Francis Beckett ("The myth of John Smith the loser", 11 December) is right to say that the people in charge of Labour's campaign were the real architects of the Sheffield rally.
"We want the biggest political rally since the war," they said, and it was personally commissioned by Charles Clarke, was pored over by Philip Gould and approved in detail at the highest levels of the party. But it was the closing sequence - not the Kinnock speech - that was the background to John Cole's effusive live report. Indeed, the catastrophic 6-7 per cent drop in Labour support occurred before the rally and was - I am reliably informed - known in Sheffield that night.
The election was lost for more fundamental reasons. Labour was not trusted, especially on tax, while the campaign tactics at the centre eventually succeeded in derailing the whole enterprise.
Jim Parish, Senior Campaigns Officer, Labour Party 1985-93
Tonbridge, Kent
What a load of bollocks Francis Beckett writes about the 1992 election. Bob Worcester's story of the 21 Tory MPs who ascribed their survival to the Sheffield rally should ring alarm bells. What sort of idiot believes a Tory MP?
Beckett follows up that tale by dismissing the theory that the polls were wrong throughout the campaign. The trouble is that they were wrong - and this is not theory, but fact. ICM, along with most polling organisations, changed its polling methods after the result because it realised that face-to-face interviews seriously distorted their findings. Labour lost the 1992 election on tax and, if we ever forget that, we will be cast once more into the freezing cold of electoral oblivion.
Now I come to think of it, the only major pollster who argued that this was not true was one Bob Worcester, who said right up to the 1997 election that the polls predicting a Labour landslide were wrong.
In 1992, people re-elected the Tories for selfish reasons. Black Wednesday and the subsequent eradication of the Conservatives' fabled economic competence led the people to think again. Yes, I agree that an unmodernised Labour Party (as long as it dodged the tax issue well) would have won in 1997. But Beckett has achieved something I thought impossible: I now have to regard Philip Gould's opinions with new respect.
Nigel Dickinson
Bristol
Echoing Dennis Potter, Francis Beckett calls "modernisation" the "little cant word" of the 1990s. At the end, the author suggests that "democracy", as misused by the extreme left, was the little cant word of the 1980s. Personally, I think that honour belongs to "postmodernism", especially because of the delicious element of irony involved.
Those very same "half-way bright youngish men on the make" who only recently advocated postmodernism (whatever that was) advocate modernisation, whatever that is, today. Yet the one is Eastasia to the other's Eurasia. Or, to put it another way, they have gone back to the future!
Chris Harris
Palmerston, New Zealand
