The Very Worst

I undertook to name the ‘Worst Party Leader of the 20th Century’. There are many contenders, and I shall name merely the most obvious.

I ought however to have referred to the ‘Worst Party Leader Since 1900’ (and yes, I know that takes in one year of the 19th century too), for there is a highly plausible candidate in Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative leader from 2001 to 2003. If anything, IDS – a transparently useless and embarrassingly inarticulate politician – has become a still more diminished figure since having been superseded (the politest term I can find for a commendably unsentimental despatch) as leader by Michael Howard. There is no disgrace in being limited in ability and intellect. There is something undignified, however, first in refusing to recognise your own limits and secondly in castigating those who do it for you once you’ve made them evident.

The farce – not tragedy - of IDS’s tenure has its counterpart in Michael Foot’s pitiful ‘leadership’ of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. That experience – miserable for a Labour Party activist, as I was at the time – demonstrated above all that Labour in the 1980s was a party as sentimental as it was absurd. Only two MPs – Gerald Kaufman and Jeff Rooker – are on record as having urged Foot to resign, yet everyone knew he was ignorant and unelectable. Securing the party over 100 lost deposits and utter humiliation at the polls, he was given an ovation at its annual conference just three months later. I was, and remain, less generous. It took astonishing vanity for the man ever to have allowed himself to be convinced by his wife that he was suitable to run for the party leadership, and he thoroughly deserved the derision and contempt that accompanied him thereafter. To this day, he maintains that a party programme of unilateral nuclear disarmament, sweeping nationalisation, compulsory planning ‘agreements’ with industry, price controls, rent controls, doubling of the pensioners’ Christmas bonus and – the final absurdity – unification of Ireland ‘by consent’ represented a sensible programme for government.

A good and mildly revisionist biography of Anthony Eden by D.R. Thorpe was published last year. It portrays Eden more sympathetically in the Suez crisis than we’re accustomed to. There is little doubt that American foreign policy over Suez was duplicitous - a severe blot on the generally capable foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration – yet so was Eden’s (lying about Israel’s role), and with scant prospect of success. It was a politically stupid course, compounded by his abandoning his post after the debacle. He was the worst Prime Minister since the war, and a disastrous party leader.

The Liberal Party - the Liberal Democrats since its acquisition of the SDP - has been led by some spectacular deadbeats. Its current leader – a man who has never had a job, and who presents as his claim to be taken seriously that he was once a guest presenter on a television quiz show – is a standing affront to the quality of British political life. Its leader but three, Jeremy Thorpe, may have been found not guilty of incitement to murder, but what came out at his trial demonstrated nonetheless an appalling man who debased the very notion of public service. He is moreover one of the few figures in modern politics capable of making Charles Kennedy appear an intellectual titan.

But, on grounds of obvious historical opportunity, the most fertile period for wretched leadership was the 1930s. For me the right choice for Worst Leader is not, however, the most obvious (good choice though he would make nonetheless). For sanctimonious, hypocritical, obtuse and ignorant isolationism the Liberal leader from 1931-35, Herbert Samuel, poses a difficult record to beat. Yet beaten it is.

The Worst Leader of Any Political Party in the past century is ... George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. Lansbury became leader in a fit of collective absentmindedness after Ramsay MacDonald (a much-underrated Prime Minister whose name even now is stupidly reviled within the Labour Party) went into coalition with the Conservatives. His foreign policy in the age of the dictators was – literally - the Sermon on the Mount. He was an absolute pacifist whose contribution to political debate was utterly ineffectual, attracting much condescending tribute to his sincerity when what was actually required was brutal dismissal. It was a long time coming, but when it did come – in the form of Ernest Bevin of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, later an outstanding Foreign Secretary under Clement Attlee – it was effective. At the 1935 Party Conference Bevin, surveying the absurdity of Lansbury’s devotion to diplomacy in preference to rearmament, denounced his leader for ‘hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it’. It was a mark of how pathetically unsuited to political office Lansbury was that he gave up the leadership without protest, and apparently without realising the extent of his humiliation.

Lansbury continued his efforts to resolve political tension by peaceful means, and thereby gave a valuable illustration of the intellectual and moral reprehensibility of pursuing diplomacy without the slightest awareness of its limits. In 1937 he travelled to the European capitals to propose a world congress to decide on the just distribution of world resources and thereby supposedly remove the cause of war (that ‘root cause’ fallacy has a long and undistinguished pedigree). He pronounced Hitler, who understandably gave him a sympathetic hearing, ‘one of the great men of our time’, and declared (Lansbury, My Quest for Peace, 1938; quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, 1993):

[T]o live, Germany needs peace as much as any nation in the world. No one understands this better than Herr Hitler… When I came away [from meeting him] it was my sincere belief that if negotiations could be started at once accommodation might be found. The threat of war was only a silly illusion which would soon dissipate if I could arrange a meeting between Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini with somebody as chairman with a sense of humour… I feel that a pleasant day’s conversation in a villa on the Riviera might bring these three statesmen to realise that they have … a world of peace and security to gain.

A foolish and fatuous elder statesman of the Labour Party, held in entirely unjustified affection by his comrades, prostrating himself shamefully and ignominiously while ‘interviewing’ a genocidal dictator. Thank goodness it would never happen now.

Comments

[Steve Kingston]

Surely Neville Chamberlain deserves a dishonourable mention? The worst of George Lansbury's idiotic posturing happened after he ceased to be party leader. Chamberlain on the other hand was still deluding himself - and worse, the nation - about the effectiveness of international conferences as late as 1938, when he was still party leader and Prime Minister. Result: we betrayed a natural ally (Czechoslovakia) and induced the French to break their treaty obligation to the Czechs (not that they needed much inducing).
Arguably this is a nitpicking point about worst performance while still party leader - if we're bringing post-leadership behaviour into consideration one might also suggest Edward Heath as a contender.

[harryj]

Party leaders reflect their parties very accurately as one would expect. I think the socialist party, with their history of perversity as a watchword, their adoration of uncle Joe Stalin greatest mass murderer of the 20th Century, extinguisher of the flame of freedom in half the world, might reasonably be expected to chose the loudest mouth in parliament and enthusiastic supporter of old Joe, as leader.( Remember the Aesop's fable about the frog and the scorpion?) As for the liberals, who more appropriate than poor old Jeremy, fraud of frauds.(Everyone knows not to trust a man in a brown bowler, except the liberals). And for Neville, I always thought he started the rearmament,gave us a little more time and gave the country a fighting chance and a real leader as successor, the whole while dying of cancer.

[Kirk]

Oliver -- you have now several times lauded Ernest Bevin's performance as Foreign Secretary. I wish you would balance that assessment by acknowledging Bevin's rather well-known antipathy for Jews (which I suppose made him well-qualified to be a Foreign Secretary) and his despicable post-war treatment of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

KL

[David Boothroyd]

There is a defence of Michael Foot, although I don't happen personally to accept it. It is that the Labour Party was ripping itself apart anyway in the early 1980s and though Foot was obviously never going to win an election, he did manage to minimise the SDP split and keep the Labour Party going such that it got through the 1983 election in one piece and still the official opposition - so that the next Leader could start to rebuild it. As for Chamberlain, his domestic policies were largely successful and he would have been re-elected in 1939 if he had called the election. WWII can hardly be laid at his door as there was this chap Hitler stirring things up a bit as well.

[GrimReaper]

"...a party programme of unilateral nuclear disarmament, sweeping nationalisation, compulsory planning ‘agreements’ with industry, price controls, rent controls, doubling of the pensioners’ Christmas bonus and – the final absurdity – unification of Ireland ‘by consent’ represented a sensible programme for government"
Well, he was a socialist, after all.
What an Earth was an intelligent chap like Oliver Kamm doing in the Labour Party?

[S. Lewis]

Grim Reaper:
There were, and are, not a few people in the Labour Party who consider themselves to be, or have been, democatic socialists. But who nonetheless were against unilateral disarmament, pro-NATO, aware that the 'republican-good, unionist-bad' concept was simplistic at best, and capable enough of learning from experience to see that a peacetime command economy was no longer a realistic option in the 1980's.
Some had come to that conclusion decades previously; that it was doomed to failure economically, a millstone politically, offensive to liberty, and unecessary for equality.