Leadership and the Labour Party

The relationships between narrative and leadership, between rhetoric and performance, between doctrine and its voicing, are crucial to party politics and are underrated by both practising politicians and scholars. This study analyses the performance of leadership in the UK Labour Party, and what this means for a new approach to understanding politics. The main focus of this study is the five-year leadership of Ed Miliband, 2010-2015. The fortunes of the party and the party leadership can be apprehended as a series of performed rhetorical events. A political leaders persona is a construction that performs rather like an actor in the political space. The author identifies and analyses the architecture and the modalities of leadership persona construction and performance in contemporary politics.