SE Academic Review 2023

31 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

Literature review There is a general consensus on the causes of New Labour’s electoral success, the debate instead lies with which cause was the most significant factor in Labour’s landslide. The 1997 election is relatively recent history only taking place 26 years ago so most literature discussing New Labour was written by those who lived during this period. Therefore, there are two main categories of literature about the 1997 election: first-hand accounts of politicians and advisors who were active participants in New Labour, and historians analysing its electoral success. First-hand accounts and political memoirs are valuable as they can be more accurate and give a clearer account of how the election campaign operated, however, as these texts were written by people who were involved in the campaign there is a danger that they may misattribute the cause of New Labour’s success to their part in the campaign or to their close friends as opposed to other sources who give a balanced account researched using a range of first-hand accounts. Philip Gould, a political advisor, key player in all of Labour’s electoral campaigns from 1987 to 2010 and the originator of the term ‘New Labour’, argues in his narrative of his time working in New Labour, Unfinished Revolution (Gould, 2011) , that Labour lost elections previously not due to presentation, which he argues was excellent, but by the British people not trusting Labour and that New Labour only won once it adopted a suburban populist message of encouraging and appealing to the enterprising new middle- class aspirations in line with many of the ideas of Thatcherism. Peter Mandelson, another political advisor under Labour leader Neil Kinnock who went on to serve as a minister in the Labour government, agrees with much of Gould’s argument. In Mandelson’s autobiography, The Third Man , he argues that the Labour Party’s modernisation under Tony Blair’s exceptional leadership was the main cause of the 1997 landslide.

Other memoirs that are often neglected but vital to understanding possible answers to this question are Tony Blair’s (2010) A Journey and Gordon Brown’s (2017) My Life, Our Times. Both memoirs offer the factor of Labour’s centralist policies being highly influential in deciding the result of the election whilst also emphasising again the importance of the modernisation of Labour. There are two major biographies of Tony Blair that cover the 1997 election: John Rentoul’s (2002) Tony Blair and Anthony Seldon’s (2005) Blair . Whilst the purpose of these biographies was not to answer the question of the cause of Labour’s landslide, both give some room in their text to the discussion of the causes of Blair’s electoral success. These books however emphasised far more than the primary sources that the unpopularity and exhaustion of the Conservatives was a very significant factor in causing Labour’s victory. The most notable piece of literature that devotes itself solely to the 1997 general election is David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh’s (1997) The British General Election of 1997. The book succeeded in giving an unbiased representation of the election and the events preceding it and gave vital psephological insight into the actual results of the election and which factors had the most impact on voters. From the literature on the question of what was the most significant factor why Labour won in a landslide in the 1997 general election, three main arguments emerge: the unpopularity and exhaustion of the Conservatives, New Labour’s centralist policies and the modernisation of the Labour Party.

“ ...New Labour only won once it adopted a suburban populist message... ”