Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  The following year, while Corbyn was collecting the headquarters rubbish, a chore he undertook as a member of a ‘democratic office’, he came across a note about a surprise party planned to celebrate his tenth anniversary as local MP. At least he attended. Surrounded by Kurds, Chileans and Nicaraguans, he sang ‘The Red Flag’ and raised a glass of beer to his comrades. Prophetically, he admitted to a local journalist that the Red Rose was losing money. ‘The problem is,’ he admitted, ‘I’m not into market economics.’

  But it was the markets that changed Labour’s fortunes. Black Wednesday, on 16 September 1992, just five months after the Tories had retained power, handed Labour a priceless advantage for the next election. John Major’s government had mismanaged Britain’s membership of a European currency agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), and as sterling collapsed and interest rates soared, the panicking Conservatives lost their reputation for economic competence. Labour’s support for the ERM was forgotten as the party’s fortunes improved. They advanced further after the sudden death in May 1994 of John Smith, a traditional tax-and-spend socialist who had replaced Kinnock as leader after the election. In the immediate aftermath, Corbyn did not anticipate that Tony Blair would stand against Gordon Brown for the leadership. Nor did he foresee that in the choice between a social democrat and a Thatcherite marketeer, the parliamentary party would overwhelmingly reject the divisive Brown. As Blair’s New Labour took over, Corbyn complained about a ‘coup within the party’, but the left was powerless to prevent Blair’s abandonment of socialism. At a special conference in April 1995 the party voted to abolish Clause 4 of its constitution, the pledge to nationalise Britain’s entire economy, described as ‘the means of production’. Only three constituencies supported Corbyn’s opposition to the motion, with 86 per cent of the membership supporting Blair. The party of towering intellectual MPs like Richard Crossman, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland was no more.

  Propelled by the Tories’ split over EU membership, New Labour’s popularity as a middle-class party soared. Its seemingly unassailable lead in the opinion polls did not, however, please Corbyn. Angered by Blair’s professed admiration for Margaret Thatcher, he opposed his new leader’s tough line on inflation, his intention not to tax, borrow and spend, and his pledge to remove welfare dependency. Above all, he despised Blair’s love of wealth, celebrity and success. Even worse for the left was Blair’s trip to Australia in July 1995 to woo Rupert Murdoch. Clare Short’s criticism of the ‘forces of darkness’ surrounding Blair, especially Mandelson’s obsession with the media, was shared by Corbyn. ‘Clare is right to draw attention to the appalling power of the spin doctors and the way that modern politics is dominated by totally unrepresentative focus groups,’ he said. ‘There is a real danger of us risking upsetting our core support, which could lose [us] the general election.’ One hundred Labour MPs, he continued, were unhappy about Blair’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ – a coterie of like-minded advisers controlling everything. Blair’s response, that New Labour had attracted 100,000 new members, made no impression on Corbyn, despite it being in line with his own early successes in Haringey. Labour MPs, he retorted, possibly tongue-in-cheek, deserved to be treated with respect, even those who repeatedly voted against the party. He supported a petition launched by the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party attacking Labour’s front bench for failing to ‘reflect their class-based loyalty to the party’. That complaint resonated with Clive Boutle and other disillusioned leftists in Islington. ‘Jeremy became our voice in the wilderness years,’ recalled Boutle. ‘He was the go-to guy.’ Twenty years later, as leader, Corbyn would organise the management of the party from his own office in an identical manner to Blair and his close circle of insiders.

  By 1996, however, his politics appealed only to the fringes. For them, royal weddings were unwelcome, Britain should accept unlimited numbers of economic migrants to alleviate world poverty, and Jane Brown, a lesbian head teacher in Hackney, should be applauded for refusing to take schoolchildren to a Royal Ballet performance of Romeo and Juliet because it was ‘a blatantly heterosexual love story’. This last episode wasn’t a one-off oddity: Corbyn agreed with Brown that Shakespeare’s ‘heterosexist’ play reflected white society and was racist. Similarly, he supported Diane Abbott’s criticism of staff at her local east London hospital as ‘blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls’ who were not suitable to be nurses because they had ‘never met a black person before’. Confused prejudice did not trouble Corbyn: while he had opposed sending his son to a grammar school, he did not criticise Abbott for sending her son to the private City of London school rather than a Hackney comprehensive. (She later described her decision as ‘indefensible’ and ‘incoherent’, but said she feared her child would fall in with ‘black gangs’ if he went to a state school.) He also remained silent when Abbott in turn criticised Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for choosing selective schools for their children.

  Corbyn’s attitude towards women was unusual. Ignoring his feminist colleagues, he would propose the decriminalisation of prostitution and, in 2016, support men who identified as women regardless of their physical state. His pronouncements, and also his silences, increasingly irked Tony Blair, particularly when after an IRA bomb on 15 June 1996 injured over two hundred people and devastated the centre of Manchester, Corbyn said nothing, just as he had remained silent three years earlier when an IRA bomb in Warrington killed two children and injured fifty-nine people. Val Veness, who was still employed by Corbyn at the Commons, says that there was ‘delight in the office’ when in April 1993 an IRA bomb had gone off in the City of London. ‘The insurance companies told the British government to produce a solution in Ireland because the repairs would cost them £1 billion,’ she recalled with satisfaction. During the most recent negotiations between Britain, Ireland and the two communities to end the killings, Corbyn’s support for the IRA provoked the Guardian to comment, ‘Mr Corbyn is a fool and a fool the Labour Party would be better off without … His actions do not advance the cause of peace in Northern Ireland and are not intended to do so.’ The MP for Antarctica North could cause ripples, but never waves.

  Three months after the Manchester bombing, Corbyn invited Gerry Adams to launch his new book, Before the Dawn, in the Jubilee Room at Westminster ‘as part of the peace process’. The book glorified both the IRA’s killing of eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint in August 1979, and the murder at Westminster of Airey Neave, the Tory MP close to Margaret Thatcher, in March of the same year. Most Labour MPs condemned Corbyn, and Blair threatened him with expulsion from the PLP. Backtracking, the book launch was moved to a hall in Islington. There Corbyn intended to justify the murder of Protestants and British soldiers and condemn the death of any IRA man, but to his disappointment Adams cancelled his visit, supposedly because of the arrest of an IRA bombing unit and the death of an IRA bomber. Corbyn never knew what was really happening in Northern Ireland. With Adams’s encouragement he continued to argue that only reunification would guarantee peace, but in his unworldliness Corbyn could not understand that the IRA was on the verge of defeat. Sinn Féin continued the peace negotiations only because the British intelligence services had completely penetrated the IRA’s command. At the same time, Corbyn remained dismissive of Ulster’s Protestant majority, merely tolerating a rare encounter with Ian Paisley in the corridors of Westminster.

  His diffident manner and political irrelevance helped neutralise the irritation he caused. Yet he was not coy about his ambitions. To assert a separate identity from Tony Benn, he stood for election to Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC). His manifesto pledged to renationalise every industry privatised by the Tories, ban Britain’s nuclear weapons, withdraw from the EU, increase pensions and all welfare benefits, hold a referendum to abolish the monarchy, agree for Britain to pay reparations to its former colonies, and submit the country to the International Court of Justice for the crimes committed during the empire. He also opposed the construction of an ‘awful’ new rail
way terminal at King’s Cross (the result was a stunning success), described the London Eye opposite Westminster as ‘an eyesore and totally inappropriate for that site’ (four million people enjoy riding it every year), and advocated women-only railway carriages as a way of protecting them from sexual harassment. With time to spare, he travelled with Talal Karim, an Islington activist, for three weeks across India – from Mumbai to Calcutta – on steam trains at a snail’s pace, either sitting on a carriage roof or on the footplate shovelling coal into the furnace. ‘You’re mad,’ Claudia told him before he left. At least no one could accuse him of sitting on his hands.

  His relationship with his wife was troubled. Claudia was a serious intellectual. Well-read and belonging to the mainstream of the left, she had become impatient with a husband who rarely read books and misunderstood South American politics. Corbyn’s belief that the government of rabble-rousing revolutionaries in Nicaragua, Bolivia and other small states could be replicated by community politics in Britain reflected how superficial was his understanding. They were virtually living separate lives, and she played little part in his next election campaign.

  Polling day was set for 1 May 1997, with forecasts of a huge Labour victory. Meeting in the Commons on the eve of the campaign, the thirty members of the Campaign Group were deflated. The anticipated landslide would further marginalise their influence. Nevertheless, they agreed to mute their hostility towards Tony Blair during the campaign. ‘The discipline of the left in the run-up to the election was absolute,’ Ken Livingstone would assert. That was not quite accurate. He could not resist urging a ‘greedy bastard tax rate’ of 99 per cent on those earning over £2 million; and Corbyn agreed that taxes should be increased, because ‘the rich should pay for the social consequences of the Thatcher and Major years’. But there was a surprise in store. At the last moment, he found himself fighting to avoid deselection. Islington’s corruption had at last caught up with him.

  The previous year, a New Labour group within the constituency led by Stephen Twigg, an ambitious Balliol-educated councillor, had successfully appointed Leisha Fullick as the council’s new chief executive in an attempt to rectify the borough’s dilapidation and its crippling financial situation. Intelligent, honest and efficient, Fullick was greeted by Alan Clinton, a veteran Trotskyist and the council’s Labour leader, with a damning ‘She’ll change nothing, even over my dead body.’ Twigg, supported by about forty Blairites allegedly financed by Lord Sainsbury of the supermarket family, attempted to overthrow Clinton, but the hard left was still in control of the council, and he failed by one vote. Undeterred, he next sought to deselect Corbyn. The moderates complained about their MP’s Marxist opposition to New Labour and his blatant disregard for Islington’s problems. Corbyn dubbed them ‘bedsit reactionaries’.

  Fullick’s responsibilities covered both Islington constituencies. During her first year, she discovered in her regular meetings with the two local MPs that Corbyn, unlike Chris Smith, never mentioned Islington’s failures in housing, education and corruption. ‘Jeremy,’ she told a Blairite subsequently, ‘is not interested in improving local services or performance. He’s not even interested in the latest district auditor’s report about the lack of street cleaning. He never asks for the plans to sort out the mess. He’s only interested in South American liberation groups.’ There was one exception to this lack of interest. Whenever a council employee was threatened with dismissal for incompetence or dishonesty, Corbyn intervened to protect them.

  New Labour’s accusations against Corbyn were of disloyalty to the party and negligence over conditions in his constituency. Twigg’s move was once again unsuccessful, and he abandoned his campaign, although Corbyn was shocked by the attempted coup. Changing Labour from representing the working class, he said, to a party of middle-class Blairite clones was ‘a pretty appalling vista for a party rooted in local democracy’. Local members rather than Labour officials at headquarters should decide the suitability of a candidate.

  The failed coup was forgotten after Labour’s landslide victory on 1 May. Unexpectedly, Stephen Twigg was returned as MP for Enfield Southgate, evoking that night’s most memorable image – Twigg’s incredulous smile and the forlorn face of Michael Portillo, the defeated former defence secretary. Blair’s triumph excited Britain. Even Corbyn could not resist celebrating Labour’s return to power after eighteen years, but he did not rush to join New Labour’s election-night party on London’s South Bank: he would have been among enemies. His personal majority increased to 19,955. The other good news for Corbyn was the election of John McDonnell, one of 145 new Labour MPs.

  McDonnell’s route to the Commons had been fraught. Since the abolition of the GLC he had worked for Camden council and the Association of London Authorities. Before the 1987 election he had been repeatedly rejected by constituencies, and had also been trounced when he stood for a place on the NEC. In 1992 he had stood for Hayes and Harlington, a seemingly safe Labour seat, but lost by fifty-three votes to the Conservative Terry Dicks. Afterwards he was sued by Dicks for having claimed in a leaflet that Dicks was sympathetic to Saddam Hussein. At the last moment McDonnell agreed to pay £40,000 damages and Dicks’ legal costs of £30,000. The source of the money was never revealed, arousing suspicions about McDonnell’s contacts. Over the next five years his agitation for direct action by the masses became noticeably more aggressive. ‘Don’t expect the change [to society] coming from Parliament,’ he told one Trotskyite meeting. ‘We have an elected dictatorship, so I think we have a democratic right to use whatever means to bring this government down. The real fight is in our communities, it’s on the picket lines, it’s in the streets.’ McDonnell never renounced this passion for violence, nor his contempt for Parliament; but to secure his nomination as a candidate he continued to mask his convictions with postures of innocence. Successfully elected as the Member for Hayes and Harlington in 1997, in his maiden speech he condemned Terry Dicks as racist, corrupt and malignant, only this time from the safety of the Commons, meaning that he was immune to legal action. He provided no evidence for that defamation. His one indication of conformity was his marriage in 1995 to Cynthia Pinto, a Goan from Kenya. McDonnell’s arrival in the Commons strengthened Corbyn, the Liverpudlian’s education and understanding of Marxism compensating for Corbyn’s intellectual deficits. Neither intended to express any loyalty to Tony Blair.

  Their first opportunity to rebel arose earlier than expected. Chancellor Gordon Brown had embraced the Tories’ agenda to deter the feckless and fraudulent from living on benefits. Corbyn was appalled. ‘We must not press ahead down the road of compelling people to work,’ he said. In his opinion, welfare benefits were an entitlement. No one, he argued, should be penalised for refusing to look for work. Those accused of ‘fiddling’ their benefits, he said, were victims of ‘sharks’ who condoned tax avoidance and evasion, or protected the rich from higher taxes. The government’s suggestion that MI5 would be used to expose benefit fraud was, he said, ‘desperation in the post-Cold War era to find something for MI5 to do’. Its officers would be better off pursuing large-scale tax evasion by the wealthy in offshore tax havens. The cure was for the government to impose higher taxes, provide ‘quality jobs’ and restore benefits to asylum seekers. He was among forty-seven Labour MPs to vote against the government. About twenty-five others abstained.

  With a majority of 179, Blair had nothing to fear, but, intolerant of Corbyn and ‘the usual suspects’, he enquired about the possibility of deselecting Corbyn before the next election. But was told that the truculent communist would stand as an independent, and win. Later, Blair would also ask about deselecting McDonnell, only to be halted by stories published in the Guardian that his popularity would guarantee victory over any official Labour candidate. The opinion polls cited by the paper to prove McDonnell’s strength were bogus, concocted by his supporters to stymie Blair, who now conceded that it would be best simply to ignore the rebel MPs.

  The prime minister’s own
ignorance of history played its part. Devoid of historical context, Blair was unaware of the battles fought by Clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell against communist infiltrators, or about Harold Wilson’s warnings to Jim Callaghan that union leader Jack Jones was Moscow’s agent. Instead of following the example of his predecessors by expelling the far left and deselecting disloyal MPs, he asked the party chairman to allow only candidates committed to New Labour to appear on the approved list of prospective parliamentary candidates. That, he believed, would remove any long-term danger. But the immediate irritation remained.

  In June 1998, Corbyn joined thirty other Labour MPs to vote against Blair’s proposal to introduce student tuition fees. (Ironically, nineteen years later those fees would galvanise the young to vote for Corbyn.) Blair’s patience snapped. He wanted obedience rather than debates that would stir trouble in the constituencies. Two left-wing MPs in Scotland were deselected, and other like-minded candidates dropped from the approved list. Persistent rebels, Corbyn was told, would be monitored by a committee chaired by Margaret McDonagh, a loyal Blairite. Corbyn again protested about draconian discipline and the NEC’s ‘big purge’ of persistent critics. Blair’s threats, he complained, would stop ‘radical voices’ emerging. He also opposed a suggestion that NEC votes should no longer be secret. Ballots, he protested, must be private to defend members from the leadership. ‘Any change,’ he warned, ‘will be strongly resisted.’ Eighteen years later, when he sought to assert his own control over the NEC, Corbyn proposed that the secret ballot should be abandoned, reducing two women at the meeting to tears. So often, his ‘good bloke’ image was tarnished by the truth.