Traditionally, the Labour Party has been hesitant to acknowledge the power and authority of the leader (McKenzie 1963: 297). After an often painful modernization process, the party now accepts that “leaders do matter” for the party (James & Buller 2015). Leadership of Labour has always been a “complicated phenomenon” (Morgan 1987: 4). Attempts to evaluate party leadership have tended rather predictably to focus on the leadership's ability to win elections. Across the 28 general elections held since 1918, Labour have won 11, and only eight with majorities. Of Labour's 14 leaders, just three have won elections outright: Attlee, Wilson and Blair (Gamble 2017). Only rarely – in 1945, 1966 and 1997 – has Labour built a large winning coalition. Gamble characterized Labour as a party with several cycles of victory, defeat and rebuilding, as between 1931 and 1951, 1951 and 1979, 1979 and 2010, made up of an arc including defeat and major victory, then loss and a process of rebuilding (Gamble 2017). The problem, famously labelled the “progressive dilemma”, is one of uniting the anti-Conservative coalition while still remaining wedded to Labour values (Marquand 1999; Gamble 2017). Added to this has been the inability of Labour to renew itself in power; as Harold Wilson put it: “If you rattle along at great speed, everybody is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop, everybody gets out and argues about where to go next” (quoted in Smith 1964: 193).

Labour, as McKenzie pointed out, only gradually came to recognize that the original chairman of the party was indeed a potential prime minister, sowing the seeds for the “reluctant leadership” narrative as a key part of the Labour discourse (Gaffney 2017). For a centre-left collectivist party, Labour holds a paradoxical attitude to its leaders (Diamond 2016: 21). Labour “venerated the collective idea” and was uncomfortable with personalized leadership, and yet it has at times perpetuated an individualized “cult of personality”, supported by the “evocation of former heroes”, so that the collective story of Labour becomes one of the “triumphs and defeats of individuals”, interwoven with an occasional theme of betrayal (Morgan 1987: 1; James 2015).