Leadership and the Labour Party

This chapter is the theory chapter, and examines the ‘discursive’ and the ‘imagined’ (the two constitute the architecture and mechanics of persona and performance), and argues that these interact all the time. Their analytical separation will facilitate methodological and conceptual clarity. I adapt the Aristotelian categories of ethos, pathos, and logos to contemporary purpose. I also argue against Weber and the notion of charismatic leadership, and argue that leadership is a performed event that is part of and contributes to a narrative. I suggest a diagram for the understanding of ‘performance’ and its conditions (one of them being narrative itself). The diagram also acts as a template for analysis.

This chapter is an account of leadership developments within the Labour Party, and the way in which party leaders have inflected party thinking and the parameters of its thinking and direction. For much of its hundred years and more of existence, the Labour Party is a case study in the failure to understand the nature, exigencies, and consequences of leadership, both partisan and national. Few party leaders have been particularly successful. I shall therefore examine here what leaders have brought to the party in terms of shaping its leadership narrative and relation to party identity, often unknowingly given the party and the left’s generally problematic attitude and relationship to leadership itself.

Identifies what we have called the ‘arc of rhetoric’, the architecture as it were of the Labour Party and leader’s narrative 2010–2015, the party entered a period of reflection and self-examination. Upon his election as the new leader, after the party’s (historic) defeat at the 2010 General Election and the resignation of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband called for a Policy Review. What the party underwent was not only a Review but a wealth of intellectual and textual production constitutive of an ideological revisionism. By applying narrative theory to the party political texts emerging within the Labour Party after 2010, which together constructed and constituted the corpus of One Nation discourse, we can grasp the underlying significance of this ideational revision of Labour Party and leftist thought. Through an analysis of the sequence of texts and their constitution as a ‘story’ that interpolates an underlying ‘plot’, we can see how a revision of Labour’s ‘tale’ offered to leadership a new party discourse appropriate to it

This chapter analyses Ed Miliband, the party leader, and his use of the rhetoric of One Nation, and the construction of his leadership persona. I analyse Miliband’s performances at the UK Labour Party Conference of 2012, and in particular his ‘One Nation’ conference speech. My analysis identifies how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’, Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’ and that of the party itself. By using a range of rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour narrative to the ‘personalized political’ and the theme of One Nation.

This chapter is an analysis of the 2013–2015 period and of the May 2015 General Election from the perspective of the performance of leadership and party, particularly vis-à-vis leadership and the presentation and deployment of policy proposals and the Party Manifesto and, in the examination of the period leading up to the General Election, an appraisal of the performative and rhetorical choices made (and not made). Within the framework of our overall theoretical discussion, this part of the chapter includes analytical comment on the General Election campaign itself. The thrust of this chapter is the analysis of Miliband’s leadership performance during the election campaign and his relationship to public opinion.

This chapter is a discussion of, first, the aftermath of the 2015 General Election from the point of view of all the elements of leadership performance and, second, the theoretical implications of the research. I shall comment here upon the rhetorical, strategic, organizational, and leadership development of the party from 2010 to 2015. I shall also comment on and appraise the ‘performance’ of both the party generally and Ed Miliband in particular during the 2015 election campaign itself. I shall also critically appraise (a) persona construction by the team (and leader); (b) persona co-construction by the media; and (c) persona reconstruction by the recipients of the image and persona (audience/public). My analysis will relate the constructed persona back to my overarching research questions: how does persona-construction and performance take place and what is its role in the political process?