The Noblest Work
“With the sudden death of John Smith, both Britain and the Labour Party have lost a man so mild, so unassuming, so modest, yet so very great,” read the obituary of John Smith in The Times.
A bland figure even to his name, once compared to a default character in a video game or an owlish bank manager, Smith’s image was the product of student debates at Glasgow University where Hugh Gaitskell himself was impressed by his future successor. Gaitskell may have died before his dream of leadership could become a reality, but in many ways Smith’s victory in 1997 was the final triumph of the Gaitskellites, the moment Labour finally found its footing in social democracy.
Perhaps it is ironic that, after years of tearing itself apart in fierce battles between the party’s right and left, Labour would be united by a man who transcended either side. Never positioning himself with either, despite claims of ownership by both, Smith found a way to cautiously guide the party to the victory it had failed to grasp for so long.
The moment the government of John Major whisked Britain out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, John Smith’s Labour never lost its lead in the polls. A three week stay in hospital during 1995 over chest pains seemed a dark omen of the future, but once more the man they called the Owl much like they had called Lloyd George the Goat bounded back into the Commons with grace. Appearing on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You shortly after, his “you’re breaking my heart” comment to Ian Hislop brought guffaws from the panel and a renewed fondness from the public. At a time when politics seemed so cynical, and the public reflected this cynicism, John Smith stood above the conflict between politics and the public just like he did over the conflict between Labour’s right and left. One of the most common descriptions of Smith was that he was like a bank manager. In those days, of course, banks were respectable institutions. The comparison denoted a steadiness, a caution, above all a decency. His reward demonstrated what a politician can get if he just demonstrates basic human goodness; a nation which loved him. This was particularly demonstrated by the outpouring of concern which followed his heart attack in 1994, his second after a similar fate in 1988, which also brought extensive concern about his ability to run the party, let alone the country.
Of course, this was not to say that fondness for Mr Smith translated to fondness for Labour. Throughout the 1990s the party still struggled to make itself a force to be reckoned with in the middle class heartlands of the South. The so-called “modernisers” led by men such as Tony Blair, the darling rising star of the party, were not so much hungry for power as they were starving. Frustrated with Smith’s seeming lack of understanding over their points, Tony Blair even briefly contemplated a leadership challenge. He climbed down after a stern talking to by the Shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a man doing his bit to rather more subtly inch John Smith towards the home owning heartlands of Middle England. But Smith’s strategy, his “one more heave” towards the next election, remained deeply frustrating with the Fabian Society terming it “sleepwalking into oblivion.” While John Major was referring to members of his Cabinet as a “shower of bastards,” Smith was conciliatory, willing to slowly drift the party towards true electability rather than shunt it as Blair might have done.
He had made early progress, defanging the unions at the 1993 party conference by abolishing their block vote and replacing it with “one member, one vote,” and risked his leadership of the party to achieve it. Power was moving from the unions to individual party members. Yet pushes to go further with party reform, such as abolishing Clause IV from the party constitution which committed it to public ownership, which Gaitskell had tried and failed to do so many years before, didn’t even seem on the horizon. It was merely “academic,” said Smith. In the 1995 party conference he instead offered his own Christian socialist beliefs to be laid alongside Clause IV, a measure supported wholeheartedly by Blair, and based on the great thinker R. H. Tawney. The party approved it.
The critics were, in one swift stroke, silenced on May 1st, 1997. Labour gained 107 seats, 380 in total, reducing the Conservatives to 203 seats. It was a repeat of the calamitous 1983 election, but this time the tables had turned. That night in the North Lanarkshire town of Airdrie, Smith was practically carried home by euphoric party workers. “Now, now,” he told the overjoyed rabble, “we’ve lots of work to do.” He was quite right.
Quickly after coming into office, the new government faced the question of where to go when it came to spending money. It has widely been noted that Smith acted as a kind of second Chancellor; neither he nor Gordon Brown were fully in charge of economic matters, and the result was tension from the very beginning. The two had an excellent working relationship but the strain of actual government was quick to produce different attitudes. In particular, Smith rejected Brown’s insistence that the new premiership stick to Conservative levels of spending for its first two years. But Brown fought tooth and nail, taking the view of only increasing spending when resources allowed, and tensions between the two rose especially as other members of the Cabinet began to pile on. It seemed as though the splits in Labour which Smith had paved over while in Opposition were now cracking open once more. Further, Smith had been unrepentant about his 1992 pledge to increase the top rate of income tax from 40% to 50%, despite it having been blamed for that year’s election defeat. This was a question of fairness; in his mind, it was morally right that the better-off should pay more. Here there was rather less conflict. Brown agreed with the increase, but not on when to announce it. Had he not agreed, it is entirely possible that the commitment may never have sheepishly made its way into the party’s manifesto that year. Smith was certainly lucky to have formed a government at a time when the British economy was arguably at its strongest at any point in its post-war history. The 1998 budget would see £4 billion dedicated to health and education each, announced by Brown to the Commons after Smith had jokingly told him, “I don’t want any gritted teeth.”
Yet another source of conflict between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor would be over the question of the Bank of England; Gordon Brown was set on granting the bank complete independence, but Smith had a long track record of supporting a politically accountable monetary policy. He had relented somewhat; within weeks of first entering Downing Street, the Bank’s existing court was replaced with a new Monetary Policy Board which included regional representatives and members drawn from industry and trade unions, producing a regular public report to the Chancellor. The system proved popular and, with plenty of prodding from Brown, John Smith eventually agreed to full independence for the Bank of England. Brown would never admit it, but part of his motivation for doing so would always be to demonstrate Labour’s trustworthiness in economics. What better way to do this than to give up control of interest rates, the most important lever of economic policy?
Meanwhile, reform came elsewhere throughout domestic politics. The Education Secretary, Ann Taylor, ended distinctions between state schools and ensured all received equal levels of funding while none were allowed to prioritise pupils on the basis of their academic ability. Free nursery places for all toddlers was fiercely pushed while Smith called for the education system to more closely resemble that in his native Scotland. The school leaving age would in 1999 be raised to 18, while vocational education was to be expanded significantly for those looking to pursue non-academic subjects following completion of GCSEs. Private schools would, to the disappointment of the left, remain untouched yet the results of the education reforms are hard to dispute; a report by the Office of National Statistics in 2023 claimed that the British had become the most educated in the world, above Finland, Ireland, or Luxembourg, with roughly 40% of Britons aged 16–64 educated to NVQ level 4 and above. One cannot apply all thanks to the government of John Smith, but it surely helped and may prove to be its most lasting legacy. Meanwhile the Health Secretary, David Blunkett, brought an end to the NHS’ internal market and embarked on a hugely expensive programme of modernisation to make up for years of underfunding during the Conservative governments. The BBC One medical drama Heartbeat would note this, with the BBC coming under fire from the right-wing press for a character’s quip of “thank the good lord for John Smith.”
The left was certainly sedated somewhat by the infusion of “grand wads” of cash into the public services, even if some were annoyed on the grounds of ideological purity when British Rail turned out not to be a fully public company when it was expensively renationalised in 2000 but a private joint-stock company with the British government being its single shareholder, on the model of the Deutsche Bahn in Germany after just a handful of years with the railways being in private ownership.
Constitutional reform was arguably the place of greatest lasting consequence for the country. In September 1997 twin referendums were held in Scotland and Wales over the creation of national parliaments with tax-varying powers. Smith had since at least the 1970s been a passionate supporter of such devolution and he threw himself into the campaign for a yes vote; as a result, both returned hearty approvals, though by a very narrow margin in Wales. Dennis Canavan would two years later become First Minister of Scotland while First Minister of Wales was occupied by Rhodri Morgan. The creation of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments represented a huge shift in the balance of power in Britain, as it began to move towards a more federal arrangement. However, questions over devolution to England, particularly the West Lothian question remained. Devolution didn’t stop at nations; city assemblies popped up under the Local Government (City) Act 1999 which established that any metropolitan area with a population of over 350,000 could at any time establish a devolved assembly with an elected mayor if it so chose. London, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol would all take up this offer which referendums in Glasgow, Bradford, and Edinburgh rejected the measure. Elsewhere, other constitutional measures emerged. The Human Rights Act 1998 entrenched the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, while the House of Lords Act 1999 abolished hereditary and religious-affiliated peers while cutting it down to a fixed membership of 700 appointed life peers. The government would have liked to have gone further and created a fully elected upper house, but the massive Lords rebellion over the act convinced them that going further wasn’t worth the time and effort. Nonetheless, the reforms would significantly elevate the position of the Lords in British politics as it gained a new image of legitimacy, to a point, with far more attention paid to it as it increasingly became a thorn in the side of successive governments.
In foreign policy, John Smith always looked first across the Channel before he looked across the Atlantic. This was particularly demonstrated with a speech alongside President Chirac at the Élysée Palace on September 3rd, 1997 when he called himself “a European to my bones.” This was further demonstrated with the Eltham Palace Treaty signed the following summer, which significantly deepened defence and security cooperation between European Union members particularly by integrating research and development and by creating joint expeditionary forces. The treaty was a message of intent about where the government saw its place in the world; at the heart of Europe, as John Major had attempted to insist earlier that decade. The Kosovo War of 1998-99 further highlighted this; Smith used the conflict as an opportunity to highlight the good Europe could do when acting together, and the European Union found itself engaging in its first united military effort with airstrikes pounding Yugoslav targets, all the while led politically by Britain as President Clinton across the Atlantic proved unwilling to dedicate himself to the cause. “At some point, Europe has to look after Europe,” President Chirac told the cameras, and America would never send combat units to Kosovo. It was a watershed moment in Europe’s history, and in Britain’s, as was quickly noticed. Shortly afterwards, the Smith government was a major backer of the merger between Airbus and British Aerospace to create EuroAir, from whom would come Concorde’s spiritual successor, the hypersonic Kestrel, in 2020.
But the most inflammatory issue on the subject of Europe was the single currency and whether to join.
This issue was kept quiet for the first three years of Smith’s premiership, but the Conservatives under Michael Portillo hammered it home repeatedly. Portillo’s effective leadership helped make it a uniting issue within the party but it might not have struck Labour so hard were they not led by someone so in favour of joining the euro. Alas, once more, conflict with Brown was to be found. In principle, Brown was not opposed to membership but like on previous issues discussed he wanted to ensure the British economy was ready for it first and so proposed economic tests which would need to be met. Smith agreed reluctantly, but never ruled out joining and openly declared his support for the concept “given time.” It would prove an excellent piece of bait for the Tories, riling them up while showing them to the public as obsessed with Europe at the expense of issues far closer to most hearts. It certainly helped sear deeper wounds within the bitter Conservatives; one faction of intensely anti-European MPs led by a young balding Yorkshireman called William Hague proved a constant thorn in Portillo’s side. Yet the issue bit at John Smith regularly; shortly after Parliament was dissolved for the 2001 general election, he was asked in an interview with Jeremy Paxman his view on the Conservatives calling for a referendum on joining the euro. To the horror of some in his party, including his Chancellor, he replied, “I’m not opposed to the idea, I think it’s a big issue and I’ve made clear my own support for joining the single currency at some point. But it’s a big enough issue to perhaps require the signature of the British people, not just be decided behind closed doors at the Treasury.” This seemed like sniping at Brown, but what it definitely was was overruling Brown, in public no less. Brown was, naturally, livid.
If the 1997 election was a repeat of 1983, then 2001 was a repeat of 1987. This comparison is far more adept than one might think; the Tories, like Labour fourteen years prior, won twenty seats back. It was certainly not enough to get back into power, and Labour was comfortably re-elected with 368 seats. Immediately afterwards there was speculation about the potential for said referendum on membership of the single currency; the European Union was regularly mentioning it in an effort to keep it on the minds of the media and Downing Street. So it was that John Smith made the announcement, without even consulting Brown, that a referendum would take place on September 6th, 2001. He made it clear that it would only be an advisory referendum, and the government would reserve the right to take an alternate decision if it felt doing so was in the country’s best interest. He wasn’t particularly worried about the reaction of Gordon Brown; Brown’s resistance to earmarking funds specifically for health and education, hypothecation, had been instrumental in convincing Smith that he needed a different Chancellor and he intended to clip his wings in the next reshuffle, perhaps to the Foreign Office. The reaction of the general public left much to be desired, with The Sun’s headline on the day of the referendum calling the Prime Minister “the most dangerous man in Britain.” When the vote came, it was decisive; 65% voted to reject joining the single currency. It seemed that Britain had exercised a sense of independence against what Michael Portillo, who remained Conservative party leader despite losing the election, “the gnawing, gnashing teeth of a European superstate.” That night, Gordon Brown met with John Smith and warned him that this was his last chance; he couldn’t overrule Brown’s authority again. An argument broke out and Brown stormed from the building, telling a startled journalist he had resigned. He would swiftly be replaced by Harriet Harman, the first female Chancellor in British history, but this little titbit of historical trivia didn’t seem enough to salvage the situation. It seemed to many, including Smith himself, that his premiership might be about to end. And then the September 11 attacks took place.
When the attacks happened, Smith was at the annual Trade Unions Congress conference in Brighton to give a speech which would never come. As the conference televisions began to show the frightful footage from New York, Smith was spotted wordlessly leaving for his ministerial car. Bathed in the white flashes of the cameras as he climbed in, he wore a face of grit and steel not often seen on such a jovial chap. Smith took no chances as the news kept coming in; the airspace over Britain’s major cities was shut down while the Royal Air Force patrolled the skies. Contact couldn’t be made with President Bush, only adding to the anxiety, fear, and confusion of the day. Rather morosely, Smith’s biographer would later write that the terrorist atrocities may have saved his premiership.
By the following day, contact was finally established with the President. He and the Prime Minister had never had a particularly good relationship, but for the time being that changed. John Smith was lukewarm about the idea of a War on Terrorism but nonetheless he proved to be President Bush’s greatest ally in assembling partners for war in Afghanistan. Just like in Kosovo, he rallied the European Union to the cause and both ground and air forces were sent by the French, Spanish, Italians, Portuguese, and even the Germans. Naturally, Britain sent the largest contingent. Yet from the beginning were the rumbles of war elsewhere, against Iraq. For John Smith, was another matter entirely.
From the beginning, John Smith was sceptical over the rationale for intervention but he kept his options open throughout 2002. As a result it came as rather a surprise to some when, after the Bush Administration refused to attempt to go through the United Nations at the meek request of the British, Smith stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons on January 20th, 2003 to announce that “Britain must say no.” America was on its own. “I thought they were meant to be our allies!” wailed one presenter of Fox News, but in Britain the Prime Minister was a hero. Much like Harold Wilson over Vietnam, he did not go as far as condemning the war but as it began in early March with bombs raining onto Baghdad and U.S. armour surging across the Iraqi desert, he was hugely vocal in calling for the U.N. to take over post-war peacekeeping. The Bush Administration, vindictively, refused while Smith’s pleas for a new push on the Israeli peace process was met with stonewalling. Nonetheless, John Smith was at that time perhaps the most popular person in Britain, even ahead of Elizabeth II whose popularity had reached a lull after it was revealed that she had sharply rebuked Princess Diana over her public condemnation of the war. Some polls suggested that in the weeks and months after the war began, Smith had a popularity reaching 90%, an astonishing figure you don’t usually see in democracies.
Tragically, John Smith did not have long to enjoy this. On August 3rd, the Prime Minister suffered a catastrophic heart attack during a private meeting with Harriet Harman. She would later tearfully retell the story of how he had clutched her hand while emergency CPR was applied, his last words being to her, breathlessly telling Harman "don't worry about me." What was happening could hardly be kept a secret, as an ambulance pulled into Downing Street, a black tarp hastily erected to hide the Prime Minister as he left Number 10 on a stretcher. He was rushed across the Thames to St Thomas’ Hospital as the world’s press convened. Two hours later the head cardiologist, Dr Mark Chambers, appeared before a podium to announce that at 13:43, John Smith had died. He was 64, the first Prime Minister to die in office since Henry John Temple in 1865. Britain went quiet. In our modern time, politics often seems a subject ripe for mocking, its practitioners at worst the subject of contempt, in an increasingly cynical culture. On August 3rd, 2003 the British people seemed to lose this feeling. “He died in service to us,” said one commentator. “He died for Britain after making sure others wouldn’t,” said another in reference to the war in Iraq. The business of the House halted for tributes to be paid, while a silent yet infinitely loud tribute emerged in Whitehall as a carpet of flowers was assembled by the public in front of Downing Street. In the little Scottish village of Dalmally, where Smith was born, a bronze statue of their most famous son would emerge. At its feet the plaque simply named him, “a good man.”
A public funeral service in Edinburgh’s Cluny Parish Church brought almost 20,000 people, with Elizabeth II making the final speech wherein she called for the British people to be more understanding about their leaders. It would help trigger a remarkable cultural shift, as a new sense about Prime Ministers began to emerge, much of it flowering from the respect afforded to that so ordinary man called John Smith. The next day he was buried in a private family service on the island of Iona, at the sacred burial ground of Reilig Odhráin, which contains the ancient graves of Scottish kings. His grave was marked with an epitaph quoting Alexander Pope: "An honest man's the noblest work of God".
Most had assumed by default that Gordon Brown or Tony Blair would glide into the leadership, but it was not to be. Much of the party still hadn’t forgiven Brown for his resignation two years earlier, and Tony Blair’s support for military intervention in Iraq and cosying up to Rupert Murdoch had hardly gone down well. So it seemed clear that both men would be shunted aside, even if they did much of the shunting themselves. Gordon Brown would be the first to announce his candidacy, only for Blair to stab him in the back two days later and declare his own shot at the leadership, claiming Brown “has the improper temperament” to be Prime Minister. One of the good friendships in British politics was over. The party watched this with unease. They were still universally adoring of the late Smith, and saw these two as conniving, having pushed Smith down and now using his death to advance themselves. They seemed to be the very kind of men which Smith was not. Britain wanted another John Smith. So it was that someone else had to rise to the occasion. It was time for Harriet Harman to stride into Downing Street.
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