2003 Labour Party Leadership Election

Percentage

The **2003 Labour Party leadership election** was triggered when Tony Blair announced in January 2003 that he would resign as Leader of the Labour Party and as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom once a successor had been elected, due to the Dr David Kelly assassination scandle. Nominations opened and 3 candidates were nominated. Jacinda Ardern was expected to run as well, being the new face for the New Labour group, however, she instead decided to endorse Alexander Redd. Alexander Redd won comfortably on the first round with 57.1% of the vote, becoming both the youngest PM in history (19 years old, beating William Pitt's record of 24) and the first non-Jewish BAME Prime Minister (being half-asian). This leadership election was also unusual as none of the candidates were fully white. All candidates were also of Asian descent, Redd's father being Bangladeshi, Chang's father being Korean and Nguyen being Vietnamese.

Speculation about a leadership election first arose following the scandle around a planned assassination of Dr David Kelly involving Tony Blair. The plan was for Dr Kelly to be killed to stop his comments over the supposed lies about the Iraq War getting out. However, the plan for the assassination was leaked. Blair was facing calls to resign and to stop dragging the party down, as this led to a crash in Labour support which wouldn't recover until a few month's into Redd's Premiership. These increased when Blair faced a mass Cabinet resignation, where even his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, resigned in protest. In early 2003, Blair announced his resignation, thus triggering a Leadership Election.

This would be the first Leadership Election Labour had in Government since 1976.

## Background

After the 2001 United Kingdom General Election, Tony Blair stayed as Leader of the Labour Party and as Prime Minister. Blair then pushed for military intervention into Iraq, wanting to start the Iraq War alongside President George W Bush of the United States and Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain. This led to claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction which led to the attempted assassination of Dr David Kelly.

### Dr David Kelly

One of the people that were debunking the claims from Tony Blair that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction was Dr David Kelly. He repeatedly gave evidence that the Government were lying about Iraq, leading others to speculate that the real reason for entry was over oil and control over that oil. The evidence for Dr David Kelly had already led to the creation of the Stop the War Coalition. According to a report, Blair colluded to assassinate Dr David Kelly. However, this plan failed and was leaked to the public, leading to mass resignations from his Cabinet.

### Blair's final days

With protests both within and outside the party showing no signs of stopping, and with Labour dropping in the polls, Tony Blair announced in January 2003 that he would resign from his roles as both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Labour Party.

This was still a shock as Blair had not shown any previous signs of resigning. Nevertheless, the ballot for the next Labour Leader and next Prime Minster opened.

## Election procedures

The process for electing the Leader of the Labour Party had developed the rules of the last election. This election operated on a one member, one vote system (this was done to simplify the election system in the sim). However, it does have a AV system in place to guarantee that the Leader would have over 50% support. On the ballot paper, you rank your candidates with 1 being your first choice, 2 being your second, etc. If on the first round, no-one got over 50%, then the candidate with the lowest amount of votes is eliminated and the votes from that person would go to their 2nd choice. This would repeat until one candidate gets over 50%.

## Campaign

There was not much heavy campaigning during the election. While all three candidates officially fitted into the Mainstream Labour branch, there were some noticeable differences between all three.

For example, while Alexander Redd claimed to be from "Mainstream Labour", many saw him as the furthest left and the most Socialist candidate out of the three of them, thus gaining a lot of support from the traditional Labour members, due to Redd stating how he wanted to introduce new social reforms and increase rights for workers. Ben Chang was the most moderate, believing that Labour needed a steady hand to guide it into the next election. Minh Phuc Nguyen was the most right-wing out of the three of them, as while he was economically left-wing, he described himself as a patriot and nationalist, even showing signs of support for the Iraq War, gaining some support from the Blairite faction.

Soon into the election, Jacinda Ardern, a prominent member of the Blairite faction of Labour, endorsed Alexander Redd, allowing a lot of former Blair fans to vote for Redd due to the endorsement of Ardern, Ardern would then run in the 2003 Labour Party Deputy Leadership Election.

## Candidates

### Nominated

The following MPs were nominated into the Leadership Election, gaining enough support from MPs

### Declined

Jacinda Ardern, MP for Greenwich and Woolworth (endorsed Alexander Redd)

## Results

 Minh Phuc Nguyen

Alexander Redd won the Labour leadership election in the first round of voting. He won with 57.1% of the votes, the most since John Smith in the 1992 Labour Party leadership election.