JOHN Smith had a landslide victory over Bryan Gould in the Labour Party leadership election of July 1992, which had been prompted by the resignation of Neil Kinnock.
Sadly, Smith was only in the post for two years: he died, aged just 55, in May 1994.
One tabloid newspaper the next morning had as its headline, “Britain’s next Prime Minister died yesterday”.
Obituaries reflected the widespread shock at the passing of such a popular and able figure.
“The suddenness of its loss has hit the Labour Party in the solar plexus”, wrote his biographer, Andy McSmith, in the Guardian.
“Whatever Labour does in the next few months, it will not find another leader with the Olympian quality which Smith projected of being above every faction, a leader for all the party. He had achieved a personal ascendancy unmatched by any Labour leader since Clement Attlee.
“...Despite the owlish blandness which characterised Smith, almost every senior Labour figure believed him capable of being a strong Prime Minister, calm in times of adversity and motivated by deeply-held beliefs. Nothing now can shake that conviction”.
Writing in the Independent, MP Tam Dalyell said: “Smith would have made an effective and, with luck, a great prime minister. He was as clever as [Hugh] Gaitskell [the Labour leader who had died suddenly in 1963], and possessed advantages that Gaitskell did not – respect for the integrity of those who took a different view, a well-developed ‘forgettory’ about past political disagreements and sparkling good humour on most occasions”.
Smith is pictured here at Glasgow Airport with senior colleagues Donald Dewar, Gordon Brown and Robin Cook on the day before the 1992 general election.
The other photograph, by Angela Catlin, was taken before Smith addressed a Press Fund lunch in Glasgow in May 1991.
In his speech, he promised that a Scottish parliament would be established within the first year of a Labour Government, along with a Scottish representative office in Brussels.
He said he fervently hoped that a Scottish parliament would have a wide range of powers over and above those such as education, health, and agriculture, already devolved from Westminster and administered from the Scottish Office. “It is enough to state that it is the right of the Scottish people to decide Scottish affairs according to their priorities,” he added.
Writing on the 20th anniversary of Smith’s death, in 2014, John McTernan, a former Labour adviser, said Smith would undoubtedly have won the 1997 election and would certainly have been a good Prime Minister.
“The ethos would have been a very Scottish Christian - Presbyterian, even - socialism, but with that sparkle of wit and humour that Smith gave to everything”.
Read more: Herald Diary
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