Hammer of the Left: Defeating Tony Benn, Eric Heffer and Militant in the Battle for the Labour Party

by John Golding

In the late 1970s and early 1980s John Golding, known as the 'Hammer of the Left', was one of the most influential figures in the Labour Party. As MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme and a top trade union 'fixer', he led the moderates' fightback against Tony Benn, Militant and the hard left.In this posthumously published memoir, edited by Paul Farrelly MP, Golding details his ruthless quest to remove Benn and Heffer from Labour's National Executive Committee. He reveals how he and his 'union mafia' made sure that Benn lost his Bristol seat - and with it his leadership ambitions - and describes the back-room fixing which dashed Roy Hattersley's hopes and delivered the leadership to Neil Kinnock.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

326 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Harold John Golding, CBE, FBA, was a British artist, art scholar, and curator.

Reviews

[Richard Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the fight against extremist infiltration of the Labour Party in the seventies and eighties. It's probably inevitable that history seems to be repeating itself just now. The epilogue describes this. Golding writes well about his involvement in the political change and doesn't spare the humbug and cynicism of the opposition - Tony Benn and Eric Heffer in particular. Of necessity the account brings in a great deal of detail on the minutiae of Labour's constitutional affairs, the conferences and governing bodies. So unless you're a political junky, much of this can become tedious although essential to understanding how the political changes were made and the enormous effort put in to get the party back.

[Malcolm Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth reading the new version with postscript by John Golding's successor as Newcastle Under Lyme's MP. The parallels with today and the guide to action is clear.

[Paul Brewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m writing about a week after Sir Keir Starmer resigned as Labour party leader and prime minister. Thinking back across my fifty-odd years acquaintance with Labour party politics, the fact that there is only one plausible successor is an indictment of a party that once possessed a great intellectual tradition. I also think it is a consequence in part of the actions taken by the author of this book. John Golding boasts of being ‘the Hammer of the Left’. In detailing the gross, vindictive factionalism of the Labour party from the late 1970s to the middle of the 1980s, he describes the course that led to it crashing to its worst defeat in eighty years in 2019 and why it is now reduced to a ‘ministry of none of the talent’, where the most plausible alternative to Starmer wasn’t even sitting in parliament.

The book opens with two competing visions of how power should flow within the Labour party, and basically covers a period of struggle between them. On one side are leftists, both soft and hard, who want power to flow upwards from constituency parties and the rank-and-file trade unionists. Golding and his side desire a top-down flow, with the members of parliament at the apex, and trade union leaders just slightly lower down. Missing from the Labour party, but more important to today’s version, is a set of Labour-leaning donors drawn from the business class. I’ve no doubt they existed in Golding’s day, but he doesn’t mention them. In one vision, policy is set by the members, and implemented by their servants, the MPs. In the other, the leadership decides what the public will vote for, and get the membership to knock on doors to support it and get the vote out come election time.

I’m very much a ‘power should flow upwards’ man, in my preferences for political parties and for government. But it’s worth noting that Golding’s choice of side is determined not by any ideology of his own, but through his experience working with the parliamentary leaders of the ‘flow upwards’ sentiment. The villain in the book is Tony Benn. I happen to have seen Benn many times, as for a number of years I worked as a lay trade union officer, until the arrival of children pushed me into family life. Benn is without doubt a stirring speaker, and I’ve heard only good things about his diaries. Golding portrays his time as a working minister of government quite negatively. Benn speaks in one of his books about ministers being unable to grasp the ‘levers of power’ owing to civil servants’ distrust of the temporary office-holders. Golding suggests Benn didn’t have the gumption to work out where they were. Benn is thus reduced to an impractical windbag, and this taints the entirety of those who backed his election as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1981 with the same brush. Surprisingly, he is very scathing about the Tribune Group of MPs, to whom Denis Healey owed his election as Deputy Leader over Benn, thanks to the abstention of about twenty of them in the second-round of the voting. (The rest, I think, voted Benn, though.)

One of the things I’d hoped he would do was to describe what caused the revolutionary mood to rise in the Labour party starting under the 1964-70 Wilson government, and more especially in the trade unions. He completely fails at this, to the point that I think he’s hiding something. He does comment that more widespread university education was a factor, as if that was a bad thing for a country long-hampered by an unequal educational system. The result is that Golding’s enemies in the party are presented as childish (that university education infantilises them!), irresponsible malcontents turned into tools for the malign Benn’s ambitions. Had Benn been elected leader, Golding would surely have been part of the crowd stabbing Benn at the foot of Clement Attlee’s statue, in the way the lean and hungry Cassius stabbed Caesar at Pompey’s. Golding just cannot accept that a fraction of the party might sincerely believe that more aggressive policy-making – stick to the manifesto! was the cry of the 1970s – would be better than his fraction's caution.

I will spare my dear readers my detailed thoughts on events after that fateful Labour Party conference of 1981, but they have not served the Labour party well. Golding’s lot gradually took over the party so that by the time of the 2010 general election intake, they dominated the parliamentary Labour party in ways unimaginable before. Nonetheless, fearful of any final capacity of the Labour Left to elect a leader via the electoral college, these geniuses manouevred the party into an ‘OMOV’ (one-member-one-vote) system. And that system promptly elected the Benn of 2015, Jeremy Corbyn! This is just another way in which they demonstrated their great political skills. I cannot understand how anyone could become malcontent with this wise leadership.

The Party That Golding and His Ilk Built nearly fell apart in the winter of 2025/6, despite having won a stonking majority not even two years earlier, and their choice of leader collapsed to levels of unpopularity rarely seen before in British political history. You can see how this can happened by studying Golding’s blind spots as a narrator and analyst of the times he lived through. He notes how the PLP would never tolerate Benn as a leader, which is exactly what we saw happen to Corbyn. It just doesn’t occur to him that factionalism will breed factionalism. It doesn’t occur to him that malcontents, like paranoids having real enemies, can have genuine grievances. It doesn’t occur to him that the kind of debate within the party that he seems to view with horror is a sign of a fertile intellectual terrain on which to build a popular movement.

For all my disgust with the consequences the author has foisted on my beloved Britain, this is a fascinating book, offering a compelling narrative. It also gives some useful advice on organising within a political party, as Golding does provide some detail of how he went about earning the sobriquet ‘Hammer of the Left’. But it is a book with an unreliable narrator, a Catcher in the Rye for British politics. Please read it if you’re interested in politics, but don’t accept his opinions uncritically.

© 2026 Paul Brewer

[John Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for any left wing member of the party who truly wants to understand the lengths the right wing will go, to win/keep control. The vitriol shown by Golding towards the left dominates his writing. Anyone who thinks the right wing will just sit back and accept the result when they lose a democratic vote will be rudely awakened as they read his frank account of how a handful of MPs supported by a few trade union leaders decided to get control of the party.

[Kyus Beaufort · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book. It's made all the more poignant by the knowledge that after all the work he did to throw the hard left out of the Labour party and make it electable again, they snuck back in after Miliband's leadership election rule changes and we ended up with four years of chaos under Jeremy Corbyn.

If you're a Labour Kremlinologist like me then there's lots to like here, as it covers in detail the internal politics of the party and the different executives, conferences and committees which Golding worked through to consign Benn to irrelevance and expel Militant altogether. It does so in a gossipy, easy-to-read way that keeps it compelling.

I was slightly surprised that he didn't go more over how the Liverpool branch of Militant was thrown out of the party, but perhaps he wasn't as involved in that and so it wasn't appropriate for this book. It's also very weird seeing MPs we would now consider as on the right of the party - Margaret Beckett for one - appear here in their earlier guise of far-left acolytes.

All of the acronyms for different organisations and unions get very confusing, but there's a helpful glossary at the back for if (when!) you get confused as to who's who.

[Pinko Palest · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wonder: did John Golding employ a ghost-writer for this? I do not doubt his literary abilities, it is the stylistics that got me wondering, and quite a few parts of the book seem to be written in a very journalistic style. Almost tabloidese in fact. This is not a serious source, of course, and it is a self-serving exercise. The so-called 'moderates' will lap this up of course, although it also contains a very harsh lesson for them too: the fight-back of the Right within the Labour party in the 80s mainly took place through the unions. In other words, the Right within Labour cannot rely solely on the PLP, and has to carry at least some of the unions with it. Luckily, this does not seem like happening any time soon. It is great fun in places, of course, and has a few home truths for everybody, even for those on the Left (for example, the packs of costly leaflets still lying undistributed)

[Jesse Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an enjoyable slog -- but its central flaw is that it's too detailed and far too same-y throughout. If you don't find interest in the minutiae of NEC procedure, or the internal machinations of 1980s-era trade unions, avoid this book! Golding's passion and wit and willingness to savage his rivals makes up the best parts of the book; but too much of the rest is consumed with endless recitation of conference card votes and NEC meeting minutes. Golding was a central figure in perhaps the Labour Party's moment of greatest historical peril -- I just wish his account was more compelling!

[Hugo Collingridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second time that I've read this and I'd forgotten just how plain entertaining it is. All of the heroes and villains are really fleshed out and it's written in a great conversational style. Like having a drink with John Golding in the Pub after a particularly bruising meeting. It helps if you've spent a lot of time in general committees, branch executive committees and so forth as well.

[Daniel Carr]

While the level of detail can verge on the tedious, this is a good read for any looking to understand the state of the UK Labour Party in the 70s and 80s during which the hard-left seized sway before losing it (for a time). It's also a solid primer on how important organising is to politics. Quite a bit of humour - often black - in Golding's retelling as well.

Would recommend to anyone interested in the 'backstory' to the current tension in the UK Labour Party, from a moderate perspective.