John Smith’s warning for Keir Starmer He led through decency, not opportunism

However, Smith’s message of renewal went beyond philosophical temperament and propriety. His mission was rooted in a desire to re-skill Britain, and equip it for the demands of the 21st century. He spoke about being “horrified” by the inequality that had arisen out of the Thatcher years: “The graffiti on the walls and a sense of decline and decay; people in sort of huddled ghettos of the poor and the disadvantaged.” He turned Thatcher’s language of decline onto the Britain she created. To turn it around, power had to leave London. “Our structures and institutions are clearly failing properly to represent the people.” It is a critique assembled by many an Opposition leader since — but it is revealing of their later inadequacies that Smith’s character and his legacy continue to loom over them all.

Smith’s route to the top was long and arduous — he’d first had to watch the devastation of the Thatcher years from within a powerless and self-destructive Labour Opposition. But while some ambitious colleagues broke away from the party, Smith stayed and played the long game. And by 1994, it appeared that his time had come. When the Daily Telegraph commissioned a wide-ranging poll on voters’ attitudes towards Smith’s Labour Party, the results were described by Anthony King as Labour’s “most encouraging news for more than a decade”. Smith had eradicated the party’s “loony Left” image and won the battle for economic competence. The data showed that people trusted him. Almost three-quarters of the electorate thought he had the “air of a family doctor or a bank manager” and looked like a man with “high moral standards”.

A campaigning mood was soon underway. And on the night of 11 May, Smith took to the stage in London to make the case that there was now “a great hunger amongst our people for a return to the politics of conviction and idealism”. But it proved to be his last act. The next morning, he suffered a heart attack and died later in hospital.

The political world mourned: the prevailing sentiment was that John Smith would have been prime minister and he would have been a great one. Giants such as Jim Callaghan lamented how the country could “ill afford to lose men of such excellence from our public life”. Fierce political opponents such as Norman Lamont compared him to Clement Attlee, arguing that he had “an inner steel and integrity which would have enabled him to make the tough choices that come with the job”. Margaret Thatcher agreed that it was a dreadful loss for the nation. “He was a thoroughly decent person,” and “had a good sense of what being British meant”, she admitted.

It would, of course, not have been so amicable had Smith actually lived to fight a general election campaign at the end of the Nineties. A Conservative Campaign Guide was leaked to the media in the days after his death that painted a very different picture. Activists were advised to attack Smith personally when door knocking. “His judgement has been entirely wrong on all the key decisions he has had to make in the last decade.” Another was that his leadership was “ineffectual and visionless” and “evasive”. Even within Labour, despite the poll lead, there had been fears that he had not yet sealed the deal with the electorate. The MPs most agitating for change were the so-called “modernisers”, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were increasingly influenced by how Bill Clinton had won in America. Alastair Campbell, then working for the Today newspaper, described the tension between the “modernisers” and Smith as a struggle between ‘“frantics” and “long gamers”.

Smith, famously, had little time for focus groups and the figures responsible for political marketing in Labour, Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould, were completely frozen out under his leadership. When asked why some critics believed he was dull compared to figures like Clinton, Smith argued that he didn’t give journalists what they wanted: “I don’t think politics is a sub-branch of showbiz.” He said he would refuse to begin “prancing around just being desperately interesting” to generate headlines. Smith’s death and Blair’s creation of New Labour firmly tilted the party in a different direction. The use of focus groups, the appeal to Conservative Britain and the courting of the media ensured that Labour’s victory in 1997 was emphatic. Few doubted that it was the right approach. And a narrative took hold — which has been heavily refuted by Smith’s former Chief of Staff David Ward — that Smith was too cautious and that a “one more heave” approach might have let the Tories in.

It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of Smith’s death in 1999 that people began to wonder how differently things might have turned out. Channel 4 commissioned an alternative history in which Andrew Marr outlined how taxes might have gone up, Peter Mandelson would have been relegated to agitating from the backbenches, and the expensive “vanity projects” like the Millennium Dome would have been axed. In the real world, Anne McElvoy reported how many MPs told her: “New Labour was never really necessary and that the party has sold its soul for nothing.”

By the time of the Iraq War, Smith’s decency was sorely missed. After resigning from Cabinet, Robin Cook wrote a lengthy piece in The Independent on how Smith’s “honesty and integrity” would have created a different political culture. People would have trusted the government more. Most importantly, Cook concluded that Smith would have cross-examined the evidence on WMD to such an extent that nobody could have credibly made the case for war. His biographer, Andy McSmith, agrees: he would have sided with France and Germany over the United States.

The legacy of Smith, however, remains most suggestive on the issue of Europe. Smith was the first leader in the party’s history to be unequivocally and unashamedly pro-European. In 1971, he voted against the Labour whip in favour of membership. As leader, he ignored tabloid pressure to argue that “Europe is not just a marketplace”, but “a community”. And it was his view that the Eurosceptics, not the EU, had held Britain back. He argued that “wholehearted participation in Europe would undoubtedly bring benefits” to the nation. What that “wholehearted participation” really meant remains one of the great what-ifs” of modern British political history. Inevitably, Smith would have been faced with compromises — and accused of various betrayals — as all Labour leaders in office are. It’s not hard to imagine another alternative history where Smith fails to convince the public of deeper EU integration and helps turbocharge Britain towards the exit. Ed Balls, for example, has argued on his podcast Political Currency that had Britain entered the Euro under Smith, it would have been sunk by the 2008 financial crash anyway.

What is more important is how Smith still represents the ideal Labour leader for many people within the party. He is a rare figure from Labour’s past that is untainted by Left-Right factionalism, with Corbyn advisor Andrew Fisher and Blair advisor John McTernan both citing him as a model to follow. In the wreckage of the 2019 defeat, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham argued that Labour needed to rebuild with a leader in the “mainstream tradition” like John Smith. Those close to Starmer, such as the Times columnist Phillip Collins, have argued that he is an heir to Smith, on account of them both having the “lawyer’s capacity to absorb a brief and press on the weak link in an opponent’s case”.

The test for Starmer will be whether he can live up to some of Smith’s ideals in office. In opposition, he has borrowed from the Smith playbook to call for greater standards in public life while also heralding the Gordon Brown Commission as “the biggest-ever transfer of control from Westminster back to the British people”. Yet Starmer is not wedded to an ideology in the way that Smith was. From reneging on his leadership pledges to the recruitment of Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke, it is clear that he is more ruthless than Smith was in his pursuit of power. It is hard to imagine Smith, a man who was unwilling to be swayed by opinion polls and focus groups, choosing the short term headlines of defectors over party unity.

While Starmer’s approach may lead him to win big at the polls, as Blair did in 1997, there is already a growing concern on the Left that he will not have a sufficient mandate for the radical change that many now demand. Because in the thirty years since Smith’s death, the desire for Labour to decentralise Westminster, upskill the workforce, move Britain closer to Europe and reform the voting system has only grown stronger. If Starmer doesn’t deliver on them, the danger for Labour is that the mythology around Smith will only go stronger.