Labour and the Conservatives have always taken very different approaches to the business of changes of leadership. Tories care mainly about electability. Margaret Thatcher’s ideological legacy was adored by many Tories — and indeed still is. When they knifed her in 1990, her Cabinet were more concerned that the electorate had fallen out of love with her. Tellingly, John Major’s turn at the helm didn’t herald a decisive shift in ideology; he was simply a more acceptable face of Thatcherism for the Nineties.

When Labour looks for a new leader, though, it inevitably becomes an internal referendum on the political direction of the party. That helps explain the violent swing, say, from the Bennite Jeremy Corbyn to the centrist Keir Starmer that left the Labour faithful gasping for breath. But despite the bloodshed, modern political parties are not versions of Terry Pratchett’s Assassins’ Guild, where advancement comes through the elimination of rivals. Michael Heseltine’s proclamation that “he who wields the knife never wears the crown” has proven to be remarkably reliable. Either way, Starmer’s position is not new — but you don’t get the impression he’s relying much on the lessons of history.

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Starmer's weaponised incompetence

By Jonny Ball

Two years on from its famous landslide victory of 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was already in bad shape. Chancellor Hugh Dalton was reportedly taking Benzedrine to keep going. Herbert Morrison, leader of the House of Commons, was recovering from a serious illness. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was drifting between office and hospital. Churchill had described Attlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about” — but he was clearly easy to underestimate. When Attlee’s internal enemies decided to oust him in 1947, their leader Stafford Cripps left his fateful meeting with the PM having accepted a new position as the Minister for Economic Affairs — a position created especially for him. In keeping his enemy close, Attlee took a somewhat different approach to Starmer, who first refused to meet with Wes Streeting, only to frostily dispatch him after 17 minutes of conversation the next day.

Hugh Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as Labour leader in 1955 but never became prime minister, dying suddenly in 1963. Harold Wilson took over and won the general election the following year, but before long the rumblings in his party about his leadership became too loud to ignore. By the late-Sixties, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins seemed the most obvious choice to replace him.

Starmer claims his political hero is Wilson; Streeting has declared himself a Labour revisionist in the ideological mode of Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, who argued for reducing inequality, improving opportunities and dispensing with socialist dogma. Jenkins was admired by almost everyone who mattered in late-Sixties Britain, intelligent journalists, broadcasters, civil servants, captains of industry, and had a coterie of well-heeled and glamorous mistresses. He looked and sounded like the future. Wilson looked like the present, stretching out to infinity.

All Jenkins had to do was pick his moment — and the aftermath of the disastrous local elections of 1968 would have been ideal. He was egged on by his enthusiastic supporters, the Friends of Roy, whom Gerald Kaufman compared to a group of schoolchildren with a crush on the hockey mistress. But to his eternal regret, Jenkins failed to act. He later admitted that successful prime ministers generally possess “a seam of utter ruthlessness”, and wondered if perhaps he lacked it. Elsewhere, he observed that if you fired a shot at your enemy, you had better make sure they ended up dead. This is a conundrum that Streeting must have grappled with himself in recent days. As for Wilson, still the greatest Houdini figure in modern British politics, he governed on and off until 1976, by which time he had moved from a modernist belief in the “white heat of technology” to being more of a national headmaster figure, permanently disappointed with everyone.

Still, worse than failing to act is sending your foot-soldiers over the top and then failing to follow them yourself, creating only bitterness and resentment. A prime example was James Purnell resigning from the Cabinet to trigger a coup against Gordon Brown, only to find that his ally David Miliband had bottled it and failed to follow through with his own resignation. Purnell left British politics soon after: the Labour Party is not kind to failed assassins.

And there is another danger that Jenkins, who was at Bletchley Park during the war, would have appreciated more than most. This is the concept of political game theory — specifically, the tragedy of the first mover whose act will always benefit the second mover. The first mover bears all the costs while exposing themselves to a counter-strike, neatly explaining Heseltine’s famous quip, which he learned the hard way in his own doomed attempt to replace Magaret Thatcher. So while Jenkins could have mortally wounded Wilson with a challenge, in doing so, he may have allowed one of his rivals — whether Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan or Michael Foot — to take the prize and unite the party behind them. This was something the wily Wilson also knew, which was why he surrounded himself with a collection of powerful lieutenants, each the commandant of a different Labour faction. If one faction thought the other faction might triumph, that persuaded them to back the status quo instead. Another reason why David Miliband didn’t challenge Brown was because he thought the party might turn to Alan Johnson if Brown went, and not him.

A successful challenger must perform three functions at once. They must reassure markets and elites; they must excite activists and MPs; and they must appear plausible to ordinary voters. That combination is exceptionally rare. Tony Blair certainly managed it. Jenkins only managed two out of three (he was probably too patrician to appeal to regular voters, especially as the Sixties started swinging). And Streeting perhaps manages two or even three as well. He is one of the few figures in the current Cabinet whom Labour MPs can plausibly imagine facing Nigel Farage across a television studio without visibly shrinking. He is fluent, a self-declared revisionist, emotionally direct in the modern political style with a powerful backstory. But Labour history is not especially kind to obvious heirs, even when they look much more likely to be successful. The party distrusts naked ambition on almost theological grounds because surely true Left-wingers would want to put the common good first.

So, a politician seeking the leadership must appear ready without appearing too eager. The advice that Brown always tried to give himself was to do a good job, and not look like he was actively plotting against Blair, simply being available when a vacancy arose. A wise dictum — albeit one that fell apart as his desire to enter No. 10 rose to almost pathological levels. In 2006, his ally Tom Watson launched the so-called “curry house” plot against Blair. However, in what became a running joke in Westminster, the conspirators’ attempts to keep the meeting secret spectacularly failed after they signed the restaurant’s visitors’ book, which was then leaked to the BBC.

Brown finally inherited the premiership in June 2007, after years of subterranean warfare — though not before Labour briefly descended into the sort of factional farce that only Labour can produce. Michael Meacher and John McDonnell maneuvered against Brown simultaneously, prompting one weary figure to remark that “the left hand doesn’t know what the far-left hand is doing”. But even that was not as peculiar as Barry Gardiner flying home from Dubai to run for leader, only to throw in the towel upon landing.

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By Richard Johnson

Coups fail when ministers hesitate, factions freelance, allies leak against one another, and everybody assumes someone else has counted the numbers properly. Most failed Labour coups begin in perfect agreement that the party leader is intolerable — only to end with catastrophic disagreement about who should replace him. Starmer’s saving grace is that those calling for his replacement have yet to choose their champion. In the coming days Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham might all join the contest — assuming Burnham can find a seat in time. If Starmer chooses to stay and fight, he may ultimately survive a bruising leadership challenge simply because his enemies can’t shape their forces into a single fatal implement.

As the clouds of dissatisfaction swirl about him, Starmer seemingly faces a choice. He could adopt a wait-and-see approach; or he could use Attlee’s method of coopting rivals into allies. Yet, instead, his experience as a former prosecutor seems to be governing his actions. He blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton (even turning up to vote against in person); suspended the whip from MPs who sided with the SNP over the two-child benefit cap; and insisted that Rayner resign over her tax problems. Now that those seem to be resolved in any case, wouldn’t it have been better to have kept her inside the tent? Lawyer first, politician second, this purge-and-eliminate approach looks more like something out of the Neil Kinnock playbook than anything else.

Through the Eighties, Kinnock played an enormously important part in preparing Labour for a return to power. That meant he had to be ruthless in purging the hard-Left — as in his landmark 1985 conference speech, where he railed against the hard-Left militant faction in Liverpool. The rest of the party knew that the radicals were harming their electoral chances, and so were prepared to back Kinnock all the way.

Starmer has followed the Kinnock approach, albeit without the conditions to make it work. Notably, he lacks an external threat that the grassroots feel they need protecting from. The Conservatives have collapsed, and though the Greens and Reform are both a source of deep anxiety, they’ve yet to prove themselves as potent parliamentary forces. Besides, whoever ends up leading the party three months from now, the next election is still years away. The purge-and-eliminate strategy hardly seems wise in the circumstances. Maybe Heseltine’s dictum will need to be rewritten for Starmer. The leader who wields the knife loses the crown.

Understand this grubby, ink-stained world, and it’s tempting to see the 1986 Wapping Print Strike as inevitable. The battle between Rupert Murdoch and his unionized printers ended with those old-fashioned presses replaced by sleek digital alternatives. Yet if the shift looks inevitable in hindsight — as a victory for technology over tradition, of progress over Luddites who refused to move with the times — there was nothing unavoidable about its broader impact. Not only did Murdoch’s new presses mean a radically slimmed-down workforce, it also altered the whole tenor of Left-wing politics, and we’re still living with the consequences today.

Before Wapping, print unions dictated which papers got printed, when and by whom. When, in May 1984, The Sun tried to run a photo of Arthur Scargill with the caption “Mine Führer”, the printers downed tools. When the edition was eventually published, there was a blank space where the picture should have been, accompanied by a text reading: “Members of all The Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either.”

Possibly because of the sector’s heavy unionization, there was an “us-and-them” feel to journalism: with the editorial staff on one side, and printers firmly on the other. Even a paper’s editor wasn’t allowed to set foot in the machine room, which was strictly reserved for unionized workers. But when Sun journalists went on strike, printers walked through their picket lines day after day. Because of the specialist knowledge required, because of the urgency of getting a paper out on time, and because of decades of bargaining, it was just assumed that printworkers controlled newspaper production, and that’s how it was always going to be. They were in charge.

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British politics has lost its hinterland

By Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky

During the Wapping dispute, though, the nation watched as printers were powerless to stop even a single copy of a single edition of a single paper going on sale. They stood not just defeated, but delegitimized, the fragile limits of their powers starkly exposed. Combined with the failure of the miners’ strike, this loss swept away the Labour-aligned trade union movement which had defined postwar Britain.

At the center of events was Brenda Dean, the media-friendly leader of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades. A huge print union — it boasted over 200,000 members in 1980 — Dean was elected SOGAT’s head the year before the strike began. She also had the distinction of being the first woman to be elected as the leader of a major industrial union anywhere in the world, in a sector entirely dominated by men. Dean was herself elected on a program of industrial reform, and soon became a formidably articulate voice on British TV screens. Acutely conscious of her image, she spent time ensuring that her appearance was always immaculate, turning her bright blue dress into a signature look.

Opposing her was Murdoch. Initially inheriting a single Adelaide newspaper from his father in 1952, he soon created a thoroughgoing Australian media empire. In the Sixties, Murdoch moved into the British market, buying The News of the World and then The Sun, which he turned from a worthy (if boring) Leftist broadsheet into a mass-market tabloid. By the early Eighties, he had added The Times and The Sunday Times to his stable, giving him a powerful foothold across the British press.

But by the time of Dean’s election, Murdoch’s patience was wearing thin. He knew he needed to eliminate the unions, and he used their willingness to strike against them. Aware that he couldn’t construct a state-of-the-art computerized printing plant in secret, he told the world that his new Wapping facility — a decisive move away from the old Fleet Street model — would be used to print an entirely new paper: The London Post. He then goaded his printers into a strike, offering them far worse terms and conditions than they were used to. As soon as the strike began, he sacked the printers en masse, replacing them with workers he’d secretly trained in Southampton. Murdoch must have imagined that the dispute which followed would last only a few months. Brenda Dean had other ideas, rallying her members with a cry of “Mr Murdoch is trying to smash our union!”

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Who are the strikers fooling?

By Terry Eagleton

She had a point. Murdoch aggressively road-tested Thatcher’s new anti-union legislation. Among other things, strikers were now forbidden from picketing anywhere other than their old places of work — the now dormant facilities in Fleet Street. So-called “secondary action” was made illegal too, meaning non-printworkers couldn’t refuse to handle Murdoch papers. And once the demonstrations at Wapping began, the Metropolitan Police were quick to ensure that the lorries left the plant safely. In the interests of that safety, hundreds of people were injured and one teenager killed.

Yet after months of militancy — and a year of Murdoch’s four papers being printed in Wapping — it became clear that SOGAT’s battle was lost basically as soon as the digital presses started rolling. It wasn’t simply that the new technology was more efficient, allowing the same output with a fifth of the workforce. More fundamentally, the dispute cost the unions their authority. It taught employers that confrontation worked, and that a determined proprietor, armed with new machines and new legislation, could execute a complete end-run around organized labor.

And where Murdoch started, others followed. By 1990, every national newspaper which had previously been printed using hot metal on Fleet Street had moved to computerized facilities, often in the Docklands. Other unions found their hands were tied by the new legislation too. The Liverpool Dockers strike of 1995-1998 remained almost entirely isolated; in the Seventies, it’s easy to imagine other workers downing tools in solidarity.

Altogether, these actions tipped the economic balance of power away from workers and towards employers, eroding participation in collective bargaining arrangements. As for the country at large, it was hard not to feel as though socialism had lost the intellectual argument. In earlier decades, capitalism and socialism were the titans fighting for Britain’s soul. Yet once both the miners and the printers had taken on the Right and lost, it became clear that organized labor could no longer set the agenda.

This unsurprisingly had an impact on the Labour Party. It had, after all, been founded by trade unions. But after Wapping, union membership declined sharply, and the tone of Labour’s rhetoric shifted from opposing plutocratic tycoons to merely tempering their influence. The 1983 manifesto talks about large-scale nationalization, even (perish the thought) withdrawal from the EEC. Compare that to its 1992 successor, which emphasizes competence and fiscal responsibility. Then, in 1997, Tony Blair won the vote to replace Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, dumping a commitment to public ownership that had endured since 1918.

1986 may not have been the only pivot on which this new world turned, but it was surely decisive. From then on, the Left stopped arguing that a socialist Britain was a fair and prosperous Britain, and was instead reduced to trying to curb capitalism’s worst excesses. As for Rupert Murdoch, he didn’t just win the strike. He helped re-write the political map of the UK. In the Print, the play we’ve written about the dispute, isn’t just an account of a thrilling battle for power. It’s also a warning.

In 1986, computerized presses meant that 1,000 people could produce four national newspapers. With the rise of the internet, that looks almost quaint. Now we barely need newspapers to be printed at all, as most journalism is consumed on screens. And now, in 2026, we face another turning point, as AI means people are barely even needed to write the articles. The unions of the Eighties might have been flawed, overreaching and at times even absurd — but they had the power to stop a runaway train in its tracks if necessary. We might soon look back on that power with envy.

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In the Print is showing at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 3 May.

Healey was no doubt a professional politician. He became an MP at the age of 35 after studying at Oxford and serving with the Royal Engineers during the North African campaign of the Second World War. But he was also a keen amateur photographer, painter and piano player. His view was, as he noted in his cultural anthology, My Secret Planet, that it is not possible to understand modern politics without knowing something of history; that it is not possible to command foreign affairs without knowing something of the culture of other peoples; and that poets and novelists can teach us more than so-called political scientists. Perhaps only Healey could, as he did, watch a four-hour production of Hamlet in the middle of a financial crisis.

Healey was such a larger-than-life character, full of quips and acerbic put-downs — he once described the performance of Geoffrey Howe in the Commons as “like being savaged by a dead sheep” — that it’s easy to imagine that he was a one-off, and that having such an extensive cultural life and a range of experiences beyond politics was quite rare even in those days. But other prominent politicians show an equally broad array of influences — in particular, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland.

It was Healey who took over from Roy Jenkins as shadow chancellor in 1972 when Jenkins resigned over the issue of — what else? — Britain’s position within Europe. Jenkins, who believed that membership of the Common Market was essential to Britain’s future prosperity, was incensed that Labour Party leader Harold Wilson was whipping his opposition MPs to vote against the government, led by Edward Heath, which was driving through the European Communities Bill. Like Healey, Jenkins studied at Oxford. Like Healey, he contributed to the war effort, and he entered politics at an even younger age. He had a deep knowledge of fine wines and he was a prolific biographer, writing accounts of the lives of Roosevelt, Gladstone, Balfour and countless others.

His early career in politics was nothing short of astonishing. As home secretary in the mid-Sixties, he pushed through a sweeping range of reforms which saw a huge upheaval in the structure of the police force, the ending of theatre censorship, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the death penalty. Arguably no home secretary since then has transformed Britain to anything like the same extent.

Jenkins was also a man of prodigious appetites, said to have had an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, Lee Canfield, as well as with Caroline Gilmour, the wife of a fellow MP. And many people, including his biographer John Campbell, believe that Jenkins’s close friendship with Tony Crosland had a sexual dimension while the two were at Oxford together.

And it is Crosland who forms the third leg of our political tripod. He was 32 when he became MP for South Gloucestershire. A devoted football fan, he took American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to see Grimsby Town play at home while serving as foreign secretary. He was also seen as the intellectual leading light of the Labour moderates: his book, The Future of Socialism (1956), is considered a seminal work.

The professional and personal lives of these three men intersected in fascinating and provocative ways, defining the Labour Party to this day. After Wilson’s shock resignation, all three stood for the leadership, but none made a strong showing, and James Callaghan was the eventual winner. Eventually, hard-Left Michael Foot became leader, defeating Healey in a narrow contest. But he was unable to make a dent in the side of Mrs. Thatcher. After she had swept to power in 1979, it would be 18 years before another Labour leader became prime minister.

As playwrights, we were fascinated by how these three close friends, all aligned in their values, all such vibrant personalities, could have failed to prevent the party they loved from becoming so hopelessly unelectable. The result is our play The Gang of Three, currently playing to gratifyingly packed audiences at the King’s Head theatre in Islington.

While we’ve tried to follow the advice of Samuel Goldwyn to all writers — “All I want is a story, if you have a message, send it by Western Union” — we’re aware that a play like ours is going to reflect matters closer to home. When our version of Crosland berates Healey during a conversation about the IMF crisis, telling him “We can’t become the party of cuts”, an audience which has just read newspaper headlines about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party reducing benefits to disabled people chuckle ruefully or sometimes groan in despair. Life, maybe especially political life, is cyclical, and the same problems come up again and again. Can you have true friends in politics? Is politics an addictive drug? Do the ends justify the means? But perhaps the most enduring theme is that when sensible people fail to put aside their own self-interests and unite, extremists and idiots can triumph.

One question which might occur to those watching the play is: why doesn’t politics seem to make politicians like this any more? While on the one hand there is always a tendency for the human brain to imagine that the golden age of anything was about 50 years ago, usually consonant with one’s own childhood, it is hard to imagine that in 50 years’ time people will be creating theater about Robert Jenrick, Alistair Carmichael, Bridget Phillipson or Kemi Badenoch, to name a few. Do we find in these politicians an interest in the arts, a devotion to philosophy, a library of publications, or a previous career in some other field of endeavor? In every case, hardly.

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Where are the Jenkins, Healey and Crosland of our political generation? In some ways, the question is unfair: the motivations and actions of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for instance, will surely be pored over for decades to come. And yet ours is clearly a political generation in search of a hinterland.

Perhaps this is in part because earlier generations of politicians had been shaped by wartime service. Crosland was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing combat in Italy and France, while Jenkins worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Even more impressively, Healey was a beachmaster at Anzio in 1944. This period may have given them all a sense of perspective in later life — allowing Healey to stand muster with the admirals he later found advising him at the Ministry of Defense and giving him the self-assurance to fire Lord Mountbatten as Chief of the Defense Staff.

Or perhaps it’s because the frenetic nature of politics today, with its 24-hour cycle and the endless delights of social media, just doesn’t allow time to build an intellectual and cultural hinterland that can season political minds. And with any slip of the tongue, unfortunate juxtaposition or foolish remark flashed around the world in seconds, it’s maybe no surprise that many modern politicians try to stick to the very center of the road whenever they’re out of the house. After all, a bacon sandwich was all it took to depth charge Ed Miliband’s general election campaign.

And when one does consider politicians who use their extravagant personalities to connect with voters, one is drawn not to principled campaigners, but self-centered populists like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. All three of the characters in our play were motivated by passion and ambition, but the conflict between what they agreed on politically and their inherent rivalry led to all sorts of poor decisions. Not least their failure to combine forces, so that one of them could become Labour leader and form an election-winning alliance.

When he lost the Labour leadership, Jenkins decamped to Europe, becoming president of the European Commission. By the time he returned to British politics, Healey had completed his stint as chancellor and Crosland had died in office as foreign secretary. Unable to prevent the Labour Party’s lurch to the Left, Jenkins launched the SDP in 1982, while Healey remained on the Labour benches until his retirement in 1992.

How different might British politics have looked today if Crosland had lived and challenged Michael Foot for the Labour leadership? Or if Healey had joined Jenkins at the formation of the SDP? Or if Jenkins had continued his fight for moderation from within the Labour Party. These events shaped the political landscape as it is today, and we think there is much to be learned from this period in history, as well as great entertainment to be derived from it. So while we resurrect these giants of the past upon the stage, we still hold out some hope that the next generation of politicians might bring something to Westminster other than bureaucratic competence or an unseemly lust for power. After all, the pendulum always swings, so maybe we will yet see the return of the hinterland to British politics.

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The Gang of Three is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 1 June.