What makes a great Labour leader – and does Starmer have what it takes?

If Keir Starmer wins on 4 July, he will be only the seventh Labour prime minister in the party’s history. Each of his predecessors has brought their own character to the office. Some old hands compare Starmer to Clement Attlee, an uncharismatic and undemonstrative leader with a hidden steeliness. Starmer himself has said how much he admired Harold Wilson – although I assumed that was a way of identifying with an election winner at a time when he didn’t want to go over the top in praising Tony Blair.

Starmer has shed his inhibitions in posing as the heir to Blair now. He has, perhaps, less in common with the avuncular cheerfulness of “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, or indeed with the sombre solidity of Gordon Brown.

But there is one name that is not on the list that still provokes lively debate about what makes a great Labour leader – that of John Smith, who died 30 years ago this month, the “best Labour prime minister we never had”.

In a new book to mark this anniversary, John Smith: Old Labour’s Last Hurrah?, I have contributed a chapter about the debate between Smith and the “modernisers”, led by Tony Blair, about the way forward for Labour – a debate that continues to this day.

Starmer has moved so quickly and so dramatically from the platform on which he was elected leader that he is often considered to be following the Blair doctrine in all things, but there are many respects in which Starmer is more like Smith.

Starmer is more respectful of traditional Labour values and presents himself as a unifying leader, despite his ruthlessness behind the scenes in despatching Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, and Corbyn himself, to the outer darkness. Whereas Blair defined himself against the Labour Party, Starmer has simply redefined the Labour tradition in which he stands.

Blair liked Smith personally; he admired Smith’s parliamentary skills; but he thought Smith was too passive. Blair said in his memoir that there are three types of Labour: “Old-fashioned Labour, which could never win; modernised Labour, which could win and keep winning, which was my ambition from the outset; and plain Labour, which could win once, but essentially as a reaction to an unpopular Conservative government.”

He thought Smith was “plain Labour”, possibly with a touch of “old-fashioned” about him. He criticised Smith for proposing, as shadow chancellor, higher taxes for those earning more than £30,000 a year in the “shadow budget” before the 1992 election.

Blair’s view was simple: in 1992 Labour promised to put up taxes on the better-off and lost. In 1997 New Labour promised no rise in income tax and won.

But because Blair won by such a large margin in 1997, it was obvious in hindsight that Labour need not have been so cautious and could have still won.

open image in gallery

The same debate takes place in the Labour Party before every election: that the leader should make “bolder” promises, even at the cost of putting off a few potential voters, in order to win a mandate for “radical” change. Otherwise, it is said, Labour risks being just a continuation of the Conservative government with different faces. However, those who look back wistfully on Smith as representing a politics that is “more Labour” can do so only in hindsight. They overlook the fact that Blair could not be sure that he would win. The opinion polls had got it wrong in 1992 and so few Labour supporters took victory for granted at the time. It was only afterwards that the “if only” school of thought took hold – mostly some time afterwards, as disappointment with Blair’s foreign policy grew.

The acid test of the difference between the Smith view and the Blair view was the issue of higher taxes on the better off. Despite the widely held view that Smith’s shadow budget had helped lose Labour the 1992 election, he still intended as leader to impose higher taxes on the better-off. The lesson he took from his 1992 shadow budget was simply that he had planned to hit people at too low a level, at £30,000 a year; for the next election, he and his shadow chancellor Gordon Brown shared the assumption that a higher tax rate would apply to annual incomes over something like £70,000 to £100,000.

Blair, however, took a sharply different view, and insisted that Labour should promise not to raise any rates of income tax at all. When Ed Balls, Brown’s adviser, suggested in a pre-election meeting that they could responsibly propose a 50p rate on incomes over £100,000 a year, Blair told him to “wash your mouth out”.

Blair thought that a significant part of the electorate would regard such a tax as confiscatory, even if it fell on a tiny minority of taxpayers, and would fear that it would be extended lower down the income scale.

There were three other important changes that Blair made when he became leader after Smith’s death in 1994, which Smith would not have. Blair shifted to a more sceptical policy on the European single currency; he insisted on referendums before legislating for Scottish and Welsh devolution; and he in effect changed the name of the party to New Labour.

open image in gallery

Under Smith, Labour had been in favour of joining the single currency in principle – indeed Smith opposed the opt-out secured by John Major in the Maastricht Treaty that allowed the UK to choose whether or not to take part. Smith thought that Britain should join the currency when it was launched. Soon after Blair became leader, he said that the case for joining depended on whether the British and continental economies had converged sufficiently, and Robin Cook, his shadow foreign secretary, said it was “unlikely” that the UK would be in the first wave.

On devolution, we can be more sure that Smith would have taken a different course. Blair decided that referendums would help get the legislation through the House of Lords, where Labour did not have a majority. Smith, who was the minister who had taken the legislation for devolution through parliament in the Callaghan government, might have thought he knew better. David Ward, John Smith’s head of policy, said: “I don’t think John would have been persuaded and his instinct would have been to make a clear manifesto commitment that would give a Labour government all the mandate it required to act on both Scottish and Welsh devolution.”

Nor would Smith have entertained the idea of rebranding the party “New Labour”. He was suspicious of marketing, and proud of Labour history and Labour values.

How much these changes helped win votes for Labour in 1997 is a question that was lost in the scale of Blair’s landslide, but it is still relevant to the debate about how to win a second election.

When it is said that Smith would have kept Britain out of the Iraq war in 2003, the question is not so much whether he would have joined the US invasion – and Ward said, “I am confident he would not have” – but whether Smith would have won the second election in 2001 or 2002.

open image in gallery

A Smith government with a small majority could have got into trouble over his enthusiasm for Scottish devolution, or for joining the euro, or for any of a number of other policies that Blair jettisoned. However, we are now deep into the realms of hypothetical history, buttressed by the benefit of hindsight.

The important question for politics today is where Keir Starmer stands in this debate. He seems to have started his leadership in one position and is now in a very different one. On the issue of tax, he stood for the leadership on a promise to “increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners”. Now, he and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, have more or less ruled out increases in income tax, national insurance or corporation tax.

On Friday, two days after the election was called, Starmer told Times Radio that the only tax rises under a Labour government would be the ones already spelt out: VAT on school fees, a higher windfall tax on oil and gas and more tax on non-doms and private equity funds. “Where there are tax rises, we have set out what they will be and what the money will be spent on.”

In many ways, Starmer has set out his own “third way” between Blair and Smith, but on the crucial question of tax, he seems to lean towards Blair. Which seems entirely sensible to me. When Starmer was accused, at the launch of Labour’s 2024 election pledge card, of merely “copying” Blair’s gimmicks and his shirtsleeves style, he replied: “The first thing I’d say about Tony Blair, rather than whether he took his tie off, is that he won three elections in a row.”

Adapted from John Rentoul’s chapter in ‘John Smith: Old Labour’s Last Hurrah?’, edited by Kevin Hickston, published to mark the 30th anniversary of Smith’s death this month