1979 thus stand as what they are: rarities.
Indeed, there is a lot here to chew over in these volumes. It seems churlish to isolate particular essays (Rob Saunders on Disraeli is also superb), but two in particular seem to offer important lessons.
First, on the Tories, John Charmley engagingly refuses to toe the pro-Churchill line. In 1945 the old ‘out of touch man’ should have given way to the ‘younger, more liberal, and more photogenic’ Anthony Eden. Uninterested in domestic policy, his one positive act of sorts was eventually to allow others to drag the party into the centre in the run-up to the elections of 1950 and 1951. For all the image we have of Churchill, the backbench rebel on appeasement, as leader he manifestly did not fight his party’s left on the beaches of industrial policy after the second world war. Leadership requires other skills.
Instead, Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan and others beavered away on a domestic agenda (the 1947 Industrial Charter) which went with the verdict of the electorate in 1945 while offering a distinctly Conservative vision, and this placed the opposition in a space to capitalise on the inevitable errors made by a government over the course of a five-year parliament. Churchill stuck to foreign policy grandstanding and this withdrawal from the domestic sphere, as well as his pretenders’ diffidence, sustained him in office. There were early shades of Tony and Gordon here.
When it comes to Labour itself Tim Bale on Ed Miliband is also vital reading. In short, Miliband absolutely nailed the leadership contest (albeit by appealing ‘to those who regarded the very idea of New Labour as some sort of neoliberal/colonialist aberration’) but then completely misread the likely economic trajectory over the next four and a half years. In refusing to take the early big calls ‘that might have made a few Labour eyes water and therefore would have commanded attention and respect’, Miliband was effectively bounced into a more unfamiliar centrist space in the last year of the parliament. Bale’s concluding peroration notes that ‘insanity, they say, is repeating the same mistake over and over and expecting a different result.’ We will see.
What lessons, then, for Jeremy Corbyn? First, the mood music of the first two years of this parliament is crucial. Miliband gambled that the economy was going to remain stagnant, and, albeit with massive regional and sectoral variation, it did not. His leadership needed either a counterintuitive policy offer in this initial period or for the discrediting of his opponents to last the length of the parliament. Unwilling to fundamentally challenge his party he gambled on events going his way and they did not. Having outperformed Miliband’s effort in the leadership contest Corbyn now has 18 months at most to set out an effective stall.
Second, having been elected on a patchwork quilt weaving in everything from Ulster to unilaterialism Corbyn needs to identify his own lines in the sand. For example, it may well be for that, in the new primus inter pares spirit, he essentially outsources large chunks of Labour’s foreign policy to the party’s centrists. These books show it has been done before – Blair, Thatcher and Churchill all included major enemies in big offices of state. If he has found no way to coax one of Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves or Tristram Hunt back into the shadow cabinet by the time Osborne takes over No 10 he will have failed that particular internal litmus test. This will mean ceding ground and, to be fair, kernels of this have begun to be seen. But more must come.
The BiteBack volumes thus serve both a historical and contemporary purpose. In challenging perceptions regarding historic failures (for example, Baldwin and George Lansbury) and interrogating the very nature of political leadership, the books provide a valuable service. They deserve to be widely read, not least by those contemplating the future of the major parties.
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Richard Carr is a lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University and author of the book One Nation Britain
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British Labour Leaders
Charles Clark and Toby S James
BiteBack Publishing | 416pp | £25
British Conservative Leaders
Charles Clark, Toby S James, Tim Bale and Patrick Diamond
BiteBack Publishing | 496pp | £25