Margaret McDonagh, general secretary of the Labour Party between 1998 and 2001, died of brain cancer in June of 2023, but her already strong reputation in the Labour party has, if anything, only grown since her passing.
On the main stage at this year’s party conference, both David Evans and Hollie Ridley (the outgoing and incoming general secretaries, respectively) talked about her in reverent terms; out in the exhibition stalls, her sister Siobhain (the Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden) staffed a stall publicising a campaign to fight the rare cancer which took McDonagh’s life. The stall sold tote bags bearing the old style Labour rose of the 90s (it has a longer stalk than today’s iteration), with the moniker “We. Will. Win.”, which I noticed on the arms of conference goers wherever I went.
McDonagh was the party’s first female general secretary – the second, Corbyn appointed Jennie Formby, comes quite close to being considered non-canon by Starmer’s party; Ridley is the third. Her continued relevance is owed to her connection, both factional and personal, to those now ascendant in the party; it’s notable that of all the stories relating to donations from Waheed Alli, it’s his gift to support her care that, I think, people within the party are most willing to staunchly defend.
However, I believe that McDonagh’s continued relevance is also and more crucially owed to the job she did, and how that relates to the circumstances the party finds itself in now. She was the general secretary during the 2001 election, when Labour arguably did something even more impressive than what it accomplished in 1997. After four years of government, Labour managed to drop only six seats from its mighty 1997 majority tally of 179.
A winning formula
In July, Labour scored an almost equally impressive majority of 174. However, contained within the good numbers were a number of worrying trends. Among these are Labour’s drop off with Muslim voters and strong finishes from Reform, both leading to the unexpected loss of a number of seats, as well as a general finely spread showing – generally dubbed the “broad but shallow” phenomenon – which delivered a great many MPs with very small majorities.
Given all of this, and the party’s general historical difficulties with winning elections, Labour is already thinking incredibly hard about how it can win the next general election. How, in short, it can do what the party under McDonagh did in 2001.
A not insignificant part of this task now falls to Ridley, the former director of nations and regions who was confirmed as general secretary on the first day of conference, having been selected for the post from a shortlist of one by the governing national executive committee (NEC).
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In her speech to conference, she hailed her “friend and mentor” McDonagh as a “force of nature”, before talking about the imperative to win again. “We are under no illusions that winning will be tough… to do so our organisation will need to do things that have never been done before”, she told delegates, adding that “the 2024 playbook cannot be used again… incumbency is the name of the game now”.
Ridley, like Morgan McSweeney, another figure who will be at the very top of deciding how the party tackles the next election, springs from the party’s organiser class. These are the hardest working people you will meet in the party, shuttling from campaign to campaign, doing long and physically taxing hours with the drive of zealots, fuelled by grim determination and bad diets, and they are respected as such. When Ridley told delegates that after her first taste of a campaign she knew she “wanted to do something every girl dreams of growing up: I wanted to be a Labour Party organiser”, she got an enthusiastic round of applause.
Ridley went on to speak of “winning being personal to her”, and the average organiser’s public-facing politics come quite close to this: they are the archetypal “Clause I socialists”, clause I of the rulebook being that which relates to keeping the party in power.
Rise of the organiser
The rise of Ridley and McSweeney – the now all-powerful aide whose name I first heard being feted by the organisers of London region in perhaps 2016 or 17 – reflects the coming to power of the organiser class.
One of the ways that’s reflected is the celebration of Margaret McDonagh; another is the way election minded think tank Labour Together has displaced traditional intellectual hubs like the Fabians or the IPPR, McSweeney’s commitment to hiring both digital and traditional new organisers, or the persistent assertions one encounters the party intends to govern in campaign mode (something that will no doubt be aided by organisers flooding into parliament as aides to new MPs).
Now more than ever, the party is run by its electioneers, not its ideologues.
Recap on all of the news and debate from party conference 2024 by LabourList here.
Also talking up the merits of Clause I at conference this year was Keir Starmer, who will look to Ridley and the party’s staff to secure Labour a second term. Labour ran an incredible field campaign in 2024, and there seems little reason to doubt that that level of rigour will continue.
But at a certain level, you need to govern in governing mode; I remember discussion amongst organisers under Corbyn of how a good ground game was “necessary but not sufficient” to win elections. The question arising is: is it enough to be organised?
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