How my party was betrayed by KGB boot-lickers

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force.

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. As leader, Michael Foot was wedded to policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the European Economic Community. The strategy, if there was one, seemed to be to lose as many votes as possible.

The remarkable revelations published in the Chernyaev diaries make this attempted political suicide easier to understand. It is clear that key elements in the Labour party structure were determined to ingratiate themselves with Moscow — regardless of any adverse electoral impact in Britain. They show, vividly, how Labour was being poisoned by key officials who were laying the groundwork, apparently deliberately, for the debacle of 1983.

Let us take Ron Hayward, who was Labour’s general secretary for most of the previous ten years. He was the worst, a vain and self-regarding saboteur who at the 1979 party conference publicly attacked the outgoing Labour government in virulent terms. As Chernyaev’s memoirs make clear, his aspiration was not a Labour government implementing beneficial policies for the electorate but a National Executive Committee, elected partly by trade union block votes and partly by hard-left constituency parties.

Hayward envisaged an annual Labour party conference controlled by trade union block votes, dominating the parliamentary leadership, whose electoral fate he regarded as irrelevant. That is why Hayward and his cadres imposed mandatory reselection on parliamentary candidates and attempted (only just failing) to remove from the parliamentary leadership any say in compiling the election manifesto.