Fifty years ago this month, British politics changed course. Depending on your point of view, you should thank or curse the Liberal party. In June 1976 it needed a new leader. Jeremy Thorpe had resigned amid one of British politics’ more lurid scandals. The somewhat discombobulated party felt that it needed not just a new leader but a new way of choosing them, one that involved local activists. Here is how the Times assessed the outcome of a specially convened party assembly in Manchester at the time:
“For the first time a British political party will bring the extra-Westminster constituencies into the procedure for electing a leader… Constitutionally, British parties hitherto have always insisted on electing leaders within the parliamentary party, simply because there would be a risk in electing a party leader who did not command the support of the Commons politicians he leads…
The importance of the change is that rank-and-file democracy may now make inroads within the Labour and Conservative parties.”
And so it came to pass. Labour included its local activists in leadership contests from 1981, and the Conservatives from 2001. Labour party members (together with members of politically affiliated organisations, mainly trade unions) might shortly choose Britain’s next prime minister. Half a century after the Liberals started this ball rolling, we can judge where it has rolled to, and whether we approve of the destination.
Different readers will have different, strongly held, views. I do not expect to sway those who are camped firmly, and on principle, on the rank-and-file side of the argument. Instead, I shall no doubt irritate purists by looking at the evidence. Down the years, where MPs and activists have disagreed on who should lead their party, what has been the outcome? (On the occasions when they have agreed, the system for making the choice has made no practical difference.)
Here are six occasions when MPs and party grassroots have made different choices.
In 1981, Tony Benn used Labour’s new electoral college system to challenge Denis Healey for the party’s deputy leadership. MPs backed Healey by almost two to one, while local constituency parties backed Benn by more than four to one. (The decisions were taken by local party committees—not one-member- one-vote). Overall, Healey managed to win narrowly, thanks to the block vote of enough big trade unions.
In 2001, Iain Duncan Smith won the Conservative party leadership, defeating Kenneth Clarke by 61 to 39 per cent among the 250,000 party members who voted. We cannot be sure that Clarke would have been the choice of MPs. However, in the final ballot that decided which two candidates would go to local party members, he led with 59 votes, against 54 for Duncan Smith and 53 for Michael Portillo (whose third place meant that he was eliminated). It is likely, if not certain, that Clarke, an experienced former cabinet minister, would have defeated the outsider who had sniped at John Major’s government from the backbenches and the political fringe if the choice was only down to MPs.
Following Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election, Ed Miliband defeated his brother David for Labour’s leadership. Once again Labour had an electoral college; but this time party members and eligible trade unionists enjoyed one-member-one-vote. David was supported by 53 per cent of MPs and 54 per cent of local party members. However, 60 per cent of trade unionists backed Ed. So MPs and ordinary party members were both on the losing side. Had the winner been decided by MPs alone, Labour’s fortunes, and British politics more widely, might have taken a very different course.
Jeremy Corbyn has won two of the six Labour contests where different sections of the party disagreed. The party had by then adopted a simpler one-person-one-vote system; however, the franchise extended beyond party members and members of affiliated organisations to “registered supporters”, who could vote in the contest by paying just £3 for that right. Of the half a million people entitled to vote in the September 2015 contest, more than 200,000 had either paid the £3 or joined the party as full members in the weeks leading up to mid-August. Corbyn won outright on the first ballot with 250,000 votes. As he struggled to obtain the 35 MP nominations he needed to qualify as a candidate (out of 232 Labour MPs), we can be confident that he would have been defeated had the choice been left to them. Who won the largest number of MP nominations? As it happens, it was Andy Burnham.
Less than a year later, Labour MPs passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn by 172-40. He was challenged for the leadership by Owen Smith, a former member of the shadow cabinet. Corbyn trounced Smith by 62 to 38 per cent among the wider grassroots membership.
Finally, back to the Tories. When Boris Johnson resigned, Conservative MPs again had the task of narrowing the field to two candidates. It took five ballots to reduce the original eight candidates to two. Rishi Sunak led each round. Liz Truss was not even among the top two until the fifth ballot, when she had the support of 113 MPs, against 137 for Sunak. Penny Mordaunt, who had run second up to the fourth ballot, ended up with 105 votes, eight behind Truss.
Truss was elected leader with 57 per cent of the 140,000 votes cast by local members, against 43 per cent for Sunak. As in 2001 with Clarke, we cannot be certain that MPs would have elected Sunak. What we do know is that they had limited enthusiasm for Truss over the course of the campaign.
That’s the record. Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer don’t appear on the list of party leaders because they were backed both by MPs and their party’s grassroots. But where the two sections diverged, MPs consistently backed the more mainstream candidate, while insurgents attracted support from the wider party (though the role of trade unions complicated the Labour elections of 1981 and 2010).
So is it better for MPs or local party members to choose a major party leader—either an actual or potential prime minister? As that Times report from 1976 noted, the question raises constitutional issues. When a party is in government, there is also the matter of the time it takes to elect a new leader. MPs can do the whole thing in days; a full nationwide contest involving grassroots membership can take two months.
Moreover, party memberships have fallen sharply in recent decades. Almost one million people voted when Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994. In the 2020 contest won by Starmer, the figure was half that. The party has not challenged the Times story last December which said its membership had fallen below 250,000 (and the numbers of members from affiliated organisations entitled to vote is also down, though precise numbers are unknown).
As for the Conservatives, more than 250,000 voted in the Duncan Smith-Clarke contest in 2001. When Kemi Badenoch won the 2024 contest, fewer than 100,000 took part.
In the early 1950s, the Conservatives claimed almost three million members, Labour almost one million. Today, party membership is one of the more unusual and unrepresentative signs of citizenship. Yet such members are handed the task of selecting an actual or potential prime minister.
The politics of the choice of system also matter. It comes down to this: do we prefer a system that favours insurgents, or one that helps mainstream candidates? To tighten the screw more, consider the significance of the six contests listed above. Benn’s defeat in 1981 was a vital step on Labour’s road to revival under Neil Kinnock. Duncan Smith failed to revive Tory fortunes; it took Cameron to do that. Miliband (Ed) and Corbyn led Labour to three successive defeats. Truss’s premiership imploded within seven weeks. All in all, not a great record for fans of insurgency.
Labour’s election system already seems to be distorting the not-yet-declared contest to succeed Starmer. Burnham and Wes Streeting have been amending their views to take account of the local Labour party members who may determine their fate.
As it should be, say those who want their party leader to reflect the “democratic” views of members who are well to the left of the wider electorate (or well to the right in the case of Conservative contests). Their (your?) view of politics will not be troubled by the declining numbers of people who take part in leadership elections, nor by the record of repeated failure of insurgent leaders chosen against the wishes of MPs.
For the rest of us, the 50-year experiment in taking the power to choose party leaders away from Westminster has gone on long enough. Each MP needs tens of thousands of votes to get to Westminster. Their need to be re-elected gives them the greatest incentive to choose the right leader. They know the candidates. They should get their power back.
