Another candidate joined the race for the Labour Party leadership yesterday. John Horgan, who had a lengthy career with the party, offers the electorate some advice.
The Labour Party's brave experiment in enfranchising its total membership for the election of its new leader could contribute dramatically to a rebirth of the party's fortunes if - and only if - that electorate can (a) come to a firm conclusion about what party leaders are for, and (b) learn the lessons of the past.
Working out what party leaders are for is not as simple as it sounds. The commonplace answer is that they are expected to be inspirational, doctrinally sound, able to exist without sleep and without seeing their families or eating regular meals for weeks on end, to have a low boredom threshold combined with a reaction time measured in nano-seconds, and the ability to give every member of the party the feeling that without their special contribution the entire edifice would sink beneath the waves.
In any well-organised party, in which all the members and activists take full responsibility for their party's welfare, this is of course a nonsense: the jobs of party organisation, of maintaining doctrinal purity and of engaging productively in local issues will be done, by and large, by an active and committed membership or they will not be done at all. Labour Party members in this context would do well to remember that there are really only two primary functions exercisable by a party leader, one of them negative, the other positive.
The negative one is to frighten the enemy. There are, thank goodness, no actual or potential William Hagues among the declared or possible candidates for the Labour leadership, but the chilling example of his progress from defeat to disaster shows what can happen to a party when it considers this factor to be of little consequence. Hague not only failed to frighten Labour: Labour rejoiced openly at his election.
If it follows from this, as I believe it does, that political parties are often better judges of other parties' self-interest than they are of their own, voters in this leadership election should strive to put themselves into the shoes of the average Fianna Fáil TD or activist and ask themselves: "Which of the Labour leadership candidates would most frighten me?"
If they identify such a person, and vote for them, they have a far higher chance of being right than wrong.
The positive function is to secure political power, either in the sense that you can implement policies of your own, or prevent others from implementing policies of theirs with which you disagree. This, in turn, means winning elections.
That may sound like a truism but is, again, more complex than it sounds. Socialists are certainly evangelists - but if they are only evangelists, or content themselves with gesture politics, they will continue to suffer the fate of John the Baptist, and their voters will be the poorer for it.
There are, it seems to me, basically two ways of winning elections. The first is to be all things to all men (with a few women thrown in). The second is to tell it as it is.
The problem about the first way is that Fianna Fáil has taken out a patent on it and Fine Gael has demonstrated the lack of wisdom of trying to challenge them on their home ground. The problem about the second way is that, taken to extremes, it can create difficulties in relation to a range of possible coalition government arrangements.
But if, as I believe, telling it as it is should be Labour's battle cry going into the next election, this is a problem that has to be squarely faced. The electorate has to be reminded that it is in no way inconsistent for a party of principle to go into government with another party of different principles, along as there is sufficient common ground on policies for the term of a single government. The relationship is not required to be permanent and the partners are not required to love each other. The irony of the last election is that it was the PDs who persuaded the electorate of the truth of this proposition.
Before the last election, academic soothsayers were muttering that, as it was highly likely that Fianna Fáil would be part of any administration after the election, it was impossible to vote against the government.
But in Irish politics today, a Fianna Fáil/Labour government undeniably is a change from a Fianna Fáil/PD government (as would be a Rainbow Coalition, or even a Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael government). The most astonishing feature of the last election was the success of the PDs in persuading the electorate that the new Fianna Fáil/PD Government would be a change from the old Fianna Fáil/PD government. If the PDs can do that, then the task facing Labour is well within reach.
This is also relevant when it comes to remembering the past. It was certainly high-risk territory for Labour to go into government with Fianna Fáil for the first time when they took that political leap: but it was not a mistake. What was a mistake, as I think many influential members of the party now privately accept, was to change their government partners without forcing an election.
The only policy change I would urge on the new leader is a public commitment never to do that again. In terms of leadership style, telling it as it is remains the only option for Labour if it is to escape from the threat of blandness. It should remember that there are two models of political support. The electorate is not conscience-free. It admires (and frequently elects) politicians who are altruistic, provocative and evince a strong sense of knowing what they are about, even though they are also perennially tempted to support those who flatter and soft-soap them. Falling between these two stools will consign Labour to oblivion.
John Horgan is professor of journalism at DCU. He is a former Labour Party TD, senator and MEP, and was a member of the party's electoral commission in the 1980s.