Dromey vs Morris: showdown at the T&G corral

The challenger: a talented negotiator, a Blairite married to Harriet Harman. His target: the 56-year-old general secretary, still hungry for the job. The prize: control of the most powerful union in the labour movement. Barrie Clement sets the scene

Jack Dromey is giving a "presentation". Plant manager Felicia Howell, a large American lady and a "tough cookie" if ever there was one, is sitting behind her desk, smoking and peering at the union official over her glasses. She is courteous, but has the air of someone who can think of a hundred and one better things to do in her Doncaster tractor factory than listen to Dromey.

With the private backing of Tony Blair, Dromey is the main challenger for the leadership of the Transport and General Workers' Union, the Labour Party's largest and most troublesome affiliate. He is expounding his New Labour industrial relations theories with characteristic effusive enumeration: "I'd make two points. Firstly ... secondly ... finally ... and thirdly ..." He also inquires about the health of the global tractor market, having boned up on the state of the Czech industry.

The object of the exercise for Dromey is to impress the shop stewards, who are also present and somewhat in awe of Ms Howell. The support of grassroots union leaders will be critical in securing votes to oust the 56-year-old general secretary, Bill Morris. Ordinary union members are often unaware of the relative merits of candidates and are prepared take the advice of shop stewards.

The fight for the leadership of the 950,000-strong T&G began as a gentlemanly contest but has become acrimonious, with Morris's backers suggesting that Militant supporters are involved in Dromey's campaign and Dromey critical of Morris's attacks on Tony Blair. Nominations close today, the election is in late June. Both are hungry for the job: while the political power of the leader is not what it was 20 years ago, it is a position from which it is possible to wield considerable influence. The T&G may no longer have the power to make or break Labour leaders, but it can, if it chooses, be a major brake on change.

This is a highly unusual T&G election. Each candidate has enlisted support from right and left. Dromey has the backing of the hard left of Merseyside, largely because Morris has taken action against some of them for alleged misuse of union funds. Morris, who was backed by the old left-wing machine in the last election campaign, has the support of Jim Hunt, a leading right-winger and regional secretary in the Midlands.

The background and experience of the two men are very different. On the campaign trail Morris often tells members that he joined the union as an engineering worker because he was in dire need of it. "I didn't become a member as a career move." This is a reference to his challenger, who, despite humble origins as the son of Irish immigrants, studied law for two years and spent 20 years as a union official. "You know where I'm coming from," he likes to tell workers. "When I was a kid it was four in a bed and the first one up got the socks."

Morris came to Britain from Jamaica when he was 16, and owes much to the union. Having worked in the engineering industry for almost 20 years, he rose through the union ranks and credits himself with turning a huge financial deficit into a surplus. His self-promotion as an uncomplicated trade unionist belies a complex and sometimes withdrawn personality who lacks his rival's self-confidence. He can appear distant from close colleagues, some of whom complain that they are rarely consulted. Significantly, Jack Adams, deputy general secretary and a former Morris supporter, has failed to declare in his favour.

Dromey, however, a highly energetic and talented union negotiator, exudes self-belief and ambition to a degree that has irritated some colleagues. His dealings with the press are a model for the less articulate.

Dromey, 46, once known as Ginger Jack and a veteran of countless picket lines, Grunwick among them, is now bald, besuited, moderate - and married to Harriet Harman, the shadow employment secretary. He is seen by the Labour leader as a beacon of articulate good sense in a primeval political swamp. At Labour's constitutional conference last month, Dromey urged his union to swing its 14 per cent vote behind Blair's modernist Clause IV, but failed.

At the Doncaster tractor factory, Dromey, head of the union's public services division, continues his crusade for a new approach to labour relations. He argues for phased retirement to provide increased leisure for older workers and employment opportunities for the young. Ms Howell demurs. He posits his theory that employee flexibility can be traded for job security. She replies that selling tractors is the only way to ensure jobs for her workforce.

This is the stuff of union election campaigns these days. Factory visits often involve formal exchanges with management. Ten years ago, such meetings would have been regarded as superfluous, electorally counter-productive, even treacherous. If the dialogue with Ms Howell proved unfruitful, Dromey's conversations with his members went well. He knows how to work the crowds on a factory floor.

On the hustings, both Dromey and Morris have encountered considerable resentment from T&G members over the Clause IV vote. Most members are understandably ignorant of the precise contents of the quaintly worded Clause IV, which called for public ownership, or its badly written replacement, acknowledging the efficacy of market forces. They are, however, much exercised by the fact that their union's vote was cast without a ballot of the membership. Morris's aides assured him that as the campaign progressed, memories would fade and that Clause IV would not be an issue, but television images of the T&G defying the Labour leader are still fresh in members' minds.

It is now a question of whether Dromey, who is giving the incumbent a good run for his money, can capitalise on the sentiment. At a company in Scarborough, the challenger was approached "somewhat aggressively" by one worker who blamed him for the lack of a vote. In fact, Dromey was one of the few who argued in favour of a referendum.

On factory-floor visits, Morris defends the absence of a ballot by pointing out that the wording of the new constitution was published too late to hold a vote. He also contends that the Labour Party did not stipulate a method of consulting union members, and that the pounds 300,000 a ballot would have cost will now be spent on services to members. The latter could well be the most telling argument to those who pay union subscriptions.

While Dromey believes that his closeness to the Labour leadership is an electoral asset, he is highly sensitive about his portrayal as an habitue of the Blairist political salons of middle-class north London. "What with our jobs and the three kids, we don't have time for dinner parties," he says.

Morris perceives weaknesses in Dromey's image. At meetings on factory floors, the incumbent assures members that, come the election, his union will pour all their resources into ensuring a victory for Labour. "But I want to ensure that the union is a first-class industrial organisation, rather than a second-class political party," he told union representatives at a chromium factory on Teesside. "The T&G must remain independent. We must not become an appendage to a political party."

One of Morris's favourite points of argument involves the union's policy to fight for a national minimum wage at pounds 4 an hour. He told shop stewards at a floor-covering factory: "There is only one person in this union who cannot argue for a pounds 4 an hour minimum rate and that's Jack Dromey. And he couldn't do it because he'd have trouble indoors." The Labour leadership, including Ms Harman, has refused to put a figure on a minimum wage, preferring to rely on an advisory commission on low pay with representatives from both sides of industry.

The Morris camp believes there would be endless scope for a conflict of interest between Dromey as leader of the T&G and Ms Harman as Secretary of State for Employment. For his part, the challenger contends that he is far more able to "manage the relationship" between union and party and tells shop stewards that he will prosecute the interests of the union without fear or favour. Says Dromey: "They are running a very negative campaign against me because they have very little positive to say about Bill. Many of the people who have declared in his favour are less than enthusiastic."

Despite their public pronouncements, there is little to choose between the two politically, although Labour's leadership sees Dromey as considerably more reliable than Morris. A perceived lack of coherence on the part of the present T&G leader has also led to dissension among the union's officer corps. His seeming flirtation with Clintonism recently led to exasperation among colleagues; Dromey has criticised him for allowing the union to "drift".

Morris was privately in favour of the reform of Clause IV, although duty- bound by the union's constitution to uphold the traditionalist stance of his leftist executive. "My mother drunk or sober," is how he characterises his loyalty to the union's ruling body.

The election is of considerable importance to Tony Blair. Having triumphed in the party itself, he wants to vanquish old Labour in the unions. A victory by Dromey would be a powerful symbol of his control over the whole of the labour movement.