Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Frequently, he spoke at meetings of the Troops Out Movement, often alongside its chairman Richard Stanton, who had described the IRA’s Brighton bomb as a ‘justifiable act of political warfare’. On 9 June 1986 he was arrested outside the Old Bailey, where he had been protesting to ‘show solidarity’ with Patrick Magee, prosecuted for the murder of five people in the Brighton bombing. Magee, claimed Corbyn, was the victim of a show trial. He chose to ignore the evidence of Magee’s guilt, which the IRA bomber confirmed after his eventual release from prison, having served fourteen years. Over the following months Corbyn appeared repeatedly at IRA rallies to protest against the plight of convicted murderers. In 1987 he handed Margaret Thatcher a petition urging the release of Hugh Doherty, arrested in 1975 and convicted for sixteen murders, including that of Ross McWhirter, the co-founder of The Guinness Book of Records, during a fourteen-month campaign of violence across southern England. Corbyn described Doherty as a ‘political prisoner’ whose visiting conditions should be improved. He signed a Commons motion after an IRA bomb on Remembrance Day in 1987 killed eleven people in Enniskillen – ‘the Poppy Day Massacre’ – declaring that the violence ‘stems primarily from the long-standing British occupation’. In May 1987, at a meeting in Conway Hall to honour an eight-man IRA hit squad shot dead in an SAS ambush at Loughgall in County Armagh, Corbyn took the microphone. His words were predictable. He exhorted the audience to stand in silence to show their respect for the dead terrorists. State execution, he said, defied the rule of law. No other British MP appeared so prominently in the spotlight alongside terrorists. Corbyn claimed that he was contributing to the peace process, but his participation as an MP at events supporting the armed republican cause legitimised the IRA’s use of bullets and bombs in their struggle to unite Ireland.

  In self-defence, Corbyn argued that earlier ‘freedom fighters’ opposing British colonial rule – for example EOKA in Cyprus and the Mau Mau in Kenya – were classified as ‘terrorists’, but after independence their leaders became internationally respected statesmen. Similarly, the resistance groups that fought the Nazis in Europe during World War II were regarded by the Germans as criminals, but admired as freedom fighters by the Allies and most of their fellow countrymen. The IRA, Corbyn said, was no different. But he was mistaken. The IRA disdained all governments, including Dublin’s: its operations were outlawed by the Irish Republic, where Sinn Féin won few votes, and the majority of Irish people on both sides of the border opposed unification. The democratic vote showed that the IRA, unlike EOKA and the Mau Mau, represented a tiny number of people. That crucial distinction – the democratic deficit – entirely eluded Corbyn.

  His continuing antagonism towards Britain aroused the interest of Ján Sarkocy, an intelligence officer at the Czech embassy in London. Operating from an unsightly building in Notting Hill Gate, Czech ‘diplomats’ had been aggressively spying in Britain since the communist state was established in 1948. Under the cover name ‘Ján Dymic’, the thirty-two-year-old Sarkocy, nominally responsible for ‘peace issues’, met Corbyn in the House of Commons on 25 November 1986. Although Corbyn would later claim that he encountered Sarkocy only once, the Czech’s reports to his superior in London and to headquarters in Prague accurately documented four meetings over the following two years.

  Sarkocy had been introduced to Corbyn by Tony Gilbert, the communist leader of Liberation, originally the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Gilbert, a paid Soviet agent, had been briefed by Cynthia Roberts, a Czech intelligence agent who concealed her true allegiance in order to gain employment with a Labour MP in the House of Commons. Using the codename ‘Hammer’, Roberts managed Labour Action for Peace (LAP), an anti-nuclear group financed by the Czech government. Among the Labour MPs linked to LAP were Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and Corbyn, who eventually became the group’s president. Corbyn’s particular usefulness to Sarkocy was that while he openly sympathised with many of Britain’s revolutionary leftist groups, he worked within the Labour Party. The Czech had every reason to expect a comradely relationship with a fellow-traveller – or, in Lenin’s description ‘a useful idiot’. Sarkocy knew that his presence at Westminster would not be a secret. Corbyn was obliged to register his visits with the parliamentary authorities, and he assumed that an MI5 officer shadowed him. During their first hour together, Corbyn warned him about intensified surveillance on East European diplomats, and bizarrely handed over a copy of the Sunday People which described the failed MI5 investigation of an East German spy in Britain.

  After that first meeting, Sarkocy met Corbyn at the Red Rose, driving there by a circuitous forty-five-mile route in an attempt to ‘lose’ the MI5 surveillance team. By then Corbyn had been codenamed ‘COB’, and was described as ‘positive’ towards the ‘Soviet peace movements’, and a potential collaborator, Sarkocy reporting: ‘He seems the right person for fulfilling the task and giving information.’ They met again in the Commons on 22 October 1987, and on a fourth occasion, on 19 September 1988, in Holloway with the American Marxist Mike Marqusee. Corbyn was neither a paid agent nor a source of secrets, but he was a genuine sympathiser. His only criticisms of the Soviet system, he would write in the Morning Star in 1989, were its disregard for nationalism and its elitism; nothing else. The relationship between Corbyn and Sarkocy was only disrupted by Sarkocy’s expulsion from Britain after the collapse of communism. ‘I have known Mr Jeremy Corbyn as a decent man,’ he would say in 2018, ‘who had a positive attitude towards the former Czechoslovakia. And he was not alone.’

  Later that year, 1987, Corbyn tabled a motion in the Commons asking the government to demand that the Kremlin ‘gives complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky’. Virtue-signalling was the highlight of his political activities as Labour headed for another electoral humiliation.

  6

  The Harmless Extremist

  In the run-up to the 1987 general election, Keith Veness, by this time a NUPE official employed by neighbouring Hackney council, agreed to become Corbyn’s constituency agent. As a close friend he anticipated the obstacles that would face the campaign. ‘I had spent years screaming at Jeremy that he had no money,’ he said. Corbyn could not even buy his own food. ‘That was my hold over him. He had to come to me for breakfast, and then I could control him for the rest of the day.’ Fortunately for Corbyn, Sogat, the printers’ union, gave him £8,000 towards his election expenses in gratitude for his daily attendance on the Wapping picket line. Other small contributions came from admirers grateful that he had given a speech or attended a funeral. ‘Jeremy was very good at funerals,’ said Veness. ‘He could always look solemn, miserable, and also speak to people.’ Corbyn counted on his agent to produce a black tie.

  During the previous election campaign he had frequently disappeared from his own constituency, taking a train to speak in Oxford, Plymouth and elsewhere. His unreliability was the result of his fondness for recognition. He would travel anywhere to hear an audience say, ‘He’s a good bloke.’ But to Tariq Ali and serious left ideologues, he remained no more than ‘a parochial figure who saw himself as a gadfly to irritate the government’. There was no substance to his socialism, Ali thought. ‘I shared many platforms with Jeremy,’ he recalled, ‘but I can’t remember what he said except that he was on the right side.’ During the 1987 campaign, to make sure Corbyn arrived at meetings as scheduled, Veness arranged for two minders to be with him constantly. ‘Don’t listen to anything he says,’ he ordered. ‘Just pick him up and take him to the next place.’

  Amid the flurry of campaigning, Corbyn found time just one month before the election to marry for the second time. His bride was Claudia Bracchitta, the daughter of Chilean exiles. The family had arrived in London in 1973, when Claudia was eleven, to escape from the Pinochet regime after Salvador Allende’s overthrow, and had settled in Haringey. Thirteen years later, as leader of the ‘Chilean Committee for Justice’, Corbyn had met Claudia at a GLC meeting addressed by Ken Livingstone. She was good-looking and intelligent, and althoug
h she was already married, he was smitten. By the following year she was pregnant, and rushed through a divorce in order to marry her new admirer. Neither of Corbyn’s parents was present at the wedding: his father had died the previous year, and his mother was not invited. In fact, he did not tell even his close friends about his marriage.

  In the weeks immediately before the election, some opinion polls predicted a Tory collapse, although most predicted a Conservative majority of up to a hundred. Throughout the campaign Margaret Thatcher was the target of vituperation, but she profited from Neil Kinnock’s support of unilateral disarmament, increased taxes and the removal of the requirement for trade unions to call strikes only after a secret ballot. Kinnock, humiliated in 1983 when he was filmed falling into the sea on Brighton beach during the party conference, was again embarrassed, this time by a dismissive press release when he paid a pre-election visit to Ronald Reagan at the White House, the result of sabotage by Thatcher’s team, which portrayed the Labour leader as having been spurned during their conversation by the US president. On the other hand, his chances were improved by his appointment of a new director of communications, Peter Mandelson, who rebranded the party by replacing the red flag with a red rose. Unlike Corbyn, Mandelson understood Thatcher’s appeal: low taxes, low inflation, fewer strikes, home ownership and opportunities for self-improvement free from state control. The unions’ defeat at Wapping had damaged Labour, while the Tories’ election poster showed a soldier with his arms raised in surrender, and the slogan ‘Labour’s policy on arms’. It all confirmed Corbyn’s belief in Thatcher’s malevolence. Dressed in power suits with padded shoulders, she inspired hatred as an evil fascist even among moderate leftists. Corbyn had no concern about his own re-election. Labour’s appeal to the middle classes in newly gentrified parts of Islington guaranteed a comfortable victory.

  In the run-up to polling day, Keith Veness expected the candidate to take a break from campaigning because Claudia was due to give birth to their first child. To his surprise, Corbyn telephoned from outside the delivery room at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead. ‘I’m really worried,’ he complained. ‘We haven’t put out that leaflet about Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Haven’t you got something more serious to worry about?’ asked Veness.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re about to be a father. I’ve never heard of anyone who lost an election because they didn’t get a leaflet out.’

  The opinion polls proved more or less accurate. The Tories won a majority of 102 seats, the first time since 1918 that a party had secured a consecutive third term. Corbyn found Labour’s electoral defeat even harder to understand than those of the two previous elections. He resented the fact that the national debate had ignored his support for immigration and his condemnation of Britain’s behaviour towards the undeveloped world.

  His detachment from mainstream Britain was reflected on the first day of the new Parliament. To celebrate a new era, Britain’s first three black MPs – all Labour – marched into the Commons chamber together. Paul Boateng, Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant, together with the Asian Keith Vaz, each dressed in their parents’ national costumes, created an unprecedented spectacle as they walked towards the speaker to take the oath. Acting as part-sepoy and part-valet, Corbyn walked immediately behind, pleased to have a place as the honorary white man for the black caucus. ‘Look at Jeremy,’ said Brian Wilson, a new Scottish MP, to George Galloway, who had also been newly elected. ‘He would black up if he could.’

  In the four years since Corbyn had left Haringey council, his image had changed. Few at Westminster had witnessed his vituperative campaign against the moderate Labour councillors, and it was not widely known that Corbyn, regarded around the Houses of Parliament as a ‘good guy’ because unlike so many hard leftists he was pleasant to everyone, had masterminded deselections and the dismissal of political opponents. The ‘hatred and divisions’ recalled by Haringey councillors at ‘nasty meetings’ orchestrated by Corbyn were concealed by a smokescreen of indifference. His calculated makeover was sealed by a shy confession: ‘I’m not personally a combative person. It’s not my style.’ The image was of a harmless extremist peddling political nonsense from the fringe.

  Four months after the election, in October 1987, the world’s stock markets crashed, and property prices tumbled. For Corbyn and his allies, hope was once again rekindled. Capitalism’s days seemed numbered. ‘The world will never be the same again,’ announced Ken Livingstone, another of those newly elected to Parliament. It was the end of Thatcher and Reagan’s monetarism, he asserted, and the moment for the state to take control of Britain’s economy. Corbyn echoed that opinion, and went even further, predicting an imminent people’s revolt.

  Tony Benn, re-elected to Parliament as the Member for Chesterfield in a 1984 by-election, was more realistic. Prompted by the party’s third successive electoral defeat and the financial crash, he considered Labour’s predicament. The decline of traditional industries had hit Labour’s relationship with the working class, with many of its diminishing numbers voting Tory. He had little time for Kinnock’s intention to make Labour electable by diluting its commitment to socialism, and asked Reg Race, a part-time adviser after Thatcher abolished the GLC, to organise a conference in his Chesterfield constituency to ‘reaffirm and redefine the socialist project in Britain for the 1990s’. Naturally, Corbyn decided to go.

  On the eve of his departure for the conference, his office took a call from his wife. She told him that his mother had died, and asked him to come home. But Corbyn decided against either going home or travelling to Wiltshire to see his mother’s body. Instead, he went to Benn’s convention in Chesterfield.

  To the surprise of Benn and Race, the event on 24 October 1987 attracted about two thousand activists, representing a rainbow coalition of socialists, communists and Trotskyists. After twenty years on the fringe, many had decided that a revolution was more distant than ever. Benn offered his familiar alternative route, taking power through Parliament. ‘I’m sure the conference is a turning point in British politics,’ he said outside the hall. Inside, he urged those present to help bring about the reincarnation of their party. His optimism was echoed by Ralph Miliband, who declared that the Chesterfield congress was the British left’s most important event since communists met in Leeds in 1918 to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution. Their manifesto, he declared, was for the state to dominate Britain’s economy and industry. Corbyn gave a dour speech about equality, taxing the rich and abolishing war. Never a convincing orator, he failed to present a sophisticated analysis of society, or even to offer a coherent Marxist reading of Britain’s woes. On the rare occasions when a speech of his was interrupted by applause, he would be so surprised that he would stop and start again from the beginning. ‘His speeches were one mile wide and an inch deep,’ said George Galloway. ‘Was he speaking about equality of wealth, or equality of misery?’ Unable to finely craft his beliefs, he sparked no imagination about the uncertain future. To Tariq Ali, who did not go to Chesterfield, the conference exposed the left’s weakness. The comrades departed, he felt, without having redefined the left’s philosophy or agenda. What did the party actually believe in? Corbyn was untroubled by any ideological vacuum. ‘I have a point of view,’ he said. ‘I try to listen a lot and to be representative of those who don’t feel represented.’

  Among those he continued to support was the IRA. On 8 May 1988, at an official meeting to commemorate dead IRA terrorists, Corbyn knew his hosts were also celebrating the murder in Holland the previous week of three British servicemen by an IRA squad. ‘In this, the conclusive phase of the war to rid Ireland of the scourge of British imperialism,’ the programme exalted, ‘force of arms is the only method capable of bringing this about.’ At that meeting, to demonstrate his unconditional loathing of any opponent of the IRA, Corbyn attacked the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed in 1985 to start the peace process. Pointedly, he criticised the Irish republic’s elected Catholic po
liticians as ‘cannon fodder’ who prevented rather than hastened Irish reunification. He shared Diane Abbott’s description of the Protestants in Northern Ireland as an ‘enclave of white supremacist ideology’ akin to Zimbabwe’s white settlers. Ian Paisley, the firebrand Protestant leader, suspected that Corbyn supported the ethnic cleansing of the entire Protestant community from Ulster. His suspicion was shared by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, although from a different perspective. For despite Corbyn’s zealous commitment, the IRA leadership never trusted him with information about their contemporaneous secret negotiations with the Thatcher government. He was a useful megaphone, but nothing more. He faced the same mistrust among his fellow MPs. And then the slide into obscurity accelerated.

  In 1988 Corbyn automatically supported Tony Benn’s challenge to Neil Kinnock for the party leadership. As Benn’s trusted footsoldier, he was the obvious person to organise the campaign. Ignominiously, Benn won only 11 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s vote. ‘Benn’s madness destroyed the left’s credibility,’ fumed Livingstone. ‘The left just fell apart.’ The following year Kinnock embarrassed the parliamentary left still further by officially embracing the market economy, endorsing Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community and abandoning nationalisation and nuclear disarmament. Then, to marginalise the Bennites even further, the party’s rules were changed. Candidates for the leadership were required to be nominated by at least 20 per cent of Labour MPs.