Notebook
Brighton
It was hardly surprising, but with all the fuss about the deputy leadership the Labour Party quite forgot that under the new rules it was supposed also to elect its leader. They repaired the oversight on Tuesday morning, when Michael Foot was formally legitimised. Otherwise, they might by now be leaderless. Some say they are leaderless anyway, but this strikes me as a bit harsh on 'Footy', as the aged performer is becoming affectionately known. In a Peculiar and characteristically Labour fashion, he really does seem to be leading the preposterous party. Old hands and hacks — and, my God, how many of us there are, stretching back 30 years and more — have come to the conclusion that it was Foot who dished Benn, and that it is Foot Who will lead the party back into political respectability and very likely into power as well. By persuading John Silkin to stand against Benn, Foot split the Left, particularly the Tribune Left. And by declaring forcibly his hostility to Benn on personal grounds, Foot ensured a pretty massive abstention of Tribune MPs on the second ballot. Foot himself abstained, and these abstentions denied Benn the victory.
Who will eventually succeed Foot, then? One thing is clear: it will not be either Healey or Benn. They clearly divide, and the party is certain to look for someone Who can unite. Silkin has thrown his hat in the ring, but he is a man of the Left, and the Party is swinging away. My money remains on Peter Shore, who performed well on Monday, between Healey pretending that he supported Labour's alternative economic strategy and Benn acting as if he had not only won the deputy leadership contest but had actually become leader as well. He gets on well enough with Silkin, both being ardent anti-Marketeers, and the two might well stand in tandem with Shore in front. This would be acceptable to the unions, the soft Left and all but the proMarket Right and the hard Left.
When Hugh Gaitskell defeated Nye Bevan for the treasurership of the Labour Party, the Right wing defeated the Left which had united itself and challenged the party leadership on the issue of German rearmament. Gaitskell went on to become leader of the party. Eric Varley's defeat of Norman Atkinson, the incumbent treasurer, may not propel him into the leadership, but his triumph is no less a victory for the Right. Varley's election was Part of a right-wing coup of very considerable success, engineered by Terry Duf fy. The hard Left have been kicked off the National Executive. Five seats have changed hands, and the NEC now has a sensible majority, something it has conspicuously lacked in recent years.
The trade unions, now as back in the Fifties and Sixties, were the instrument of moderation and common sense. The difference is that the Transport and General Workers Union nowadays is part of the loony Left rather than the rock of the hard Right it used to be. Had the T and GW not gone Left and mad under Frank Cousins and Jack Jones, then it is most unlikely that the Labour Party itself would have shifted so far to the left that it was almost captured by the Trotskyites and others. Alex Kitson did his best to ensure that the Transport Workers' huge block of 1,250,000 votes went to Denis Healey, as the members had intended, but he was foiled by the delegation, who took the opportunity afforded by Kitson's absence chairing the Labour Party conference, to vote for Benn. This may be the last occasion when the T and GW will be regarded as the big battalion of the Left. It will not be the last time it looks silly.
CI live Jenkins scored a notable double this week. On Tuesday, just before the results of the election of the National Executive were announced, he said: 'I hear that the "hit list" has gone wrong.' The hit list was the list which the engineers' Terry Duffy and others had decided upon, to clear the hard Left out of the NEC. Clive could not have been worse informed. On Sunday night he had excelled himself. To a select company of journalists including the editor of the Daily Mirror, he announced at 8.29 pm, that Benn had won 'definitely'. 'There is no doubt about it. It was either by 0.5 per cent or by .05 per cent. I'm not sure about that, but I know he has won.' Tips like that cause newspaper headlines on edition times to be scrapped and rewritten. Fortunately for us all, at 8.30 pm precisely, the result itself was announced. Clive had everything right except the name of the victor. On Monday morning, very abashed, he came up to explain himself. 'I had it right,' he said, 'but my figures were those of the first count. I didn't know about the recounts which showed that Healey had won.'
Judith Hart performed the party a very signal service on Wednesday morning. Chairman Kitson declared carried on a show of hands a resolution for a commitment to withdraw from NATO to be put in the manifesto. A card vote was then demanded. A delegate asked how there could be a card vote when the chairman had already declared the resolution carried. The chairman said that the card vote had been called before he declared the resolution carried but that he had not heard it; that was his ruling. The delegate then challenged the chairman's ruling. Kitson therefore stood aside and vice-chairman Judith Hart took the chair. She asked for a show of hands on the chairman's ruling. A card vote on that was called for, but she had to explain that you couldn't have a card vote on a chairman's ruling. So she took a show of hands, not once, not twice, but thrice. It looked to most observers as if the chairman's ruling had been rejected, which would have meant that the anti-NATO resolution would have been carried. But it did not look that way to Judith Hart. Observing the ranks with Nelson's eye, she declared that the chairman's ruling was upheld. Alex Kitson resumed his seat, the card vote was held, and Labour will not have to fight the next election committed to taking Britain out of NATO.
Floot's first conference speech as leader — if we don't count the special Wembley conference — was distinctly odd. He was effective on the rights of MPs. His rebuke of Tony Benn — 'he has served in more Labour cabinets than I have' — was neat. But a long-winded argument based on the misconception that Mrs Thatcher had agreed with President Mitterrand to pour public money into a channel tunnel didn't work at all. His pique, indeed chagrin, at the way the Foreign Office said there was nothing new in what Brezhnev said to him in Moscow showed all too clearly, and left him staking out the claim that he knew more about Gulliver's Travels than anybody in the Foreign Office. Most embarrassing was his nuclear disarmament stuff. He repeated his pride in CND and said, 'I am an inveterate peace-monger' with such force that hardened observers at once concluded that he was preparing the way for his own repudiation of unilateral nuclear disarmament. This is what happened to Nye Bevan, who would not go naked into the conference chamber. The prospect of office and pressure from the Right looks like turning the old anti-American unilateralist into a pro-NATO multilateralist in his sere and yellow days. Age inexorably shifts politicians to the right.
George Gale
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