March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 48

By William John Shepherd

Leaders of the Opposition: From Churchill to Cameron, ed. Timothy Heppel, hardbound, 288 pages, $95, Kindle edition $76.

The British Parliament has an opposition party with a shadow cabinet that serves as an alternate government should the ruling party resign or lose office. The effectiveness and changing role of postwar opposition leaders are examined in case studies by fifteen British political scholars headed by Timothy Heppell of the University of Leeds. Like all too many scholarly books, it is priced far too high.

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Of the sixteen leaders herein, equally divided between Conservatives and Labourites, nine became prime minister. Three postwar premiers—Macmillan, Eden and Gordon Brown—are excluded because they succeeded colleagues and did not lead the Opposition. Also left out are John Major, who served only seven weeks as a caretaker after losing the 1997 election; current opposition leader Ed Miliband; and three acting leaders who served only briefly.

If many British prime ministers are obscure, the seven opposition leaders who never made it to the top are even more so, especially for American audiences, though Neil Kinnock has some brief claim to fame for being plagiarized by U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden when Biden ran for president in 1988 (145).

In his introduction, Heppell explains the use of concepts advanced by political science professor Fred Greenstein of Princeton to consider how opposition parties prepare to assume power, judging each leader as communicator, architect of a policy, and manager of the party, and by his emotional intelligence. An excellent performance in opposition, he notes, does not necessarily make for an excellent prime minister—or vice versa.

Keven Theakston, author of Winston Churchill and the British Constitution (reviewed, FH 124, 2004) and the brief life Winston Churchill (FH 156, 2012), wrote this book’s Churchill chapter, observing that WSC and Harold Wilson were the only postwar former prime ministers to lead their parties back to power. For the Tories. the scale of defeat in 1945 was huge and the comeback slow, a gain of 88 seats in 1950 leaving them still a few votes behind Labour. The following year they achieved a narrow majority.

Theakston concedes that no other Tory leader would have done better. None had Churchill’s prestige, he says, though Churchill was somewhat miscast as opposition leader, since his return to power came despite him rather than because of him. (Really?) Churchill was a part-time leader, Theakston says, busy writing his memoirs and often traveling abroad, where the war had made him a figure of stature. He delegated party management to others, such as Anthony Eden, who often chaired meetings and spoke for the Opposition in Parliament. Churchill, so notable for his lightning parries at “Question Time,” was really a celebrity virtuoso soloist rather than the leader of an orchestra (18).

Heppell ends by exploring factors that make for effective Opposition, such as when when a longstanding government, headed by a tired prime minister like Gordon Brown, is assailed by a dynamic opponent, such as David Cameron in 2010. He considers also “strategic repositioning” with appeals to moderate voters, as practiced by Churchill in 1950-51 and Tony Blair in 1997. The role of the leader has changed, Heppel concludes, with more focus now on personality in a media-driven age, more centralized party control, and reduced tolerance for failure. It is no longer possible, he avers, for a leader like Churchill, who lost elections in 1945 and 1950, to survive in a passive role. Finally, Heppell notes, there has been a decline of positional or class-based politics, a move toward “valence politics” based on the apparent competence or likeability of a leader.

The book has a good index and an impressive bibliography but no illustrations. The reader should also note the use of in-text references listed parenthetically instead of standard footnotes or endnotes. There are also some typos in the chapters on Edward Heath and John Smith (83, 152).

Mr. Shepherd is Associate Archivist, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C..