The 1990 British presidential election was the ninth election for the Presidency of Britain, with its first round taking place on the 14th June 1990 and the second held on the 5th July 1990. Like every British presidential election since 1975, the top two strongest candidates in the first round advanced to the second round, with the second round winner to be elected President of Britain.
Incumbent President Michael Heseltine ran for a second term, but for the first time, faced significant opposition to re-nomination. One of the cabinet’s main right-wingers, Michael Portillo, ran a hard-fought campaign against Heseltine, and received the backing of several newspapers and barons, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and its affiliated newspapers. While he did manage to drum up significant support during 1989, when the ‘poll tax’ became an issue, he established himself as a staunch defender of the measure, which made him deeply, deeply unpopular with the public at large, and someone (allegedly a supporter of Heseltine at Conservative Central Office) helped leak to the press rumours of Portillo’s homosexual activities as a young man, disgusting his mostly homophobic base of right-wing Tories and causing Murdoch’s press to hastily withdraw its support for him. Heseltine was re-nominated by the party membership fairly easily after that.
By contrast, Labour’s primary process was much less messy than previous years. Kinnock had agreed with his Shadow Chancellor John Smith that they should aim for one to take control of the Presidency and the other become Prime Minister so that a unified Labour government could retake power from the Tories, and Kinnock had steadily come around to the fact that he didn’t have the public clout to be a good presidential nominee, particularly compared to how Smith was fairly affable and inoffensive to the press and the public. With only token competition from a few old stalwarts of the left like Tony Benn, Smith was picked as Labour’s presidential nominee by the end of 1989.
Meanwhile, the still-fledgling Liberal Democrats were struggling to find an identity, and had spent the two years since their foundation bleeding resources to David Owen’s SDP and continuing to lose voter support compared to Labour from its heyday at the beginning of the 1980s. Consequently, leader Paddy Ashdown’s challenge was very much seen as a token effort, though his campaign did raise the Lib Dems’ profile in their early stages.
The first round saw the first instance of the Tory candidate failing to win a plurality since the two-round system was introduced; Smith won out with 41.1% of the vote to 38.6% for Heseltine, while Ashdown won a small but still respectable 17.3%, outperforming the polls. (Just under 1% of voters backed Owen, whose party was moribund after being humiliated in the Bootle by-election a month before, but remained on the ballot nonetheless.)
The result was a wake-up call to the Tories, who aggressively turned their fire onto Smith, trying to find any angle they could to turn voters against him by tying him to the unpopular Kinnock and the Labour left. None of this seemed to stick, though, particularly as Smith enjoyed the support of Ashdown and the Lib Dems, pledged an end to the ‘poll tax’ and pointed to Hesletine’s ten years of unabated power and the ramifications his policies had had, particularly in a famous poster campaign reading ‘Yesterday was his, tomorrow can be ours’. By contrast, Heseltine was still struggling to encourage right-wing Tories to vote for him despite his bruising primary battle with Portillo.
Not only did Smith come out ahead again in the second round, he did it with the biggest margin of victory and vote share Labour had seen in 25 years. 56.3% of voters turned out for Smith to just 43.7% for Heseltine. For the first time in 15 years, Labour would have a figure in Buckingham Palace, and they would not relinquish this for years to come.
Smith’s mandate allowed him to convince Howe to abandon the ‘poll tax’ by the end of 1990, replacing it with the council tax, a tax which was considerably more proportionate to income. Not surprisingly, this instantly worked to make him popular with both his party and the public at large, though this appeal did not really carry over to making Kinnock and his party in the Commons much more well-liked.
Meanwhile in the Conservative Party, orphaned from his old ally, Howe was left mostly rudderless, and when polls in early 1991 were starting to suggest the public thought Kinnock would make a better Prime Minister than Howe, that was the last straw for the Tory right. One of its most prolific figures, Bill Cash, put him through a leadership contest which he failed to win by a large enough margin in the first round to avoid a second, and realizing he had little chance of beating Cash, Howe stood down. In his place his Chancellor, John Major, was put forward in what was effectively a contest between the 1922 Committee and the rest of the party. Warning that Cash and what he stood for would not be popular with the electorate, Major narrowly won the second round.
Surprisingly to most observers, Major did in fact manage to briefly revive the Tories’ fortunes. He managed to flaunt his humble pre-political career and reserved tone in a similar manner to Smith, and enjoyed the same popularity with voters as a result. During the 1992 campaign, one thing that stood out to voters was the stark contrast between Major meeting voters at small meet-ups and giving speeches on soapboxes to Kinnock’s ‘Sheffield rally’ where he bombastically introduced ‘the next Cabinet’ (something that Smith said after the election, though it is difficult to confirm if he was telling the truth or just blame-shifting, he had advised against).
The election ended in a surprise victory for Major’s Tories, who secured a tiny 12-seat majority. For a moment, Major was seen as the Tories’ saviour, but in October 1992, that impression would be shattered forever as he and his Chancellor, Norman Lamont, were forced to withdraw Britain from the ERM after spending millions to prop up the pound in an effort to stay in it. The right of the party, and the British public, immediately turned on Major, his efforts to blame the debacle on Smith being discredited by the President’s fairly disengaged stance in the negotiations.
1993 would only see this conflict get worse. Major continued fighting to create an opt-out of the provisions of the Social Chapter once Britain became a member of the new European Union (EU), but this pleased few- the Tory right wanted to just leave the union, and Labour and the Lib Dems wanted to have the workers’ rights protections the Social Chapter offered implemented. Putting this to a confidence vote, the infighting within the Tories ended up causing Major to lose control of the House of Commons, and a general election was forced upon them that October.
Labour, which had given its leadership in the Commons to Smith’s protégé and fellow Scot Gordon Brown, regained control of Parliament for the first time in 14 years with a strong majority of 97, the third-biggest in its history, and set to work with a reformist agenda. Smith and Brown implemented several major policy changes, most notably implementing a national minimum wage, child benefit reform, abandoning plans to privatize the railways and certain sections of the NHS, and laying the groundwork for devolution to Scotland and Wales.
Having entered opposition, the Tory right started forcing its agenda on the party as forcefully as the Labour left had done when Heseltine came to power. Any chance of this revitalizing the party was snuffed out by two major factors: firstly, the figure chosen to lead the party and spearhead this new image for the Tories was John Redwood, former Welsh Secretary infamous for mouthing the country’s national anthem because he didn’t know the words. Secondly, it launched itself on the so-called ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, intended to engender public support for traditional values, only for several of its MPs to get in sex scandals (one resigning amidst reports that he fathered a child with his mistress, another being found dead after auto-erotically asphyxiating himself).
In May 1994, however, a major tragedy struck the Labour Party when John Smith had a sudden heart attack and died, the first (and to date, only) British President to die in office. There was a national outpouring of mourning for Smith, and his death has often been compared to that of John F. Kennedy in terms of its electoral significance; this was seen for the first time when Labour narrowly won the 1994 EU elections and held up well in the local elections in defiance of the typical anti-government trend of mid-Parliament elections.
With Smith gone, the decision of who would succeed him as President was dependent on a vote within the Labour Party membership, and a touching speech made by Home Secretary Tony Blair at Smith’s funeral was very well-received and this, combined with his youth and strong speaking skills, quickly cemented him as Smith’s natural successor. Sure enough, that August Blair won the vote to succeed Smith, and was inaugurated.
Fairly soon after Smith’s death, however, something interesting started to happen within Labour. Blair, Brown and several of their close allies were determined to make Labour appeal to middle-class voters who had gotten richer in recent years and drifted away from the party; consequently, the party started to take a more centrist track under their leadership, supporting a populist crackdown on crime and decentralizing the banks, with Brown pledging ‘no return to boom and bust’ as the economy grew over the course of the 1990s (a claim that would, of course, come back to haunt him).
Going into the 1995 election, Blair was riding high in the polls, and was widely expected to win re-election easily. But that year’s election would not be without some surprises, even if the surprises in question mostly concerned Labour’s rivals…
(first round results by county)
(second round results by county)