It suddenly dawned on me the other day that whenever I do TLs with John Smith in, I always still have him die of his heart attack in 1994. So I thought I'd write what in Wayne's World terms you might call 'the super-happy ending' for him.
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Sir John Smith, QC, is a retired British Labour politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007, the longest-serving ever to come from the Labour Party and to never represent an English constituency, and as Leader of the Labour Party from 1992 to 2007, the second longest-serving behind Clement Attlee.
He entered Parliament as MP for North Lanarkshire in central Scotland in 1970, establishing himself as a pro-European moderate member of the Labour right, and served in junior ministerial roles in the fourth Wilson government and briefly as Secretary of State for Trade and President of the Board of Trade in Callaghan’s Cabinet from 1978-9. He rose through the ranks of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet between 1979 and 1992, when after Labour’s shock defeat in that year’s election to John Major’s Conservatives, he was elected to succeed Neil Kinnock as leader of the Labour Party and of the Opposition.
As Leader of the Opposition, Smith continued to reform Labour as Kinnock had, abolishing the trade union block vote at the party conference in favour of ‘one member, one vote’ and making some moves to reduce its spending pledges on child benefit. Despite this, he faced opposition from right wing 'modernisers' such as his Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, who were adamant that Labour should move to the centre to win the next election; Smith largely rejected these overtures, instead focusing on sniping at repeated sleaze and divisions within the Major government while recognizing the electorate was finally warming to Labour's social democratic principles again. Despite suffering a heart attack in May 1994, he made a fortuitous recovery and memorably condemned Tory disability minister Nicholas Scott for misleading Parliament in a press interview given that evening from his hospital bed, an image which endeared many British voters to him and bolstered Labour's already consistently huge leads over the Tories in the polls.
The 1997 election saw Labour win its biggest landslide ever, with a majority of 149 seats in the Commons, which silenced claims from Smith's critics that the public had no appetite for 'old Labour'. The first Smith government became very popular with the public for undoing several of the more unpopular neoliberal economic policies of the Thatcher and Major governments, such as renationalising the railways, abolishing the NHS’s ‘internal market’, introducing the national minimum wage, reforming schools to bring the English and Welsh model closer to the Scottish model (which both Smith and his Education Secretary Ann Taylor saw as fairer), and ending the UK's opt-out of the Maastricht Treaty’s ‘social chapter’ so it would guarantee certain minimum working conditions, something the Tories had aggressively objected to under Major.
On social issues his first government was similarly bold, with devolution being implemented in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Greater London (without referendums, except to ratify the Good Friday Agreement- Smith admitted after leaving Number 10 that he eschewed them because of how divisive they had been under Wilson and Callaghan), his Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam negotiating a settled peace agreement between the Protestant leaders and IRA (something Smith stayed out of due to his own Protestantism), and abolished the homophobic Section 28 of the Local Government Act. He also introduced more diversity to a British Cabinet than ever by giving positions to Paul Boateng, Keith Vaz and Chris Smith, the first black, Asian and openly gay members of a British Cabinet respectively.
Despite the Tories trying to hammer him for being too radical in the run up to the general election in the summer of 2001, their attacks had little impact- Smith was well-liked by both the public and most of the Labour base, and their new leader Michael Portillo had badly humiliated himself by advocating to keep Section 28 only for allegations to emerge that he had taken part in homosexual acts at university (reported in the
Sun in 1999, showing the odd nebulousness of Murdoch’s press in the Smith years). While Labour won a slightly reduced majority of 123 that year, they also picked up several seats against the grain, including Enfield Southgate- thanks to a concerted effort by former NUS figure (and homosexual) Stephen Twigg, Portillo became the first Leader of the Opposition in 70 years to lose his seat at a general election. Consequently, Smith and his party enjoyed what they felt to be a major moral victory, having for the first time secured a second full term for Labour.
The idealism of the Smith years, like that of most countries enjoying a peaceful climate in the early 21st century, was shattered just two months after the election, as 9/11 saw new US President George W. Bush begin his ‘war on terror’ in earnest. With this came a war within the Labour Party, as Blair, the Home Secretary and Smith’s main rival on the party’s right, started advocating for closer relations with the US, up to and including backing Bush’s desire to go to war with Iraq. While Smith did acquiesce to supporting forces in Afghanistan, he and his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook never supported the UK going into Iraq, both because they saw the evidence as flimsy and because of how the Afghan intervention had proven more problematic than expected. This led to many fights between the two in Cabinet- Smith reportedly once told Blair on the matter, ‘this is why I put you in the Home Office and not the Foreign Office, Tony’.
It has also been argued that this conflict was why Smith did not resign on the tenth anniversary of his ascent to the Labour leadership, as he had considered. Seeing Bush as a far-right warmonger, and knowing Bush saw him as a cowardly liberal European, Smith made common cause with other social democrats in Europe, particularly new French President Lionel Jospin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, against Bush. Eventually, his problem took care of itself for him, as Blair resigned both from the Cabinet and the Commons in a fit of pique in late 2002, though to his frustration Labour had no trouble holding Sedgefield in his absence.
Perhaps partially because of this, as his second term continued Smith turned to reforming Britain’s relationship with Europe, helping push for its institutions to shift a little more towards democratizing and worker’s rights provisions to combat Euroscepticism. (At the same time, and on similar principles, he introduced devolution to the English regions, though these did not inspire the same political excitement as in the Celtic nations or London.) The results of this were not as substantial as he hoped, and Brown convinced him not to join the Euro, but it did somewhat foster better relations between Eastern Europeans from new EU members who migrated to the UK and the British public from 2004 onwards.
Ironically, he got a little help on that point from the Tories, led from 2001-3 by Iain Duncan Smith (whose disastrously ineffectual leadership prevented the party capitalizing on the feud between Smith and Blair) and then from 2003-5 by Michael Howard, which came under fire for their ‘firm but fair’ attitude to immigration and heavy emphasis on it in Conservative campaigning materials that many people started to perceive as simply racism.
When the 2005 election came round, it was a muted affair. While Labour were not in the best shape thanks to the infighting and Smith’s age reducing how much he could campaign due to the strain on his heart, Howard was far from a credible alternative, and the Tories could only manage a net gain of 7 seats. Labour emerged with a hefty 102-seat majority, and the main headlines were on the 64.1% turnout, the lowest since 1918, rather than any accusations of Smith being undermined.
Smith’s third and final government was also fairly limited in its scope. The 7/7 bombing in July 2005, and the fairly understated response to it, finally started to cause the public to sour on Smith, and when the Tories elected the young and rather moderate David Cameron as their new leader that December, he made a name for himself running rings around Smith in Parliament.
Despite this, as the right of the party had been demotivated after Blair’s departure and there was little appetite for anyone to Smith’s left, he continued in power until the 2nd May 2007, the tenth anniversary of him taking over as Prime Minister. After a leadership contest between two rather unpopular and long-serving figures- his Deputy Prime Minister Margaret Beckett, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown- Beckett won, and would go on to serve as Prime Minister until Labour lost the 2010 election.
Smith would also leave the House of Commons that year, after just shy of 40 years in the House of Commons. He has been remembered with more reverence than he was afforded at the end of his premiership, particularly by Labour supporters; in May 2008, a year after stepping down, he famously gave a tongue-in-cheek interview to the
Guardian’s Simon Hoggart entitled ‘A Discussion With John Smith QC, the Honourable Member for Airdrie & Shotts’, in which he discussed returning to a quiet constituency life as a backbencher. In the 2009 honours, Beckett granted him a knighthood, though he turned down an offer of membership of the House of Lords from Cameron the following year, not for partisan reasons but citing his heart troubles, and retired from public life.
