Healey defeats Foot for Labour Leadership, 1980

On the occasion of the death of Denis Healey, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-34434378 I would like to review the question of what would have happened if he had defeated Michael Foot for the Labour Leadership in 1980. (Remember, 1980 was the last time the Parliamentary Labour Party chose the Leader.)

The vote on the second ballot was quite close--139 to 129. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)_leadership_election,_1980 A change of six votes would have made Healey the Leader of the Labour Party. According to Ivor Crewe and Anthony King in *SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party* (Oxford UP 1995), p. 75, the votes of a few right-wingers who were already planning to leave the party--and who wanted Labour to choose the most left-wing possible leader (in the absence of a Benn candidacy) in order to weaken the party--were crucial to Foot's victory. They quote one MP as saying

"It was dirty politics. I admit it. I--and I reckon quite a few others--thought that Foot had to be elected in order to convince the waverers that the game was up and that we had no choice but to move. I was particularly concerned about Shirley [Williams]; if Healey had won, I still think she wouldn't have come over."

To find how typical this MP was, Crewe and King questioned all the living Labour MPs who had defected to the SDP "and asked them...to tell us in confidence whom they had voted for in each of the two ballots in the 1980 election. Most of them replied. Most said they had voted for Healey on both ballots, and many of them were obviously surprised that we should even have asked the question. But five, whose names we cannot reveal, including the MP just quoted, acknowledged that they had voted for Foot, in the second ballot if not the first. One of them added: 'I voted for Foot because I thought he would make the worst leader for Labour, not only in a personal capacity but also because he was nearest to the left.'

"In other words, we know that enough of those who subsequently deserted Labour for the SDP voted for Foot to have produced a tie in the election. We expect that at least one other did so. If he did, he would have produced the margin by which Foot won. If our findings are correct, Foot was indeed the left's candidate in the leadership election, but he was also the candidate of a crucial minority of the future SPD. He was the product--and Labour the victim--of what the French call *la politique du pire*, the politics of the worst."

So my POD is that the Labour right wing votes unanimously for Healey. Or, if it be objected that by 1980 it is implausible that *no* Labour right- wingers would play *la politique du pire* and vote for Foot, let's say that only three did so, instead of six, and that in addition three centrist Labour MPs voted for Healey instead of Foot. Anyway, Healey wins. Consequences? The formation of the SDP is at any rate delayed. Jenkins and a few Jenkinsite MPs might leave Labour anyway, but the Gang of Three, and most of those who followed them, would not. The question is how Healey would have used the time this would buy for Labour. Crewe and King suggest that Healey would not have fought the left aggressively as Gaitskell had done, but would be more of a compromiser like Callaghan--and that if he had tried to fight the left aggressively, he would have lost. In either event, there would be a party split--one which, though delayed, might actually have ultimately taken more Labour MPs out of the party than in OTL.

Indeed, one admittedly biased source actually suggests that the defeat of Foot would open the way for Tony Benn to become Labour Leader! (Which sounds more plausible to me now than it would have before Corbyn's victory, though admittedly that took place under one-person one-vote rather than under an electoral college). "If Healey had won, a challenge under the new rules might have been unstoppable, and once the choice lay with a broader-based electoral college, Benn might have won." https://books.google.com/books?id=lIM_b98LgdIC&pg=PA189

Anyway, let's say a Labour split can at least temporarily be avoided. Does Healey stand a chance against Thatcher in 1983, or does the "Falklands factor" guarantee a Conservative victory, even if not by the same margin as that against Foot in OTL?
 
There would be turmoil within the party, but the left would never have been prepared to split off from the party, and the gang of three would never have left the party had Healey won. Foot would've remained deputy leader.
Roy Jenkins would probably have simply defected to the Liberals, but I doubt he would have properly re-entered frontline politics.
Healey might've made Owen shadow chancellor, Hattersley and Williams to either Home of Foreign office.

Labour might've won in '83, but much more likely that the recovery of 1982-83 will lead to increased support for the tories, and lead to the government's re-election with lets say 335-350 seats.

Healey might stay on a year or so, but then stand down in favour of Hattersley (whom he apparently always saw as his natural successor). Labour might have won in '87, but id say its more likely that Labour would return to office in 1991/2 under Hattersley or John Smith.
 
Healey's son thinks he would have been a rubbish PM, although of course Healey gets mentioned as best PM the Brits never had a fair bit.

Interview with him
In 1980, Michael Foot was elected in the last Labour leadership election conducted solely by the party's MPs, beating Healey by 10 votes. Two factors sealed this: a handful of votes for Foot from MPs who were about to leave Labour for the SDP and hastened their exit with an act of self-justifying sabotage; and Healey's history of treating the Labour left with a reckless belligerence. As Roy Hattersley once pointed out, "in defence of what he knew to be right, he could never resist grinding his opponents into the dust."

"That was one factor, without question," says Healey. "I had the same weakness in those days as Hugh Gaitskell: I didn't only want people to agree with me; I wanted them to share my views." He laughs. "And you don't need that. All you want in politics is acquiescence. If I'd behaved more sensibly, I could have probably won.

"One of my other great weaknesses," he says, "is that I've always wanted to do something rather than be something. Doing the job of chancellor or defence secretary was important to me, whereas being prime minister wasn't. That was a great mistake: I never fought hard enough. I think I could have made it if I'd tried."

Those two admissions, I suggest, can perhaps be bundled up into one story, of his self-control being hampered by a lack of ambition. Without his eyes on the prize of leadership, did he feel free to chuck his weight around?

"Yes, I think so. I think I was a fool. I didn't want to be leader of the party, and I should have wanted to."
[...]
His most incisive character-sketch comes when we discuss the very different mischief wrought by the SDP, and the anticlimactic career of that short-lived political poster-boy David Owen. "When he was born," says Healey, "all the good fairies gave him every virtue: 'You'll be beautiful, you'll be intelligent, you'll have charm and charisma.' And the bad fairy came along and tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'But you'll be a shit.' That was his trouble."

So that's the POD, I imagine, he actually wants to be PM. But that's a hell of a personality shift at the time, and likewise with the Falklands he can't beat Thatcher. To be fair without the Falklands Foot would have beat Thatcher, so it ain't a stretch to say Healey would have, heh.
 
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