In a past that was another country the annual Labour party conference was a significant gathering. Its set-piece debates were often truculent and sometimes sulphurous. The political analyst Lewis Minkin, who has died aged 84, was a perennial spectator. His interest lay not so much in the public spectacle as in its backstage hinterland.
The party leadership was always keen to secure what was euphemistically seen as a good conference – one that avoided embarrassing defeats. Lewis became the expert on the Machiavellian arts of party managers seeking to marginalise critics and of critics attempting to defeat the leadership.
In particular he was massively knowledgeable on the complex decision-making within each major union, with its consequences for the casting of its block vote. This ubiquitous figure with his laser-like focus and his briefcase bulging with documents became a necessary and supportive adviser for journalists. His assessments eschewed the stereotypical and the simplistic; he understood and presented this hidden world in all its complexity and ambiguity.
This scrutiny gave rise to his book The Labour Party Conference (1978), a pathbreaking analysis of the party’s internal processes. Lewis’s own passionate support for the party-trade union link formed the basis for The Contentious Alliance (1991), which focused on the complexities of the relationship between the party and the trade unions at a time when he was relatively optimistic about its future.
The Blair Supremacy (2014) analysed changes in party management under New Labour. Lewis was highly critical of the managerial strategy developed under Tony Blair, while understanding the compelling reasons – not least electoral – that made many within the party go along with it.
The three volumes weighed in at more than 2,000 pages. Together, they offered the most rigorous, empirically based study of power within any British political party. Lewis produced not a static, ahistorical snapshot, but an examination of how the distribution of power and its exercise shifted through time.
He was committed to a more egalitarian and democratic society tempered by a robust concern with problems of practicality. These values were most apparent in his favourite book, Exits and Entrances (1997), in which he explored his own complex and tortuous working practices.
Born in Leeds, Lewis was the son of Annie (Esther Ann, nee Richards) and Bob (Barnet) Minkin, who both worked in the tailoring trade. One of Lewis’s earliest memories was of clothes arriving at the house for his mother to add buttons. Bob’s family had migrated from Tsarist Russia around 1890, probably to escape the danger of pogroms. Annie’s family had moved from Staffordshire to Yorkshire to work in the mines. Lewis was shaped by the working-class cultures of both parents.
From his mother he also inherited a pitch-perfect voice and developed a massive repertoire of songs. An early ambition was to be a comedian on the Northern Working Men’s Club circuit. His skills as a raconteur with impeccable timing and a smattering of Yiddish evoked Jewish traditions of humour and story telling. His father also introduced him to rugby league at a very early age, and Lewis’s commitment to Leeds rugby league endured.
At primary school he experienced appalling antisemitism. A scholarship gave him entry to Roundhay school, where in the late 1940s working-class pupils were scarce. He left aged 15 with no qualifications and worked in a variety of clerical jobs; his national service was in Cyprus during the Eoka campaign.
His early involvement in Labour politics came as a leftwing activist in Leeds, a city whose MPs were solidly on the right. He entered Leeds University as a mature student in 1963, and impressed Peter Nettl, the biographer of Rosa Luxemburg. Lewis made a significant contribution to Nettl’s The Soviet Achievement (1967), an account of the development of the Soviet Union.
After graduating with a first in politics (1966) he went on to postgraduate work at York University. In 1969 he joined the department of government at Manchester University, initially as a research associate, but soon becoming a lecturer and eventually senior lecturer. At his first research presentation, he bewitched his audience with a blend of humour and sheer intellectual power. He carried these skills into his teaching but was a semi-detached member of the department.
In the late 1970s, he was a political adviser on TV productions, working with the director Roland Joffé on Trevor Griffiths’ series Bill Brand, about an eponymous leftwing politician, and on some of Jim Allen’s plays, including The Spongers.
The higher education changes of the 1980s meant that the research culture he cherished was withering. He took a very early retirement from Manchester in 1989. His concern with creativity led him to take up visiting professorships at Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield Hallam universities.
His politics had shifted towards what he called the centre-left. From Neil Kinnock’s election as Labour party leader until the Blair years, he was involved in discussions within Labour’s leadership group. Such participation did not mean any loss of rigour in his assessments of those with whom he collaborated and argued.
In this area his proudest achievement came through serving as vice-chair of a new National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, which produced the policy document All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (1999). It included Lewis’s definition of creativity as “imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value” and which “is possible in all fields of human intelligence”. The report was met with much interest, and a pilot scheme of creativity partnerships between schools and outside creative professionals was established in 2002, and taken up more widely in 2004.
In 1988 Lewis married Liz St David Smith (nee Hughes). She survives him, along with her son, Tom, and Lewis’s son, Daniel, from his first marriage, to Lillie Plews, which ended in divorce, and four grandchildren.
• Lewis Minkin, political analyst, born 25 June 1936; died 9 March 2021
