Behind the news: How political parties choose their leaders
The idea of a political party holding an election to select a chief is a surprisingly recent innovation. RICHARD TOYE traces how the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have gone from muddling through to involving members in this most crucial decision
The battle to succeed Theresa May as Conservative party leader and as Britain’s prime minister is set to be reaching its conclusion as this issue of BBC History Magazine is published. A convoluted process, which began with MPs whittling the contenders down to two names to be put to ordinary party members, has been part beauty contest and part Westminster knife fight. It is the latest – and perhaps even the most brutal – in a sequence of Tory party leadership contests that has periodically gripped the political classes’ collective imagination since the 1960s.
Yet although choosing party leaders via an election process that involves the membership is now a regular feature of British political life, the way in which this came about was messy and haphazard. The three main national parties – the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats – have all arrived at their different methods by different routes and over different timeframes.
In the 19th century, the conventions and assumptions surrounding political parties were very different to today. Parties were far less centralised, and at the same time their leaders in parliament were not expected to be accountable to ordinary Liberals or Conservatives. There were forms of mass political involvement, for example, via the National Liberal Federation (founded 1877) or the Tory Primrose League (founded 1883). But there was absolutely no question of these bodies actually selecting their respective parties’ national leaders. Lord Salisbury, Conservative prime minister for three spells between 1885 and 1902, would have been baffled and horrified at the idea that he should have earned his position by performing on some sort of hustings in front of party activists.
Rather, party leadership was determined by the capacity of a politician to command the confidence of his colleagues in parliament – that is, to reconcile competing factions and to herd wayward backbenchers into acting as a coherent group of supporters. Yet popular pressure could play a role. In the run-up to the 1880 election, WE Gladstone, who had nominally retired from the leadership of the Liberals, made a series of powerful speeches (the ‘Midlothian Campaign’) that gripped the country and was
credited with bringing the party back to power. Queen Victoria would have much preferred that either Lord Hartington or Lord Granville, who shared the formal leadership between them, become prime minister, but the strength of Gladstone’s position was such that she had no choice but to ask him to form a government. His renewed position at the head of the party, then, was established and enabled at the elite level, but it rested on his popularity and influence within the country as a whole.
It was the birth of the Labour party that, in the longer run, changed expectations of how leaders should be chosen, by being the first party to use a formal democratic process. With its breakthrough in 1906, when it secured 29 MPs, Keir Hardie was narrowly elected as the first chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Although he regarded the job as “a trial and a torment” and served only until the end of the following year, he is now regarded as Labour’s first leader. Another closely fought battle took place in 1922, after Labour emerged as the official opposition for the first time. Ramsay MacDonald saw off JR Clynes, a less colourful figure who had been chairman in the previous parliamentary session. MacDonald was thus in position to become Labour’s first prime minister when the Conservatives lost their majority after Stanley Baldwin called a snap general election in 1923.
Until 1981, in theory, the PLP retained the right to elect the leader each year during periods when the party was out of power. In fact, there were only eight such contests. One
of the most significant of these took place in 1935, when Clement Attlee was chosen by fellow MPs, who recognised the sterling efforts he had made as deputy and then acting leader over the previous four years. Had the decision been left to party members, they might well have favoured one of Attlee’s better-known rivals, Arthur Greenwood or Herbert Morrison, in which case Labour’s postwar history could have been very different.
At this time, would-be Conservative leaders did not compete openly for the post but rather ‘emerged’ as the result of informal soundings. In 1937, Neville Chamberlain was regarded as Baldwin’s heir apparent and succeeded him as prime minister. There was a special meeting at London’s Caxton Hall to elect him formally to the leadership of the party. The motion, which was approved by acclamation, was seconded by Winston Churchill.
Out of the public eye
The avoidance of undignified public contests was the chief advantage of this method, but in 1963 the choice of the Earl of Home to succeed Harold Macmillan threatened to bring the process into disrepute. Home, the foreign secretary at the time, triumphed on the basis of Macmillan’s recommendation to the Queen. This was at the expense of RA ‘Rab’ Butler and Viscount Hailsham, both of whom might have been better equipped to tackle the challenge posed by Labour’s dynamic new leader, Harold Wilson.
A system of elections by MPs was instituted in 1965 and the modernising Edward Heath was the first victor. But it was these same rules that allowed Margaret Thatcher to bring him down a decade later, and she in turn fell victim to them in 1990. Five years after that, Thatcher’s successor, John Major, called the bluff of his critics by calling and winning a leadership election himself. However, it was not
enough a election over scandal. electoral vote, landslide The John constituency first to was Labour college Pardoe solve loss party the at his Liberals, system followed to in the parties broader involve 1976 polls which following when suit 30 at problems its per the with gave membership David cent, hands the MPs the and and Steel creation Jeremy of 30 Tony he affiliated was per in soon a Thorpe cent of Blair. chosen leadership an suffered unions of the
40 and Member break per then the cent. One John power This Vote’ Smith, of arrangement, leftwing system was replaced in unions, 1993. which by Although its elected a long-term so-called Neil intended ‘One impact Kinnock to has clash been between to empower MPs and constituency party members activists when – as Owen seen Smith in the unsuccessfully Similarly, the challenged Conservative Jeremy party’s Corbyn 1998 in reforms 2016. led to the election of a leader, Iain Duncan-Smith, who was to the taste of radical party activists rather than to the majority of
MPs. He didn’t last long. Now Britain faces the prospect of a prime minister being chosen, ultimately, by Tory members who appear to be in no mood for any form of compromise with the EU. How it turns out remains to be seen.
But internal democracy isn’t always necessary for a modern party to be successful. The Brexit Party does not have any members, only “registered supporters”. Nigel Farage simply created it and installed himself as leader. Perhaps, if we enter a new age of populism, the 2019 Conservative party leadership contest will come to seem as quaint as the methods by which the politicians of the
Victorian era climbed to the top of the greasy pole.