Q & A with Donald Macintyre
The former political editor of the Independent recounts covering the 1993 Labour Party conference and how the party under Smith compares with today.
As political editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, then through his twice-weekly column, Donald Macintyre covered the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and Tony Blair. IFTC caught up with him to discuss Smith’s legacy, Prescott’s knockout speech, and how social media has changed British politics.
You covered the 1993 conference and John Smith’s drive to secure one member, one vote (OMOV) for candidate selection. What motivated the change and how important was candidate selection reform at that time?
The modernisers’ complaints about Smith, the Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson narrative—and to some extent Blair himself—both at the time and even more so retrospectively, were that Smith came very reluctantly to modernising. Some of the factual element of their critique is right, but I think their interpretation is wrong in certain aspects.
I met Blair on one occasion in the run-up to the conference and I can remember his attitude was "we've got to get this through. It's very important to have OMOV. We probably will get it through at conference, but we are worried that not enough will change and it won't be as full-hearted and total as we want." Blair was very downbeat about what was going on.
The factual element is Smith had a different attitude. He wasn't hugely interested in the media approach to politics. My guess is that he was less drawn to the idea that you had to keep changing the party, but he came to see that OMOV was an important test of his authority and that it was better to get it through than not get it through.
The critical question was would the constituency section of the party decision-making process be done by activists or by party members?
I think Smith's attitude to that was, “if you hold a gun to my head, of course, it's more democratic to have the members doing it than leaving it in the hands of party activists, and it might make life a bit easier for me if they do.” He didn't have quite the messianic view of it that Blair had.
But what Smith did was more epic than Blair allowed for in advance, and people like Philip Gould did in retrospect, for two reasons.
It was right to push for OMOV. It was a really big change with symbolic and real aspects and is often underestimated in retrospect. The union and constituency activist influence had been this huge stick that the Tories used to beat the Labour Party with, "you're all in lock-step to the unions" and so on.
Secondly, Smith put his leadership on the line over it. I had a conversation with John Prescott after the 1993 conference. He went through what that process had been like in the run-up to the conference. Smith basically said, “I'll have to go if I don't get this through.” Prescott, whatever his own thoughts on OMOV, had a deep sense of Labour Party history. He replied, "but not even Hugh Gaitskell did that over Clause Four or nuclear disarmament." Prescott depicted himself as appalled to believe that Smith would take this risk.
Smith took an amazing risk over this. And I think that's where the “he wasn't a true modernizer" [crowd] misses the point. In the process of levelling the playing field for Blair, I think it's easy to underestimate Smith's role, even if he came to it a little slowly.
You could subsequently say that OMOV hasn't had a great history [in leadership selection]. Ironically both under Blair and under Jeremy Corbyn, it's tended to be almost a lever of the leadership. Personally, I wouldn't give party members the absolute right—as it subsequently became—to elect the party leader in the Labour Party any more than I would in the Conservative party, where we’re seeing a car crash of monumental proportions unfolding at the moment. Liz Truss did not have a majority of MPs supporting her.
I'm a very old-fashioned believer in MPs being allowed to decide their leader. We would have had Ken Clarke in the Tory party leadership if that had been the case.
Apparently, Murray Elder, John Smith’s chief of staff, was the one that suggested Prescott deliver the final appeal to the unions to back OMOV. Why was he the logical choice for the speech instead of Deputy Leader Margaret Beckett or even Gordon Brown?
That's a really good question. Prescott was ideal for the job in ways that the other two would not have been.
Brown was already heavily associated with a particular view of the direction of the party. One forgets this in the recent mythmaking that portrays Brown as the socialist and Blair as the closet Tory. The truth is, certainly at that time, their views were indistinguishable. He would've been unsuitable for the job because a lot of people, particularly in the union delegations but probably also in parts of the constituencies, would've associated him with a particular view. He was a "moderniser".
Beckett is a really interesting figure, but I just don't think she would have the power that Prescott had. It was only a little more than a decade earlier that Beckett had been on the left of the Tribune group and had turned on Kinnock at the famous 1981 Tribune rally and denounced him and Joan Lester for not voting for Tony Benn in the deputy leadership.
Beckett changed a lot. She became under Blair this headmistress-esque safe pair of hands, constantly on the Today program stating the leaders' message in a very impressive way. But at that point, I could see that Smith might not wholly trust her to do the job. She had come from a relatively far left position. she was the Rebecca Long-Bailey of her day in the seventies and eighties. I don't know how wholehearted she would've been about OMOV at that point.
Prescott also probably had doubts about it, but the moment where he says "this man has put his head on the block." That's his point. Smith is the Labour leader and they are going to deliver for him. Plus, he carried a lot of clout with people who were not on the natural right of the Labour Party.
Prescott was pretty devastated by something Matthew Parris had written about the speech, how he scrambled his sentences and so on. He was pretty upset by that. It was a performance. I'm sure it reads weirdly. If you were writing a great speeches anthology, it wouldn't work in print, but it was quite something at the time.
Something striking about the media coverage in the run-up to the conference and around the vote itself was the lack of backbiting from backbench MPs. Union leaders snipe at Smith, particularly John Edmonds from the GMB, but there is much less hostility from opponents within the party. Thinking about what goes on today and how MPs on both sides are quick to give hostile briefings to the media against party figures, the lack of dissenting voices was quite stark.
That's true. That's very interesting. Kinnock had a lot of trouble because he had people like Ken Livingston running around. The left was sniping at him a lot.
If you look at Blair, as things wore on and as the dispute with Brown got bigger, there was quite a bit more backbiting and hostile briefing from all sorts of quarters. But I can remember the first summer of Blair's leadership, Richard Burden, a very mild-mannered MP, dared to criticise something that Blair had done, and it was like the roof fell in. It was a front-page story.
Keir Starmer has some issues with the left. First of all, his leadership platform was very different from what he's saying now. It was tactically unnecessary for him to do that. He was streaks ahead. To be fair to Blair, Blair never pretended to be more left-wing than he was.
Smith commanded a lot of respect across a broad spectrum of the Labour Party, even though his views were very firmly Atlanticist, pro-European, social democratic—absolutely no question. He felt like a quite unifying figure.
The other big thing is social media now. You would think that social media could be disciplined, but people just can't resist. Everything now is theatre. I mean, the whole Sam Tarry episode was like watching a docudrama in real time. We are living in a very different era now.
I worry a lot about Twitter in relation to politics. Not because I don't think it's a brilliant tool or because I think there's something inherently wrong with it, but people forget that only a minority of people use it. It has become a sounding board that changes policies, perceptions, newspaper stories—everything—when actually we still have a majority of people who don't use the thing.
Before you go…
Friend of IFTC Sir John Curtice is in the i paper this week explaining why Liz Truss’s leadership campaign has been so successful.