Labour’s most and least successful leaders, now including Corbyn

I have been blogging for 13 years, so there are certain key posts I can update as history unfolds. This week, I’m revising my tables that try to answer to the vexed question of who are Labour’s most and least successful leaders. I will include Jeremy Corbyn’s performance in the two general elections he has fought, now that he has stated he won’t fight a third. The problem is that the answer changes depending on which measure you look at. Here are just some of the ways of considering it.

Length of time spent as Labour Prime Minister (suggested as a measure by Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul):

Labour’s top 10 election results by seats:

On this ranking, only three leaders (Attlee, Wilson and Blair) get a look-in. Blair is clearly the stand-out election winner, with three of the only five clear wins we have ever had. His third election as leader, in 2005, was greeted with much gloom at the time but is our fifth best result ever. His first two, in 1997 and 2001, are in a league of their own – to my mind, 2001 was even more impressive than 1997 as it was achieved after four years in government. It was a judgement on our performance, not that of the Tories.

Labour’s top 10 election results by vote share:

On vote share, the two-party dominance in the 1940s and 1950s makes Attlee look more impressive than Blair (lots of narrow defeats but on spectacular shares of the vote), and Gaitskell’s 1959 defeat gets into the top 10! But looking at it another way, the 1997 and 2001 results do brilliantly to get into the table as they were achieved in a three-party system. The 2005 vote is, however, nowhere to be seen. Jeremy Corbyn’s 40% in 2017 just misses getting into this top ten.

How each leader grew or shrank the PLP:

The legacy versus inheritance table on MPs starts to do justice to the achievements of our early leaders as it shows how they grew the party.

MacDonald’s presence near the top is troubling as most of us only know about the end of his career, when he split from the party he had built up and headed a Tory-dominated coalition to push through cuts. He is, for good reasons, such a bogeyman for most Labour people that we tend not to study his role in building the party through to 1929.

Clynes is almost totally forgotten but was an interesting figure – as Home Secretary, he blocked Leon Trotsky’s asylum claim to enter the UK! Neil Kinnock’s achievement in dragging Labour out of the mire shows through here. Corbyn comes below Miliband, his position in this table flattered by the already small PLP he inherited but managed to shrink still further.

How each leader grew or shrank Labour’s vote share (inheritance/legacy/change):

This table shows a slightly different picture. Another little-remembered early leader, Adamson, takes the number two slot.

MacDonald and Clynes are again near the top. Kinnock is above Wilson and Blair, who underperform on this measure as their final wins were on vote shares not much different from the defeats of their immediate predecessors – in fact, this table puts Miliband and Corbyn above Blair…

Perhaps the most interesting question for contemporary historians of Labour – and still a relevant matter of political debate – is how to view the 2005 results of 355 seats on 35.2% of the vote. Was this a unique historic hat-trick, and an amazing defensive victory given the context of the aftermath of the unpopular Iraq War? Or was it the four million lost votes thesis (from 13.5m in 1997 to 9.5m in 2005) put about by Blair’s detractors?

Until we have another victory to compare with which we can compare 2005, it remains our most recent winning result. We are now in the odd situation that this year’s result was 1.2 million votes higher than our win in 2005 but delivered 152 fewer seats. This odd fact shows that under first-past-the-post the capriciousness of the electoral system means it’s not just how many votes you get that matters, but in which seats and how the opposition vote splits up.