If John Smith were alive, imagine how different this Labour government would be

I find it hard to believe the man I knew being taken in by the homely banalities favoured by the current US President

Ten years ago next week, I walked into my office on the Shadow Cabinet corridor to be told that John Smith was on his way to hospital after a serious heart attack. So vivid is the memory of the next two hours in which we desperately hoped to hear that he had survived that it is a shock to realise that it is a decade old.

The next few days witnessed a spontaneous expression of public regret and grief over the premature death of a popular figure. It was so powerful that John Major felt obliged to propose, out of respect for John Smith, that we should all adopt a more respectful, less aggressive political tone, a suggestion that was immediately ignored by his backbench critics and rapidly forgotten by his own speechwriters. Even hostile newspapers caught the mood of their readers and wrote warm appraisals of John, which I shall charitably assume they regretted never printing while he was alive to read them.

The reason for the public affection for John Smith can be summed up in one word. Trust. He was an open, candid personality who did not dissemble his thoughts, and the public respected him as a politician who was unusual in the sincerity of his views. Let it be said his candour sometimes did not make him comfortable to be near. I retain equally vivid memories of the occasional dressing down by him which left me in no doubt of exactly what he thought, and to be fair, I usually deserved it. But the upside was that he always told it to your face. John Smith would regard with contempt the very idea of briefing against a colleague off the record.

His honesty left him no time for the duplicity of lesser politicians. When he was campaign manager for Roy Hattersley and I was the opposite number for Neil Kinnock, we used to meet for a whisky every evening to smooth difficulties. I shall never forget his withering scorn when, one night, we both pulled from our pockets identical letters of loyalty sent on the same day to both of us from the same colleague.

Integrity requires consistency and the determination to stick to what you believe in. It is now fashionable in some quarters to write down John Smith as safe and cautious, but those of us who knew him at the time appreciated he could be tenacious and courageous. It was only John Smith's determination, assisted by a barnstorming speech by John Prescott, that convinced a Labour conference to adopt the system of "one member, one vote", under which Tony Blair was subsequently elected.

If he had lived, the features of the political landscape would look very different today.

For a start a Labour Government would not now be mired in accusations of spin. John Smith was a man of substance who endearingly held to the old-fashioned view that it was more important whether a policy would work in the long term than whether it would look good in the headlines tomorrow. Even as leader, he remained irritated whenever he was badgered to please the press with the kind of novelty initiatives that are now so fashionable in Downing Street. Perhaps, as a result, Labour under John Smith might not have won the last two general elections with quite such an extravagant majority, but we would have made more strategic use of our period of office.

One strategic objective on which John Smith would have delivered would have been to ensure Britain was a respected player in Europe. During his campaign for election as leader, I organised a dinner for him in Strasbourg with Labour MEPs, at the end of which he gave a passionate address on how he had defied the Labour whips to vote for entry into the European Community in order to stay true to his belief in Europe. I remember wondering at the time whether, on the eve of becoming leader, it was wise to be quite so honest about his pride in voting against the whips.

I do not believe John Smith would ever have contemplated ending his term in Downing Street leaving Britain still outside the euro, although that now appears an inevitable failure of the Blair years. Nor would John have tolerated the Murdoch press bouncing him into a referendum on the European constitution, or anything else.

The corollary to his enthusiastic Europeanism is that he would have been a more pragmatic Atlanticist than Blair. I find it hard to imagine the John Smith I knew being taken in by the homely banalities favoured by the present occupant of the White House. He would have needed a large scotch to recover from his distaste at the President of the United States informing a press conference how delighted he was to discover they shared the same toothpaste.

Nor do I believe that John Smith would have let Britain be tricked into the quicksand-marked occupation of Iraq. One of the joys of working with him was his intense intellectual curiosity. On one occasion, we shared a five-hour car journey as the only way to get back to our homes in Edinburgh. After the first hour, John got bored by the absence of anything to exercise his mind and resolved to become an expert in horse-racing. For the next four hours, he systematically emptied me of all the knowledge I had acquired over a lifetime of following the sport.

He would have put the intelligence services through a similar cross examination to test their claim that there really were WMD in Iraq, and I doubt whether he would have been convinced. If he had been taken in at the time, I suspect those who had misdirected him would not now be running the intelligence services, but would be grateful for asylum in the Pentagon.

John Smith would have brought one other major strength to a Labour Government. He had the valuable knack of talking on equal terms to people from all walks of life. I have been with him at lunch in the City and at a community centre in his constituency, and found him just as at ease with the company round the table at both.

He would not have fallen into the trap which Number 10 has set for itself of always projecting the Prime Minister in the company of top people and international figures.

The result is that lifelong Labour voters rarely see Tony Blair in the same frame as people like themselves, and are left doubting whether it is their party. John Smith liked meeting ordinary people and even the most stylish image-maker could not have stopped him being photographed with them.

He would have trumpeted Labour's solid achievements on social justice, rather than appearing faintly embarrassed by them. I also doubt whether his sense of honesty would have tolerated the present policy of dragging middle-income professionals into the top band of tax to compensate for Number 10's reluctance to put up the rate paid by influential executives.

John Smith himself would have had no patience with such parlour games of guessing what might have been. He would have been delighted that Labour had a double victory, and, as a thoroughgoing realist, would have wanted us to get on with making the most of it, rather than imagining the impossible. But, nevertheless, there will be many of us this weekend who will pause for a moment to lament Labour's Lost Leader.