John Smith - twenty years on

Twenty years on from the death of John Smith, on 12 May 1994, and it's almost as though he never existed. Admittedly he was the leader of the Labour Party, in opposition, for only just under two years, and served in cabinet - as trade secretary - for barely six months, in the dying days of Jim Callaghan's government in the 1970s. But he was a significant figure and deserves a higher standing than I think he currently enjoys.

When Smith took over the Labour leadership from Neil Kinnock in the aftermath of the disastrous 1992 general election defeat, much of the talk among commentators and politicians alike was that Britain might very well be turning into a de facto one-party state, on the model of Japan or Mexico. As the newly elected Labour MP Tony Wright put it: 'We live in a dominant party system, where political changes occur through shifts in the dominant party.'

John Major had just won the Conservatives' fourth victory in succession, despite the country being in the pits of a recession that could hardly be blamed on anyone else, and the likes of Giles Radice were asking, perfectly seriously: 'Can Labour ever win?'

By the time Smith's leadership was cut short by his heart attack, that talk seemed a long way distant. Opinion polls had Labour with a twenty-point lead over the Tories, and were showing that nearly 80 per cent of the electorate agreed with the statement 'Labour is a much more moderate and sensible party than it used to be'. He had changed the party, and the public perception of the party, leaving a perfect legacy for his successor, Tony Blair. Victory in the next general election, whenever it came, was certain.

Some of this was due to Smith's own persona and politics. He was a mix of the old right and the mainstream left in the Labour party. On the one hand, he had, in 1971, joined Roy Jenkins in rebelling against the party whip, siding with Ted Heath's government in the vote to join the European Economic Community (as we used to call it). On the other, he had remained in the party a decade later, when Jenkins and others split to form the SDP. Asked why he hadn't defected, his answer was simple and revealing: 'I am comfortable with the unions.'

And that felt about right. He seemed quite comfortable generally: unflappable, reassuring and convivial. He was unmistakeably part of the Labour movement, but couldn't be painted as an extremist. He gave the appearance of speaking common sense; to quote Tony Wright again, he had 'the great gift of making ideological declarations sound like a request to call and rad the gas meter'.

He could also, despite the contented image, be a radical thinker. The party was reformed on his watch, not simply by reducing the power of trade union leaders, but also by introducing all-women shortlists. On a wider stage, I was particularly taken by his call for the remaking of the United Nations Security Council, suggesting that it be expanded to include ten permanent members, with the addition of Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and Nigeria. (Though I always felt the Arab League needed to be included as well.)

In a nice tribute to Smith, published today in the Guardian, John McTernan argues - I think correctly - that he would have been a successful prime minister. He wouldn't have won such a big majority in 1997 as did Blair, but he would have made far better use of it. McTernan suggests he would have gone on to win a second term and, having refused to join America in the invasion of Iraq, a third.

I'm not quite so sure about that last bit. He would have been in his mid-sixties by then, and I suspect pressure from the next generation would have persuaded him to stand down before attempting a third election. There were some notably disloyal members of that generation - primarily Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson - who took great delight in plotting and in undermining those with whom they didn't agree. Indeed even during Smith's brief tenure, there was a lot of talk about a potential coup by Brown and Blair to oust him from the leadership.

But all this praise shouldn't obscure the one great failing of Smith.

Apart from his own personal virtues, the other reason why he made such extraordinary progress in the polls after 1992 - and one of the reasons why the Conservatives haven't won an election since then - was Black Wednesday, when Britain was forced out of the ERM. This gift for an opposition landed in Smith's lap within a month of him taking over the leadership. The Tories' reputation for economic competence (which had somehow, miraculously, survived two massive recessions) was severely damaged and is only now recovering. John Major, claimed Smith, had become 'the devalued prime minister of a devalued government'.

But Smith himself had been on the same side of that argument as had Major. As shadow chancellor, he had been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the ERM. He was wrong. And it was quite a big thing to have been wrong on - probably the most important policy decision of the time.

Worse still, he gave no indication of recognising that he had been wrong. His enthusiasm for the European project - going all the way back to that vote in 1971 - overrode other considerations, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, had he been elected prime minister, he would have made the same mistake again, but on a larger scale. Under a government led by John Smith, Britain would almost certainly have been in the first wave of countries joining the single currency.

Which, ultimately, is why, in John Smith, the Labour Party chose the wrong man to succeed Neil Kinnock. The right choice - as I've claimed here before - was the only other candidate in the leadership election, Bryan Gould. For an account of how that would have turned out, can I direct you to the Inane Ramblings of a History Graduate.

Dan Atkinson

One of the best accounts of how we ended up with Tony Blair - rather than, say, a Labour prime minister - was The Age of Insecurity, the first book by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, published back in 1998, but still a rewarding read. To put it another way: I've re-read it as part of the preparation for each of the three books I've written on the story of modern Britain. And then I read it again for the module I'm teaching at Chichester University

Like I say, it's still a rewarding read.

So obviously I'm pleased that Dan has written a review for Lobster magazine of my most recent book, A Classless Society. Well, not simply a review, more like a rather splendid essay on the 1990s. Happily for me, he likes the book, but adds some typically good stuff of his own, including a fabulous comment from Douglas Jay on John Major: 'The Conservatives have found their Attlee.' I wish I'd known that quote when writing.

My thanks to Dan for his kind words and for continuing to be a source of inspiration.

I should also note that his always excellent blog has moved address and can now be found here.

David Aaronovitch on A Classless Society

The first official review of my 1990s book, A Classless Society, is published in today's issue of The Times. Sadly, David Aaronovitch isn't impressed. He evidently doesn't share my belief that popular culture not only reflects social change but shapes it. 'If you believe this,' he writes, 'then Jack Dee, say, becomes as significant as the Governor of the Bank of England.' Or indeed, I'd suggest, quite possibly more significant.

To take a longer perspective (because Jack Dee may not prove to be the key figure), I'd certainly argue that Spike Milligan changed Britain more than did Cameron Cobbold. The latter, in case the name's not immediately familiar, was Governor of the Bank of England in the 1950s during the period that The Goon Show was laying the foundations for the cultural revolution that was to come.

Inevitably, as always with reviews, attention is drawn to those things I neglected to mention. There's no reference, as Aaronovitch points out, to Srebrenica. He's probably right and there should have been, but I was trying to keep my focus on Britain, and there's a limit to what you can include. By the same token, one might point out that, so keen is Aaronovitch to attack my criticism of Tony Blair, that he doesn't once mention John Major, whose government occupies more pages than does that of Blair.

Ah well. He does at least say that my writing is 'amusing [and] perceptive', and that goes a long way, as far as I'm concerned. And the review does take up a full-page at the front of the books section.

Above all, I'm grateful to Mr Aaronovitch for taking the book seriously enough to criticise its failings. My thanks to him and to The Times.

Forthcoming books - part one

This autumn will see the publication by Aurum of the third (and very definitely final) volume in my series about the building of a new political and cultural consensus in Britain. A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s covers the period of John Major's premiership and takes the story up to 2001 with the re-election of Tony Blair.

It's an interesting period, and a slightly difficult one to assess at so short a distance. There's a strong temptation to see it all in terms of today, but I've tried to resist that; there was a different atmosphere in the country at the time, and I think it does constitute a distinct era in its own right. Above all, it was a time when politics ran hard to keep up with cultural change.

To coincide with the new book, there will be paperback reprints of the first two volumes in the trilogy: Crisis? What Crisis? and Rejoice! Rejoice!

A hundred days later...

Today is the hundredth day since I started to write my book on the 1990s, the sequel to Crisis? What Crisis? and Rejoice! Rejoice!. And it currently stands at just over 105,000 words, which means that I'm five days ahead of schedule, since I aim to average a thousand words a day.

And that's good news, because back on day 25, I was four days behind schedule, with a daily average of just 852 words.

I'm not entirely sure it's healthy that I should know such things. But I keep an Excel spreadsheet, into which I enter the wordcount every day, and which then calculates daily and weekly averages. A touch Aspergian perhaps, but it does entertain me when I get to the end of a long night's writing, so I shall continue.

Obviously I don't want to spoil the ending for any potential readers, but I have to say that John Major's grip on power is looking very insecure at the moment.

Nick Cohen

In the new edition of Standpoint magazine, Nick Cohen spends most of what is ostensibly a television column writing about Things Can Only Get Bitter. And, happily for me, he's very flattering: 'the most interesting essay on British culture I have read since George Walden's New Elites.'

He also, I'm glad to see, credits Dan Atkinson's blog entry that originally inspired the piece.

There's the bit where Cohen says my 'grasp of politics is feeble', of course, but obviously I think he's wrong. It's not really true that I'm 'interested solely in the left' - hell, I've just spent the last two months writing about the John Major government for my forthcoming book on the 1990s. But this essay is about the left-inclined section of a particular generation, and is therefore necessarily partial.

He is right, however, that my interests are parochial. Britain fascinates me, and British culture is what I write about. I don't really feel qualified to comment on international subjects.

This is the bit I really like: 'Yet for all his parochialism, his description of how we moved from the harsh and confrontational world of Thatcher to the soft and mendacious world of Blair remains superb.'

As someone who's enjoyed Cohen's own books, I'm rather pleased with that.

Top Ten: Political Diarists (part one)

1. Tony Benn
The daddy of all diarists, Benn is currently on eight printed volumes, covering 1940-2007 and containing millions of words. They’re obviously an invaluable commentary on Labour and left politics in that period, but they’re also the most fabulous self-portrait in the whole of English literature. Politically, the best is the 1980s volume The End of an Era (Hutchinson, 1992); personally, the most touching is Free at Last (Hutchinson, 2002), which includes the death of his wife. ‘I started writing them because in a vague way I felt I had a responsibility to give an account for my life,’ he said in 2001, ‘so when the day of judgment comes and God asks what did I do with my life I can hand him fifty million words.’

2. Gyles Brandreth
Don’t be fooled by his book Something Sensational to Read in the Train, which skims too rapidly through his entire life. Go instead for the brilliant Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), which covers his time as a Conservative MP in the 1990s. It’s a gripping account of John Major’s doomed government, with all the appeal of a political car crash. And Brandreth is the most incorrigible gossip and name-dropper.

3. Woodrow Wyatt
Another appalling gossip, Wyatt was the turncoat Labour MP who became a slavish devotee of the cult of Margaret Thatcher. In his last years he decided to keep a diary so that it’d make some money for his family after his death. Consequently The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt Volumes One and Two (Macmillan, 1998-99) contain as much tittle-tattle as he could find. And since he’d penetrated Thatcher’s inner circle, it’s good stuff. Just make sure to skip the dull bits about the Queen Mother, horse racing and wine.

4. Edwina Currie
Best known for including memories of her affair with an unnamed senior Conservative politician, the most interesting material in Diaries 1987-1992 (Little Brown, 2002) is actually about the particular pressures of being a woman MP. Currie is equally strong on the new breed of Conservatives who arrived in Parliament in the wake of Thatcher.

5. Bernard Donoughue
Donoughue was an adviser to Labour prime ministers in the 1970s. Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No. 10 (Jonathan Cape, 2005) gives a tremendously detailed insider’s version of Wilson’s second period in office, buried within which are some gems for those fascinated by the position of Marcia Williams. The sequel – Downing Street Diary: With James Callaghan in No. 10 (Jonathan Cape, 2008) – isn’t quite as gripping, since Sunny Jim can’t make up for the absence of Our Harold: only really for hardcore students of the era.

Flashman

Watching Prime Minister's Questions this afternoon, I was struck again by the way that Ed Balls shouts 'Flashman' at David Cameron whenever the prime minister makes a personal attack on Ed Miliband.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with the privately educated Balls (Nottingham Boys School) suggesting that Cameron (Eton) might give the impression of being a public school bully, picking on poor little Miliband (Haverstock Comprehensive).

But it does make me wonder where this righteous class anger was back in the days when Tony Blair (Fettes) was having a go at a succession of state-educated Tory leaders: John Major (Rutlish Grammar), William Hague (Wath-upon-Dearne Comprehensive), Iain Duncan Smith (St Peter's Secondary) and Michael Howard (Llanelli Grammar).