In short, the future, perhaps the very existence, of the Labour Party was at stake in the years following the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. The new Social Democrats had written it off, and aimed to replace it by an alliance, eventually a merger between themselves and the Liberals. I remember the occasion – a dinner in the house of Amartya Sen and his wife Eva Colorni – to which one of their Kentish Town neighbours came late, with apologies. Bill Rogers had just been meeting with the rest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ (Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, all eventually in the House of Lords) to draft the declaration establishing what became, a few weeks later, the Social Democratic Party. It was joined by a substantial number of the Labour middle and professional classes, some of whom were to return to the party when it stopped pursuing its visibly suicidal course. On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s’.3 The question was, could the Labour Party be saved?
In the end it was saved, but only just, at the Labour Conference in 1981, when Tony Benn stood for the deputy leadership of the party and was defeated in a photo-finish by Denis Healey. The future of the party was not certain until after the disastrous election of 1983, when Michael Foot, who had been elected leader in 1980 (as the candidate of the left, also against Healey), was succeeded by Neil Kinnock. On the eve of his election I spoke at a fringe meeting on that occasion, organized either by the Fabian Society or by Marxism Today. Kinnock himself made a point of being there, and signing a copy of my book ‘with warm thanks’, so, if I recall, were David Blunkett and Robin Cook, then also on the non-Bennite Labour left, at the time I write pillars of the Labour government since 1997. Whatever his limitations, Neil Kinnock, whose candidature I had strongly supported, was the leader who saved the Labour Party from the sectarians. After 1985, when he secured the expulsion of the Trotskyite ‘Militant Tendency’ from the party, its future was safe.
This was the only occasion on which I actually met Neil Kinnock, apart from the time when I interviewed him for Marxism Today a little later, returning rather depressed about his potential as a future prime minister. Hence the absurdity of the habit of some political journalists for the next year or two of linking my name with his (‘Kinnock’s guru’). Nevertheless, there was a sound political reason why the name of a Marxist intellectual who was not even in the Labour Party should, at a few moments of the battle for the survival of that party, have been useful for those who wanted to save it. I had been among the very few who predicted serious trouble for Labour, which gave me some standing in the controversy. I was among the few known socialist intellectuals who were openly sceptical of the project of taking over the party and argued against its proponents with passion and (I hope) some effectiveness.7 But in those difficult times it was particularly useful for the opponents of the sectarians to be able to cite support from someone known to most activists in the party – at least to those who read books and periodicals – and with a long and incontrovertible track record on the far left as a Marxist. For in 1980 and 1981 constitutional changes had given the sectarian leftists what looked like a built-in majority within the party and thus virtually handed its fortunes over to them. The future of the party depended essentially on detaching enough activists of the Labour left from the sectarians to offset this, at least at crucial moments.
The case for doing so had to be made from the left, all the more so since until 1983 the chief alternative candidate for the Labour leadership was Denis Healey, formerly Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who represented everything the left disliked, who did not try to conceal his contempt for most of them, and who had established a justified reputation as a political bully-boy. The Labour Party under Tony Blair has moved so far to the right of its traditional position that there is probably less ideological difference between Healey and myself when we meet today, old men looking back on a better past, than there has been since we first met in the student CP, but by the standards of the 1970s he was the man of the Labour right. In private life he was and is a person of charm, high intelligence and culture, underneath the battlements of his trademark eyebrows, and the author of one of the few British politicians’ memoirs that can be read with enjoyment as a book. However, the public Healey was easier to respect than to love. He would certainly have made a far better political leader than any of the other candidates, although the sectarians would have done their best to destroy him. The situation at the time was such that probably only a leader with left-wing credentials could have got the party out of its crisis.
Michael Foot, who beat him, was not constructed to be a party leader or potential prime minister, and should not have been elected to the leadership. He was and is a marvellous man. For years he and I used to meet at the Hampstead bus stop from which we travelled together, I to the university, he to the House of Commons or the office of the journal Tribune, an increasingly stooped, casually dressed old man with a limp and a fine profile, shaking his white head of hair with passion. Walking – he belonged to the generation of the great hiking British intellectuals – and public transport were his forms of locomotion. Since he became a government minister only briefly in the 1970s, the official car was not part of his ego.
He was and is a Labour politician who attracts genuine love, as well as admiration for patent moral integrity and for his considerable talents and literary culture. He had eloquence of the kind that belonged to the era of mass meetings and great House of Commons occasions, before the days of the small TV screen: the oratory of the flashing eye, the gesture, the elocution reaching to the last row. He was a highly professional journalist of great rhetorical power, superb at denouncing injustice and reaction. He was a voracious reader and easy writer of some style, never tired of singing the praises of those he admired most, Jonathan Swift and William Hazlitt. Perhaps his capacity for enthusiasm, or his unwillingness to hurt, made him too uncritical. His life of Aneurin Bevan, the great leader of the Labour left, whose parliamentary seat in the South Wales valleys he inherited and in due course passed on to Neil Kinnock, was too hagiographical, his numerous book reviews, including those of my own books, not critical enough. I cannot think of anyone who actually disliked him.
He seemed, even to his contemporaries and colleagues, to belong to an older, almost a pre-1914 generation, the first from the old dissenting provincial middle class to abandon their traditional loyalty to the Liberal Party for the cause of the workers. He was not built for authority but for opposition, a ‘tribune of the people’ who defended it against the presumption of its rulers. For almost all his career in the Labour Party he was the spokesman of the left against the leadership, although they could always rely on his utter loyalty to the movement – notably in 1964, when the left had Harold Wilson’s first Labour government with a tiny majority of three at its mercy. He was not an organization man. He lacked the unfortunately useful gifts of intrigue and horse-trading that give the term ‘politician’ a bad name, and the sense of egoism and personal ambition that drives so many of the most formidable of them. The three years of his leadership were a disaster.