When he left the war cabinet in 1943 Greenwood found himself in the strange position of Leader of the Opposition to the government in which his party leader served as Deputy Prime Minister!
Arthur Greenwood - the most important Labour deputy of them all.
After the 1945
election, Attlee’s old rival Herbert Morrison became both party deputy and
Deputy PM too. John Prescott is the only other Labour deputy to be Deputy PM as
well. Morrison retained his position, being challenged twice by Nye Bevan but
winning easily on both occasions. He lost out in 1956. In an uncanny
repetition of the 1955 leadership election he was a poor third with Bevan second.
65-year-old James Griffiths was elected. He stood down in 1959 and was replaced
by an already seriously ill Bevan. In theory he held the position for a year.
In practice it was for just six months before he became too ill to carry out
his duties. Bevan died in 1960.
Herbert Morrison - one of only two deputies to also serve as Deputy PM. Incidentally, grandfather of Peter Mandelson.
The balance between
left and right was upset by Bevan’s death and was exacerbated when right-winger
George Brown was elected as the Welshman’s replacement, defeating the left
candidate Fred Lee and the rising star James Callaghan, though it took him a
second ballot to do so. He fended off challenges from the left from Barbara
Castle easily and Harold Wilson by a narrower margin.
Although he had many
problems with Brown when he became Prime Minister, Wilson adopted LBJ’s tent-pissing philosophy and for the
rest of his time in parliament urged no opposition to Brown– even after he
resigned from the Cabinet.
Brown lost his seat in
1970 and Roy Jenkins succeeded to the position with an easy first round victory
over Michael Foot and Fred Peart. Jenkins’ time as deputy was not an easy one.
Foot challenged again the next year, as did Tony Benn – making the first of
several bids for deputy or leader over the next 17 years. Jenkins narrowly
failed to win on the first ballot and picked up no votes at all in the second.
However, one-third of Benn’s backers failed to transfer to Foot
and Jenkins secured re-election in the run-off.
The strongly
pro-European Jenkins resigned after Labour decided to include a referendum on
the then Common Market in its next manifesto. Foot stood for a third year in succession,
as did Tony Crosland from the right but centrist ‘unity’ candidate Ted Short defeated
Foot in the run-off. He stood down shortly after Jim Callaghan became PM in
1976 and this time Michael Foot – after three previous attempts and a failed
leadership bid as well – finally won the post, beating Shirley Williams in a
straight fight.
After Foot’s election
as party leader in 1980, his defeated rival Denis Healey was elected unopposed
as Deputy, a year before the bitter and dramatic showdown with Tony Benn
referred to in the previous post which also covers all subsequent deputy
leadership elections up to and including Harriet Harman in 2007.
2015 Deputy Leader contenders
So to the current contest. Five candidates have
declared for this year’s election so far and an oddity is that with the
exception of Stella Creasy all are older than any of the leadership candidates.
This actually makes them more appealing to party voters as none of them could
be seen as overly-ambitious to challenge the leader should he or she fall into
difficulty. In any case, as we have seen, whenever a deputy has acted as an
acting leader they have failed to progress to the top job. Morrison, George
Brown and Margaret Beckett lost out in such circumstances, with Beckett even
losing her position as number two as well. Harriet Harman has been acting
leader twice but has never put her name forward for the top job on either
occasion.
With regard to age
considerations and looking ten years ahead to the end of the parliament elected
in 2020, the oldest candidate for deputy Ben Bradshaw will be pushing 65. Only
the youngest of the five declared so far – Stella Creasy, who would be 48 – could
be thought of as a potential future leadership contender, barring anyone
falling under buses and such like.
Regardless of whoever
is elected, this is a good thing for Labour, knowing that the number two in the
party hierarchy (if not in actual political clout) isn’t likely to be
undermining and plotting against their boss – something which hasn’t exactly
been always the case but has been generally so since elections were removed
from being the sole preserve of the MPs.
Ben Bradshaw
Bradshaw, 55 by the
time of the election has been an MP since 1997. A grammar school boy with real
life working experience, starting out as a reporter with the Exeter Express
& Echo then the Eastern Daily Press in his native Norwich. He subsequently
transferred to BBC Radio Devon before obtaining a post as Berlin correspondent
(he had studied German and taught English in Germany) for BBC Radio. He was
promoted to the prestigious ‘The World At One’ before becoming MP for Exeter.
Bradshaw therefore has
a long and distinguished career in broadcast and print journalism with no hint
of spaddery in his background. He held a number of junior governmental
positions. He is a strong advocate of LGBT rights, gaining a 100% rating by the
campaign group Stonewall. He joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport in 2009. He held the same brief for a short period
after the 2010 election defeat, losing it when he failed to gain election to
the Shadow Cabinet later that year.
Controversially, he is
one of a number of leading Labour politicians – Chris Bryant, Jim Murphy,
Gisela Stuart amongst others – to be a leading light in the Henry Jackson
Society, named after the late US Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a somewhat
ambivalent politician, aggressively hawkish on the Vietnam war but strongly
pro-Civil Rights at the same time. The society’s influential figures include
those not usually thought of as sympathetic to Labour such as the academics
Patrick Minford, Andrew Roberts and Roger Scruton, a slew of Tory MPs, UKIP’s
Douglas Carswell, and Ulster Unionist David Trimble.
In its favour is that
many of the right-wing members like David Davis & Carswell are sympathetic
to civil liberties (though others are certainly not – Nadine Dorries for
instance).
All this regardless,
it is not a good place for a Labour deputy leader to be and I expect much of
Bradshaw’s links to be a focus for debate in the months ahead.
Stella Creasy
While Bradshaw has a
comfortable-looking majority, Stella Creasy has a stonking one of 20,000+, in
her Walthamstow seat, well up on 2010, which means there would be no difficulty
for her in taking on the deputy’s task of nationwide travel not just on
official visits but to constituency parties as well.
Creasy is from the
2010 intake, daughter of academic Labour Party members, distantly related to
the aristocracy through her mother (and make no mistake, no matter how distant,
this will be a line of Tory attack if successful) and the journalist Polly
Toynbee.
Like Bradshaw she has
a Grammar School background, her early years being spent in first Manchester
then Colchester. She failed the 11+ and it was only the move south which
allowed her the chance to re-sit. She is herself opposed to selective
education. However she is yet another who has been immersed in party politics
and government since leaving university, working as a researcher for Douglas
Alexander and Charles Clarke (themselves both off the same production line).
But she has also shown
a willingness to get her hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of politics, serving
on Waltham Forest Council, campaigning against the excesses of payday loan
companies, and for the greater inclusion of women on banknotes. As a result of
the latter, she became the subject of violent threats against her on Twitter,
including rape, with one of her trolls jailed for eighteen weeks last year.
She has, what Denis
Healey famously described as a ‘hinterland’, a life beyond politics. For Healey
it was photography, music and painting. For Creasy it is music, even to the
extent of writing album sleeve notes for indie band The Wedding Present.
A rapidly written but
thoughtful, reflective piece in The Guardian 48 hours after the election defeat
demonstrated her understanding of what had happened without offering cheap
fixes for the future.
Many would have liked
her to challenge for the leadership itself.
Angela Eagle
Eagle, 54, is the
longest-serving of any contenders for leader of deputy, having been first
elected in 1992. Almost a quarter of a century in parliament before staking a
claim on a top position is almost unheard of these days.
Eagle is from a
working class family and has a comprehensive education. But like so many
others, her pre-Commons employment was exclusively political, working for a
major trade union as a press officer then parliamentary researcher.
Her 1992 victory saw
her become the first ever Labour MP for Wallasey. Her current majority is a
healthy five-figure one, more than four times greater than when first elected.
Famously, her sister Maria was elected in 1997 to provide the House of Commons
with its first ever twins.
She served as a junior
minster in the first two Blair administrations before being sacked – reputedly
in error. She was restored to government under Gordon Brown and was elected to
the Shadow Cabinet in 2010. She was the
MP subject to Cameron’s patronising “Calm Down Dear” shortly before becoming
Shadow Leader of the Commons, a position held throughout the remainder of the
parliament.
She too has a
‘hinterland.’ Her website says she is a former British U-18 chess champion and
represented both Lancashire and England before political demands took their toll
on her free time. She is a keen cricketer and has musical interests which
extend from The Pretenders to Barbra Streisand.
The big question mark
is whether someone who has been in parliament for 23 years, 13 of which were
under a Labour government, but never reached Cabinet status, is the right
person to undertake the campaigning and party morale-boosting role which
inevitably comes with the job of deputy.
Caroline Flint
The word ‘marmite’
could have been invented for the uber-Blairite Caroline Flint who will be
rising 54 by the time the internal election is completed. Her majority of just
under 10,000 in her Don Valley seat is healthy enough for her to take on the
role of deputy.
Educated at Twickenham
Girls School (which despite the name, was a comprehensive), she is a rare
non-Oxbridge candidate, having studied at UEA. She has worked outside of
politics with the former ILEA and Lambeth Council before becoming a political
researcher for the GMB prior to election in 1997.
She has never reached
Cabinet rank but served continuously at Minister of State level in Tony Blair’s
third administration in 2005 and after Gordon Brown’s takeover until resigning
in 2009, unhappy with the way Brown ran the government and suggesting that she
had been “female window dressing.” Not backwards at coming forwards she did a
photo-shoot for the Observer Woman magazine then later complained that her
looks were “a doubled-edged sword” – a position somewhat at odds with agreeing
to the photo-shoot.
She has been involved
in a number of controversies, including being caught up in the parliamentary expenses
scandal – though her repayment was the comparatively minor sum of £572.
Of much greater import was her admission on the floor of the Commons that she
hadn’t actually read the Lisbon Treaty, having only been “briefed” on it. At
the time she was the Minister responsible for implementing the same treaty –
the most important piece of EU legislation affecting the UK since Maastricht.
At the same time she remains popular with many of her
peers, assiduously works her constituency, and had all three of her children
(one from her husband’s former relationship) educated locally. Her husband is a
Doncaster councillor, important in having her ear kept to the local ground.
Tom Watson
Watson, 48 has been MP for West Bromwich since 2001
and currently has a majority of just under 7,000. Secondary educated and with a
non-Oxbridge background (Hull), Watson was, like many before and after, heavily
involved in Labour student politics. That led to an appointment as Labour’s
Youth Development officer before taking the tried and tested route of trade
union political officer prior to becoming an MP.
One of his early parliamentary interventions was to
recommend a further examination of drug policy including looking at legalisation and regulation. This is in sharp distinction to Flint for instance who went out
of her way when Home Office Minster to criminalise the use of ‘magic mushrooms’
against expert advice.
Despite his current image as an anti-establishment
figure Watson was in favour of the Iraq war and against an investigation into
it. Promotion to the Whips office followed and shortly afterwards he received
the unwanted accolade of ‘Top Toadie’ as part of a series on such, written by
Marina Hyde in The Guardian.
But Watson had already shown a flair for bringing an
individual touch to government. Apart from drugs policy he campaigned to change
organ donation laws and when promoted to Under-Secretary at the MOD was
instrumental in awarding posthumous pardons for over 300 soldiers shot for cowardice
in the First World War. Watson also has a long interest in the importance of
information technology, setting up his own blog as early as 2003 and when in
the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown, set up procedures to make non-personal
governmental data more widely available to the general public.
His reputation as a plotter came to the fore in 2006
when he was instrumental in signing a letter urging Tony Blair to resign in
order to avoid speculation about his future. Give the option of withdrawing his
signature or resigning he adopted the latter course. When it came to light that
Watson had travelled to Scotland to see Gordon Brown the day before the letter
to Blair he offered the disingenuous in the extreme excuse that he was just
dropping off a present for the Browns’ new baby!
In opposition Watson used his expertise to campaign
strongly against the Digital Economy Act but it was the phone hacking scandal
which established him as a serious player and first really brought him to
public attention. A vociferous and effective opponent of the Murdoch empire on
the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, his relentless harrying of the Murdochs
and Rebekah Brooks, did him no harm within the Labour Party or those sympathetic
to the victims (i.e. just about everyone). Famously, he labelled James Murdoch
as akin to a Mafia boss. This was not something the Murdochs were used to but
it was something they had to endure.
He wasn’t prepared to let it drop there either,
writing a book ‘Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of
Britain.’
He was promoted to Deputy Chair of the Labour Party in
2011 and campaign co-ordinator. He resigned from the latter position during a row
over the selection of a candidate for Falkirk West for the 2015 election when
the Unite union organised a mass expansion of constituency membership in favour
of Watson’s office manager who was later suspended by the party.
Watson’s reputation as a campaigning MP emerged again
when he became prominent in attempts to investigate the possible existence of a
paedophile network in parliament which had been protected at the highest level.
He suggested that a close aide to a former Prime Minister had been involved and
while he didn’t use parliamentary privilege to name names, few in the public
arena had little doubt as to the identities of either.
Watson works his constituency well. In the last
parliament he erupted when nine schools scheduled for new classrooms had their
funding withdrawn by describing then Education Secretary Michael Gove as a
“miserable pipsqueak of a man.” A view unlikely to lose him support within the
Labour Party.
He partially blamed the media for the break-up of his
marriage but anticipated his new partner Stephanie Peacock would join him in
the House of Commons when she contested the neighbouring constituency of
Halesowen and Rowley Regis which the Tories had gained from Labour by just
2,000 votes in 2010. However, she put on just a couple of hundred votes as the
Tories gained 800 more and their majority increased to 3,000
The view that one of the causes for the scale of the
Labour defeat can be attributed to Labour voters staying home may be one reason
for her surprise loss as turnout was down by 10% compared to 2010.
If Watson is elected then the Murdoch press will come
after him with a vengeance. It’s something he’s aware of and hopefully in a
position to deal with. It may in fact be a blessing in disguise. As deputy,
Watson may well draw the sting away from direct attacks on the actual leader.
He may find his most effective role as deputy leader
is to be a human shield for his boss, regardless of who that person is.
For what it's worth, my own first preference votes since the leadership and deputy elections have been opened up have been:
Leader
1983 Neil Kinnock
1988 Neil Kinnock
1992 John Smith
1994 Margaret Beckett
2007 N/A
2010 Ed Balls
Deputy
1981 John Silkin
1983 Roy Hattersley
1988 Roy Hattersley
1992 Margaret Beckett
1994 Margaret Beckett
2007 Peter Hain
Had ordinary party members been entitled to vote prior to 1981 my vote in both the 1976 & 1980 leadership elections would have gone to Michael Foot as it would have in the 1976 deputy election also. 1980 deputy is N/A
For what it's worth, my own first preference votes since the leadership and deputy elections have been opened up have been:
Leader
1983 Neil Kinnock
1988 Neil Kinnock
1992 John Smith
1994 Margaret Beckett
2007 N/A
2010 Ed Balls
Deputy
1981 John Silkin
1983 Roy Hattersley
1988 Roy Hattersley
1992 Margaret Beckett
1994 Margaret Beckett
2007 Peter Hain
Had ordinary party members been entitled to vote prior to 1981 my vote in both the 1976 & 1980 leadership elections would have gone to Michael Foot as it would have in the 1976 deputy election also. 1980 deputy is N/A
