2024 has been a significant year for the Labour Party, witnessing the party’s first General Election victory for nearly two decades, as well as the centenary of its first accession to government in 1924. In its history, Labour has endured a deficit of electoral success; since the party’s foundation, only four of the eighteen Labour leaders have achieved parliamentary majorities. In part due to their scarcity, these individuals have frequently been at the forefront of the Labour tendency to cultivate individual cults of personality. However, electoral success comprises merely one component of how party actors are subsequently perceived, a perception consisting of layers of interpretation and reinterpretation. As a result of this continual revisionism, the boundary between exaltation as a ‘hero’ and denunciation as a ‘traitor’ can converge and is repeatedly determined by the strategic ends of the contemporary party, with Labour actors offering reinterpretations of their predecessors for the purpose of political gain. This research will explore how memories of Labour leaders have transversed the frontier between ‘hero’ and ‘traitor’.

The abiding connection between Labour and its past, often acting as a prevailing undercurrent conditioning the contemporary party, is a deeply entrenched subject within Labour historiography (Jobson, 2018; Robinson, 2012). Although contributions from scholars are considerable and varied, a similar structure of analysis is often adopted, with chapters presented as chronological accounts of eras, or biopics of individual Labour leaders (Jones, 1996; Morgan, 1987; Pugh, 2011; Yeowell, 2022). Alternatively, interventions frequently highlight the uses and abuses of memory in relation to a specific era of Labour history (Crines and Hickson, 2016; Cronin, 2004; Fielding, 2003; O’Hara and Parr, 2006; Randall, 2009; Seldon and Hickson, 2004). This research will adopt an alternative focus, centring not on biographical studies of individuals or of particular periods but how these actors have subsequently been interpreted. This study will not pass a final judgement upon the fate of Labour leaders, determining whether they were a ‘hero’ or a ‘traitor’; instead, it will decipher how reputations are achieved and fluctuate through the passage of time.

The research questions for this project are:

• How have Labour parliamentarians evoked the party’s history to make contemporary ideological claims?
• How has the favourability of Labour leaders fluctuated overtime, and what caused this fluctuation?
• What has been the role of historiography in determining the reputation of leaders?

The research will evaluate Labour leaders in relation to four related themes: ideology, statecraft, strategic context and qualities of character. Each theme will provide a theoretical framework for assessing Labour’s mnemonic practises, and it will also structure the chapters of the resulting thesis. The consideration of these respective criterion will offer an understanding of the process through which memories of Labour leaders manifest and how different variables have moulded this dialectic between actuality and interpretation.

Despite Keir Starmer’s claim that he leads ‘[a] changed Labour Party’ (Starmer, 2023), Starmer’s employment of selective nostalgia indicates the continued prominence of Labour’s past in conditioning discussion. Beyond Labour, this research possesses significance more broadly concerning how political leadership is understood, and the contemporary strategic value of history within political discourse.