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As the nomination period for the Labour Leadership contest ends with David Miliband taking 165 CLP nominations to his brother’s 147 with the others far behind, and the prospect of a new era opens up, one sentence reported from the Mandelson memoirs came forcibly to mind about why this hadn’t happened long before – namely that the members of the Brown Cabinet knew for at least 18 months before the election that Labour was headed for a bad defeat, and likely a catastrophe, but believed they could do nothing about it.   Why not?   That says it all about the state of today’s Labour Party. The Blairite interregnum not only cloned the PLP in the Leader’s image, creating a pool of loyalists on a scale as never before, it also fundamentally changed the culture of the Labour Party.   A premium was put on conformity with the party line over all other considerations, ostensibly to avoid the party in-fighting of the 1980s, but in reality to enforce a disciplined obedience to whatever Blair as leader decided.   The carefully built-up democratic traditions of the Labour Party were circumvented, sidelined, and finally simply ignored by the leadership.

The culture of member activism steadily faded, party control was unprecedentedly centralised, conference was downgraded to a mere leadership rally, and party officials were suborned into ensuring that the leadership’s preferred candidates won the party’s parliamentary selections around the country to ensure that the praetorian guard around the leader in the House was regularly topped up.   The strategy worked well, at the price of destroying the party’s democracy and replacing the vigorous internal struggle over the party’s soul in the 1970-80s with almost total quiescence in the 1990-2000s, the silence of the graveyard.

Two lessons immediately arise from this sad saga.   One is that it has left embedded the fallacy that being young, clever, articulate and telegenic is the necessary criterion for leadership, as though ideology, values, principles, and policy vision didn’t matter.   In fact they matter overwhelmingly more than anything else.   The other is that we now need a leadership which is not wholly disrespectful and dismissive of its membership (apart from canvassing at election time), which does not define itself in opposition to its own party members, and which does not demand obsequiousness by a careful calibration of patronage, iron discipline, intimidation, and rule-busting shenanigans.   What is needed is to restore the principle of collective, accountable, and representative leadership.

I was once told when I was a young MP that the way to judge politicians is to ask yourself: do I know the two or three things that this candidate would go to the stake for?   It’s a criterion well worth reviving now.