Achilles Heels

All elections leave a lasting legacy, but if there was one election in modern times which has influenced more or less everything that has happened in British politics since then, it is surely 1983.

The catastrophic defeat suffered by Michael Foot’s Labour Party in that year began the process of self-examination and reform which eventually begat New Labour in the 1990s and shaped the politics of today.

In the wake of Mr Foot’s death aged 96 this week, the most intriguing tribute came from the lips of Tony Blair - “he was as far removed from the techniques of modern politics as it was possible to be.”

Only Mr Blair with his silken charm could have made this sound like a compliment. In truth, he dedicated moreorless the whole of his career to wiping out all trace of the Labour Party which Mr Foot represented.

Labour went into that 1983 election with so many weak spots it must have been hard for Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to decide which one to target.

The 700-page manifesto with its raft of left-wing policies – later dubbed the longest suicide note in history – was not the half of it. Their real Achilles Heel was poor Mr Foot himself.

This week’s outpouring of grief over the death of this much-loved Labour hero was doubtless genuine, but the harsh truth is that Mr Foot should never have become Labour leader.

His narrow victory over Denis Healey in 1980 robbed it of the one man who might have been capable of stopping the Thatcher juggernaut in its tracks.

Twenty-seven years on, Labour is once more going into an election in which its leader is viewed as its Achilles Heel.

David Cameron certainly thinks so. That much was clear when he unveiled the Tories’ campaign slogan ‘Vote for Change’ at the party’s Spring conference in Brighton last weekend.

What he was really saying to the public here was: “You either vote for me, or you get another five years of you know who.”

As I noted in this column several months back, persuading the public to vote for five more years of Gordon Brown was always likely to be Labour’s toughest challenge in the forthcoming contest.

And yet, as it turned out, the week’s events have exposed the Tories’ own Achilles Heel, in the shape of its deputy chairman and billionaire benefactor Lord Ashcroft.

The Electoral Commission has now ruled that his £5.1m donations to the Tories were “permissible,” but the row over his tax status seems set to rumble on.

It had long been thought that he agreed to become resident in the UK for tax purposes when he received his peerage in 2000, but it has now emerged that he has paid no tax on his overseas earnings since then.

Not the least of the Tories’ problems is that their former leader William Hague, who recommended him for the peerage, only became aware of this fact in the past few months, and Mr Cameron even more recently than that.

The Tories have inevitably sought to portray all this as a distraction from the main issues of the economy and how to tackle the deficit, and so in a sense it is.

And yet, if it leaves a bad enough smell in those marginal constituencies which have been targeted by the Ashcroft millions, it may yet save the day for Labour.

A few months back, it seemed possible that Gordon Brown might lead Labour to an even worse result in 2010 than Michael Foot did in 1983 - an outcome which would have neatly brought the New Labour story full circle.

Thanks in part to Lord Ashcroft, he is now back in with a fighting chance.

Michael Foot: Greatness marred by misjudgements

There seems little to add to the reams of material that has appeared both in print and on the airwaves about the death of Michael Foot. He was undeniably a great parliamentary figure and his death moreorless severs the only remaining link with the days in which politicians were expected to command the House of Commons by the power of their oratory rather than command the news media by the succinctness of their soundbites. As Tony Blair said yesterday, he was as far removed as it is possible to be from the techniques of modern politics, and maybe that is no bad thing to have inscribed on your tombstone.

Nevertheless....I have to say I have been struck by the degree of sentimentality in some of the tributes, notably from Lord Kinnock, about Foot's contribution to the Labour Party in the period after the 1979 defeat. To listen to some of what has been said, anyone would think he saved the party during that grim period. The truth was he actually came close to destroying it.

In my view, Foot would have gone down as an immeasurably greater man had he not succumbed to the vain belief in 1980 that only he could succeed in uniting the party.

Of course, he not only failed to unite it - the Gang of Four split off to form the SDP shortly after his election as leader - but the programme around which Foot subsequently united the remainder of the party was one which was so out-of-kilter with the prevailing wind in British politics at the time that it resulted in Labour's worst election defeat since its arrival as a major political force.

The harsh truth was that Foot should never have become leader of the Labour Party ahead of Denis Healey and, in so doing, he robbed the party of the only leader who would have been capable of stopping Thatcherism in its tracks.

Had Healey succeeded Jim Callaghan, the split in the party would probably still have occurred, but it would almost certainly have occurred from the opposite end of the party spectrum, with the hard-left heading off into well-earned irrelevance.

Labour under Healey would have been in genuine contention for power at the 1983 and 1987 elections and would certainly have returned to office earlier than it ultimately did.

More significantly in terms of present-day politics, it would also not have been necessary for the party to ditch its entire Croslandite social democratic tradition as it ended up doing under Tony Blair in its desperation to return to power after four successive election defeats, and to retain it at all costs thereafter.

Any political career inevitably contains its share of misjudgements, and Foot made one other which I would like to mention here - namely colluding with Enoch Powell to scupper Harold Wilson's modest plans to reform the House of Lords in 1968.

This act of ideological purism - Foot wanted the Lords abolished, not democratised - resulted in the Second Chamber going unreformed for another thirty years, and the survival into the 21st century of a legislature defined in part by heredity.

As someone with more than a superficial knowledge of political history, Foot should have taken the long view, and realised that parliamentary reform in this country has only ever proceeded by increments.

For the man whose accession to the party leadership inadvertently begat New Labour, it goes down as another example of unintended - but not entirely unforseeable - political consequences.

The 'character question'

During the course of his long career, Gordon Brown can have faced few more humiliating episodes than having to run the gauntlet of journalists last Monday shouting the question: "Are you a bully, Prime Minister?"

A man who has dedicated his political life to the pursuit of social justice, and whose concern for the underdog is genuine, found himself accused of unforgiveable behaviour towards junior staff in no position to fight back.

Whatever the truth of the situation – and it has to be said that Downing Street’s carefully-worded denials were somewhat less than convincing – the revelations by journalist Andrew Rawnsley have certainly done Mr Brown no favours.

They do not make him a bad man. But as the election looms, they certainly raise questions about his ability to deal with the pressures of his role, and hence whether he is up to another five years in office.

Talk of the 'character question' in relation to Prime Ministers invariably leads to speculation about how some of our great leaders of the past may have fared under the kind of media spotlight today’s politicians have to endure.

Was Winston Churchill a bully, for instance? Almost certainly yes, but arguably some of those self-same character traits helped us win the Second World War.

Would the sexually rapacious David Lloyd George have survived the kind of intense scrutiny of his private life that modern-day politicians undergo? Almost certainly not.

And just what on earth would the tabloids do to a latter-day Gladstone who was found to be in the habit of touring round the streets of London at night trying to rescue fallen women from a life of vice?

So I am always tempted to allow politicians a certain amount of leeway in terms of their individual character flaws, on the grounds that these can and often do go hand in hand with genius.

That said, the public is surely right to expect its leaders to treat those around them with respect, and to ensure their private behaviour matches their publicly-stated ideals.

What saved Mr Brown this week was the intervention of the rather aptly named Christine Pratt, of the National Bullying Helpline, who unwisely disclosed that employees of 10 Downing Street had rung her supposedly confidential service.

It enabled the Labour spin machine to turn its fire on her, thus distracting the media’s attention from the scene of the original alleged misdemeanour.

To my mind, though, there were two aspects of the story that were particularly damaging. Firstly, the timing.

Amid growing signs of economic recovery, Labour has been steadily pegging back the Tories’ poll lead which last weekend was back down to six points in one survey.

In an intervention that might have led Monday’s news bulletins had the “bullying” story not overshadowed it, former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine moreorless admitted we were heading for a hung Parliament.

This week’s events will have given the Tories some respite from this apparent attack of the jitters.

By far the most damaging aspect of the accusations, however, is that they reinforce an already widely-held view about Mr Brown’s style of politics.

The Prime Minister may or may not have “bullied” Number 10 staff. What his people have undoubtedly done down the years is use the black arts of spin to batter a succession of fellow ministers and potential rivals into submission.

Alistair Darling, who claimed “the forces of hell” had been unleashed against him by No 10 after a rather-too-candid interview about the recession, is only the latest in a long line of figures to feel the sharp end of this.

It is primarily because Mr Brown has such ‘form’ in this regard that Labour may find it harder than it thinks to bat these accusations away.