Political commentary

The Hedda factor

Ferdinand Mount

Brighton 'Will all those supporting the Women's Action Committee amendment please meet Hedda Gabler at 4pm in the lobby of the Metropole Hotel?' The polite young woman in dungarees slips this heartstopping invitation quite matter-of-factly into a string of instructions to supporters of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Even the most confident and liberated of men would hesitate before being swept up in such an adventure, likely as it is to end in a fatal gunshot in the cloakroom at the Labour agents' dance, or, worse still, being addressed as Lassie by Mr Alex Kitson.

This is undoubtedly the place for Hedda, though, and is that her little son Osvald (doubtless suffering from some ghastly hereditary malady) playing in the aisle with a scrumpled rank-and-file mobilising committee leaflet? Energy, life, freedom, the people — you can bet the entire Rosmersholm North CLP would be solid for Tony Benn. Mr Benn himself is not unlike an escaped Ibsen character: 'Look, is not that Tony coming up the garden path with that old springy step of his? How he has changed from the days when we read poetry together on the old bench.'

The next briefer, Pete Willsman, is a soft-voiced bearded fellow. He is the quiet one — `Ah, my faithful Herr Willsman' — who does something frightfully violent in Act Three. He is not be confused with Jon Lansman, who is the one Denis Healey failed to recognise, still less with Vladimir Derer, whom The Times fingered as the mastermind of the bunch. Mr Derer is the old buffer in a cardigan who knows a thing or two — `Ah, my dear Derer, still plugging away at your old last, I see, when will you and your beloved revolution ever see the light of day?'.

The nice thing about the Bennites is that they tell you exactly what they want you to do. Last year we were told how the electoral college for the leadership was to be sneaked past a bewildered Shopworkers' Union. This year, it is Mr Roy Grantham of APEX who is to be made a fool of.

'We've got the manifesto within our grasp,' says Mr Willsman. 'The motion was passed at the APEX conference probably without Roy quite knowing what was going on. By a strange coincidence, a motion in identical terms will crop up in a resolution at this conference. And we shall put out the word on poor old Roy so that if he breaks his mandate and tries to reverse his conference decision, every delegate will know he is bringing his union into disrepute.' Ah, Mr Willsman. I perceive you are a cunning fellow. Unfortunately, Mr Grantham remained blithely indifferent to these suasions, and his delegation continued to vote for the party leader to retain control of the Manifesto. The simple answer to all this stuff about party democracy, my dear Willsman, is to stuff it.

This was the first conference for several years in which the Right has won anything at all. Denis Healey hung on by a whisker. Eric Varley defeated Norman Atkinson for the dubious glory of the Treasureship. And the long prophesised right-wing gains on the National Executive finally materialised, bringing the two factions into rough equality, with Michael Foot holding the balance. For once, the unions delivered the goods, and the dear old block vote came into its own again. Mr Terry Duffy really did exert control over the engineers' delegation. Only the good Willsman advanced to take a seat on the Conference Arrangements Committee which fixes the agenda.

The altered arithmetic will undoubtedly quieten down the day-to-day running of the party and so make Labour look at least a little more election-worthy. Mr Heffer and Mr Benn may be removed from their chairmanships of important sub-committees or at least have their more baroque flourishes suppressed.

Yet it is not only these numbers that count in the long run. It is the qualitative definition of 'Left' and 'Right'. When unilateral nuclear disarmament is the policy not only of a 'centrist' leader like Mr Foot but also of the 'right-wing' unions like the Steelworkers and the Shopworkers, and when 'right-wing' unions like the Steelworkers, the Railwaymen and the General and Municipal Workers all come into line in opposition to British membership of the EEC, then it is questionable how much value the terms really have. If Denis Healey so slavishly avows enthusiasm for the 'Alternative Economic Strategy', can a right wing with its own effective voice on policy be said to exist at all?

The centre may look more like holding, but the centre has shifted a huge distance to the left. The boos and hisses that greeted the couple of speakers who dared to oppose giving up the British bomb and expelling the US nuclear bases show how thoroughly the party has been Footified — tenderised towards the good intentions of the USSR, and hostile to the Americans and the EEC. The personal distrust of Tony Benn is a sideshow perhaps as fleeting as the distrust of Harold Wilson in the Fifties.

Seen in this light, Mr Benn's defeat is a kind of accidental pantomime staged for the benefit of the electorate. The Tribune Group treat him as King Rat for standing against Mr Healey. The Right give melodramatic thanks for deliverance.

All the same, Hedda (or Heather, as her English counterpart turns out to be called) continues to be the crucial factor in the direction of the Labour Party. It is not simply that Mr Benn has the young behind him. He has the energetic, practical — careerist — young behind him. These are far more dangerous than the sandalled nutters of yore because they will not willingly write off the career-time invested in reordering the Labour Party.

'Capitalism is crumbling, comrades,' Mr Benn tells us (it is the day the Stock Exchange panic). Something about this ageold cry makes him sound less like the heir of the Chartists and the Levellers than like Psmith being the voice of the masses. Even Mr Benn's assurance that he would be prepared to shoulder a bayonet against the advancing Russian hordes sounds more like Captain Mainwaring than Comrade Trotsky. Mr Benn is a master of Home Guard nostalgia.

By contrast, the Solidarity rally was all heroic fervour. There was a lot of fighting talk, some of it genuinely impressive, from Mr Healey, Mr Hattersley and Mr Shore, who in contrast to last year made a brave speech in the economic debate, far braver, alas, than Mr Healey's. They too talked about the need to organise. In practice, the right is now a mirror image of the old Left in its woolly idealism. Its main conception of organising is still to fix half a dozen trade union leaders over lunch at the St Ermine's Hotel.

What saved Mr Healey was not the fix but Mr Benn's own agitations that unions should consult their members. However desultory, incompetent or loaded those consultations, they could not help revealing that a majority of the rank and file wanted Healey, even in two of the most reliably left-wing unions, the Transport Workers and the Public Employees. It's a poor lookout for a right-wing leadership which lets left-wing activists do its organising.

A narrow Healey victory is an entirely tolerable outcome for the Left, even if only half the Left realises it. The activists should be warmly thanking Neil Kinnock and the other Tribunites who abstained. Far better for Labour to go into an election with Mr Foot and Mr Healey and then, the day after polling day, subject one or both of them to a 'McIntosh solution' (so called after the dumping of Mr Andrew McIntosh from the leadership of the GLC in favour of Ken Livingstone).

But even if Mr Healey's survival and the improved NEC do make Labour marginally more palatable to the voters, they can stop neither the quarrelling nor the steady drift to the Left. Policy after policy has shuffled into step with the policy of the British Communist Party. Only NATO remains. And if that goes next year, how could Mr Healey honourably stay as Deputy, considering that it would then be too close to the election to reverse? What's that you say? No, Mr Healey is an honourable man.