Keir Starmer’s changes are minor in the history of leadership election rules

John Rentoul traces the twists and turns of how the two main parties have chosen who should lead them since 1963

Tony Benn, in whose name the choice of party leader was taken away from Labour MPs alone

For most of the 20th century, Labour was the only major party that had rules for the election of its leader. The leader of the Conservative party used to “emerge” through a mysterious consultation among grandees. This was finally ditched after the awkwardness of Alec Douglas-Home becoming leader in 1963 instead of Rab Butler. Douglas-Home was a peer at the time, so he had to renounce his peerage and return to the House of Commons in a by-election.

For the next leadership election two years later, the Conservatives copied Labour by holding an eliminating ballot of MPs to elect Ted Heath. This is the only method of electing a party leader that is consistent with the theory of representative democracy. The people elect MPs who organise themselves into parties in parliament; those parties choose their leaders; and the leader of the party that has a majority in the Commons forms a government.

In that theory, grassroots members of parties influence the choice of leader indirectly, by choosing candidates to stand as MPs. That wasn’t good enough in the 1970s for supporters of Tony Benn, another lord who renounced his peerage. They took over much of the machinery of the Labour Party to create a policy platform of nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and what we now call Brexit after the 1979 election.

But they could not get Benn elected as leader, because most Labour MPs wouldn’t vote for him. They campaigned to deselect anti-Bennite MPs, but those battles were hard-fought, mostly unsuccessful and would in any case take time. So instead they took the shortcut of changing the rules for the election of the leader.

At a special party conference in 1981, they brought in an electoral college, made up of 40 per cent trade unions, 30 per cent party members and 30 per cent MPs. But they couldn’t launch an assault on Michael Foot, the leader, straight away, as he had a lot of support among grassroots members. So they used the new system that autumn to try to elect Benn to the deputy leadership. Surprisingly, despite fixing the rules for factional advantage, and despite the departure of many Labour MPs to the Social Democratic Party, Benn still lost by the narrowest of margins to Denis Healey.

The rules continued to be a source of factional contention. In 1993, John Smith changed the electoral college as a way of persuading the wider electorate that the party wasn’t beholden to trade union leaders. He changed the proportions from 40-30-30 to equal thirds but crucially, in each part of the college, trade unionists and party members would vote as individuals, one person, one vote. In the Bennite college, unions and constituency parties would vote as blocks, so each union cast its whole vote for one candidate – often on the basis of a “consultation” of its members as obscure as that of the pre-1965 Tory party. The new system also happened to make it easier for someone such as Tony Blair to win.

Meanwhile, the Conservative party fell victim to similar factionalism after the Blair landslide. William Hague, elected by Tory MPs, changed the rules to make it harder for Michael Portillo – when he got back into parliament in 1999 – to unseat him. He brought in a system that raised the bar for triggering a contest and which gave party members the final choice. Previously, three MPs could launch a challenge: a candidate, a proposer and a seconder; now it would require 15 per cent of Tory MPs (currently 55) to demand a vote of no confidence in the leader. If that vote is carried, or if there is a vacancy, Tory MPs hold an eliminating ballot to reduce the number of candidates to two, whose names go to the party membership for a simple majority vote.

The Conservative rules have remained mostly unchanged since then, while Labour continued to tinker. Ed Miliband abolished the electoral college in 2014, giving the vote to members, trade unionists and registered supporters (people paying £3 to have a vote in the leadership election without actually joining the party) all voting in a one person, one vote election. He set the thresholds for joining a contest at 20 per cent of MPs for a challenge and 15 per cent when there was a vacancy, a hurdle which Jeremy Corbyn cleared at the last moment, securing 36 nominations when he needed 35.

This produced the clash of constitutional theory: that a party could end up being led by someone in whom a clear majority of its MPs had no confidence. Despite this, Corbyn still nearly won the 2017 general election, but that is another story.

We must return to the final chapter of this story: Keir Starmer’s attempt to return to John Smith’s three-part electoral college. It would have given MPs more influence in future, but union leaders reacted badly – even though it would also have given them more influence through their members. Instead, Starmer has settled for raising the number of nominations needed to get on the ballot paper, in the event of a vacancy, from 10 per cent of MPs to 20 per cent. The threshold for a challenge remains at 20 per cent. He has also abolished the category of registered supporter, which had become less important anyway as the fee had been raised from £3 to £25, and limited the franchise to members of at least six months standing.

This all makes it slightly harder for a candidate vehemently opposed by a majority of Labour MPs to become leader, but without going as far as the Tory system, which at least ensures that the winner has wide support in the parliamentary party – and which means that if a candidate such as Iain Duncan Smith turns out to be no good, the MPs can get rid of them.