In February 1975, Barbara Castle writes in her diary on the effect of Margaret Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader:
“I can’t help feeling a thrill. She is so clearly the best man among them…
“[Her] election has stirred up her own side wonderfully; all her backbenchers perform like knights jousting at a tourney for a lady’s favours... by making an unholy row at every opportunity over everything that the Government does. Today they were baiting Harold [Wilson] over Reg Prentice’s speech, and once again Harold was getting away with it, not by wit, but by sheer verbosity. Everybody kept glancing at Margaret to see when she would take him on. She sat with bowed head and detached primness while the row went on; hair immaculately groomed, smart dress crowned by a string of pearls. At last she rose to enormous cheers from her own side to deliver an adequate but hardly memorable intervention with studied charm. Roy Jenkins, sitting next , groaned and I said, ‘She’s not quite real, is she?’”
In her memoirs Barbara Castle added:
“No one seeing her then would have foreseen the mastery she developed over the House as Prime Minister. She was not very effective in opposition. But all the time she was proving what I have always believed to be true—that performance in opposition is no clear indicator of what a leader is capable of achieving when given responsibility.”
In June 1981, Frank Johnson writes about Michael Foot, who was elected Labour leader in November 1980, presenting himself as a compromise candidate to unite the party:
“One suspects that [Mr Foot] is rather melancholy. After a lifetime of romantic left-wingery—in journalism, in biography, on a thousand television panels and editions of Any Questions?, in set-piece orations in the Commons—he suddenly, against all augury, became leader of the Labour Party...
“Until he was propelled by fortune to his present position, Mr Foot had attained a quite different, though equally formal and traditional position in our national life. He was Her Majesty’s Leader of the Left.
“It was a position just as dignified as Black Rod or the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. But... on achieving this further dignity, Mr Foot has made a mortifying discovery: there are lots of people to the left of him... For, while Mr Foot was ranting happily away all those years, a different, less respectable, less comfortable left was coming into being. To a traditionalist such as Mr Foot, accustomed all his life to a left which shared his bourgeois taste for parliamentary democracy and for belles-lettres, it must be a baffling, faintly menacing, universe.”
In late 1988, after being elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1983, Neil Kinnock was interviewed by BBC journalist Vivian White:
“As leader of the Labour Party, what is now your personal view of unilateral nuclear disarmament?” Kinnock replied: “As leader of the Labour Party, I am not allowed personal views. Personal views and being leader of the Labour Party are almost a contradiction in terms.”
In December 1992, Neil Kinnock reflected on his policies as Labour leader, saying: “If it had been possible to have led the Labour Party of 1983 or 1987 or 1992 by Attlean acerbity, or Bevanite evangelism, Wilsonian wiliness or Callaghan bonhomie, then the task would have been much easier... In the event, however, the condition of the party made management an obligation, so I got on with it.
“It would have been useful to have had a neat and magnetic central theme... I have to say, however as a matter of fact rather than self-defence, that until as late as 1991 there was always a significant risk that any progressive lunge that was too big or too quick could have fractured the developing consensus... And as far as the central theme was concerned, I and others put repeatedly: ‘the purpose is to win.’”
On 7th May 1999, Alan Clark wrote in his diary about William Hague, the leader of the Conservatives:
“There has been (on our TV screen) little Hague, in his “Bruce Willis” haircut (whatever that is) and his dreadful flat northern voice. I find it just awful, skin-curdling, that the party—our great Party—formerly led by Disraeli, Balfour, Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher (even) could be in the hands of this dreadful little man who has absolutely no sense whatever of history or pageantry or noblesse oblige.”
Chris Mullin, Labour MP, writes in his diary on 30th May 2001:
“Watched William Hague answering questions on television. Everyone keeps saying how awful he is, but I find him impressive. He is calm, cheerful, rational and exudes self-confidence. It is just that the tide of history is against him. Also, he has based his campaign on an appeal to the meanest instincts of the British people at a time when they—or most of them—want something better. Thank goodness.”
“I can’t help feeling a thrill. She is so clearly the best man among them…
“[Her] election has stirred up her own side wonderfully; all her backbenchers perform like knights jousting at a tourney for a lady’s favours... by making an unholy row at every opportunity over everything that the Government does. Today they were baiting Harold [Wilson] over Reg Prentice’s speech, and once again Harold was getting away with it, not by wit, but by sheer verbosity. Everybody kept glancing at Margaret to see when she would take him on. She sat with bowed head and detached primness while the row went on; hair immaculately groomed, smart dress crowned by a string of pearls. At last she rose to enormous cheers from her own side to deliver an adequate but hardly memorable intervention with studied charm. Roy Jenkins, sitting next , groaned and I said, ‘She’s not quite real, is she?’”
In her memoirs Barbara Castle added:
“No one seeing her then would have foreseen the mastery she developed over the House as Prime Minister. She was not very effective in opposition. But all the time she was proving what I have always believed to be true—that performance in opposition is no clear indicator of what a leader is capable of achieving when given responsibility.”
In June 1981, Frank Johnson writes about Michael Foot, who was elected Labour leader in November 1980, presenting himself as a compromise candidate to unite the party:
“One suspects that [Mr Foot] is rather melancholy. After a lifetime of romantic left-wingery—in journalism, in biography, on a thousand television panels and editions of Any Questions?, in set-piece orations in the Commons—he suddenly, against all augury, became leader of the Labour Party...
“Until he was propelled by fortune to his present position, Mr Foot had attained a quite different, though equally formal and traditional position in our national life. He was Her Majesty’s Leader of the Left.
“It was a position just as dignified as Black Rod or the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. But... on achieving this further dignity, Mr Foot has made a mortifying discovery: there are lots of people to the left of him... For, while Mr Foot was ranting happily away all those years, a different, less respectable, less comfortable left was coming into being. To a traditionalist such as Mr Foot, accustomed all his life to a left which shared his bourgeois taste for parliamentary democracy and for belles-lettres, it must be a baffling, faintly menacing, universe.”
In late 1988, after being elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1983, Neil Kinnock was interviewed by BBC journalist Vivian White:
“As leader of the Labour Party, what is now your personal view of unilateral nuclear disarmament?” Kinnock replied: “As leader of the Labour Party, I am not allowed personal views. Personal views and being leader of the Labour Party are almost a contradiction in terms.”
In December 1992, Neil Kinnock reflected on his policies as Labour leader, saying: “If it had been possible to have led the Labour Party of 1983 or 1987 or 1992 by Attlean acerbity, or Bevanite evangelism, Wilsonian wiliness or Callaghan bonhomie, then the task would have been much easier... In the event, however, the condition of the party made management an obligation, so I got on with it.
“It would have been useful to have had a neat and magnetic central theme... I have to say, however as a matter of fact rather than self-defence, that until as late as 1991 there was always a significant risk that any progressive lunge that was too big or too quick could have fractured the developing consensus... And as far as the central theme was concerned, I and others put repeatedly: ‘the purpose is to win.’”
On 7th May 1999, Alan Clark wrote in his diary about William Hague, the leader of the Conservatives:
“There has been (on our TV screen) little Hague, in his “Bruce Willis” haircut (whatever that is) and his dreadful flat northern voice. I find it just awful, skin-curdling, that the party—our great Party—formerly led by Disraeli, Balfour, Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher (even) could be in the hands of this dreadful little man who has absolutely no sense whatever of history or pageantry or noblesse oblige.”
Chris Mullin, Labour MP, writes in his diary on 30th May 2001:
“Watched William Hague answering questions on television. Everyone keeps saying how awful he is, but I find him impressive. He is calm, cheerful, rational and exudes self-confidence. It is just that the tide of history is against him. Also, he has based his campaign on an appeal to the meanest instincts of the British people at a time when they—or most of them—want something better. Thank goodness.”
