AFTER SMITH / 3: Labour's lost leader: Not a Gaitskell, but perhaps an Attlee, says Ben Pimlott

WHAT were you doing when you heard the news about John Smith? Most people this weekend can answer that question. Many will be able to for the rest of their lives - much as an earlier generation still recalls the shock of Kennedy's assassination. That the death of a political leader out of office should have been such an event is a symptom of the unhappy state of British politics. It is also a tribute to a leader whom people of all opinions and classes warmed to, had confidence in, felt they could trust.

The tragedy of John Smith's death is partly to do with what he might have achieved, rather than what he did. There is a sense of being cheated: a feeling that here was a man with the intelligence, integrity, steel but also - vitally - the psychological balance to have made a great prime minister, who would have restored the office to its proper dignity and shown that it is not necessary to be megalomaniac or shallow to hold supreme power.

Smith was leader of his party for just 22 months - a shorter period than any predecessor apart from Arthur Henderson, who took over from Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 and then lost his seat in the ensuing general election. He is the sixth Labour leader never to have become prime minister. But he is the only one, apart from George Lansbury, who led the minuscule PLP in the early 1930s and resigned just before the 1935 poll, never to have led his party into a general election.

Given such a short period at the helm, it is not surprising that his concrete achievements as leader should be few. Elected leader after the election, he distinguished himself in his handling of Maastricht. His most important success was over one member one vote - an issue that had dogged, depressed and debilitated the Labour Party for 15 years or more, and on which his predecessor had been forced to accept an unhappy compromise.

It was a gamble: his hair's-breadth victory at last year's party conference vindicated his stand, and symbolised the end of Labour's long road back to respectability. Yet his achievement lay in consolidating the work of his predecessor, rather than in striking out in a new direction. Credit for the basic work of restoring the party to sanity still belongs to Neil Kinnock.

Judged by immediate results, Smith's record is not a remarkable one. What he achieved was intangible: he made Labour seem, for the first time since the 1970s, a party most people would trust in government. That remains his legacy.

Since his death, he has been compared with Hugh Gaitskell - who died suddenly at an almost identical age, and at a comparable moment in his party's history. In fact, they were quite different political personalities. Both were men of principle and courage. In Gaitskell's case, however, there were contrasting pictures. To his friends, Gaitskell seemed a man of ideas and a visionary leader; to his enemies - and there were many - he seemed an elitist prig.

Smith was more of a piece. His image was indistinguishable from the reality, and his cleverness - and self-confidence - were homespun. For all his forensic lawyer's skills, nobody could accuse him of being an intellectual.

What he offered was a combination of shrewd management and generous political and personal style. Unlike Gaitskell, he was not arrogant or cliquish. He was comfortable enough with himself, and his own opinions, to be able to listen to those of others and to appreciate other points of view. He was the least paranoid leader the Labour Party - or any party - has had in modern times. He could combine intimacy with his friends with an olive branch to his enemies. There was no 'Hampstead Set' or other exclusive club of cronies, similar to those who kept Gaitskell company. Grumpier people, like John Prescott, were brought in from the cold.

Smith created space to think, talk and air grievances. 'It was wonderful not to have the Thought Police,' as one Walworth Road official puts it. When Gaitskell died, Bevanites who expressed sympathy did so through gritted teeth. By contrast, some of the most moving tributes for John Smith have come from left-wingers. Smith was equally relaxed with those outside the party, and he did much to reduce the instinctive horror of a Labour government that existed in the City.

There were also gaps. It is tempting to look back at a man struck down in his prime through rose-tinted spectacles - as happened both with Gaitskell and, for a time, with Kennedy. Smith was certainly not beyond criticism. The most frequent point made against him - oddly, for the leader of a party that had lost four elections in a row - was complacency. He seemed content to allow the Government to dig its own grave, and saw too little value in offering a radical alternative.

Scarred by his experience as Shadow Chancellor during the 1992 election, he showed a deep reluctance to make any policy suggestions that might involve increases in public expenditure. At this moment of mid-term government disarray, his methods seemed to reap electoral results. But there have been no great policy innovations associated with his leadership, and most commentators agreed that the politician Labour had most to thank for its local election gains was John Major. Gaitskell left a Labour Party that was a cauldron of policy debate. By comparison - though it would be unfair to blame Smith too much for this - today's party has seemed ideologically uncertain.

Yet - and it is on this that his place in history rests - he turned Labour from a party on the margins of British political life to one that is now firmly back in the mainstream, and one that can claim to have recaptured the consensus. 'Neil wanted to win,' as one member of the Shadow Cabinet puts it. 'John knew he was going to.'

If not Gaitskell, who in Labour's history does he most resemble? Conceivably the past leader he was most like is Clement Attlee - a man of prosaic opinions, imperviousness to fashion, private virtue, concern for the unprivileged, love of the Labour movement and - as his time as premier demonstrated - outstanding judgement, who travelled great distances by never looking too far ahead.