Indeed, Eagle’s campaign was almost entirely negative. She was surely right to raise the brick thrown through her constituency office window, and the homophobic taunts she had received, but there was an insinuation both on her part and on that of her supporters that this was the work of ‘bullying’ Corbynistas. The Sun went so far as to link the incident to the murder of Jo Cox MP by a fascist.29 But this approach, while it might galvanise the minority of Labour members discontented by Corbyn’s leadership, was hardly designed to win over Corbyn supporters. And the problem with adopting a line of attack predicated almost wholly on personality, as Theresa May would later discover, is that it focuses a very unkind light on your own personal competence. Ultimately, this was ineffectual with Labour members, to the extent that Eagle’s own constituency Labour party, Wallasey, issued a statement supporting Corbyn after a motion passed ‘with an overwhelming majority’.30
At any rate, the press spoke too soon. Eagle was not the ‘unity candidate’ for the 172 MPs who had voted ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn’s leadership. Owen Smith, positioning himself as a man of the soft Left, untarnished by power, untainted by the past, won the Labour nominations he needed and made it clear he would run. Eagle had no natural base of support in the parliamentary party. She was not a Blairite, or from the old Labour Right. She had come from the party’s soft Left, but there wasn’t much of a soft Left remaining by this point. To avoid dividing the right-of-Corbyn vote this time, and having had a poor campaign, Eagle stepped down. But if Smith seemed untainted by the past, he also had the monumental disadvantage of attracting headlines such as ‘Labour leadership: Who is Owen Smith?’ In fact, as Corbyn’s social media supporters quickly unearthed, his background suggested he was anything but a Leftist: he was a supporter of austerity, was pro-Trident, had supported the Iraq war, and before he became an MP was a lobbyist for the privatisation of health care as a senior Pfizer employee.
Some pundits were, in fairness, angry about the sudden ditching of Eagle. Anne Perkins, leader writer of the Guardian, lamented that while Eagle’s ‘gender was not exactly a problem’, she had ‘a bit too much history’. She had made ‘hard, real-time decisions’ to support the war on Iraq, Trident, and whatever other militarism was on the agenda. Members preferred ‘purity’ to such ‘pragmatism’. But Perkins also averred, although without presenting any evidence, that Eagle had been seen off by the ‘lingering backwash of the patriarchal world of industry, trade unionism and smoke-filled constituency committee rooms’.31
Certainly, sexism and homophobia had been part of the picture. John Humphreys, for example, had attacked Eagle for crying over her decision to resign from the shadow cabinet, implying that this did not evince the macho toughness needed from a true leader. Smith, for his part, had sought to differentiate himself from Eagle by insisting on what a ‘normal’ person he was: ‘I am normal … I’ve got a wife and three children.’ He implied, in other words, that if he didn’t have children or a heterosexual marriage, he’d be something other than normal. Throughout the campaign, he cut the figure of a Butlin’s red-coat act, with a cheap and cheerful humour that was often sexist. For example, in an extremely odd moment, he tweeted at Nicola Sturgeon that he had the ‘perfect present’ for her, accompanied by a photograph of ‘the world’s biggest gobstopper’. Challenged about this, which seemed to suggest that the leading woman in British politics should shut up, he offered the standard lad’s response that it was ‘just banter’. When, on a campaign stop, a member of the public wanted to ask him a ‘personal question’, he gestured to his penis and said: ‘Twenty-nine inches – inner leg measurement of course.’32
The signs increasingly were that Smith’s campaign was a disaster. It pleased no one. It was off-putting to Corbyn supporters, off-putting to any liberal centrist with remotely feminist politics, off-putting to the old Labour Right. Blairites faulted it for presenting a watered-down, pallid version of Corbyn’s policies. Dan Hodges foamed that Smith was running a ‘spineless, incoherent, incompetent campaign’ whose message was ‘I am just like Jeremy Corbyn … Ditch Jeremy Corbyn’: ‘Amazingly, this “Dump Corbyn, Get Corbyn” line isn’t resonating with the Corbynite true believers. For the simple reason that while many of them are stark-staring mad, they aren’t stupid.’33 The one issue on which Smith differed with Corbyn was his position on accepting the referendum result, with Smith arguing that Labour should block Article 50. Corbyn’s allies argue that, had Smith won on that agenda, May could have called the election right away and crushed Labour much as she attempted to do in 2017.
There were also signs that, political strategy aside, Smith’s everyday tactical judgement was way off. He made strange suggestions, such as proposing peace talks with ISIS. He bragged of his role in the Northern Ireland peace process, when any role he had – as an advisor to Paul Murphy MP – was extremely minor.34 It would be worth thinking about what the Tories and their supportive media, who hounded Corbyn over fabrications and nonsense about the IRA twenty years after Good Friday, would have made of a Smith leadership given his ISIS slip. Or, indeed, what many more slips he would have made on a daily basis.
As with the 2015 leadership contest, Corbyn ran his campaign like a social movement. Indeed, even if had he not intended it, the movement was there. On 27 June, while Corbyn was holed up in a tense, bitter meeting with Labour MPs, an estimated ten thousand protesters gathered outside in his defence. Thompson, who organised the rally, pointed out that it had been pulled together within the space of nine hours. Another meeting scheduled two days later at Congress House and organised by Momentum had to be postponed due, the organisers said, to ‘overwhelming public demand’. Nonetheless, beginning a string of rallies, Corbyn made an ad hoc and rapturously received appearance to thousands of students outside the School of Oriental and African Studies. Protests were held that weekend in Manchester, Liverpool, Exeter, Plymouth, and Penzance.
Importantly, the cross-section of his supporters turning out were, far from the caricature of ‘Trots’ purveyed by the media and Labour MPs, a mixture of people who supported ‘Old Labour’, former Greens, people who had voted Plaid or other parties out of desperation for a decent alternative, left-wing journalists like Paul Mason, and leading union officials such as Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union and Jennie Formby of Unite. This was the coalition which had backed Corbyn in the first place. There were also elements of the youth meme culture that would play an important role in the general election. Hilary Benn, whose sacking precipitated the coup, was cheerfully mocked on a placard with the slogan, ‘Chat Shit, Get Sacked’.35
Soon, Corbyn was touring the country with a red fire truck donated by the Fire Brigades Union. On 2 July, he joined a huge march through Liverpool, before appearing in front of a rally of 20,000 people chanting, ‘Tories Out, Corbyn In’.36 Two days later, he was in Teesside. On 7 July, he was joined by thousands in a rally in the centre of Birmingham. Two days later, he was given a hero’s welcome at the Durham Miner’s Gala. His tour took him up and down the country from Milton Keynes to York and Harrogate.
Corbyn’s support from the constituencies remained strong. A Newsnight investigation into fifty of the constituency Labour parties which had backed Corbyn found that at least forty-five of them still would, suggesting that he retained 90 per cent of his old support. The Guardian, which supported the coup, conducted a survey of 4,000 of its readers and found that 81 per cent had backed Corbyn, and 95 per cent of those intended to do so again. Crucially, the trade union leaderships did not desert Corbyn, instead turning their fire on the MPs who had orchestrated the coup:
The current crisis within the parliamentary Labour party is deeply regrettable and unnecessary … The government is in crisis, but already serious debates are taking place and decisions being made which profoundly affect the interests of working people … It cannot be right to seek to denude the Labour front bench at this time, when the government more than ever needs to be scrutinised and held to account by an effective and un
ited opposition that does the job it is paid to do. Jeremy Corbyn is the democratically-elected leader of our party who secured such a resounding mandate less than 10 months ago under an electoral procedure fully supported by Labour MPs.37
As Corbyn toured the country, the newspapers continued to ratchet up the warnings of doom if Corbyn won. The Sun cheered a report which it said showed that Corbyn had a ‘0% chance of winning the next general election’, and highlighted its former hate figure Neil Kinnock’s claim that Labour would not win again ‘in his lifetime’ if Corbyn won.38 Even more ominously, the television sofa-friendly Birmingham MP Jess Phillips threatened to resign if Corbyn won.39
None of it worked. The ballot finally closed on 21 September, with the result announced on the 24th. To little surprise, Corbyn won the second leadership contest with a marginally higher percentage than before, at 61.85 per cent. Whatever supporters he had lost, he made up for with more to spare, including some who had voted for another candidate in 2015. How did Corbyn’s opponents get it so wrong? And how did he survive against such odds?
Above all else, the coup was a shortcut, a resort to brute political force, and as such an admission of failure. Corbyn’s critics had all the time in the world to prepare the ground for a better offensive. They had their own supporters within the shadow cabinet. They had the majority of the support within the party apparatus. Most Labour councillors and local notables were not Corbynistas. There were sufficient divisions and weaknesses at the top to allow them time to develop a strategy in which to gradually unwind the hold of Corbyn’s supporters through demoralisation. The party membership, even those who had joined after 2015, were far more ideologically open than all the panic-mongering about Militant and Trotskyists let on. It would have been possible to have a series of slow, patient, conversations with them, rather than resorting to ineffectual abuse, Cold War-style grandstanding, and largely symbolic purges.
By acting as they did, without a candidate or a strategy, the plotters effectively admitted that they lacked the vision to persuade people, the resources to bear with a period of marginalisation, or the imagination to hold firm for a future in which they might have something to offer. They let their sense of entitlement to rule drive them to distraction. By acting so quickly and precipitously, and without any idea of what should come after, they made it obvious that they were attacking party democracy. That they also chose to attack around the same time as the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry’s findings, which left the éminence grise of the plotters bespattered with disgrace, was also suspicious. Many members felt that the coup was at least partly an attempt to avert the fallout from that report.
Corbyn, for his part, was completely underestimated. The conception of ‘leadership’ that both the backbench belligerati and their media supporters were working with was such that they didn’t get how Corbyn was doing what he did. He had an excellent relationship with his base, and understood their power and how to mobilise it. He wasn’t as good at handling overwhelmingly hostile media – his critics clearly had a point about this – but what they missed was that he was also not particularly impressed or intimidated by them. A coup predicated on intensive media pressure had worked on Blair, because that was where he gained his strength. Corbyn never depended on the newspapers or broadcasters for anything. These are strengths that the leadership would turn to Labour’s surprising advantage in the general election.
‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn …’
No one had expected Theresa May to call the election when she did. On the morning in question, 18 April, Corbyn’s team had heard that an announcement would be made later that day, but a snap election was not the first guess as to what it might be.
Rumours in Westminster had suggested that Theresa May was seriously ill, and had been instructed in a meeting with the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers to resign sooner rather than later. The Evening Standard speculated that there was a royal death. Social media spun into its own characteristic speculations. By quarter past ten in the morning, Labour got the call: May was going for an election. Publicly, she said that the election had to be called because she needed a strong hand in negotiating Brexit and the opposition were trying to hamstring her: ‘The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.’ Perhaps, in this, there was also a sideways dig at her backbench critics: overwhelming victory would strengthen her hand within her own party and cabinet as much as anything else.
However, purely on its own terms, the decision made sense. The Conservatives, with a popular leader and a clear stance on Brexit, were twenty points ahead in the polls. The triple whammy of Brexit, the chicken coup, and a new Tory leadership had left Labour languishing in the mid-twenties, its leader with negative approval ratings. While, prior to Brexit, the party had been incrementally repairing its base, driving up its core vote in a number of by-elections, it began losing more seats than it won. The decision by centre-Right MPs Jamie Reed and Tristram Hunt to resign their seats forced Labour to fight a couple of urgent defensive battles in Stoke and Copeland, with UKIP and Trident driving the news agenda. Labour lost Copeland and barely held on to Stoke. In local council elections it performed poorly, and lost the West Midlands mayoral contest to the Tories thanks to an abysmal campaign run by the Blairite Siôn Simon on the Brexit slogan ‘Take Back Control’. Labour had been divided over the triggering of Article 50, with even Corbyn’s ally Clive Lewis resigning from the shadow cabinet in order to vote against the decision. Corbyn’s advisors felt it was a case of short-term pain for long-term gain, in that demonstrating acceptance of the result would help prevent it from continuing to be an issue that could damage Labour. But the immediate risk was that by three-line-whipping through Article 50, without achieving any additional concessions, Labour would give the Tories full control of the negotiations. As in Scotland’s independence referendum, the EU referendum seemed to have precariously realigned politics along nationalist lines, giving the Tories a huge advantage. For May to wait any longer, and risk the negative economic effects of Brexit undermining her support, would have seemed perverse.
When the announcement was made, almost all but Corbyn were pensive. For Corbyn and his advisor Seumas Milne, it was a clarifying moment. They knew what to do, and saw it as an opportunity to get the message out. That afternoon, an emergency meeting was held, and immediately afterwards they hit the campaign trail. One senior advisor explains that they went straight from the meeting to knocking on doors in Croydon. A registration campaign and a social media strategy were embarked upon instantly. Labour, as far behind in the polls as it was, hit the ground running. Meanwhile, in what would be an ill omen for her campaign, as Tory MPs emerged blinking into daylight to greet the news that they were now embroiled in an election, May went AWOL without so much as a cabinet discussion.
Corbyn’s cheerfulness must have seemed bizarre to Westminster watchers. Indeed, he began his campaign by pointing out that he had stood for Labour leader as a 200–1 outsider, warning the media not to write him off. Was this just a cute line from a struggling politician, or a genuine admission of the overwhelming odds stacked against him? In fairness to Corbyn, his refusal to panic had already been demonstrated as a strength during the coup attempt. What is more, he had always shown his best side when under pressure, and campaigning.
But this wasn’t how his backbench opponents saw it. Many Labour MPs went home to their constituencies and prepared for defeat. As the election began, it was leaked that up to a hundred Labour MPs were preparing to form their own group after the election if Labour got thrashed, presumably as a precursor to a coup.40 Other plans included the idea of reducing the number of directly elected seats on the National Executive Committee, so that Corbyn’s support in the apparatus would be watered down.41 Several newspapers and journalists speculated on whether Labour could just overthrow Corbyn in a coup before the election. Alas, the Telegraph reported, they could not because that would mean rerunning the past, failed coup attempt by triggering another leadership election.42 Non
etheless, the Labour Right were preparing for a bloodbath and a merciless war against a leadership discredited by awful results.
The type of campaign run by the party’s management at Labour HQ, and by local anti-Corbyn MPs, reflected this expectation. The official campaign refused to direct resources and activists into potential target seats, instead waving a defensive struggle to ‘save’ seats that they assumed were marginal. In Battersea, activists were encouraged to troop up to Westminster North. In North London, activists were asked to campaign for Enfield North MP Joan Ryan. Ryan, one of the most voluble anti-Corbyn backbenchers, and chair of Labour Friends of Israel in parliament, distributed a leaflet to her constituents suggesting that they would have more confidence in Theresa May than in Jeremy Corbyn, but that they could feel safe in voting for her as she was reliably right wing.
Everything from that side of the Labour establishment was predicated on the idea that the Tories were about to annihilate Labour, and the party’s job was to save as much as possible and try to survive long enough to depose Corbyn.
Blue Wedge
However, the early signs were that the Tories were faltering. May’s disappearance for the first few days of the campaign, the disorientation of Conservative MPs, and the failure of the Tory campaign to get off the ground immediately gave Labour an unexpected opening.
Even when May did begin to make appearances, they were carefully stage-managed, with questions tightly controlled and May seemingly desperate to avoid a spontaneous interaction with anyone. This was enough to draw negative publicity from irritated journalists, and it began to explain why the Conservative establishment had not wanted an election contest between May and Leadsom, since Leadsom may well have won. The Tories also increasingly gave the impression of being a one-trick pony: regarding Brexit as their trump card, they played it obsessively. For May, the campaign came down to who the electorate wanted to negotiate for Britain in withdrawing from the European Union. And, indeed, as long as that was the key issue, the Tories had a clear advantage. Not just because the stark Tory position on Brexit motivated their supporters, but because May was personally popular, while Corbyn’s personal polling was abysmal – the index of a very public auto-da-fé (no smoke without fire).
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