New Statesman & Society leader, 8 July 1994
Just as in 1992, the "race" for the Labour leadership is no such thing. Like John Smith then, Tony Blair is certain to be elected by a landslide, and the result is that the whole show has become rather tedious. The interesting question is not who wins on 21 July, but what Blair will do when he becomes leader – and so far he has proved himself adept at not revealing too much apart from his broad political philosophy.
But if Blair is pretty much home and dry, the same cannot be said of either of the contestants for the job of deputy leader. Here there is a real race going on between Margaret Beckett and John Prescott, and the signs are that it is going to be a close-run thing. All the opinion polls put them neck and neck.
Whom to choose? A difficult question, not least because of the amorphous nature of the deputy leader's job description. Indeed, there is a strong case, most eloquently advanced in the past couple of weeks by Tony Wright, the MP for Cannock and Burntwood, that the deputy leadership of the Labour Party is not really a job at all. Just about everything the deputy leader does, the argument goes, from filling in for the leader at prime minister's questions to chairing various national executive sub-committees, could quite easily be done by other senior Labour politicians. On this view, just about the only thing that a deputy leader is useful for is what Beckett has been doing since Smith's death – leading the party between a leader's death or resignation and the election of another leader. And there's no reason that such a caretaker leader could not be elected by the NEC as and when the need arose.
Of course, in practice, what Labour's deputy leadership has meant has depended on the incumbent and the period. When Labour is in office, it is generally a post conferred to give status to its holder. Out of office, the deputy leadership can be more important. With Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley, the post was perceived as crucial because each
provided right-wing respectability to a left-wing leader – which is why the two serious attempts to unseat them from the left (Tony Benn's 1981 challenge to Healey and Pres-cott's 1988 challenge to Hattersley) were so vigorously opposed by the party machine. In 1992, the idea behind Smith's support for Beckett getting the job was that as a right-wing man, he needed a left-wing woman to provide "balance".
Nevertheless, for all the symbolic importance that the deputy leadership has had in recent years, it is difficult to work out precisely what the last three deputy leaders have done as deputy leaders that goes beyond the symbolic. Healey managed to be deputy at the same time as holding down the shadow foreign affairs portfolio; Hattersley was shadow chancellor and then shadow home secretary – neither of them exactly part-time jobs – while he was deputy.
It is true that Beckett was charged mainly with sorting out the party's campaigns and organisation – but that was largely because of pressure from Prescott, who based his 1992 deputy leadership campaign on a promise to turn the job into a campaigning one if he was elected. As she has found in the past couple of years, travelling the country whipping up party morale sounds like a great idea but is rather difficult to put into practice except at election times. Reinvigorating the Labour Party is a mammoth task, certainly too big for even the most dynamic politician to take on single-handed. It is no surprise that we have heard rather less about "the need for a campaigning deputy leader" than we did in 1988 and 1992.
So we are back to making a decision on the basis of who would better complement Blair in the way that Healey complemented Foot or Hattersley complemented Kinnock. Is there anything to choose between Beckett and Prescott? Certainly not on political grounds. If 15 years ago Beckett was very definitely on the hard left, she has not been for at least five years, and there is nothing in her personal manifesto to suggest that the Campaign Group is being other than sentimental in giving her its support. Contrary to the Guardian's view that she is "too much a creature of old left labourism for comfort", these days Beckett, like Prescott, is very much a mainstream Labour politician, just a little to the left of the party's centre.
Both Beckett and Prescott have been key figures in Labour policy-making in the past five years, and both can be assumed to back its broad thrust if not every last detail. Both are more Eurosceptical than Blair, both are hostile to electoral reform, both like the idea of cutting defence expenditure to continental European levels. Of course there are differences in nuance between them – but either would provide much the same political balance to Blair.
Which brings the decision down to such matters as style and personality. Beckett is undoubtedly the more cautious by temperament – though whether this is a good or bad thing is arguable. Her critics say that she is dull and plodding, her friends that she is sober and dependable. Similarly, Prescott's energy and enthusiasm for policy innovation are recognised by all – but there are widely differing assessments of their worth. His critics describe him as a loose cannon and say that some of his policy ideas are half-baked; his friends say that his energy is a great strength and argue that most of his policy ideas have been sound. Prescott has the advantage of being and sounding working-class, say his supporters; Beckett is a woman, say hers. Then there are the questions of who has more experience (probably Beckett), who is better on television (definitely Prescott), who is more effective in parliament (definitely Beckett) and who is more inspiring on the stump (definitely Prescott).
It's a very difficult choice – and all for a job that doesn't really matter. In the end, the best way to settle it is probably to toss a coin.
