Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But all of this would only be possible, Benn said, if the next government passed three emergency bills within the first month. First, ‘within a matter of days’, they must push through an Industry Bill to ‘extend common ownership, to control capital movement and to provide for industrial democracy’. Next, ‘within a matter of weeks’, they must pass a bill to take back all the powers ceded to Brussels, which would mean leaving the Common Market. Finally, because neither of those bills would get through the House of Lords, they must pass a third bill to abolish the second chamber. ‘We shall have to do it’, Benn said, ‘by creating a thousand peers and then abolishing the peerage at the time that the Bill goes through.’ The capitalist press would accuse them of setting up an elective dictatorship. But Labour could never govern ‘if it only has control of half of Parliament’. ‘Comrades,’ he said grandly, ‘this is the very least we must do!’26

  In much of the hall the reaction to Benn’s speech was unbridled ecstasy. When he reached the bit about abolishing the House of Lords, the ‘roars of approval’ were so loud that he struggled to be heard. But most of his fellow MPs simply gaped in horror. As Denis Healey mordantly remarked, Benn talked of restoring capital controls ‘within a matter of days’; yet if he ever got the chance to put his plan into effect, capital would be gone within hours. ‘Some said flatly – although not for attribution – that Mr Benn must have gone over the edge,’ wrote the journalist Fred Emery. ‘Others were unprintable, angry that through his demagogy he had nullified the party’s earnest attempt to open proceedings by trying to get itself taken seriously.’ The Mirror warned its readers that his programme would be ‘physically, politically and democratically impossible WITHIN MONTHS, LET ALONE DAYS’, while the Express thought ‘he would be far more at home in a Polish Politburo than a British Government’. To Benn, though, the papers were being ‘hysterical’. In his mind he had been positively ‘prime ministerial’.27

  That evening, the Gang of Three spoke at a meeting organized by the right-wing Campaign for Labour Victory. All three were in combative form, but none more so than Shirley Williams. Benn, she said, was living in a ‘dream world’. Listing his three bills, she said witheringly: ‘And all this would be done in a couple of weeks! I wonder why Tony was so unambitious. After all, it took God only six days to make the world.’ There was some heckling at that, but she was no longer in the mood to pull her punches:

  There are too many good Labour members who are frightened to go to their local party meetings because they are frightened of being shouted at or abused or kept down … It is not easy if you are an elderly woman or a mother with young children or a man coming off the night shift to go along and be bawled down and abused and be told you are just a bloody Tory …

  I was brought up as a youngster to learn about fascism. My parents fought against fascism, and they were both on the Gestapo blacklist, so I know something about it. But there can be fascism of the left as well as fascism of the right …

  Too many good men and women in this party have remained silent. Well, the time has come when you had better stick your heads up and come over the parapet, because if you do not start to fight now, you will not have a party that is worth having.

  Afterwards, in Williams’s hotel room, the Gang of Three and their friends gathered to discuss the day’s events. The evening news flickered in the corner: there was Benn, making his promises; there were the activists, cheering him to the rafters. As they watched, their mood darkened. By the time the meeting broke up, some were talking about leaving the party.28

  The decisive day was Wednesday 1 October, which went down as one of the most extraordinary in the Labour Party’s history. It began with a debate about Britain’s future in Europe. The left’s position was that a Labour government must get out immediately, without wasting time on a referendum. When Owen stepped up to make the case for remaining, some delegates hissed him. But he was not deterred. It would be a ‘constitutional outrage’, he said passionately, ‘first to go to the British people and let them decide in 1975 and now not even to give the British people a chance to determine their own destiny’. As he stepped down there was a chorus of boos. Moments later, his front-bench colleague Peter Shore mounted the rostrum. His speech was much more to the activists’ liking. ‘At last’, Shore said dramatically, ‘the wraps have dropped from people’s eyes.’ There was no need for another referendum, since Britain’s entry into the Common Market had been ‘a rape of the British people, and of the British Parliament and the rights of our constitution’. A rape of the British people! That was the activists’ kind of talk. And the result was even better than the left had hoped: 5 million votes for coming out, just 2 million against. Benn thought it ‘a fantastic victory’.

  Then the conference turned to mandatory reselection. From the rostrum, Benn’s former Parliamentary Private Secretary, Joe Ashton, made a last, desperate appeal, begging the activists not to drive their own MPs away. ‘If Roy Jenkins wanted to form a party of twenty-five sacked MPs now, in this Parliament,’ he said, ‘they could be in business in six months.’ ‘No!’ came the cries from the floor. Some delegates began a slow handclap: when Ashton finished, it was to a torrent of boos. Benn thought his old friend’s speech ‘disgraceful’. The delegates agreed. A few moments later, mandatory reselection passed. ‘The Conference nearly went berserk,’ Benn wrote happily.

  Next on the agenda was control of the manifesto, a subject that had long been dear to Benn’s heart. ‘All the damned-up bitterness welled up,’ wrote Fred Emery, who watched in disbelief as Benn launched into a long litany of Callaghan’s alleged betrayals. ‘Reflation of public sector service spending: ruled out! Substantial cut in arms expenditure: ruled out! The immediate introduction of a wealth tax: ruled out! The imposition of selective import controls: ruled out!’ On the platform, Callaghan, visibly furious, shook his head and mouthed: ‘It’s not true. That’s a lie.’ Amid uproar on the floor, the conference voted on a motion to hand control to the National Executive. This time the moderates managed to eke out a victory, prevailing by 3.6 million votes to 3.5 million.

  But Benn was not downhearted. Already he was looking forward to the next item on the agenda: the rules for electing the next Labour leader. After so many months of bickering, everybody knew this would be very close. It was, but after yet another nail-biting result – 3.6 million to 3.5 million once again – the delegates approved the principle of an electoral college. On television, the picture showed some punching the air, others jabbing their fingers at the MPs, one or two literally dancing with glee. Benn, not surprisingly, was thrilled. ‘The left went crazy with delight,’ wrote John Golding, but ‘there was utter dismay on the faces of the moderates and most MPs’. He glanced at Healey, who looked completely ‘shell-shocked’. Callaghan just sat there, grim-faced. It was, thought Owen, ‘an awful day’. ‘It is a day of total anarchy’, said Rodgers afterwards, ‘and assures 13 years of Tory rule.’29

  But then came the twist. The party might have voted for an electoral college; but which electoral college? First the conference considered giving the MPs, the unions and the activists 33 per cent each. But the moderate unions voted no, so that failed. Then came a second motion, giving the unions 50 per cent and splitting the rest between the MPs and the constituencies. By the narrowest of margins – 3.55 million votes to 3.49 million – that failed, too. So the party was now in the bizarre position of having approved an electoral college in principle while rejecting two possible versions in practice. ‘Constituency party representatives howled,’ reported the Mirror. ‘One man hurled his papers on the floor and jumped on them.’ Meanwhile, ‘Mr Callaghan gave a broad grin and an approving laugh.’

  All was chaos, all was muddle. It could scarcely have been a worse advertisement for the Labour Party as a party of government. But more chaos followed overnight. At a hastily arranged evening meeting, Benn and his allies on the National Executive decided to back a formula that gave 40 per cent to the MPs and 30 per cent each to the
activists and the unions. But after another meeting at midnight in the Imperial Hotel bar, the CLPD decided that this was a ‘terrible sell-out’ and sent Benn’s old special adviser Frances Morrell to tell him that the unions should get 40 per cent, not the MPs. By his own account, she burst into his bedroom and harangued him while he sat there in his underpants, an odd scene by any standards. Unfortunately, when the National Executive met over breakfast the next morning, Callaghan was having none of it. If this was really what they wanted, he said, he would resign within weeks and let the MPs choose their own leader. Benn said that would be a disgrace. ‘Well,’ Callaghan snapped, ‘I tell you that the Parliamentary Party will never accept a Leader foisted upon them. I’ll tell you something else, they will never have Tony Benn foisted upon them.’30

  On this cheerful note, Callaghan, Benn and their colleagues made their way into the hall for the last day. This time the delegates began by voting for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the closure of all American air bases on British soil. Then they returned to the question of the leadership, considering the National Executive’s hastily revised plan for a 40–30–30 split in the unions’ favour. Once again the activists and left-wing unions were largely in favour, the MPs and moderate unions largely against. But the unrivalled star of the debate, whose intervention became a staple of documentaries about the party’s ordeal, was the maverick Staffordshire MP Andrew Faulds. An RSC-trained actor with a magnificent Victorian beard, he did not hold his own activists in high regard. ‘I represent the true Labour Party in Smethwick,’ he began, ‘not the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, nor the militant Trots, who have infiltrated so many constituency parties as you know!’ At that, there were roars of protest from the floor. ‘Madam Chairman, the baying of the beast betrays its presence!’ Faulds roared. ‘You can hear them!’

  In the end, the chairman had to cut off Faulds’s microphone, partly because he was clearly out to provoke the beast, but also because he launched into a personal attack on Tony Benn for ‘welching’ on his own government. But his intervention set the seal on what had been an extraordinary few days. In a ludicrously bathetic ending, the moderate unions again rejected the National Executive’s electoral college, which meant muddle had given way to deadlock. At last, David Basnett of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU) suggested that they thrash it out at a special conference the following January. ‘Another day of feud and fury,’ sighed the Mirror. ‘After the events of this week, the astonishing thing about the leadership of the Labour Party will not be the new method of election but that anyone should want the job.’31

  Still, the left had good reason to celebrate as the conference came to an end. After so long in the wilderness, they had finally enjoyed a week of resplendent victory. After the traditional rendition of ‘The Red Flag’, some stayed behind to sing the ‘Internationale’, their clenched fists raised. For Tony Benn, too, it had been a week of pure ecstasy. It was a ‘watershed’, he wrote, that would change ‘the future of British politics’. He was aware, of course, that the headlines had been appalling. But he knew why:

  The fact is that last week at Blackpool we really pulverised the Tories by the strength and force of our alternative policy. Nobody is going to tell me that Mrs Thatcher is frightened of Shirley Williams or Bill Rodgers or Jim Callaghan, of Denis Healey or Peter Shore. But they are transfixed by the thought that there might be a radical Labour Government.32

  In reality, Mrs Thatcher’s aides were delighted by what she called ‘Labour’s Orwellian nightmare of the Left’. And to the newspapers it seemed a debacle unprecedented in modern political history. ‘LABOUR CHAOS’, said the Mirror. ‘LABOUR ANARCHY’, said the Express. Both papers, despite their different perspectives, thought Labour had crossed a line. The Express, wiping away crocodile tears, declared that ‘the Labour Party as we and our fathers have known it, the Party of MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson; the moderate Party of social democracy as all, even its opponents, have respected it, was killed yesterday and consigned to the dustheap of history.’ The Mirror was, if anything, even bleaker. The ‘lunacy of the left’, it said, had ‘inflamed delegates into a mood of political madness’, while Benn had made promises with a ‘cynicism so blatant as to turn the stomachs of the mass of decent Labour supporters’. In the meantime, ‘Mrs Thatcher might as well cancel her own conference at Brighton next week. Blackpool is doing the job for her.’33

  In the broadsheets the mood was one of utter horror. For the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, the conference marked the triumph of the ‘lumpen polytechnic’ – a phrase which brought a storm of letters from polytechnic lecturers over the next few days. ‘Political liberty is now at threat in Britain,’ he wrote gloomily, ‘for I cannot feel confident that it would long survive the coming to power of the people who have taken hold of the Labour Party.’ The Times was even more apocalyptic, printing an extraordinary editorial entitled ‘The Dark Side of Britain’. Blackpool, it said, had been ‘as remote from ordinary reality as a planet of lunatics’, while Labour had succumbed to a blend of ‘resentment, of phantasy, of paranoid suspicion, of hysteria, of hatred … of hypocrisy and of an engulfing dark tide of preposterous zeal such as we have not seen in Britain since the seventeenth century’. If it ever gained power, it would turn Britain into a ‘socialist state’ closer to ‘the countries of eastern Europe than to anything known among the advanced industrial countries of the West’. Yet The Times thought Labour’s agony was merely a symptom of a deeper sickness: ‘the damage that has already been done to Britain by a progressive social, political and economic decline. As a sign that is alarming; as a portent it is terrifying.’34

  The Gang of Three left Blackpool in a state of near-total despair. No longer could they delude themselves that this was merely the darkest hour before the dawn; no dawn seemed remotely likely. For Rodgers and Williams, the thought of leaving a party they loved was almost physically painful. But Owen, always more impulsive, was ready to go. He was wary of any deal with Jenkins, but the more he thought about it, the more tempting a new party seemed. If he flinched now, he told a friend:

  all my life I will know there was a time in 1981 when perhaps had we had the courage, the vision; had we been prepared to break out, cut loose and accept being called traitors, things just might have been different. Britain just might have pulled itself up by its own collective will and common sense if it had just been given the chance. Who knows?35

  But before Owen could make his decision public, there was a twist. When, on that last acrimonious morning, Callaghan had threatened to resign so that his fellow MPs could pick the next Labour leader, he had not been joking. As he remarked to John Golding at the end of the conference, ‘there are better things to do’. Almost two weeks later, on the afternoon of Wednesday 15th, he announced that he was off. Nobody was particularly surprised. By now even his opposite number thought he had been hard done by. ‘Jim looks a different man … so relieved,’ Mrs Thatcher confided to Callaghan’s old friend Helmut Schmidt a couple of weeks later. ‘I feel a little sorry for Jim,’ Schmidt said. ‘Well so do I,’ Mrs Thatcher agreed; ‘he’s such a nice man.’ ‘I don’t know whether you know’, Schmidt said, ‘he is talking about you with a great amount of respect, if he talks to me anyway.’ If Benn had been listening, it would have confirmed all his suspicions.36

  Would Benn stand? Only two months earlier, he had drawn up a rough campaign strategy. But by resigning so suddenly, Callaghan had made things very difficult. Not only had Benn said many times that the old system was illegitimate, but he knew perfectly well that most of his colleagues detested him. Only a few days later, he got into a blazing row in the Commons tea room with a group of Labour MPs, some ‘white with anger’, others calling him a hypocrite to his face. ‘They were having a collective nervous breakdown,’ Benn wrote scornfully. ‘They are in a state of panic, and the hatred was so strong that I became absolutely persuaded that this was not a Party I would ever be invited to lead, and nor could I lead it.’


  After Blackpool, few people thought the Gang of Three could remain in the Labour Party. But in this splendidly literary cartoon for the Daily Telegraph (14 October 1980), Nicholas Garland pictures them as the ‘dauntless Three’ in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s poem ‘Horatius’ (1842), defending the bridge into Rome against Tony Benn’s invading horde.

  Yet although Benn felt ‘such an outcast’ that he could barely face going into the Commons, he itched to throw his hat into the ring. Alas, his allies told him it was hopeless. The hard-left Audrey Wise thought Callaghan ‘had no business to resign as leader’, while Chris Mullin complained that Labour MPs were being ‘very divisive’ by going ahead with an election. But since the MPs were never going to back down, the Bennites knew the game was up. In a meeting at his Holland Park house, they advised him to stay out of the contest and wait for a ‘real’ election, fought on their new rules. Benn clearly found this hard to take, but he had no choice. ‘Well, in that case, because I accept your judgement,’ he said glumly, ‘let me start with the real election campaign as soon as I can.’37

  No Benn, then. So who would win? The overwhelming favourite was obviously Denis Healey. The Shadow Industry Secretary, John Silkin, rich and immensely ambitious, announced that he would stand, too. But Healey’s only really heavyweight rival was the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Peter Shore. Angular and cerebral, with a relatively low profile outside Westminster, Shore was a brilliant speaker, particularly when savaging his great bogeyman, the Common Market. He was fervently attached to interventionist economic policies, which endeared him to the left, but he was also hawkish to the point of nationalism, which pleased the right. Most predictions had Healey and Shore as the final two. But few seriously doubted that the former would win comfortably.38