Daily catch-up: the history of British Labour leaders

Plus Jewishness and the left; the smoking remains of Alan Bennett; and driverless trains

Further to my musings yesterday about the Corbynites' rewriting of recent history, I don't want to blow my own trumpet but I could at least let you know I have a trumpet, as Blackadder said. I have written the chapter on Tony Blair in British Labour Leaders, edited by Charles Clarke and Toby James, and recently published by Biteback. In it, I comment:

A winning electoral strategy ... is one plane on which the assessment of Blair ought to brook no argument. No single party has won elections so convincingly under the universal franchise as Labour did in 1997 and 2001. The argument has, nevertheless, been brooked ever since. Labour would have won in 1997 if it had put up a donkey with a red rosette as leader, it has been said. Or, without the insulting implication towards him, if the party had still been led by John Smith. This is a strong theme of revisionist Old Labour history: that it would have been better to have won the 1997 election with a smaller majority but on a more socialist platform.

I point out that this more "socialist" platform might have included adopting the euro, when the European currencies were locked together in 1999, and a Scottish parliament without a referendum, which would have risked problems in the House of Lords that could have derailed a Labour government.

I go on to say that, when Blair was eventually forced out of the leadership by Labour MPs who "mistook voter fatigue ... for a willingness to vote for a slightly more ‘left-wing’ leader and programme", the "John Smith thesis" was finally put to the test in 2010. It was found wanting.

The chapter on Clement Attlee by Nick Thomas-Symonds is also recommended for romantic so-called leftists who subscribe to the Myth of the Sainted Clem, the Prime Minister who made Britain's Bomb, subverting Cabinet government, joined the American war in Korea and balanced the budget at a time of real austerity.

• Saul Freeman has written a sad personal post about being half-Jewish and left wing on The Gerasites website. The site, a tribute to the great Norman Geras, is also commended to you, especially Himadri Chatterjee's post on how he came to admire Jane Austen, another of Geras's favourite subjects.

• I reviewed Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. I thought David Cameron struggled to look as if he cared that he planned to take £1,000 a year from the tax credits of working poor families, and Conservative MPs made it worse by barracking Jeremy Corbyn's serious questions.

• Despite adopting the open letter format, Daniel Finkelstein's to Alan Bennett in yesterday's Times (pay wall) is magnificent. Here is an extract:

“Award-winning playwright Alan Bennett has launched a withering attack on the Tories, describing their style of government as ‘quite close to a totalitarian attitude’,” the [Guardian] announced. I know how absurd you regard appending the description “award-winning” is, so I couldn’t help laughing (I hope) with you. Let’s put it this way. I don’t think the awards were for observations about Tory governing style. I don’t think you’d have even won “highly commended” for that.

Your argument was: “It’s not merely that they [the Tories] want to be the governing party, but the only party, and that’s never been part of the British political tradition. That stems originally from Mrs Thatcher: she did believe that Labour was wicked.”

What a puzzling thing to say. What evidence is there for it? True Mrs Thatcher didn’t much like Labour. But I don’t think they liked her much either, as far I recall.

In the past 20 years, Labour has been in power for 13, and in five of the other years the Conservatives had to govern with another party. They couldn’t, in other words, even be the only party in their own government. And while there are plenty of criticisms that can fairly be made of David Cameron, the best I can say of calling him “totalitarian” is that it shows originality.

By the end of it, there is not much of Bennett left.

• I did not know that the Central, Victoria, Northern & Jubilee Underground lines are already basically driverless. Jack Brown has a superb post on how the supposedly strike-free Dockland Light Railway went on strike this week.

• And finally, thanks to Andy Hutchcraft ‏for this news:

"One of the Russian gymnastic brothers has sadly died. The other brother has now retired as he doesn't have Oleg to stand on."