Election defeats do not define Kinnock's remarkable life

Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labour Party, is one of the most interesting politicians of my lifetime. He was interviewed recently about the 1992 General Election, when, despite much positive expectation in advance of that contest, Labour and Kinnock lost, his second unsuccessful election as leader. In the aftermath, he resigned.

In the interview, he recalled that when he realised that he had lost in 1992, he said: “That's it, I've just wasted the best years of my bloody life.” 

I have been thinking about it, and him, since. Many who heard him will have thought the same as me. Firstly that it was characteristic of Kinnock - never a man to emotionally understate things - and second that it just felt flat wrong. Yes, it is his life and thus his place to judge it, but the most cursory look at his leadership of the Labour Party from 1983-'92 would not suggest those years were in any sense a waste.

Of course, he wanted to win. He wanted to end 13 years of the Tories in power and for Labour to form a government. He wanted to be Prime Minister. And when that didn’t happen it’s no wonder he thought he had wasted a decade.

To understand why he didn’t win, we have to go back a little. The Labour government lost the election of 1979 to Margaret Thatcher. The government she defeated had first been fatally weakened internally, when the trade unions brought the country to its knees through a series of strikes which became known as the Winter of Discontent. After the election defeat, the Labour Party in opposition went far to the left of the political spectrum, and one of the supporters of that change was a young MP called Neil Kinnock.

Kinnock was a close supporter and friend of the new Labour leader, Michael Foot. This association, as well as his at times brilliant speechmaking, helped him to rise quickly in the party.

But the positions that the Labour Party took up during that period were wildly popular inside the party, and deeply unpopular among many voters. Labour consequently suffered a huge electoral defeat in 1983, Foot resigned, and Kinnock was his natural and ultimate successor.

Kinnock won the leadership because he was on the left. He quickly realised that being so far on the left made it impossible for Labour to win a general election. As his deputy leader and sometimes rival Roy Hattersley once said, this was an unhappy situation for him to be in. He needed to make changes to win, but the changes he was to make were inevitably presented as demonstrating that he could not be trusted to stick to any principles. That dilemma would follow him all throughout his leadership. His attempts to resolve it were what he spent the best years of his life trying to do.

That process was made harder by two men most of all: Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn. Scargill led the 1984 Miners’ Strike, an event which placed Kinnock in an impossible position. The strike was called without a national ballot of all coal miners, which made it hard for the Labour Party - and other trade unions indeed - to fully support it. The strike was also unpopular among very many of the voters who Kinnock knew Labour had to win over to defeat Mrs Thatcher. But Kinnock, the Welsh son of a coal miner himself, could not - temperamentally, emotionally - oppose striking coal miners. So he had to try and thread a middle position, which was a torturous fence to try and sit on. His long winded answers to questions about his position led to him being nicknamed the ‘Welsh windbag’, which was one of many ferocious attacks mounted on him by a deeply hostile - and deeply Tory - British press.

Scargill lost the Miners’ Strike, but left wounds on Kinnock.

The other man who created political challenges for Kinnock’s project was Tony Benn. In his later years, Benn became very fashionable among many on the left, who saw him as an honourable and principled socialist. He was those things in many ways and he was also - at the same time -one of the greatest advantages Margaret Thatcher had in her political life. Benn’s utterly impossible, though undoubtedly romantic, positions dragged the Labour Party into an unelectable position, and his continued courting of conflict within the party made it seem out of control and divided. Kinnock was furious with Benn for, as he saw it, making the Labour Party unelectable.

Kinnock fought two elections as leader. In 1987, he led a technically brilliant Labour campaign, in which the party - and he - came across as professional and extremely well organised. And it didn’t matter a damn. The party’s vote barely increased and Mrs Thatcher won another huge victory, her third. The scale of this defeat led Kinnock to believe that the party needed to change even faster than it had in his first spell as leader. So, out went a commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament; out went a hostility to the EEC; out went many of the left wing positions that Kinnock had held so easily when he was a younger man.

In this period, Kinnock became noticeably tougher and less patient with colleagues who took different views. He changed his image, quietening down his natural ebullience, speaking more slowly, more deliberately, always wearing the sober suit. He tried everything he could to try and win.

But change the Labour Party as he might, he could not change it enough to win the 1992 election. In that campaign, the Tories mounted a ferocious attack on Labour for its tax plans, managing to persuade many aspiring working and lower middle class voters that voting Labour meant more tax for them. Those attacks succeeded, and while Labour got a lot closer to the Tories in terms of seats, they still lost.

Kinnock took full responsibility and resigned as leader. Some thought that a momentary lapse of his at an election rally in Sheffield in the last few days of the campaign, where he became overexcited while speaking, was partly to blame for the loss. It really made no significant difference. The problem was tax and that people - perhaps for the reasons outlined earlier - did not trust Kinnock when he tried to reassure them on it.

But defeated and all as he was, the efforts he made as leader of his party could in no sense be described as a waste of life, but one of extraordinary endeavour.

After the election defeat, Kinnock went on to do many interesting things. He became a Vice President of the European Commission and continues to play a lively and always interesting role in public debates. I met him once and was enthralled by his wit and lively company. But it is as a public speaker that he is most compelling, and in next week’s piece, I will take a look at one his most famous speeches, and how relatable it is to the experience of people in the west of Ireland.