Scottish Labour Party (1976) MP for South Ayrshire, John Robertson, then MP for Paisley and Alex Neil, the UK Labour Party's senior Scottish researcher. The split came just before the resignation of Harold Wilson as prime minister and party leader and the election of James Callaghan as his successor. By 1979 the Scottish Labour Party had lost its seats in the House of Commons, and in 1981 it was formally disbanded. Almost immediately the SLP became the focus for entryism from the International Marxist Group (IMG), and at the party's first congress in October 1976 the IMG was expelled, along with a number of
John Smith (Labour Party leader) John Smith House in his memory. Tony Blair, Smith's successor as Leader of the Labour Party, was initially quite popular and an effective campaigner who capitalised on public mistrust of the Conservative Party to win a landslide victory at the 1997 general election. Smith's biographer, Mark Stuart, claimed that Smith could have won Labour a victory on a scale similar to that achieved by Blair because of the combination of the Black Wednesday debacle and internal Conservative Party divisions over Europe since 1992. Stuart argues that the lack of a "Blair effect" would have meant that the Conservative Party would