The Last Post previewed

Some further advance publicity for my Radio 4 show on Wednesday morning. Paul Donovan in the Sunday Times:

Other Armistice Day offerings include Alwyn Turner's melancholic history of The Last Post (R4 FM, 11am), just after the two-minute silence

The wonderful Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph:

Alwyn Turner tells the story of one of the world's most familiar tunes. Once it was just one of a dozen bugle calls played every day in British Army barracks. In the 1850s it became something played at soldiers' funerals. In the First World War, it gained its greatest resonance. Now it is played internationally to mark the passing of an era or to keep alive the memory of conflicts past and present. It has become the music of loss, an almost sacred anthem in an increasingly secular society.

and again in the Sunday Telegraph:

The Last Post began as a bugle call in British barracks, played to show all was secured at the close of day but, from the 19th century on, has become one of the world's most familiar tunes, played at funerals and state occasions. Alwyn Turner tells its story with the help of men who've played it. Its very simplicity makes it hard to play perfectly but, as we hear, there's something about it that uniquely signals sadness, solemnity, respect.

And finally Liam Williams in the Independent:

It started as just one of a couple of dozen bugle calls played every day in a British Amy barracks - then, in the 1850s, it found a new role, played at soldiers' funerals. Alwyn Turner tells the untold story of The Last Post.

Whoever is responsible at the BBC for promoting programmes is clearly doing a fine job, and I'm very grateful.

You don't give up: a portrait of Liz Kendall

When Liz Kendall was asked recently if she would step down from the Labour leadership election in an attempt to unify the anti-Jeremy Corbyn forces, she bristled at the very suggestion. 'You don't give up fighting for what you believe in,' she insisted. 'I love the party too much to see us lose again.' The echoes of Hugh Gaitskell's 'Fight, fight and fight again' were presumably not unconscious.

Born in 1971, Liz Kendall (not to be confused with the similarly named girlfriend of American serial killer Ted Bundy) studied history at Cambridge. She then followed the conventional path and - like David Miliband and James Purnell - went to work for the Institute for Public Policy Research, one of the many left-wing think tanks of the time that between them produced more ministers manqué than government initiatives.

While there, she co-wrote a 1994 pamphlet on the virtue of citizens' juries, a kind of state-approved focus group that would 'bring the voice and experience of ordinary citizens into the political process'. It was a neat idea for expanding democracy, borrowed from Germany, but of course it never materialised, and I can't find a reference to it in the last twenty years.

As soon as Labour was elected in 1997, she was recruited to become a special adviser (alongside John McTernan) to Harriet Harman at the department of social security, where she concentrated 'on women's issues especially lone mothers'. Unfortunately, it was a cut to single parent benefits, ordered by Downing Street, that precipitated the first great rebellion of the Tony Blair government, and cost Harman her job. Kendall left Whitehall at the same time and went back to the IPPR and to work in the charity sector.

She was put on the national list of candidates, but failed to secure the nomination to succeed Tony Benn in Chesterfield, where the Labour candidate was, said the Guardian, 'virtually guaranteed a seat in Parliament' in the 2001 election. (Actually it fell to the Liberal Democrats.)

She moved on to the charity Maternity Alliance and became in due course a special adviser to the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, perhaps the only politician to be name-checked in a David Bowie song (in 'The Gospel According to Tony Day', the 1967 B-side to 'The Laughing Gnome').

In 2010 she was finally elected to the House of Commons, taking over Hewitt's old seat in Leicester West. She was thirty-eight, which by New Labour standards was getting on a bit, but she was singled out by John Curtice in the Sunday Telegraph as one of the party's rising stars of the new Parliament, along with Tristram Hunt, Rachel Reeves, Chuka Umuna and Gloria De Piero.

She did have a position under Ed Miliband, as shadow spokesperson for care and older people, but you'd be hard pushed to notice her make any public impact. Nonetheless, when Miliband resigned following his election disaster in May, she was the first to declare her candidacy, the speed of her decision seeming to wrongfoot others who might be considered to be on the Blairite wing of the party.

She herself, for obvious reasons, tends to disown the Blairite tag, but there is something in it. As Blair himself admitted, he never came close to completing his public sector reforms, to achieving a reorientation towards users; Kendall talks a strong case on the subject. She's also spoken of the need to meet the Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP to be allocated to defence. And she's almost as harsh on Jeremy Corbyn as Blair himself, suggesting that, even if he were to win the leadership, she wouldn't want to see him as prime minister.

The implication of that, of course, is that she would rather see a Conservative government than a Corbynite Labour one. And that has attracted a great deal of abuse from the left. It is, though, a legitimate argument for any but the most tribal. If you believe that it is essential to have a strong economy in order to provide public services, and if you believe that Corbyn would severely damage the nation's economy, then it is logical to conclude that you'd rather wait your turn, in the expectation that there would still be something worth taking over in five years time.

If that seems silly, then it's indicative of the foolishness of the current party alignment. Somewhere, in a parallel universe, the Tories lost the general election badly and Bill Cash is currently the front-runner to become Conservative leader. He's a man of principle, not afraid to speak his mind, offers hope for the future, at least you know what he believes in etc etc. And Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine are issuing statements that he'd rather see a pro-EU Labour government than for their own party to win under Cash.

Since her abrupt arrival on centre stage, Kendall has been profiled often enough in the papers for us to learn that she went to school with Geri Halliwell, that she's a fan of Public Enemy, Dr Dre and Eminem, that's she's a keen runner, and that she had a lengthy relationship with the comedian Greg Davies. None of which has done a single thing to project a personality, or to change the public perception of her as something of an enigma: someone who clearly wishes to be the leader, but exhibits no obvious sign of leadership.

In person, it's acknowledged, she is warm and charismatic. (Mind you, that's what they always said about Ed Miliband, as well.) She is also reckoned to be extremely determined, steely and committed, though this hasn't come across at all in the hustings thus far. Presumably, however, it explains why she considered it appropriate to stand for the leadership at all, with only five years in Parliament behind her and no time in government.

In that lack of experience, as in much else, she resembles nothing so much as a Labour version of David Cameron. Both have the same desire to accept aspects of the modern world that don't sit easily with traditionalists in their parties, in her case in relation to the public sector and social security. And perhaps if Kendall were in the same position as Cameron in 2005 - if her party were coming off the back of three election defeats, rather than just the two - she might have been better heard and made more impact.

But that's not where Labour is right now and, though she may well be back, it wouldn't be surprising if she left Parliament altogether. She could probably have far more impact campaigning outside than she would in a shadow cabinet led by Yvette Cooper, and certainly more than she would grimacing on the backbenches behind Jeremy Corbyn.

In 1974 Margaret Stewart wrote a fine book titled Protest or Power? A Study of the Labour Party. In that divide, there is little doubt about which side Kendall stands on.

This is the second in a series of profiles of the four candidates in the Labour Party leadership election. Yesterday: Andy Burnham. Tomorrow: Yvette Cooper.

I wish it could be 1983 again

The longest suicide note in history. Gerald Kaufman's description of the Labour Party's 1983 election manifesto is one of the great modern political cliches. And like so many cliches, it's become so familiar that it can sometimes conceal the truth.

So it's worth asking: Was that manifesto really the most ludicrously left-wing platform ever put to the British electorate? What did it actually say?

Obviously, there's the famous stuff about nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community (as it then was), and abolition of the House of Lords, but what else was in there?

Well, the document starts with what it calls 'an emergency programme of action', centred on these pledges:

• to make 'a major increase in public investments, including transport, housing and energy construction';
• to 'begin to rebuild British industry, working within a new framework for planning and industrial democracy'
• to raise child benefits and pensions, 'and give special help to one-parent families and families with disabled dependents';
• to 'promote women's rights and opportunities, and appoint a cabinet minister to promote equality between the sexes';
• to 'act to improve the environment and deal with pollution'.

It's not perfect, and you or I may not agree with everything, but it's a coherent and reasonable set of priorities. (It helps, of course, that thirty years have passed, and ideas like having an equalities minister no longer sound like the loony left nonsense they were depicted as at the time.)

Also quite reasonable is the call for greater investment in industry, partially funded by North Sea oil, and the threat that if the major banks did not play their part, 'we stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership'. That was considered extreme at the time; not so much now.

The document goes on to say that:

Our proposals add up to a considerable increase in public spending. Our programme is thus heavily dependent upon the achievement of our basic objectives: namely, a large and sustained increase in the nation's output and income and a matching decline in the numbers out of work. It is this that will make the resources available for higher public spending programmes and cut the enormous cost of unemployment.

Elsewhere it explains that 'It would be wrong to finance the initial boost to spending by increasing taxation', and that therefore: 'Like any other expanding industrial enterprise, we shall borrow to finance our programme of investment.'

(It's probably worth noting that at the time it didn't seem so heinous to say you were in favour of borrowing; Keynesian economics was still a plausible option.)

And it goes on. And on, and on. For there was a major problem with the document in that it didn't confine itself to the big themes. By attempting to shoe-horn everything in, it lost focus. (Perhaps, on sober reflection, a policy on angling wasn't entirely necessary.) Kaufman's use of the word 'long' wasn't entirely inappropriate: it's not the word count, so much as the number of subjects covered.

But I would suggest that perhaps Kaufman's phrase was simply too memorable, and that it has misshaped our perceptions of the time. It lays the blame in the wrong place. Because - and I don't think this is simply in retrospect - it wasn't the manifesto alone that resulted in Labour's worst electoral performance since the war.

Not when there was so much else that was wrong.

Austin Mitchell's excellent book on the 1983 election, Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party, for example, documents some of the appalling incompetence that marred Labour's campaign that year. There was no organisation, no planning, no idea what the hell was going on. The party leadership, lacking strategy, just lurched from one day to the next.

And at the supposed head of this dysfunctional operation was Michael Foot, a good and gracious man who should never have been chosen by Labour MPs to be their leader. It wasn't a role for which he had any qualities.

The press, of course, were merciless. Clive James in the Observer called Foot 'a floppy toy on Benzedrine,' the Sunday Telegraph referred to him as 'an elderly, ranting pamphleteer waving a stick in Hampstead,' the Sun said he was 'an amiable old buffer, his jacket buttoned too tight, his collar askew, his grey hair falling lankly'. The Sun also ran a cruel and devastating headline: 'Do you seriously want this old man to run Britain?'

With all the excited froth at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn's chances of winning the Labour leadership election, there are repeated references back to 1983 (when, as it happens, Corbyn first entered Parliament). The Labour Party took such a beating that year that its soul was scarred, and it's been living in fear of being labelled 'left wing' ever since. The longest suicide note in history casts an even longer shadow.

I'm not sure that the party should be so afeared. There were many other reasons why Labour lost in 1983.

There was the split that produced the SDP, there was the Falklands factor, there was the start of economic growth (after monetarism had been quietly buried in an unmarked grave). And, above all, there was a lack of unity in the higher reaches of the party, no sense that any of Foot's senior colleagues were interested in following him or agreeing with each other.

Oh yes, and there were the policies. But they only come in at about number five or six in the list of reasons why it all went so horribly wrong. They need to be kept in proportion.

Probably the one huge strategic mistake in the manifesto was the commitment to leave the EEC without a further referendum. Allow for that  - admittedly major - change, and then imagine that this manifesto had been presented to the British public in 1997 by Tony Blair, when he was at the peak of his persuasive powers and the Tories were on the ropes. I believe Labour would have won handsomely.

This is not to say that it's all about presentation. But it is to say that, when it comes to winning elections, policy isn't anywhere near as important as politicians and commentators believe it to be. Broad positions count, leadership and unity count, detail doesn't.

And concepts of 'left' and 'right' don't matter much either. Most people don't think of themselves in those terms. At various times, Labour voters will switch to Ukip, Conservative voters to Labour, and Lib Dem voters to just about anybody...

There are other lessons Labour needs to learn from the 1980s, and I shall return to the subject. I think it might lead somewhere.

Magic Gardens

I was very pleased to read in last week's Sunday Telegraph of the work of Rose Fulbright. She's the great-granddaughter of  Clough Williams-Ellis who created the village of Portmeirion, about which I once created a book. More relevantly, Fulbright is also the granddaughter of Susan Williams-Ellis, the founder of Portmeirion Pottery.

Apart from her ceramic designs, Susan's great passion in later life was sketching underwater, and a few years back I edited a book of the paintings that resulted, Magic Gardens. This art, I now learn, is the inspiration for Fulbright's new range of loungewear, the Tropical Collection. Which is excellent news: Susan's art has been due for rediscovery for a very long time. There's some much more interesting work in the archive, but this is at least a start.