Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock's Labour Party

by Richard Heffernan, Mike Marqusee

“I’m in it to win. That’s my attitude to life and to politics.”—Neil Kinnock, December 1989Defeat from the Jaws of Victory takes the reader behind closed doors to witness Kinnock’s Labour hierarchy in action—fixing votes, stage-managing meetings, dispensing patronage to favourites and settling scores with enemies.Riding high on the backlash against the Bennite rebellion of the early 1980s, Kinnock went on to build the most autocratic regime in Labour’s history. Centralizing power in a vastly expanded private office, he destroyed the party’s democratic structures, stripped it of any trace of radical policy, and purged it of hundreds of dissident members. Every nook and cranny of the Labour machine was filled with careerists whose primary qualification was personal loyalty to their leader. Under Kinnock’s aegis the party ran up a £2.5 million overdraft, and proved incapable of removing an unpopular Tory government in the midst of the worst recession since the war.Heffernan and Marqusee employ extensive research in Labour’s archives and interviews with leading MPs, party employees and constituency members to chronicle, with unsparing accuracy, a decade-long drive for power which was ruthless, reactionary and, in the final analysis, spectacularly unsuccessful.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published November 23, 1992

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much more an analysis of policy/rhetoric than of actual personalities which is fine if that's what you like to read about but I generally prefer approaches which feel, for a lack of a better way to put it, gossipier. More importantly, the fundamental thesis of the book, that Labour needed to embrace the far left to win the next election was simply and categorically proven wrong! This isn't to say that I have no sympathy for the Labour left but the partisanship of the book precludes some of the more practical considerations of the mechanics of politics/winning elections and doesn't adequately account for electoral realignment happening at the time (to be fair it's always easier to identify these things with hindsight!). Still a very informative read about this era of the Labour party, and I think the chapter on Mandelson (eek!) is an excellent case study of media analysis and base and superstructure in the tradition of someone like Hall.... wish the book had been more of that rather than recounting factionalist drama #75 in the most clinical way possible.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The simple, everyday story of how an erstwhile firebrand became a principle-shedding megalomaniac - and by “simple” I mean “psychologically fucked up” and by “everyday” I mean “hey, kids, can y’all think of a contemporary parallel?” Heffernan and Marqusee deliver an excoriating post-mortem on the reign and legacy of a little Napoleon who’s swaggering machismo only barely masked eggshell fragility; whose appeasement of the establishment came at the cost of terrible internal damage to his own party; whose ideologies were misplaced; whose opportunities for substantial opposition and even possible leadership were squandered; whose lieutenants were utterly unsuited to their fast-tracked positions; and whose administration was hamstrung to the point of incompetence. An opportunist. A moral coward. A truly small man.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative, Devastating and sustained invectives on Neil Kinnock (what a small man). Nakedly and unashamedly partisan but none the worse for it.