Marathon man Murphy will have to learn how to sprint

“Some of you, I hear, support me simply because you think I can win.”

That was the young Tony Blair, newly elected leader 20 years ago, cheekily saying the unsayable at the Labour party conference in Blackpool. I doubt Jim Murphy will be mentioning the former Labour prime minister very often in his campaign in Scotland over the next few weeks. Whether he likes it or not, if Murphy wants to win the Scottish leadership he will have to accept the former PM’s lack of popularity north of the border, and make his appeal to party and trades union members there accordingly.

But while Blair may not get many positive name-checks, in a sense Murphy will be campaigning in the spirit of that impish Blair line quoted above. His pitch will be that he is a big hitter, someone with the gumption and guile first to halt the Nationalists’ momentum and then to recharge Labour levels of support. Some will question whether Murphy has the capacity for reinvention required for this task. Others will remember past disagreements and simply worry that he is not the person to win back lost support. As a keen runner his favoured distance may be the marathon. He has a sprint to win over the next few weeks.

After his 100 town tour of Scotland in the run-up to the referendum on independence, Murphy can be in no doubt as to the intensity of feeling in the country or the size of the challenge facing Labour. He will have to be a quick learner. The tone and thrust of his comments in the past few days suggest that he is. He has rejected talk of “New Labour versus old”. He has apologised for the party’s failure to listen to voters in recent years. He has spoken more warmly about trades unions than he possibly has for some time – a development not unrelated to the nature of the electorate he is now bidding to win over.

In pulling off this rather rapid repositioning Murphy is actually following the advice of someone not often seen as a particular fan of Labour, the commentator Gerry Hassan. In a fascinating Open Democracy post Hassan tried to challenge a few of the myths that feature regularly in much of the Westminster media’s coverage of Scotland.

“Increasingly the terms of reference used to explain Labour machinations: ‘Blairite’, ‘moderniser’, even ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless,” he wrote. “There isn’t a very powerful, radical left in Scottish Labour, and hasn’t been for as long as anyone can remember. These terms need to be put in the dustbin of history, as terms such as ‘Gaitskellite’, ‘Bennite’ and even ‘Brownite’ have been previously.”

But Hassan added that Scottish Labour does have a record to be proud of.  “Scottish Labour once stood for something positive,” he declared, “a definite, clear-cut worldview which could be described as administrative Labourism. It was not radical or very left wing, but it delivered big things: it built homes, new towns, lifted people out of poverty, brought hydro-electric schemes to the Highlands, and championed an active, interventionist state.”

Murphy will doubtless reject the “Blairite” label that Nationalists and others will throw at him, arguing that it is time to move on from all that. But he may in practice seek to establish a rather Blairish third way between the Nationalists’ empty populism and calls from his left to establish socialism in one (devolved, almost independent) nation.

And he would be right to emphasise above all that Scottish Labour cannot afford to fight among itself. It needs instead to listen to voters and reconnect with them. The other leadership candidates seem to agree. When Neil Findlay talks about establishing a national house-building programme “to build council houses and social housing on a grand scale”, or setting up a living wage unit in the Scottish government “that would use grants, procurement and every lever of government to raise the minimum wage to the living wage”, he is engaging with the very issues that concern a lot of voters. And when Sarah Boyack says that the party needs to build on the ultimate success of the No campaign to “involve people across the whole country and reach out to the people that we have worked with over the last few months,” she is making a similar case. “There have been thousands of debates across the country,” Boyack has said. “People have huge ambition for Scotland and it’s the Labour Party, I believe, can take those agendas forward and make Scotland the place it needs to be.”

The general secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey, has said that Labour should use this coming leadership campaign as a platform to relaunch the party first in Scotland and then in the UK as a whole. That is a good and necessary idea. Labour are now the underdogs in Scotland, and the momentum created by a successful recovery there would spread further south.

Something tells me that Jim Murphy is not really Unite’s favoured candidate. But they may have to get used to the idea. No Labour leader in Scotland has yet managed to match the seriousness and commitment of Donald Dewar. But it is not just height that Murphy has in common with the former first minister. He has some of his metaphorical stature too. If the marathon man can learn to run and dip like a sprinter, Murphy might just come out ahead in a few weeks’ time.