Hugh Gaitskell - Labour's lost leader?
Labour History debate with Bernard Donoughue, Bill Rodgers and Dick Mabon
10 December 2003

Pondering how different a Hugh Gaitskell premiership would have been from Harold Wilson's tenure as Prime Minister has become one of the great 'What Ifs...?' of modern Labour history.

Juxtapose sketches of the two men and one cannot help but be struck by the contrast. Laments on Gaitskell invariably centre on his honesty, loyalty and adherence to principle over expediency. Portraits of his successor as Labour leader are always harsher for the comparison. Nye Bevan's description of Wilson as 'much more dangerous than Gaitskell because he isn't honest and he isn't a man of principle, but a sheer, absolute careerist, out for himself alone'1 encapsulates what has become an unforgiving consensus on the Wilsonian style.

Bernard Donoughue - a young follower of Gaitskell who later headed the No. 10 Policy Unit under Wilson - is in an unrivalled position to have observed the two men's starkly different conceptions of leadership: 'Gaitskell's fight and fight and fight again speech was about him standing up for what he believed. I later worked for Harold Wilson for whom I have great affection but I have to tell you that he would not have stood up and talked about fighting and fighting and fighting again. He would have been in the backroom negotiating all kinds of deals and compromises.'

Donoughue was speaking at a recent Labour History Group seminar on Hugh Gaitskell's legacy forty years after his death. He was joined by former 'Gaitskellite' MPs, Bill Rodgers and Dickson Mabon.

Gaitksell's early death at the age of fifty-six in 1963 meant that he never became Prime Minister as it appeared certain he would. In the one General Election he did contest as Labour leader in 1959, the Conservative victory was decisive. Today, he seems to have largely disappeared from view. Despite strong claims to be so, he is seldom hailed as an influence by current leading Labour modernisers. So what was it about Gaitskell that inspired such fierce loyalty among a group of followers who were happy to become known as 'Gaitskellites'?

All three speakers talked of the real sense of shock that was felt at his passing. Bill Rodgers recounted the impact on the young Tony Crosland who was in tears following the memorial service and on Roy Jenkins who felt unable to attend because it was 'so painful'. Dick Mabon described how his death led to 'great lamentations in the labour movement' and Bernard Donoughue how he was 'personally politically bereaved and felt I could never attach myself to someone in politics again.'

Bill Rodgers dedicated his early political life to the Gaitskell cause, organizing the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) to mobilise grassroots opinion in support of Gaitskellite policies in the early 1960s. He described how he 'became tremendously committed to his spirit, his thoughts and his character': 'Intelligence, judgement, courage and especially loyalty. All of those characteristics - which he looked to in others - were very much all true of him.'

Bernard Donoughue was also a member of CDS and said that Gaitskell was a particularly attractive figure to the young for his 'blazing integrity and courage': 'Most politicians learn to compromise. To the young, Gaitskell was attractive because he did not appear to be like that. He had principles and he was prepared to stand by them.'

Gaitskell's determination to modernise a party whose dominant instinct was to preserve the legacy of the Attlee government in aspic struck a resonance with those who had come to regard it as too old fashioned. For Donoughue, 'he was clearly trying to move the Labour Party away from its flat cap, trade union dominated image. He was aware of the aspirations of younger people who were inclining to be much more classless than the Labour Party acknowledged at the time. He was also surrounded by very impressive young people like Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Bill Rodgers who appeared to have a touch of the future about them.'

But the qualities which inspired such fealty in his acolytes made Gaitskell a controversial figure. The traits that led admirers to label him principled were seen as stubbornness and inflexibility by opponents. Bill Rodgers detected in him a 'prickliness' and 'prissiness'. Mabon describes Gaitskell as a 'very partisan leader, not a pussy foot': ''He became known for defying his own party when he thought they were wrong'.

It was this partisanship which so polarises views on Gaitskell. For devotees, had he lived, the necessary fight to move beyond the 1945 settlement would not have been fudged. In this view, Harold Wilson is the guilty man who sacrificed Labour's need to face up to the changing society around it on the altar of party unity. To Gaitskell's critics, his rigidity would have spilt asunder a party that, at its heart, did not share his revisionist outlook.

As Bernard Donoughue concluded: 'As Prime Minister, you do have to take people with you that you don't particularly like or respect and I don't know how good he would have been at that. I think there would have been collisions. The Labour Party was not then ready for the kind of modernization which we were all hungry for. You could argue that we had to go through the horrors of the late 1970s and 1980s to prove that some of the old luggage had to be thrown away.'

Summary by Patrick Loughran, the Labour Party's Head of Political Research

¹ John Campbell, Nye Bevan, p.350, Richard Cohen Books, 1997

List of speakers for the debate:

• Lord (Bernard) Donoughue) - Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit 1974-79
• Rt. Hon Dr Dickson Mabon - first Labour MP to pledge his support for Gaitskell during the 1955 leadership election; subsequently a minister 1964-70 and 1976-79.
• Rt. Hon Lord (Bill) Rodgers - organiser of Gaitskellite 'Campaign for Democratic Socialism' during early 1960s, Labour Cabinet Minister 1976-79 and SDP founder.