Has there ever been a time when one generation has not looked back wistfully to an earlier generation’s politicians? Nostalgia is commonplace in politics, and yet recalling the Labour leadership contest 40 years ago makes for a genuinely painful comparison with today’s.
The two main contenders from the 1980 election, Denis Healey and Michael Foot, were both political giants. But for most of the run-up to that vote, another man altogether was widely thought of as the favourite. Now largely forgotten, he was also a political heavyweight — but strikingly different from the other two runners. His name was Peter Shore.
While Foot and Healey were clearly the Left and Right candidates respectively, Shore was impossible to pigeonhole, and that ability to win support across all wings of the party was one reason why many on the Left had decided to support him as the most likely to beat Healey — including Foot himself, who was going to nominate Shore until changing his mind and deciding to run himself.
A new biography of this leader-that-never was has just been published with the apt title Labour’s Forgotten Patriot. It’s a superb work which refreshes the political history of the second half of the 20th century by inserting the contribution of a man who, far from being forgotten, ought to be revered on the Left as an example of a tradition of Labour patriotism. Many of Labour’s current problems — more accurately, much of the reason Labour has its current problems — can be traced to the Left’s rejection of that tradition.
I was both lucky and privileged that my first serious job was as Peter’s researcher, so that for four years, I had what was the equivalent of a permanent tutorial in politics and ideas. While many MPs (still) regard their researchers as fodder to be eaten up and spat out when their usefulness is over, Peter saw it as his role to bring his staff on and help foster their careers.
I remember in my first week accompanying him to lunch — always at 1.40, after listening to The World at One — in the Policeman’s Café in Westminster Hall. Sat at a table were Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman, and when Peter went to join them I looked for a nearby table to sit at. Peter beckoned me over. “When we have lunch together,” he told me, “we have lunch together.” That was typical. Unless a meeting was highly confidential, I would always be asked to join. Unless I saw things for myself, Peter reasoned, how would I understand the way politics worked?
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