ALAMY For decades, the year 1931 was spat at as an accusation at Labor conferences, used as a metaphor, repeated as a warning. This was the year Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labor Prime Minister, joined the Tories to form a national government. The year MacDonald was elected, Labor activists found him to be a traitor. After 1931, every Labor leader in turn was accused of being a new MacDonald, abandoning true socialism and becoming a “Tory”. The problem, of course, was not really that Labor had, in an unusual streak of bad luck, elected one leader after another who was secretly a double agent. It was that the left wanted them to say or do things that were either impossible or incredibly vague or electorally untenable, and sometimes all three.
