On 23 March 1988, left-wing MP Tony Benn announced he would challenge Neil Kinnock for the leadership of the Labour Party. The ill-fated challenge came at a time when Kinnock was attempting to modernise Labour’s image and policies following a third successive general election defeat in 1987.

Kinnock had previously clashed with Benn during the 1981 deputy leadership election. Kinnock, a member of the Tribune Group, refused to endorse the left-wing challenger to the incumbent deputy leader, Denis Healey. In the end, Healey prevailed by just 50.4% to 49.6% in the second ballot; the narrow margin of victory – by just 0.852% of the electoral college vote – carried profound consequences for the future of the Labour Party.

In the immediate term, the perceived treachery of the Tribune Group prompted Benn’s supporters to form the Campaign Group (later the Socialist Campaign Group). The 1981 deputy leadership election ultimately represented the high-water mark of Bennite influence within Labour – a level of left-wing prominence not surpassed until Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015.

Benn was prevented from standing in the 1983 Labour leadership election after losing his seat in that year’s general election. Kinnock, meanwhile, soon emerged as the contest’s frontrunner, presenting himself the candidate able to unite Labour’s warring factions.

Labour won 229 seats and 30.8% in the 1987 general election – an improvement on the party’s historically poor performance in 1983. However, Kinnock was unable to prevent a Conservative majority and unseat Margaret Thatcher as prime minister.

The party’s subsequent policy review was regarded as heretical by the left-wing Campaign Group for its ideological concessions.

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Upon launching his campaign, Benn argued that Kinnock’s leadership was abandoning core Labour principles. He pointedly described his platform as a “campaign for socialism”.

The former cabinet minister said he had been urged to stand because the country was in “a period when socialist ideas have been attacked and some people have dropped them.” His aim, he said, was “to put socialism back on the agenda.”

In a speech on 19 March 1988, Thatcher claimed to have written the “epitaph for socialism”.

Setting out his stall, Benn declared: “While we go on worshipping profit and neglecting need, and prattling endlessly about productivity, competitiveness and economic efficiency, we’re missing the central point – which is whether we want to be a community of independent people, or driven back to the jungle where the strongest devour the weakest. That is the central question.

“And the raising of these moral questions, and a decision to place them in the forefront of political debate is the most urgent single task the Labour movement faces.”

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At the same time, Eric Heffer, a left-wing ally of Benn’s, announced he would challenge the incumbent, Roy Hattersley, for the deputy leadership of the party.

In a joint statement, Kinnock and Hattersley dismissed the contest as “futile and selfish”.

They said: “When the priority of the huge majority of the Labour movement is to combat the Tory offensive against the health service and the poor and to secure support for our campaigns for jobs and justice, these people have chosen to turn inwards.

“Only our foes will be pleased and everyone with any sense knows it.”

Robert Worcester, a Labour pollster, predicted a landslide Kinnock victory, but warned of a six-month “kamikaze campaign” conducted by Benn’s supporters.

In an interview with the Independent, Benn warned that without a “socialist alternative on offer”, anxiety could drive voters further to the right. He expressed his nervousness that Labour policy reviews appeared to be shifting the party “closer to the Thatcher position at the time the Thatcher position is beginning to fail.”

The Labour MP added: “The policies that are being put forward now by the Labour Party are to the right of the policies of [Harold] Wilson in his latter years; they are not radical policies. Today, we are saying market forces will do it, and yet market forces and the technological revolution are burning people out.”

Benn denied that he would remain a “pain in the neck” of Neil Kinnock, declaring: “I think I am a tree in the garden, which is growing, too.”

Benn’s challenge was considered to be unpopular with the majority of the parliamentary party, who saw it as damaging Labour’s electoral prospects.

But Benn, who had threatened to run annual leadership challenges, argued that “division can be healing”.

Speaking on the night before his defeat was declared, Benn told a gathering of supporters: “I do not want anyone to think that tomorrow is the end. It is the beginning. It is twice as good as we thought it might be.”

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The election itself took place on 2 October 1988, at the opening session of the Labour Party annual conference. It resulted in an overwhelming victory for Kinnock, who secured 88.6% of the electoral college vote to Benn’s 11.4%.

Kinnock won the support of 183 MPs, while Benn secured the backing of just 38. In the deputy leadership contest, the incumbent deputy, Roy Hattersley, was re-elected.

Speaking to BBC Newsnight shortly before the declaration of the result, the left-wing Labour MP and future party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said Benn’s campaign achieved a “degree of activity and discussion of socialist values”.

The campaign, he believed, would “result in stronger socialist policies in the long-run”.

Corbyn, then the secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) of left-wing MPs, spoke of the “rebirth… of a serious, thinking left that is looking forward beyond the 80s… to the serious economic issues the next Labour government is going to have to face.”

Jack Straw, who supported Kinnock’s candidacy, described the election as a “distraction”. Straw argued that the contest had “weakened” the position of the left in the party.

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Kinnock led the Labour Party into the 1992 general election.

The result, a fourth consecutive Conservative majority, confounded pollsters and precipitated Kinnock’s resignation. Hattersley also resigned as deputy leader in the wake of the election campaign.

John Smith succeeded Kinnock as Labour leader.