LABOUR'S DEPUTY DOGFIGHT

The predecessors to Powell vs Phillipson

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THEY were the big beasts of politics, fighting like stags for the deputy Labour leadership.

Previous lineups in the battle for this critical post include radical socialist Nye Bevan v Herbert Morrison, and Euro-pioneer Roy Jenkins v Michael Foot, the greatest orator of his day.

But the daddy of all these tussles was Tony Benn, posh-boy darling of the radical left v tough-talking war hero Denis Healey, once memorably described as "an intellectual thug".

Their fight for Labour's soul, the great rumble in the Westminster jungle of 1981, electrified politics and set the course for Labour today.

Benn, the public school son of an MP who inherited the family title of Viscount Stansgate, helped get the law changed so he could give up the peerage and sit in the Commons.

Healey was a bluff, rubicund grammar-school Yorkshireman, raised in the working-class textile town of Keighley.

A scholarship boy to Oxford, prewar he was a member of the Communist Party.

It was a no-holds-barred, naked struggle for power. This was the first contest after MPs lost their exclusive right to choose the deputy leader, with a newfangled "electoral college" giving 40% of the votes to affiliated trade unions, 30% to MPs and 30% to delegates from local parties.

And it coincided with a surge to the left, frustrated by Thatcher's election win of 1979. Fixers in some unions got to work to deliver for Benn and his radical policies of state intervention.

I'd been on the inside track for some time, reporting developments as Labour Editor of The Times. Benn's diaries record me and Mrs R having dinner at his West London home in October 1978, and his union backers kept me informed.