What you think about John Smith defines who you are in Labour party politics. If you think he was the last complacent vestige of old Labour, you are eligible to become (to pick an example at random) a European commissioner. If you think he was the last hope we had of a Labour government that knew what Labour governments were for and whom they were meant to serve, you probably carried a banner on the Iraq anti-war rally saying "BLIAR".
The truth about Smith, as this thought-ful and readable biography makes clear, is rather more multi-layered. As a young man, Smith's Gaitskellism had all the Messianic fervour of the young Blairites and then some more. "More Gaitskellite than Gaitskell" was how a fellow Glasgow University student described him, while Gaitskell himself once remarked: "I heard a young student called John Smith in Glasgow last night, and I am sure he's a future leader of the Labour Party."
In order to defeat a left-wing candidate, Smith was prepared to vote as a delegate from a trade-union branch that had once represented the female cleaners at a local bus depot, but had been defunct for two years. Even the ambitious student was a little shamefaced about that.
As he grew older, Smith became more relaxed and less inclined to assume that the end justifies the means, but his views did not change significantly. So the fact that the left breathed a sigh of relief when he took over from Neil Kinnock as party leader, and was devastated by the political implications of his early death in 1994, is as good a measure as you can find of how far Labour has travelled in two decades.
Mark Stuart, an associate researcher in politics at Nottingham University, agrees with the assessment of Smith's first biographer, Andy McSmith, that Smith was a decent, honourable and clever man, with strong principles, a forensic legal mind, a cool brain and the politician's precious sense of timing. It is an assessment that will not now be challenged until Labour leaders of the present generation come to write their memoirs. Then, I suspect, we will hear again about the Smith of early Blairite mythology, a cynical politician content to sit back and leave Kinnock and Blair to do all the heavy lifting. Stuart convincingly demolishes this view, but that will not stop it from gaining currency.
What he does show, equally convincingly, is that Smith unintentionally damaged the Kinnock leadership. Smith, like Roy Hattersley, regarded Kinnock as an intellectual lightweight who could not always handle big occasions. I think they were wrong, but it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kinnock did muff a big chance to inflict a near-mortal blow on the That-cher government at the time of the Westland affair. Without intending to do so, Smith and Hattersley helped undermine their leader's fragile confidence.
Stuart provides a good deal of detail that was missing from McSmith's biography - perhaps too much. At more than 500 pages, the book is overlong, and there are some surprising omissions. A long analysis of the reasons why Labour lost the 1992 general election does not mention the absurd, triumphalist Sheffield rally. The polling guru Bob Worcester insists that it was the deciding factor; thus it is not good enough for Stuart to ignore it.
This book was written with the full co-operation of the Smith family, which for years after his death felt hurt and be-mused by the Blairites' apparent need to demean his memory. It was only last year, when the Labour leadership paid fulsome tribute on the tenth anniversary of his death, that the Smiths began to feel some peace. Their hand is evident on most pages of the book.
So, this is not just the biography of a politician but of a much-loved husband and father, to whom the author refers as "John" throughout, snatched from his family in his prime, at the age of 55, still doing his duty seven days a week. Stuart recounts how, on Sunday 8 May 1994, Smith turned out for a European election campaign meeting at the Blantyre Miners Welfare Club. "It wasn't just a case of turning up and shaking a few hands, it was a whole afternoon . . . As ever, John did the glad-handing very well, but at a price. He had given up a precious Sunday, as it turns out his last Sunday, his only rest day, to help out in a part of the country in which Labour was certain to win anyway." Four days later he was dead.
Francis Beckett's most recent book, with David Hencke, is The Blairs and Their Court (Aurum Press)
