Abstract
This chapter is an account of leadership developments within the Labour Party, and the way in which party leaders have inflected party thinking and the parameters of its thinking and direction. For much of its hundred years and more of existence, the Labour Party is a case study in the failure to understand the nature, exigencies, and consequences of leadership, both partisan and national. Few party leaders have been particularly successful. I shall therefore examine here what leaders have brought to the party in terms of shaping its leadership narrative and relation to party identity, often unknowingly given the party and the left’s generally problematic attitude and relationship to leadership itself.
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Notes
- 1.
See Gaffney (2015).
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Gaffney, J. (2017). Leadership Lessons from the Past. In: Leadership and the Labour Party. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50498-2_2
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