Iconic late Labour leader Smith’s story carries warning for Starmer
Thirty years after he died of a heart attack in his London flat, on May 12, 1994, the Rt Hon John Smith – Leader of the Opposition, expected to be Labour’s first Prime Minister since James Callaghan – is to an extraordinary degree unheralded.
There was much emotion. Colleagues dabbed their eyes. BBC Scotland cleared its schedules for Smith’s funeral. He was even buried in the sacred sod of Iona; for years after, locals complained of tourists wearing a path through family plots as they sought out his headstone.
But there has never been a biography; no drama ever filmed about Smith’s life. His name has so faded that when, in December 2019 and at a Labour campaign-event in Morningside Parish Church, I told the woman beside me the building had hosted John Smith’s funeral, she stared. “John who?”
There are vested interests in the great forgetting. Had Smith lived, there would have been no New Labour; indeed, his Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, so despaired of his boss’s tack that he thought of quitting politics.
Tories, in turn, loathed how effortlessly Smith skewered them in the Commons, having John Major quite on the ropes by the time of his demise. And, to this day, Neil Kinnock devotees believe Smith’s Shadow Budget was central to their hero’s 1992 defeat.
Of fisherfolk descent, son of a bristly headmaster on Islay, Smith was born in 1938 at Dalmally, schooled in Ardrishaig and Dunoon, and joined the Labour Party at 17.
But his true apprenticeship was the debating scene at Glasgow University – then the hotbed of Gaitskell-supporting moderates. Smith studied law, became an Edinburgh advocate, was “blooded” in the hopelessly safe Tory seat of East Fife – he fought it twice – and entered Parliament in 1970 as MP for what was then North Lanarkshire and, from 1983, Monklands East.
He would do everything for this notoriously corrupt airt save from live in it, preferring leafy Morningside. But, in an era when the numpty-count among Scottish Labour MPS was high, Smith’s abilities shone – even if he was among Labour rebels who, in 1972, defied their whips and voted for Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community.
Declining Harold Wilson’s offer of Solicitor-general in February 1974 – Smith would not be sidelined as a Scots law-officer – he agreed in October to become Undersecretary of State for Energy. He was promoted to Minister of State. Then James Callaghan – whom he had endorsed – was elected PM and Smith became Minister of State at the Privy Council Office, working closely with Michael Foot.
The Labour veteran was now Leader of the House, and Smith, effectively, minister for delivering devolution, as newly resurgent Nationalists screamed through the keyholes. The North Lanarkshire MP’S adroit handling of new arrangements for Scotland and Wales – through what was, from April 5 1976, a hung Parliament – so impressed Callaghan that, in November 1978, he made Smith his Secretary of State for Trade – and the youngest member of the Cabinet.
Smith was thus fortunate to be shot of devolution when it all disintegrated in March 1979. But he and his colleagues subsequently roped Scottish Labour so fast to it, in principle, that Blair (who did not want it) could not axe the policy.
Smith was also notable for what, in 1981, he did not do – flee the hard Left with other moderates for the new Social Democratic Party.
Like Roy Hattersley, he stayed and waited for better days. By the new 1992 Parliament, Smith was one of the few surviving Labour MPS with ministerial experience and his election to the leadership was a formality. He had already survived a 1988 coronary – being in a hospital at the time – but The Sun eerily railed of the new Labour leader: “He’s fat, he’s 53, he’s had a heart attack and he’s taken on a stress-loaded job.”
Overnight, Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson were exiled. Young lieutenants like Blair and Gordon Brown grasped with foreboding that Smith had no intention of transforming Labour; no interest in appealing to aspirational voters like “Mondeo Man” and “Worcester Woman”.
Smith would but adjust it. He believed the prosperous should pay more taxes because they ought to. And, given how rapidly Major’s administration now disintegrated into division, sleaze and acrimony, Labour began to do very well at the polls and in by-elections.
But in 2007 Andrew Marr went too far in asserting that Smith “would have become Prime Minister. Had he done so, Britain would have had a traditionalist social democratic government, much closer to those of continental Europe, and our history would have been different”.
Smith had been at the very Cabinet table during the Winter of Discontent. His economic policies had not appealed in 1992, he had hollered for the calamitous European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and – a heavy drinker – he was not the nicest of men. Had he survived, the Tories would almost certainly have dumped Major for, say, Michael Heseltine, and transformed their prospects.
Now they hesitated; Labour, meanwhile, were lucky to hold Monklands East – at the by-election, the SNP slashed Smith’s five-digit 1992 majority to just 1,640 – and, by the time the Conservatives grasped the scale of the oncoming storm, it was too late. Blair’s 1997 Commons majority was an astounding 179.
Smith had not, indeed, sealed the deal. Three decades on, are we so sure the latest Labour leader has sealed it either?