Why is Labour's deputy leadership contest more significant than it seems?
Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards
Podmasters
4.7 • 909 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The post of deputy leader is ill-defined at best. Yet delving deep, and going back to contests in the 1970s, shows they change the course of Labour's history. The current one will also make waves when the result is declared. Plus Donald Trump.. the peacemaker.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. |
| 0:22.6 | Thank you very much for tuning in wherever you are and as ever we have got a lot to cram in in our time together if it's okay with all of you |
| 0:30.6 | a couple of reflections from me uh shortish so you know because there's two two reflections |
| 0:37.0 | one on labor's deputy leadership |
| 0:39.8 | contest and then on Donald Trump in the context of the Middle East, Gaza, etc. Then some |
| 0:47.6 | brilliant questions from all of you ranging very widely indeed. Before all of that, an announcement, |
| 0:54.8 | there will be a second bonus podcast this week. It'll either come out on Thursday or |
| 1:01.5 | Friday. And if you are a Patreon subscriber, you'll get it 24 hours earlier, add free. So do |
| 1:08.5 | subscribe to Patreon, please. Talking of which, that is a neat segue |
| 1:14.3 | into my first reflection, because the bonus podcast for Patreon subscribers this month was looking |
| 1:22.7 | at the strange significance of Labour's deputy leadership contests. And I say strange and significant, |
| 1:32.7 | because strange, in the sense that the post has always been pretty ill-defined, significant, |
| 1:41.0 | because the more I reflected and prepared for that bonus podcast, the more I became |
| 1:47.6 | gripped by its kind of strange centrality. But anyway, I focused on the deputy leadership |
| 1:55.5 | contests of those that were decided by the wider Labour Party. In other words, the dramatic contest of |
| 2:05.5 | Tony Benn versus Dennis Healy in 1981, the current one obviously between Bridget Philipson and |
| 2:12.7 | Lucy Powell, and looking at the authority acquired when Angela Rainer and John Prescott won through these |
| 2:22.8 | routes. And I say, the more I did, oh yeah, for some weird reason, these changed the course |
| 2:30.3 | of a party's history, even though the prize is such an ill-defined one. Anyway, |
| 2:37.5 | afterwards, I thought I was one of the kind of world experts of Labor Party history post-1945, |
| 2:45.1 | certainly. But the great Labour historian and Brexit minister, Cabinet Office Minister, Nick Thomas Simmons, |
| 2:52.7 | who you will know has written great biographies of Harold Wilson, Claire Matley and others. |
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