John Smith 1938-1994: The man who would have led Britain

JOHN SMITH, 1938-1994. Leader of the Opposition, 1992-1994. Educated Glasgow University. Advocate, Scottish Bar, 1967. Labour MP for Lanarkshire North, 1970-1983; for Monklands East, 1983-1994. Secretary of State for Trade, 1978-1979. Married Elizabeth Margaret Bennett, 1967; three daughters.

THE GREATEST political tribute to John Smith is the simplest one: had he lived, he would have become Prime Minister. That is a guess, of course, an assertion thrown into the darkness. But over the past few months I, like many others, had slowly come round to the belief that the likeliest outcome of the next election was a Labour victory. This was not only because of Conservative disunity. It was because of the will and the worth of Mr Smith.

For they - we - got him wrong. The London-based political classes never quite understood this man. They were prepared to concede his decency and seriousness, to mutter about lawyers, Presbyterianism and Scottish Sunday afternoons, to grant him the odd good joke across the despatch-box. But they seemed almost blind to his huge and mounting popularity in the country - opinion-poll ratings rivalled only by Harold Wilson at the height of his radical reputation in the Sixties. Labour MPs such as Dennis Skinner were reporting extraordinary events - 650 people turning up at meetings in small cathedral towns. Something was happening in Britain, even if Westminster had barely noticed. That something was Mr Smith, in his certainty, making contact.

This is not an easy country, nor an easy time, for political leadership. The failure of so many familiar nostrums has left an uncertain people, suspicious of promises and temperamentally ready for betrayal. To them, Mr Smith had been sending quite quiet, consistent and unrhetorical messages. He was quite sure he would win. He was quite sure he could help.

This is a time in which democratic leaders are raised high, then savagely brought down, a grim carnival of grotesques. But Mr Smith was self-confident enough to disappear from view, to stay almost comically ordinary, to give others the credit. He never struck attitudes or sought attention for himself. Faced by the media demanding instant policy, a political agenda subservient to the news agenda, he was infuriatingly passive. He was keeping his eye on the long term, thank you. It was conventional, unheroic and frankly, we thought, a little simplistic. But it was working.

Yes, we got him wrong. We did not look closely enough. What was precious and rare in him was his anger. This may seem an odd judgement on a man known for his good humour, wit and zest for life. But it did not take long when one had him by himself for the conversation to turn to the unfashionable matter of poverty. He thought about the lives of his poorer and unemployed constituents and the effect on him was almost eerie. He would start on what it was like to live on benefits as a single mother. His voice would harden and suddenly you found that the easy-going Westminster Good Old Boy you thought you were sitting next to had disappeared and you were making eye-contact with someone you hadn't realised was in the room - a driven, angry and quietly implacable soul.

Serious? Oh yes. Scottish serious. Those policy 'mistakes' - his insistence on a national minimum wage, the Social Charter, the requirement in 1992 for higher taxes on middle-income families, were at the core of his political meaning, his old-fashioned Christian anger. For a man of the Labour right, the essence of respectability, Mr Smith was curiously popular and admired by those Labour left-wingers who knew him well.

His tax policies may have helped Labour lose the 1992 election and would have been finessed before the next one. He was too focused on winning to make the same mistake twice. But Prime Minister Smith would have surprised the middle- class South (a part of the nation I think he never really understood). However reassuringly conventional the suit and spectacles, when he used words like fairness, opportunity, greed, he meant them. Some would have been shocked by the results; others, perhaps, inspired.

As almost every tribute has mentioned, he was a witty man, warm and painstaking in small acts of kindness. I will never forget the small flicker of pleasure when I turned a Commons corridor and saw that short, bulky form approaching - fast walk, alert gaze, sharp comment still. I won't forget staring down into the Commons chamber and getting an unexpected wink and broad grin from him. I won't forget the laughter, infectious as flu, or the unrepeatable jokes.

But none of that is really the story of what has gone. I contend that the reason why Mr Smith connected to voters was that they somehow saw through the cheery but cautious Westminster man, and grasped a little of the steeliness, the anger, and the general grown-up- ness of the politician behind. They saw a man most politicians didn't. You may call that romanticism, or the emotion of the moment. But this is a day for emotion. We are missing someone special. We are missing a version of the future, a human chance that has gone.

He is the lost leader of a lost country. Had he lived, he would have entered our lives, affected our wealth, altered our morale, changed how we thought about our country, influenced the education of our children. His grin would have become a familiar icon, his diction the raw material of satire. At however many removes, and however obscurely, his personality would have glinted through the state and touched us all. For good or ill? The question is now meaningless. That Britain won't happen.

(Photograph omitted)