The Modern British History Podcast
My personal interest in this comes from being a longstanding modern British history enthusiast, with an interest in UK domestic affairs over the recent past.
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The Modern British History Podcast
11. The Legacy of Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith - with Dr Martin Farr
Both Smith and Gaitskell died suddenly and never gained political office. What do they tell us about how the Labour party remembers its lost leaders? What might have happened if they had both lived? And finally, where are they best placed on the spectrum of political opinion in the Labour Party?
In this episode I'm joined by Dr Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Newcastle University, to take on all these questions and many more.
We hope you enjoy the podcast.
Welcome to the Modern British Political History podcast. I'm joined on this one by Martin Farr, who's senior lecturer at New Castle in Contemporary British History. Welcome to the podcast, Martin. Great to have you on.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much so on this one, we're talking about Hugh Gateskill and John Smith as a pair today, and there's going to be a lot to say. I think we're going to talk a little bit about them both in tandem and a bit about them as individuals as well. But to start off, martin, you've looked at these two together and my first question is why have you chosen to look at them together?
Speaker 2:Well, I suppose in many senses it may be obvious but then also slightly obscure. And I tend not to my research, I tend not to have many ideas. I quite like to basically like I want to be a journalist, so I quite like having a commission or a story and I go and do it. So I quite like doing chapters and things, and I and I've had a big project involving biography, which doesn't really require much in the way of conceptualising this, but this was a one of those where I did think, oh, that's something that comes together and it may be fruitful in various ways. And it derives from the fact that I've been basically my interest is in British political history, and particularly post war British political history, and also, weirdly, an interest in moralisation and cultures of passing. I'm doing a writing, a chapter at the moment, on a bit trees newspaper, bitters, politicians, a genre of political writing, and it occurred to me this is some time ago now. It's been as a guy I get distracted by these commissions and these other things that pop up. But the research began with the realisation that Hugh Gates given John Smith for the only party leaders to have died. Now I'll caveat that by that I mean in the modern political era, which I classed being post 1918, when we had the representation of people that votes for some women, the modern party system, basically being created after the end of the First World War. So, prime Minister, have died the camp of Adam and died, that's before the First World War. Bonne Law resigned before dying, but in terms of a party leader who was actually leader of the party, these are the only two that have done so, and lots of similarities and parallels developed after that point. That was the essential reason. And then I liked the idea that I was interested in, the idea that both of them were expected to win the next election to be the Prime Minister. So there's a quite a long counterfactual, which we may go into thread in history about Prime Ministers who never were the best Prime Minister we never had, and so on. But these two were expected to be Prime Minister and they were leaders of the opposition after long periods of concerted governments. They both labour. So another similarity they were regarded as moderates and they had become leader after a period of civil war in their party, between left and right, as tends to happen in the labour party. They were thought to be, as I said, the next Prime Minister. But then they were taken unexpectedly.
Speaker 2:Let's turn Smith's case, perhaps because he had in fact both of that heart attack before as well and had survived them. But Smith didn't survive his second heart attack. And they are both succeeded by younger men who go on to become Labour's most successful Prime Ministers in terms of electoral success. I mean that's the fact in terms of Harold Wolfson winning three elections, four elections actually. Blair winning three elections, tony Blair, we go beyond. So I quite like the fact. There are facts in terms of this is the case and there are these similarities. Then we go into interpretation as to what it meant, what the legacies were and so on. But both died and were replaced by younger men who won the next election and the election after that and were Labour's longest serving Prime Ministers. And both of them actually are named, checked by Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, as being people he wants to emulate.
Speaker 2:And there are many other parallels too which will come up and related to the party and left and right. What it means to be a socialist or social democrat in modern Britain, about Britain's relations with Europe, comes up as a very big issue for Gateskill and for Smith. There's the way in which they were remembered in their party and the reputations and legacies were used or misused or simply forgotten. With Blair in particular, blair is a kind of project leader. We have the new Labour project and there's a sense with the Blair people particularly, that the 97 election, which was a landslide victory, whereas Wilson's in 64 was a very narrow one, you got a landslide two years later in 66. Blair's was a project and Smith would not have achieved the same as Blair did With Wilson and Gateskill. Wilson's victory was much more narrow, so it's conjecture as to what would have happened, but there's a very good chance that both Gateskill and Smith would have been prime minister had they lived. They didn't and we had Wilson and Blair instead, and all the changes come from that.
Speaker 2:So that's that's the central reason. There are many more sort of micro similarities and so on, as well as differences between them, but that's why I thought it was quite an interesting way to approach a subject of interest to me, which is party politics, led party, but also biography, life, writing, memorialization, legacy, things like that, and Gateskill in particular. More than Smith, gateskill had Gateskillites. There was a part of the party that were very much devoted to him, roy Jenkins being perhaps the most prominent example, whereas Smith was leader for less long and I didn't have quite the same coattails in that sense. So there are many more similarities, differences that want to go through, as one often puts on A level scripts, similarities, differences, but those. That's, in a nutshell, why I thought it would be something interesting to write about and indeed possibly talk about.
Speaker 1:To pick out one, in terms of how they were seen by the public at the time they were operating and to the extent that they were known by the public. Are there any similarities or differences you'd pick out there in terms of the general perception of both of them as leaders?
Speaker 2:Well, this is what. This is one of the interesting elements of it, because you're looking at, I mean I should sort of mention a gate school died in January 63 and Smith died in May 94. So we have the 30 year difference in terms of where we are in politics, and politics changes very rapidly. Howard Wilson said, and we have from gate school to Smith, we, we move. I mean, smith isn't quite in the 24 seven news culture that we have today, but it's moving into a bit. There's 24 seven news by Smith's time, bbc news and so on, so there's rolling news coverage of Smith's death in the weather wasn't for gate school. So the consumption of media in 63 was basically morning and evening newspapers and news bulletins. On the three we're basically two TV channels had news bulletins and radio. So one was waiting for news. With Smith it was a bit less the case because there was rolling news. As I say where it's now. Of course we can summon news as we want it from whichever source you want. So gates has a much more limited media environment than Smith does. Also, gate skill is Dying in a time where there's greater this can be exaggerated but a more deferential period in terms of Elites and those in authority.
Speaker 2:I mean it's it's a coincidence, obviously, but he happens to die the same year as that was a week that was first broadcast on BBC, the same year as I think the year after Private I was first published the, and the Pupumas scandal, of course, was the same year. We get the, the wars over, we've got this post war generation that haven't been in uniform. The Beatles, perhaps the most, are the exemplars of this just missing national service. They don't feel the same kind of connection with their parents generation that their parents have with their generation. They haven't gone through the same experience of deprivation and wartime and serving uniform and so on. They're more likely to mock and to debunk and to Disparage. And that begins this is one of the great cliches of the sixties, of course, this social tumult this does begin in the year that go to school dies by the time we read Smith and indeed I've got a talk, which I've done about this subject and I compare and contrast the private eye, even private, I was taken about when Smith died and that's the other point. I think, going back myself slightly, is a both who regarded as, as politicians of integrity and of weight and their deaths were mourned by people on both sides of the aisle in the House of Commons, and that's another comparison we could perhaps have with today.
Speaker 2:But at the time of this batch of question, the gates for isn't a more differential age? There's much less of the way of media. The writing generally is more so. But even though there've been convulsions in the Labour Party, the writing of it is quite straight.
Speaker 2:With Smith death we're in the throes of the major administration and Smith dies just before the water's breaking the major administration. Really in a way they had in 92 with Black Wednesday, major wins an enormous majority or an enormous number of seats of votes. He wins in 1992 and a small majority in the Commons. But it's the fourth administration for the Conservatives, the fourth time they've been in power consecutively, three for that you won for major. But then everything falls apart major, some of the classical administrations where everything goes wrong, and as it does for Macmillan.
Speaker 2:So we've got this kind of end of era, the end of almost the end of Rome, the, the sense of entitlement and indulgence and so on, which is great for someone like Smith and indeed Smith was a lawyer, blair was a lawyer, very good Smith, especially at the dispatch box, very witty, taking down the government, mocking the government to connect again with the gates for era where we have private tie and tw three we now have. That was a week that mock the week. And have I got news for you which are laying into the major, major administration at every possibility and it may, just providing with all sorts of fodder for gossip columnists and for the kind of culture we have today with social media which is totally unregulated, and also now we have the fake news and we have people inventing things and we now Cut off of AI generated for sorts. Smith is still rooted in the period where there's veracity, where things are being Factually true, but there's almost a free-throught in terms of ridiculing the administration. He presents a figure of property, but also one who has a sense of humankind can mock and ridicule the government.
Speaker 2:So the parallels which I started with are also true in terms of how the public perceive these deaths. Smith's was unusual, I think, in the extent which people were genuinely shocked to move by it. It's almost one could exaggerate these things. It's a bit journalistic, but it does strike me as being One of the last very serious, cross-party, serious moments we had. You never really have it when there are moments like Joe Cox's murder or David Amos's murder, when a politician or death of a politician, in this case murder brings parties together and brings give some cause to reflect on the system. When both Gates and Smith died, but especially Smith because politics was a bit rougher than there was a Question mark afterwards. Should we be more civil in our discourse now? So this course now Smith has gone, but didn't last.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you hear that echo a lot. Can't we have a more civilized politics? Can't we stop the shouting to? Let's come back to the similarities and differences point and firstly digging to both Kind of on their own terms for a little bit, and then I think I'll set a bit of the groundwork for revisiting that point about what we think about them overall. So, starting with Gates girl, are there things in Gates girls personal background that you'd point to to be able to give us A sense of him as a man? What drove him, his values, his principles are the things you would point to.
Speaker 2:One of the central cash register of the rich. Labor party has many, and it's not ever really been a socialist party. Tony Bernal was, so it's a party with socialists in it, and and Ben himself wasn't a socialist too much of his time in the party became what later in life really it's often been led by, and of course labor's only ever had male leaders. So I'm saying men, because there's any of them men. This is a very awkward issue for the party.
Speaker 1:I suppose from like the likes of Harriet Harman, but then that's a stand-in leader, isn't it, margaret?
Speaker 2:Beckett immediately died, yes, and leaders, and because there were two candidates last time but the man prevailed, gates, who was a classic example. So they party is the party of working people. It is the obvious pick alarm of the treasure union movement from the first world war onwards. Working class leaders, like after him, kirsten was named, but more often than not, and the most prominent ones, like Clement at me, who went to Hayleybury, which was the public school which generally trained civil servants for India, and Gates got, who went to Winchester, which of course is the private school to the current prime minister, which is soon. I has had Antony Blair went to fetters, which is the Scottish heat, and it's more often than not been led by Middle-class white men rather than working class white men. Again, it's the ethnic diversity is not very prominent either in the party in the past, and so Gates Gill is the epitome of that type of intellectual. So you often say the labor and says the member. Labor always has, it, will have it in 2024 or 25, as it has in the past, appealing to voters in Hartley pool and Hampstead. Now you can pick any two places, you know, with the same letter. But I picked hamster because that's where Gates Gill was from and there's a certain cliche of a hamster intellectual. Hamster is a very affluent and leafy part of North London, leafier than Islington, but Islington socialist hamstered, socialist hamstered intellectuals. These are terms of affection or of derision, depending on your view, both from the left and from the right. So McMillan or Sunak or Johnson could ridicule Stammer or Blair or Gates who is being North London intellectuals, and they would also and this is getting all these kind of Very fluid the leveling up agenda we have at the moment, the the need to have a John Prescott for a Tony Blair, to have an Angie Rayner For a Kirstammer, to balance the middle-class southern posh boy with someone earth here with roots in working-class culture. So it's not a new thing at all and it's something that the parties always felt and Gates Gill had.
Speaker 2:This Gates was problem was that he had come to prominence in Contradistinction and actually in opposition to working-class forces in the party. In particular, an hour in Bevan Beva and not bevin, who was the, the Foreign Secretary, bevan of the health service and, and I bet them was hugely charismatic figure. He dies in 1960, instantly, and his their interviews, like Ian McLeod in 1970 or Tony Cross in 1977, where very major figures in parties die in office, but they weren't leaders of parties. Bevan could have been, but the party preferred Gateschill because most of the MPs as well or the most prominent figures that Newspaper supports as the editors. The proprietors tended to believe in a certain type of Labour leader, of which Clement Attlee was an example. Gateschill was another, blair was another, but Gateschill had this war with Bevan, the Bevanites and the Gateschillites throughout the 1950s.
Speaker 2:Generally speaking, when Labour loses elections it's when it's been in power and loses an election there's generally a civil war because, unlike the Conservative Party, labour is much more concerned with doctrinal truths, if not purity, where we fulfilling our responsibilities, whilst this government had betrayal. The word betrayal comes up regularly in Labour's history and much more it does with the Conservatives, for whom the acquiring and retention of power is the most important thing. So Labour loses in 51 and there's a civil war, and the civil war, as in 1970, a bit, but in 79, very much more. Was the government socialist? Did it betray its roots? Was it listening to its members or was it guided by the parliamentary party? The 1979 civil war is what Smith eventually comes at the end of.
Speaker 2:In Gateschill's case they, broadly speaking, settle things enough in 1959 to go to the country as a united front. You've got Barbara Castle who's a Bevanite, with Gateschill and Bevan and presenting this front to the country. But then they lose in 59. And the 59 losses a bit like the 92 loss. It's such a shock to the Labour Party that it does suggest there must be a radical reform of what the party is offering the voters. They use the term retail politics in the 60s but it needs to have a retail offer and he says something the public wants to buy basically, rather than something that the Conservatives can say this is a Labour policy, you don't want it, so vote Conservative. The way the Conservatives in the 60s especially tied the party into what voters wanted. Voters by and large didn't really believe in class struggle per se. They wanted a television set, they wanted a fridge, they wanted white goods, they wanted a more comfortable life.
Speaker 2:Essentially the argument would be that the Labour leaders are recognised as the ones who've been most successful electorally. So Gateschill prevails in this. But there's bad blood. Atley is a rather hands off leader for the last few years of his time as Labour leader. 20 years is Labour leader, 35 to 55. And he's quite old by the end. It is rather hands off from the Labour Party having a civil war and it's very nasty.
Speaker 2:And the Bevanites people like Michael Foote are against Gateschillites people like Roy Jenkins, and this can still be seen in part in the Labour government of 6470. And indeed, when we go into 1971, and we have the big debates about entering the European economic community, the common market, there's a split in voting in October 1971 about going in on Heath's terms, which is exactly the fissure that 10 years later produces the SDP. So of course this is where we do history. It's nice to trace these things. There is a very clear thread from the Gateschill Bevanites wars of the 1950s through to the fissures in the Wilson governments and then the split of the SDP in 1981. And the view of I mean actually any Labour person could say this the only beneficiary of all of these problems are the Conservatives and that's why they tend to be in power more often than Labour. So that's a distinct Gateschill issue.
Speaker 2:His background is as an Oxbridge public school, an all-thunder intellectual. The one thing that sets them apart from that kind of photo fit, if you like, of leading Labour figures put it that way of which Roy Jenkins was part is his Euroscepticism. It wasn't called that at the time, but he's very anti joining the European common market. But otherwise he's very much a kind of very modern, forward looking metropolitan figure and to that extent not really representative of the party and the movement as a whole. But then of course neither had actually been.
Speaker 2:The last part I make because I've gone on for a long time is this is coming back to me. I love the fact that if you know, you can just Google these things there's only one Gateschill. Nobody else in British public life has ever been called Gateschill. So if you just type Gateschill, it's always him that comes up, whereas, by contrast, john Smith is every man, it's the every man named John Smith, it's the term you always use. So that's one contrast they have. And similarly, gateschill dies of a really weird disease, which I have to read out because I don't have to, I can't remember it. It was called systemic lupus erythematosus. It was such a bizarre disease that people wandered for years after whether they were being poisoned by the KGB. So the very singular name had a very singular end. Whereas John Smith, every man died of the very common ending of life a hashtag.
Speaker 1:I was particularly interested in the point you made about the press and have them having a particular idea of what a Labour leader should look like, and I wonder if you could go into a bit more of that. Is that something about a certain middle class snobbery, that there's more comfort with a certain type of leader with a certain type of background, particularly a Labour leader?
Speaker 2:I think so. I mean, I think so. This isn't about scientific talk I mean, we're not doing this with the chat rather than something I'm publishing but I remember my mum always saying, from a working class, labour background, labour fact, daily Mirror reading Household is on she wanted the Prime Minister of the Labour leader to I can't remember the words she used, but something like to be better than me, to present themselves as being someone that was you expect to be leader, to sound like a leader, to look like a leader, to be authoritative in some way, to have that element of and as part of that there's almost a genuine flexion to the type of person that should be leading a party or leading the country. It's also not right or wrong to say I think that's a view. That was. I think she was expressing a broader view than that, which is quite hard to test or to measure. But I think there's something to that and it's probably related to the idea of I'm sinking aloud here but of what an officer looks like, what leadership is meant to constitute in our very class based system, culturally as well as in terms of wealth and opportunity and so on, and also there's an empty self confidence that comes from it. I mean, you know, I've had this. I've been in universities now as a student in this academic for 30 years or so. It's very striking, anecdotally, just how much confidence and articulacy that certain education can confer confidence, especially and this is something which I could suggest through all sorts of sources and biographies and memoirs and interviews that I've read about people discussing this in terms of politics and public life and it was in the Conservative Party too the challenges that someone like Heath or Satcha had Satcha had being a woman as well, but Heath coming from a fairly working class background in a party which was not remotely working class in terms of his parliamentary constitution or its members, is true there too, so that's part of it.
Speaker 2:But I think also that on the other side there's a sense of this is what the Conservatives fear. So the Conservatives feared Gateskill, and they feared more than Smith. They feared Blair. There was a guy called John Maples who wrote when Blair became leader of the party in 94, what was known as the Maples memorandum, and he basically said if this is as good as he appears, we're in trouble, because the point that Blair and Gateskill would make, and Smith too, is that Labour only wins when it wins votes from the centre and it only wins when it doesn't frighten electors. And part of that is to have a leader who does not frighten electors and who fits the profile of someone they could imagine as being leader, which Attlee did, which Blair did.
Speaker 2:What makes Smith different we may come onto this, and this is a big thing for me as well, I think is as a Scott and what Smith represents in terms of what we then had as a kind of a national polity and after 98, we have the fracturing of the UK into its constituent parts, with different parliaments and so on. That's what changed enormously. That's what Gateskill does fit, that kind of that notion of what a leader should look and sound like, and for that reason the Conservatives fear him more than they feared Bevan, who they would have regarded as someone who would have been charismatic but also potentially prone to outbursts. So I think there's an argument for saying and I think this is borne out electorally that Labour is most successful when it has a leader who does not frighten the horses.
Speaker 2:And that is the case with someone like Gateskill and someone like, for that matter, smith, who was decried by many as being like a bank manager, looking like a bank manager, sounding like a bank manager. But that's what voters want with Labour politicians. They do not want someone who appears to be wishing to like it or not, someone who's threatening to redraft the society, redraft the constitution, rebalance the economy. Radicalism doesn't really, I'm afraid for the Labour Party, bear fruit electorally. It does better when it can not appear to be too much of a leap from what voters tend to think of as being a leader or politician, and that's not merely my making an assertion. It's based on Labour's electoral success. When it does well, it's with that type of leader.
Speaker 1:This is my last question about Gateskill. So lots of people, or some people, I should say, draw a line from Gateskill to Blair and suggest a connection to them. I think even some people in new Labour have drawn that connection. To what extent do you draw a connection between Gateskill and Blair?
Speaker 2:I wonder what connection per se, other than looking at it in terms of the history more broadly. So it's not explicit at all between Gates Good and Blair, probably more so with Smith and Gates, because Smith would have been a Gates like Smith went to see Gates Good speak. Smith has the view that in his best momentary point is that Labour is generally better led from the centre right of the party electorately than from the left or the centre left of the party. So there's no connection there. And of course, in so far as Gates Good lost his first election. Gates Good fought as leader of 59. He lost. So that isn't very Blair. Blair is defined by success In Peter Manglison's brilliant framing. If I can remember correctly, labour's electoral history since 1974 was lose, lose, lose, lose, blair, blair, blair, lose, lose, lose, lose. So that's personalising to a great extent. But it is actually true that whether you take a party within an election is a personal mandate. Of course there's other matter. So Blair would say there's not much there electorately because I guess wasn't that successful. So it's not in that sense much in the way of threats connecting Gates Good and Blair, other than that their backgrounds are remarkably similar, as that's perhaps exaggerating it. But they are of a similar age with a very similar social background, very similar education, similar output politically, apart from on Europe. But Gates Good has been an actor in the Civil War of the 1950s through which the parties come never does it, but it's come through it, whereas Smith wasn't really part of the SDP wars in the 80s but he was a pretty clean pair of hands in that sense he wasn't really thought, although he was thought, on the right of the party. It's not like Tony. Ben raised Smith very highly, even George Galloway did. I was told me this because even though Smith was on the right of the party, he was straight about it. Their view always was Ben in particular. He never trusted a leader who played left and then went right, like Harold Wilson, like Neil Kinock. It's quite cold in the States where you have people in the primaries and caucuses pleasing their base and then turning to the right of their Democrats, watch the left of their Republicans when they're the candidate. But the view of Smith is that, and also Gates Good for that matter, is you know where they're coming from. They are straight, centre, right or even right wing Labour politicians there's no mucking about. There's none of the sub-diffusion. Tony Crossland's got this great line. Crossland, of course, dies in 1977 as far as secretary.
Speaker 2:One of these characters was Gates Good. He said you never knew if you could believe a word Harold Wilson was saying to you even as he was speaking to you. Wilson was regarded as extremely slippery in all sorts of ways and lacking in foundations. I'll end this point by saying that one thing that Gates Good had, which they argued he didn't have and Wilson certainly didn't have, was a very clear sense of moral purpose. Both Smith and Gates Good could be thought of as having clear set of values and principles and policies they believed in which they maintained, and in Gates Good's case it produced a civil war or helped access a civil war and arguments and so on. With Smith it was a very clear sense that we've come through these 1980s troubles and now we are going to be a socio-democratic party.
Speaker 2:Wilson and Blair. This is one reason why Gates Good and Smith's followers both decried that. They obviously were sad their person died, but they also deplored what came afterwards, wilson in particular, because they thought Wilson and Blair lacked principle, that they were slippery and they were good on television. And Wilson we have devaluation and Labour leaders, the Senate election, blair will be going to invade Iraq and what the Blair and Wilson governments did was demonstrate what you have with leaders without principle that Gates Good would not have devalued or been forced into devaluation in 1967, and Smith would certainly not have invaded Iraq. And that's part of the issue of legacy and what the person meant after their death. But it's only something really which people like us are that exercised about.
Speaker 1:So let's turn to Smith then. So we've touched on him, but let's go into a bit more detail on Smith before turning to the kind of bigger questions about connecting the two and what does it all mean? You've mentioned a little bit about his background, but could you give us a bit more information about what was his background in terms of the salient elements that affected his politics and his positions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I should also again like all about autobiographically. I was explained why I'm doing this is that I was doing my PhD at Glasgow when he died, and so it was partly me thinking about this at the time and also being very annoyed that when Blair was elected it was no, rather when Wilson died it was 95. When Wilson died, howard Wilson and Blair had been leading the Partlade Party for one year and most of the courage of Wilson's death not most, but lots of it was about was Wilson. Was Blair the new Wilson? Rather than discussing Wilson as a historic figure, it was dragging it into the contemporary realm, which does happen.
Speaker 1:But I was almost unavoidable. There's a podcast I like called the Rest of his History, and they talk about it so often what people will think they're talking historically, objectively and actually they are projecting the current preoccupations right onto the past.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I'm sure that's right. I think it's better to be honest about it. But I think it's also important just to be able to assess the one without the other but then do both by all means. But I was annoyed that how much coverage there was of Wilson's death was being hijacked by Blair, and it would have been had he died two years earlier when it was Smith's leader. But so I was at Glasgow when he died and Smith had been a Glasgow lawyer, a Glasgow University lawyer he'd been. He won the Observer Mace in 62 year before Getsville dies. The Observer Mace is the great debating prize that universities used to compete for.
Speaker 2:Whatever this will do, and he was at the GUU, the Glasgow University Union, which was a, you know sorry, which I'm not from Scotland myself, but I was very, became very much attached to Scotland, to Glasgow, from my time there and how much of Labour's successful, significant parliamentarians and figures came from Scotland historically. Ramses MacDonald another great betrayal. But in the 1670s, 80s, so many important people and in Blair's government too, I mean Blair himself was born and raised in Scotland, although you can tell about. You have people like John Reed, you have George Robinson, you have Donald Dewar, robin Cook, really big characters who came from this very and most of them came from the Glasgow University debating society, very smart. So I was at Glasgow when he died so it seemed to be hit home more. He was from the Highlands rather than from the West Coast but he was buried in the Highlands and he became a lawyer from Glasgow and he went West and became an Edinburgh lawyer, very smart, very profitable, but had like Gatesville.
Speaker 2:This is an important point about Gatesville and Acle. It's not so discernible in Blair. That's not meant to be a dig at Blair but I don't get a sense from Blair's interviews and writings that he felt this. But at least, for example, tawny's sense of purpose should have been a Conservative in his background, his trade, education so on. But he was converted by his experience of poverty in eastern London between the wars.
Speaker 2:And Gates and Smith's too could easily because Smith's case not a conservative but could have been a liberal quite easily. Gates could easily have been a conservative given his background. But they were exercised by inequality and by the moral purpose of the Labour movement. I don't get a sense of Blair being animation in quite the same way by the moral agency of the Labour movement, in quite the way the Gates and Smiths were, but they were, and so Smith becomes all those could become a very profitable lawyer and just do that. He's also an MP elected in 1970 for Monkland's East, or becomes Monkland's East then after Labour loses the election in 1970, but it went back in power in February 1974 and he's made a junior minister and he rises up pretty effortlessly because he's very smart and very capable and what again?
Speaker 2:Another these things will keep coming out. Another parallel with Gateskill is that although Gateskill is a bit further ahead than Smith in terms of the party and government, attlee appoints Gateskill Chancellor, partly to get Gateskill the leadership when Attlee retired. So Gateskill is Attlee's preferred, not not explicitly, but he's obviously the person Attlee would prefer to be leader rather than Bevin. John Smith is appointed to the Cabinet in the last six months of the Callaghan administration in 1978 and Callaghan makes it clear and I've written on Labour leaders in the 80s and this is his view of motion David Owen to Foreign Secretary after Tony Crossden died unexpectedly, and John Smith to be energy secretary in the Cabinet. He wants these two to be the leader of the Labour Party in the future.
Speaker 1:One of the big accusations against Smith that you hear from, particularly from the likes of Tony Blair, is that he had this one more heave approach to Labour winning the election that Tony Blair and some of his sort of followers would say it wasn't enough just to carry on in the same ilk, that you needed to modernize the, as he would describe it, modernize the party one step even further than it had been under Kinneck and Smith. So I suppose to what extent do you think that is an interesting kind of accusation to think about and to what extent do you think that they were actually on a path to winning the election anyway? So that kind of maybe takes away from the point of actually you needed to do something radically different to win it. Was it going in that direction anyway? Or is there something to this point that actually there wasn't enough of a desire to really shift the party one more step to, to take it into the direction that you've suggested, that Labour tends to win on, which is in the centre ground?
Speaker 2:It's certainly worth discussing. It's certainly interesting, not necessarily because it can be demonstrated one way or the other, but because of what it reveals about people and the idea one more heave is to suggest great complacency that eventually it's almost this notion of what used to be called the pendulum effect in politics that got parties switched in power one to the other eventually, and that historically we may find out whether this is true next election. No government's been elected five times, or no party's been elected five times in succession. So there was an expectation that eventually the party will, and the Conservatives had lost their principal selling point, which of course is economic competence, through Black Wednesday 1992. And there is an argument saying that, yes, it's very likely Labour would have won, simply because and this is another one of these huge b-shows of politics, but this has made up heard of it is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them, and so once the government has demonstrated itself unfit for office through whatever the scandals may be, it will therefore fall to Labour if Labour does not present the population of the electorate with this terrifying or incompetent alternative. So keep it straight back, no risks and power may follow. Now that may have happened because we won't know.
Speaker 2:I suspect had Labour done nothing more in terms of reforming itself from 1992, that it would also have won in 1997. But the objection I would have, and certainly Smith's family or supporters would have, is that the one more heave thing and the way Smith has been portrayed, I think in parts to big up the Blair rights and what Blair project is to underestimate the extent to which he was changing the party. So I'm speculating, but I think, had Smith just done nothing at all and that the Conservatives screw things up? He did one in 1997 with the smallest majority, but I'm Blair to cover and one in the most majority. What they generally mean is and this is where we come up to Gates because Gates wanted to do this. He wanted to abandon clause four of the Labour Party Constitution.
Speaker 2:So the other party has never been a socialist party. It has tenets of what it's believed in, which can be and constitution. It's the Torres don't have. It's got. It's got books about what you should be doing, whether Torres don't have. They're much more malleable, much more nimble than Labour has been. And so one of the things that Labour has this tabernacle is clause four, as was, which in itself is also quite vague but it sounds quite portentous and quite serious. I'm trying to remember it now. The workers for secure, by hand or by brains, the full fruit of the labour and the something or thereof. And essentially it means that workers will have the fruit of the labour. What does that mean? Some do that as meaning that means nationalisation that the state owns or the people own, rail or the Bank of England or coal, that's the workers having their full fruits of the labour that they serve in public ownership of these commodities.
Speaker 2:But it doesn't say that it's not interpretation but, nevertheless, it's something which the Conservatives could use to beat Labour with once nationalisation became a dirty word in 1970s. Like it or not, that was the case, and so Gates wanted to get rid of it because he thought it was too restrictive. But he knew it was a fight he couldn't really win, so he didn't attempt to win it. It was the first thing that Blair did was scrap clause four. It was a statement of intent, and he did so while keeping the parties together, because the party wants to win power, and so people who are unhappy with the direction of travel are keeping quiet for the sake of the great good. Smith did not want to go through with scrapping clause four part because he thought it wasn't really binding in any way. But I think the one thing that Blair writes could say that Smith didn't do that. They did that they would regard as radical and he didn't. But that's true.
Speaker 2:But I think they're exaggerating its importance. They're also overlooking, unless they're prepared to admit it, the fact that Smith had brought in something like OMOV one member, one vote which was an enormously important reform for the party and one reason we had Jeremy Corbyn years later. So Smith was, I think, much more radical than was given credit for, because he didn't look radical and because he looked quite conventional and because he wasn't prepared to go as far as Blair was prepared to go in terms of limiting the role of trade unions In a way. Why should he? Blair has a different politics to Smith. In many respects Blair is an outlier in terms of Labour Party thinking and practice, but he was so actually successful that it was overlooked by some but not by everybody, where Smith was much more firmly in the labour tradition and much more conventional. And I think the desire to be almost the punk, desire to have this division, this separation this year zero notion means that they're exaggerating the conservatism of the Smith period.
Speaker 2:And I have actually asked this because there's no answer to the question is one of these counterfactuals.
Speaker 2:I've asked this question of Peter Mandelson and Charles Clark. Both Clark had been Kinect number two throughout the 1980s and they both told me and I thought was absolutely astonishing with great confidence that Smith would not have won in 1997. Now, none of us know, but I think it is totally ludicrous to think that they would not have won in 97 with John Smith as leader. Nothing like his larger majority certainly, but certainly a workable majority, and that's why I think he, as we've got a good chance of being leader and I think that one more heave is a stick to beat and to thereby also to inflate and fluff what came after.
Speaker 1:So that talks about a criticism of Smith from New Labour, but then there's also a critique from parts of the left of Smith and Gateskill, some dubiousness and uncertainty about them as figures. And there's that adage about the right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors, and I was asking to what extent is that an interesting adage to use to think about how I suppose the left look at Gateskill and Smith as figures? Yes, it is very interesting.
Speaker 2:But the enormous caveat we shouldn't really need saying, but I'm saying it is one has to be aware of context and circumstances and the changes. It's so easy often in journalism, because the number of words are so few and the deadline is immediate, to oversimplify things and to say that things are similar because they are the same, because they're similar. We mentioned already about the differences in Britain between 1963 and 1994. Similarly, the role that Smith and Gates have in the party is very different. Gateskill is a very divisive figure, smith isn't. Gateskill puts people's backs up in a way that Smith doesn't. Gateskill is quite impetuous in a way that Smith isn't. He has Peccadillo's that Smith has different peccadillos. So one of the things that interests me very much is whether they could have done the same, whether they could have been successful today. For instance, gates School's private life was colorful, should we say.
Speaker 2:Smith liked to drink, which isn't meant to be euphorism for being drunk, but it really interesting comes Hugo Young's papers which are in the Guardian archives. Young goes to see what his politicians regularly. He's a journalist and he goes to meet some of the writes up their interviews afterwards informally and it's remarkable really, not that I object to talk because I like to drink as well, but it compared to politicians today who are almost all so, but all the time that Smith would regularly not back several large whiskers in this course of conversation in the afternoon in his office and in his comments. And people will have parents or grandfathers who regularly had a drinks cabinet in their office, so that the culture of politics and public life is so different then compared to 30 years later, and so I wonder whether this kind of thing would have been tolerable. Jack Straw has made this point actually about Smith and his drinking to try and suggest that he would not have been a viable leader in a more modern era.
Speaker 2:But the reason why the differences exist in all sorts of ways, as I mentioned, but differences are different periods for the party and what that person meant in the party. Smith comes in after Labour has lost three general elections and the last one really for Labour Party heartbreakingly so 1992, expecting to win Gateschool's, only lost one. He's been as leader for longer than Smith has, but he's come after Labour's been out of office for not quite so long but having had an equally kind of torturous civil war of which he was part. He was a protagonist. Smith wasn't really a protagonist in the 1980s civil wars. He was in Scotland very often. He wasn't involved in these battles. He's a clean pair of hands in a sense, although blairs are cleaner, of course. Gateschool was replaced by Wilson, who was a Bevernite. So the Gateschool-like Bevernite wars rumble on a bit through the 1960s, but again discipline imposes itself because of the each-winner election.
Speaker 1:What was the view of, from the left, of a figure like John Smith and I get it. It depends on which part of the left but I suppose I'm thinking of, if you were in, of the Bevernite persuasion of politics was there a strong view on John Smith? Was it the fact that, like you say, he hadn't actually been involved in enough of sort of political strife that there wasn't really a strong view of him?
Speaker 2:Gateschool could be quite a difficult person to deal with and that could put people so.
Speaker 2:That could put people maybe a bit and that a technician towards him that could make it difficult for him to be to get things through.
Speaker 2:Smith, by contrast, was extremely pluggable and personable. I've got lots of quotes and things from diaries and from interviews of people of the left who would say that Smith would always talk to them in a way that Gateschool wouldn't and Kinnock wouldn't, livingston and Ken Livingston, george Galloway, tony Ben people on the far left of the parliamentary Labour Party having got a bad word to say about John Smith either at the time or subsequently Quite. Unlike the view of Kinnock, who had been someone who had been of the soft left and then went right and then tried to smash them, smith has this and this is one of the things that makes his death a tragedy for many of his friends and supporters was he had a manner and an ease and a wit. I've got the conservative, frank Ant Cranbourne saying he's a real wit, a genuinely funny person, and that can go an awful long way in politics being able to not antagonise your opponent, to be able to.
Speaker 1:And diffuse, I suppose, difficult political situations.
Speaker 2:To diffuse things absolutely, whereas Gateschool could be quite highly strung and quite impetuous and Smith didn't have those qualities. So against the background of the differences in the party in the country between 63 and 94, you have the personal chemistry with the individual, which I think is enormously important, and how the public sees them is even more important. How the public sees them is more important. But to have Smith succeeding Kinnock and having the attributes that Kinnock was felt not to have, such as gravitas and weight and economic competence and so on, was quite significant, whereas in many ways Gateschool is quite like the athlete who he succeeds, athlete. Well, I mean in many ways. That is an outlier because athlete is not particularly clubbable and not especially concerned with these sorts of things. He's very brisk and brusque, and matter of fact. But there's a great again. It's that context.
Speaker 2:The context of 1945 is different from the context of the 60s or the 90s. You have this moment in time after the war where the public wants to change which Labour offers, not that athlete per se offers. Athlete wins an election that Churchill loses because they're not voting, the public, for a leader, a great man, in a voted commas, they're voting for a program and what the party can do to transform the country, and that's what Labour offers in 45. Whereas in the retail politics of the later period it's much more about the individual, and even more so now will we have. The public has the means if they want to know a great deal about the politician and to hear the politician, to see the politician, to see them have their photograph in their breakfast or to see their families and so on.
Speaker 2:For that extent I think Smith would have struggled in the modern era, as would Gates call it, because Smith wasn't a great phrase maker, he wasn't very for some other reason, when the Blairites didn't like him not didn't like him, but they, I think they do disparage him. So Peter Mandleton had become a very important figure in the Labour Party in the 1980s as media guru and then becomes an MP, and the first thing that Smith does virtually is to push Mandleton out from being an advisor. He does not like sound bites, he does not like the slickness of the marketing of politics as it become in the 1980s.
Speaker 2:He was against that kind of thing, whereas Blair comes in and is brilliantly brilliant media and Mandleton's back in the tent and they're concerned with dominating the media agenda. Smith would have found that difficult and dissertationful, and that's why I think that's another one of the reasons why they're keen to establish distance between what Smith offered and what the Labour promised.
Speaker 1:So, to finish off, then, what would you point to as their legacies of Gates' girl and Smith?
Speaker 2:I think there are two big points and there are subdivisions, but the two big points really about the specific and the general and the specific art, these two individuals and their circumstances and what that meant. The bigger issue, which I take this to be an illustration or we're thinking about, is about politics, politicians and society, about communication, about representation, about memorialization and legacy. You can extend those kind of themes into all sorts of areas of where we are in Britain in 2023. I'm very much keen on going into the minutiae of this specific, certainly, but they do relate to these bigger issues, as I think historical research ideally should do. It should have its particular and then the wider implications of that.
Speaker 2:In terms of the particular, I find it normally compelling the notion of the life lost, of the administration lost, but also of the wrong turns thereafter taken. Of course, there would have been wrong turns had Smith and Gates, who lived. Of course, had Smith survived his second heart attack, he couldn't have stood as Prime Minister. There's no chance he could have had two heart attacks and then been part of it. So he wouldn't have been Prime Minister had he survived his heart attack. But had he not had the heart attack and one office, he would have inherited the economic crisis of Black Wednesday, as the major government did, and it could have been another Labour administration, as in 47, as in 67, as in 31, suffering a massive economic crisis and being out of office after one. And then we're discussing Smith, the failed Labour leader. Similarly, gates School might have sneaked in, had devaluation crisis and then the closed back, so one could end up getting tangled up in counterfactuals. But at just one remove we have these people who were one election away from probably becoming Prime Minister, and then the fact that the people that succeeded them did in many ways, things they wouldn't have done.
Speaker 2:And in some extent I mean, I come from Battery Rock for many people this is the landmark of the last 100 years British history in terms of misgovernment, and that happened through a really big thing which connects my two broad themes here, the specific and the general, the role of contingency and circumstance and accident in history, and that things can almost a sliding doors moment, to use a more modern mean and that the fact that these two just happened to die from one really weird disease and from a heart attack meant that history was different. And of course there are all sorts of ways in which things can happen elections, some are not standing or someone choosing to retire. It's full of contingency, full of circumstances, but these happen to be the two that I fixed on the desk of these two people and what that meant to the party thereafter. And in the bigger, broader themes there's the way in which politics and politicians as a profession have been absolutely reduced over a long period of time, but particularly so in the last, in the last when Iraq was hugely damaging to that reputation of politicians being competent. So it's very hard and what public tends to think is not so much that the conservatives are corrupt and awful and all labors that they were all corrupt and awful. So there's that the lumping people. And yet voting turned out to stay pretty much where it was in Gatesfield and Smith's days. The big difference is in the last section of Gatesfield, 1459, 93% of voters voted conservative or Labour.
Speaker 2:It's inconceivable to think of that, anything like that, happening now we have four party politics in some parts of the UK rather than two party politics, so the fracturing of what was in Gatesfield. Even then there's still great change. None of these things ever start. They accelerate changes, but a much more homogenous country, a much more homogenous society. No revolution, Westminster ruling, the whole of the UK. Uk is not in Europe.
Speaker 2:All change in all sorts of ways, so contingency and chance are hugely important, as is the notion of commemoration and legacy, and how short memories are, of course, and how reputations and legacies can be twisted, not necessarily malevolently, but often by accident. People don't quite remember these things. The caravan moves on. The news cycle now is so much faster and so much more intense than it even was in Smith's day with social media, and so I suppose the very last point to make, as a speculative one, is if this would happen today, if one of the leaders would suddenly drop down dead, would there be even as much commemoration as there has been a Smith and Gates school? Or would the tumult, the constant changing and the need for content of news media, social media, the distractions everyone feels and the reputation of politicians means that it's unlikely or less likely that they would have quite the same resonance if they were to die in 2023 than when they did in 1963, 1994.
Speaker 1:I think that's an interesting question to sign off on. Thanks so much, martin, for joining us on this one. I've really enjoyed it, my pleasure. Thank you very much, harry.
