Choosing the Labour Leader

Reviews / Votes

'Leadership contests tell us an awful lot about the parties that conduct them and the politicians that contest them. By writing this book, as well as his companion volume on the Conservative Party, Tim Heppell has done all of us interested in British politics a great service... He makes it clear that in leadership contests, as in politics more generally, timing (and momentum) is everything: a number of Labour's 'nearly men' may have made it all the way to the top if only the elections they stood in had occurred earlier or later (sometimes only months earlier or later) than they actually did. Politics, then, is about might-have-beens. But it is also about institutions, interests, ideas, and individuals. Heppell's evaluations of Labour's leadership contest strikes a judicious balance between each of those factors and captures the interactions between them... Anyone interested in asking how and why Gordon Brown's successor got themselves elected will be in better position to answer that question after reading this thought-provoking and well-researched book.' - Dr Tim Bale, Department of Politics and Contemporary European Studies, University of Sussex; 'Heppell's book considers the circumstances in which each leader of the Labour Party acquired their mandate and the consequences that flowed from the manner of their election. This is significant as although there are many excellent books on leadership selection in the British Politics, there are none that focus explicitly on leadership selection within the Labour Party alone and thus Choosing the Labour Leader makes a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary Labour politics.' - Dr Michael Hill, School of Education and Social Science, University of Central Lancashire