Leaders: John Smith 1992-94

John Smith (1938-94)

The paradox about John Smith, the fifteen Labour Party leader, is that throughout his career he was regarded as being on the party's right wing, but posthumously he became an almost iconic favourite of the left. The view of Smith's admirers is that, if he had lived, he would have won the 1997 election and would have been a more radical Prime Minister and more emollient party leader than Tony Blair. The harsher view, taken by more partisan Blairites, is that he threw away the 1992 election and might have done the same again in 1997.

Smith remained doggedly consistent through his long career in his belief in social democracy as expounded by Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland. To the Bennite left, he was barely distinguishable from the founders of the SDP, but by the late 1990s, his views on redistribution through taxation seemed `old Labour'.

The son of the headmaster of a village school, born 13 September 1938, he grew up in the tiny town of Ardrishaig, in west Scotland. After Dunoon Grammar School, he read law at Glasgow University, where he was the leading figure in a promising Labour Club (he was Chair in 1960), whose other stars included a future Scottish Secretary and First Minister, Donald Dewar, and a future Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine. Having been talent spotted by officials at the party's Scottish head office, Smith was a parliamentary candidate at the age of only 22, in a by-election in East Fife in 1961, a safe Tory seat in which he did well to come second. He unsuccessfully re-fought the seat at the 1964 General Election. He then took a break from politics to establish himself as a lawyer and start a family. In 1967 he married a contemporary at Glasgow University, Elizabeth Bennett, and had three daughters, Sarah, Jane and Catherine. For the whole of Smith's political career, the family home was in Edinburgh, not London. Smith returned to politics by winning North Lanarkshire, with a majority of 5,019 in the 1970 election. He was considered to be a reliable and hard working backbench MP with a fine grasp of detail, but no firebrand. His political tactic was - as his friend Roy Hattersley put it - to be 'on the right but not deeply involved in the right.' He avoided making enemies and generally did as directed by the whips, except on one significant occasion: in 1971, when he was among several dozen pro-marketeers, led by Roy Jenkins, who broke a three line whip and secured the UK's entry to the Common Market. He was quickly forgiven for this and for turning down the first government job offered him by Harold Wilson in 1974, as a Scottish law officer. After serving briefly as PPS to Scottish Secretary Willie Ross, in October 1974, he was appointed an Under-Secretary of State at Energy, with special responsibility for the new North Sea oilfields. Eight months later, he found himself working alongside Tony Benn, who respected him enough to demand his promotion to Minister of State level in December 1975 (and to vote for him in the 1992 leadership election.) Together they created the British National Oil Company. Smith vehemently protested when the company was later privatised by the Conservatives. In April 1976, James Callaghan sent Smith to work as deputy to Michael Foot, Leader of the Commons as Minister of State at the Privy Council Office. His job was supervising the extremely complex legislation to create devolved assemblies for Scotland and Wales. The number of parliamentary days the legislation required was a post war record, but Smith finally saw it through. By the time devolution was killed off by referendums in the two countries, he had been promoted Secretary of State for Trade (as of 11 November 1978), making him the youngest member of the Cabinet, just after his fortieth birthday.

In opposition, Smith set a unique record as the only person to be re-elected to the Shadow Cabinet every year for three whole parliaments, until he became party leader. This was despite his threadbare record as in the early years, when much of his time was spent reviving his law practice. As Shadow Secretary for Trade, Prices and Consumer Protection 1979-82, during 1981, he made only two brief speeches to the Commons. In 1982, he did not speak at all until after he had been promoted to the post of Shadow Energy Secretary in December. In 1983, he qualified as a QC.

He became a much more significant figure in the Labour Party after the 1983 General Election and the subsequent resignation of Michael Foot. A boundary change in lthat election meant that he was returned as MP for Monklands East, with a majority of 9,799. He ran Roy Hattersley's campaign for the party leadership. Under pressure from unions like the GMB and AEUW, Neil Kinnock appointed him Employment spokesman in October 1983, then promoted him to be Trade and Industry spokesman a year later. His reputation as one of Labour's best parliamentary performers was established during the Westland crisis, an argument over the future of a Cornish-based helicopter firm, during which Smith played a large in forcing the resignation of Leon Brittan, his opposite number in the Cabinet.

After the 1987 election, Smith was appointed Shadow Chancellor, which made him deputy leader of the party in all but name, and the most obvious putative successor to Neil Kinnock. He was privately approached by some MPs who wanted him to run against Kinnock, but turned them away. Perhaps understandably, his relations with the leader were cool, and deteriorated until their inability to get on became an impediment to Labour's election chances. The origin of the problem was that Kinnock wanted to hurry ahead with a radical policy review, whilst Smith was reluctant to commit himself early, and moved only when he felt that the time was right.

An example of how nimbly he could move, when he thought it necessary, was during the Cabinet crisis which led to the resignation of the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, brought on by Margaret Thatcher's opposition to Europe's Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), the prelude to the euro. Labour had always opposed British membership of the ERM, but in the middle of a parliamentary speech in October 1989, Smith casually announced a new policy, which favoured joining if certain `prudent' conditions were met. The switch, which had not been agreed by the shadow cabinet, was adroitly timed to maximise the advantage of the Lawson-Thatcher rift. Smith was notably vague about what the `prudent' conditions for ERM membership might be.

His popularity in the party was undiminished by the political risk he took in January 1988, during a free vote on abortion. Smith and the Monklands West MP Tom Clarke, his Parliamentary neighbour, were the only members of the shadow cabinet to support a proposal to tighten the abortion law by reducing the upper time limit to 18 weeks.

Politically, he may have been assisted by the sympathy he attracted after he had suffered a heart attack at the age of 50, just after the 1988 annual party conference. It might have killed him but for the lucky chance that it hit him whilst he was in hospital, after being cajoled by Mrs Smith to go in for a check up. It took him out of politics for the latter part of 1988 and the early part of 1989. Whilst he was convalescing, he came second in the shadow cabinet election, topping the poll the next year. At the time, Smith appeared to be a cautious Shadow Chancellor, keen to make Labour acceptable to business, and anxious not to repeat the expensive manifesto commitments which had bedevilled Labour's 1987 election campaign. He imposed a rule that no shadow minister was allowed to enter into a new spending commitment. However, he did not demur from expensive promises to raise pensions and child benefit, and to pay for them, he proposed what amounted to a 19p in the pound income tax increase for the highest paid. This threatened increase, freely misinterpreted by the Tories and their supporting newspapers so that even the relatively low paid imagined that it applied to them, was possibly the single biggest cause of Labour's 1992 defeat.

Nevertheless, when Neil Kinnock retired, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Smith would be his successor, despite the mistrust he had aroused among `modernisers' like Tony Blair. He easily saw off his only challenger, Bryan Gould, an opponent of ERM, and was virtually able to choose his own deputy in Margaret Beckett.

His brief leadership was characterised by what one admirer called `masterly inactivity'. It frustrated the `modernisers', who wanted to push ahead with party reforms and with another drastic revision of party policy. Smith was not to be hurried. He displayed a fondness for setting up commissions and committees to mull over difficult issues. The most prominent was the Social Justice Commission chaired by Lord Borrie, which produced a long, erudite and widely read report on reforming welfare state, with little obvious impact. There were other commissions or committees handling topics like economic policy, electoral reform, and the role of the trade unions within the Labour Party.

On this last issue, Smith again displayed his capacity for moving quickly and decisively when he chose. The committee was examining the time-honoured method of using union `block votes' in the election of party leaders and selection of parliamentary candidates. With union full time officials around the table, there was no sign that it would produce any radical reform until Smith made a sudden appearance at its meeting in July 1993 to pronounce that nothing less than a one-member, one-vote system would do. At the time, Smith seemed to be heading towards certain defeat, because a rule change had to be agreed by the annual party conference, which was itself dominated by union block votes. Three of the four biggest unions were opposed to introducing OMOV. Yet Smith persisted, against the odds, cajoling and exhorting the leaders of the smaller unions and privately hinting that he would resign if he lost. In the end, the reform was agreed by a tiny majority at the party's annual conference in October 1993. It was possibly the single most important change to the Labour Party's rule book in its entire history, whose most obvious beneficiary was Tony Blair. John Smith, meanwhile, was hit by a second, and fatal heart attack in his London flat early in the morning of 12 May 1994.

Key books include: Andy McSmith, John Smith: A Life 1938-1994 (Mandarin, 1994); Gordon Brown & James Naughtie, John Smith, Life and Soul of the Party (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1994); Christopher Bryant (ed), John Smith, An Appreciation (Hodder & Stoughton 1994).