Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  In the summer of 2013 he was offered an opportunity to reconcile his opinions. On 21 August, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria dropped sarin gas on two suburbs of Damascus occupied by opposition groups. At least 281 people died in hideous pain. As punishment for breaking international law, David Cameron proposed joining America in a retaliatory bombing raid on the facilities manufacturing the gas. He required Labour’s support in a Commons vote, and after Ed Miliband was briefed on the evidence and the proposed action, he agreed that his party would vote with the government. Over the following days, he reneged on that promise. Bowing to Corbyn’s warning, he agreed that, as an ally of Russia, Assad deserved Labour’s support. ‘I don’t think a bombing campaign in Syria is going to bring about their defeat,’ Corbyn explained. ‘It would make them stronger.’

  To embarrass Cameron, he also mentioned Britain’s ‘double standards’. Saudi Arabia, he said, ‘routinely beheads people in public every Friday … We have very little to say about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia because of the economic link-up with them.’ On 31 August, without Labour’s votes, Cameron was defeated in the Commons. Not only Assad but also ISIS was spared. Miliband also accepted Corbyn’s argument against bombing ISIS strongholds because innocents would die, and ‘the process spreads bitterness and violence’.

  Outside Parliament, Corbyn was supported by the playwright David Hare. As the ‘flipside of Cameron,’ Hare wrote, Corbyn’s objection to attacking ISIS showed that he ‘at least recognised a moral problem’. Such a conclusion about Corbyn’s moral probity was controversial. Was Hare suggesting that Assad’s production of sarin should continue unimpeded, that he should be allowed to gas Syrians with impunity, and that Cameron’s refusal to tolerate his breach of international law was immoral? Neither he nor Corbyn ever properly explained.

  Some suspected that one reason for the sympathy Corbyn garnered was his anti-Zionism. On social media sites he had been a member of groups in which other contributors identified Mossad as responsible for terrorist attacks in New York and Paris so as to justify Western intervention in the Middle East, and described the theft of children by Jews to sell on the black market. Among many groups he had joined on the internet was Palestine Live, a secret Facebook group featuring Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories about Jewish power, and descriptions of Jews as ‘Zios’, ‘ZionNazis’ and ‘JewNazis’. Other members included the former BBC economics editor Paul Mason, the Marxist MP Chris Williamson, and Jackie Walker, an anti-Semitic member of the Labour Party. He posted ‘favoured’ on several virulent anti-Semitic comments, but would resign from the group in 2015 – after his election as party leader. His sympathy with Muslim issues also led to an attack on Hindu nationalist politics. In 2013 he tabled a Commons motion calling for Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat in India, to be barred from visiting Britain for failing to stop riots in 2002 that had caused the deaths of hundreds of Muslims. Two years later, Modi visited London as India’s prime minister. Corbyn would refuse to meet him.

  Amid his political joustings, Corbyn also reconfigured his private life. Following his divorce from Claudia in 1999, he had enjoyed relationships with a succession of younger women. Among the most prominent was Loraine Monk, a member of the London party executive who lived in Kingston-upon-Thames. Noted for dressing in Oxfam clothes, Monk asked Corbyn to take her to receptions, and to his friends’ bemusement he agreed, although he had always refused Claudia’s similar requests. Other women followed, including Ann Cesek, a lively blonde Marxist who had campaigned for his adoption as MP in Islington North, and another, a friend of Val Veness whom he later spurned. Years later, the tabloids reported some of Corbyn’s other relationships under the headline ‘Hot Trot’. Many were bewildered by how an unkempt, anti-social man, now in his sixties and dedicated to his allotment and jam-making, could attract any woman. The answer was partly that active left-wing women seek different qualities than domestic goddesses, and partly what Val Veness told Corbyn to his face: ‘You couldn’t pull all these women if you weren’t an MP. They wouldn’t be interested in an old man with a beard.’ Those relationships had not strengthened his bonds with his three sons. To his surprise, they had grown up as inner-city kids interested in music and football. One, wearing a baseball cap backwards, lounged on the streets growling about ‘an operation down West’ – meaning London’s West End – and dived into telephone kiosks to check if there were any forgotten coins. ‘I didn’t bring them up like that,’ Corbyn complained, although there were times of happiness, such as when all four Corbyns watched Arsenal play in an FA Cup final.

  Corbyn’s lifestyle changed after he forged a new, long-term relationship. In 1999 he had helped Marcela Alvarez, a Mexican living in Britain, to find her son, who had been taken away by his father. In the midst of the custody battle, Marcela’s sister Laura had arrived from Mexico to give moral support. Over the years Corbyn and Laura developed a transatlantic friendship, albeit Laura was twenty years younger than him. Unlike Claudia Bracchitta, she was not a middle-class intellectual but a small-town activist. Their relationship developed slowly, not helped by Corbyn’s evident boredom during his visits to Mexico – he tended to go off on his own to send long text messages to people in England – but eventually they agreed to share his cramped house in Berriman Road, a quiet street in Highbury.

  Like her predecessors, Alvarez soon discovered that Corbyn was ‘not helpful with the housework’, and was rarely at home, for all his objections about a ‘very unequal society’. Nevertheless, they married in 2013. As before, none of his political friends knew in advance or were invited. He feared, he confessed, journalists investigating ‘every last aspect’ of his home life, and travelling to Mexico to interview his new wife’s relatives. That would make his life ‘very hard’, he said.

  The marriage ended any thoughts he may have been having about a complete change of life. Over some months he had spoken of abandoning politics and retiring to Wiltshire to keep bees, a new hobby. He seemed attracted by a return to his childhood interests of cultivating vegetables, rather than just his weekly visits to his allotment in East Finchley, and turning wood like his father. Laura, small and dark haired, seemed amenable to fitting in with his wishes. Unlike his previous two wives, she appeared undemanding, and relieved to have swapped her life in Mexico for London. There was no plan for the future other than to follow her husband’s familiar routine of Westminster, events in Islington and speeches to far-left groups across the country, while she developed an interest in selling organic coffee. That could easily be done from Wiltshire. At the Islington North Labour branch’s annual summer party in 2012, Keith Veness had encouraged that move. ‘You’re an old git,’ he said. ‘You’ll drop dead in harness if you don’t.’ Not long after, Corbyn called him to discuss whether he should leave Parliament. In the end, he decided that he could not afford to resign. No alternative career seemed likely.

  9

  Party Games

  Since his election as party leader, Ed Miliband had successfully maintained the appearance that all was well within Labour. The Blairites had not rebelled, while Corbyn, McDonnell and about fifteen other MPs on the left had limited their opposition. Despite his flaws, Miliband had crafted an alliance that produced a 2015 election manifesto for a united party. Convinced that Britain wanted to move left, he buried New Labour’s confidence in markets, blamed Blair for Iraq, and pledged to spend much more on public services. In concert with his supporter Len McCluskey, he appealed to those angered by the ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tory toffs’ who had enriched themselves during Cameron’s so-called years of austerity. To reduce inequality, he pledged, Labour would end neoliberal economics and the profit motive. Corbyn watched and waited. Although he felt the manifesto was ‘not fundamentally redistributive’, the offer of at least some socialism attracted him. For the first time since 1981, he believed the party was moving his way.

  In his unvarnished style, McDonnell was more forthright. The moderates, including Miliband’s
front bench, had not opposed every benefit cut: ‘We’ve got to eyeball these bastards because they’re supposed to represent us, not crap on us in the way that they are at the moment.’ His villain-in-chief remained Tony Blair, the sorcerer who had welcomed globalisation and dismissed personal insecurity and excused inequality as part of the human condition. McDonnell’s taste for revenge was unquenchable. ‘We’ve got to destroy the government,’ he insisted. ‘We cannot cope with the re-election of a Tory government in whatever coalition form it is, because our society cannot cope with it.’ Those who failed to mobilise were guilty of ‘a dereliction of duty and cowardice’. Such zealotry attracted Andrew Fisher, a thirty-six-year-old communist who would become McDonnell’s researcher. Fisher was built in his new boss’s mould – he had called anarchist riots in Croydon in 2011 ‘aggravated shopping’. In the forthcoming general election, to be held on 7 May 2015, he planned to campaign in Croydon for the anarchist Class War candidate against Emily Benn, the Labour candidate and Tony Benn’s granddaughter, part of Old Labour’s aristocracy. Corbyn and McDonnell endorsed Fisher’s sentiments.

  Corbyn, ever the political optimist, started the campaign expecting a Labour victory. The success of Syriza, a Marxist party in Greece, and the growing support for Podemos, a populist leftist party in Spain, inspired hope for the British left. But they misunderstood the plight of their counterparts in Germany and France. Across northern Europe, voters were abandoning many basic socialist ideals in their anger at increased immigration. The drift to the right was hastened by the decline of trade union membership and the disappearance of traditional class consciousness. Corbyn also misjudged the British public’s reaction to the Tories. Austerity may have been their proclaimed way forward, but the reality was different. Contrary to the government’s pronouncements, public spending in 2015 was 10 per cent higher in real terms than in 2007. Government spending had outstripped growth by 4 per cent every year since 2000, even after allowing for inflation. As a result, contrary to ministerial claims, the nation’s debt was not diminishing: it was doubling, as government expenditure increased. The beneficiaries of the extra money were the poor. Government statistics showed that the gap in earnings between the richest and the poorest had been closing since 1990, especially on taxed income. After excluding a handful of hugely-paid chief executives, Britain’s highest earners were receiving only about four times more after tax than the lowest-paid. Corbyn’s slogans did not match most people’s experience; nor did voters agree about Labour’s legacy. He might blame Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan for the financial crisis, but the majority of voters understood that in 2007, after fifteen years of unprecedented growth, Gordon Brown had borrowed excessive amounts so he could distribute welfare benefits, some to questionable claimants. It may have been charitable and socialist, but it was irresponsible.

  Ed Miliband went into the final day of the campaign convinced that the following day he would be driving from his constituency in Doncaster to Downing Street. Either Labour would win an outright majority, or it would be the largest party in a coalition government. The TV exit polls at 10 p.m. shattered that illusion, prompting disbelief among the politicians of all parties. After midnight, the pattern of Labour’s failure was irrefutable. The party had alienated the north, was weak in the Midlands, was ignored in the south, and had been wiped out in Scotland, where the SNP won fifty-six of the fifty-nine seats. Voters did not trust Miliband on immigration, welfare or the economy, and rejected him as ineffectual. Instead of hitting his target of 35 per cent of the vote, Labour won 30.4, two million votes behind the Tories. Miliband had raised his party’s share by 1.4 per cent, but had lost twenty-six seats. His self-confidence wrecked, he instantly resigned. Stunned Labour MPs were plunged into another leadership election without time to digest what had gone awry.

  Moderate MPs told a post-election party inquiry headed by Margaret Beckett that voters had rejected Labour’s ‘wrong message’ about its economic competence. They blamed Miliband’s insensitivity to working-class fears about immigration, Labour’s disdain for middle-class owner-occupiers, its denigration of aspiration, and Miliband’s contempt for those who took pride in England. Miliband disagreed, blaming the electorate’s poor judgement in not embracing a ‘progressive’ manifesto. His other culprits were the right-wing media’s ‘determination to destroy’ him, Tory lies about Labour’s economic record, and the fallout from the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014, when Labour had lost support after allowing its spokesmen to share a platform with Tories.

  None of those details mattered to Corbyn. Miliband’s defeat, he said, was a failure of Blairism – a ‘virus’, according to Dave Ward of the Communication Workers’ Union, a word Corbyn would not have rejected. He was convinced that Labour would have won had Miliband offered uncompromising socialism, and blamed the loss of Labour supporters on Ukip and the Tories and their racist, anti-immigrant propaganda. The solution was not to hanker after repeating Blair’s three election victories, but to offer pure socialism.

  At the Campaign Group’s first post-election meeting, on 3 June, its nine members were in despondent mood. Unlike in 2010, there seemed no prospect that in the next twelve days they could persuade the required thirty-five MPs to nominate a left-wing candidate for the leadership ballot. There was also the question of who such a candidate could be. Diane Abbott had been humiliated after attracting minuscule support in 2010, and after two failures John McDonnell had ruled himself out, not least because nothing would persuade him to modify the hellfire sermons he had been preaching over the previous forty years. Most recently, he had described himself as ‘the last communist in Parliament’, had pledged to disband the armed police and MI5, to abolish the monarchy and ‘expropriate the banks’, and exhorted the ‘People’s Parliament’, a group organised by Seb Corbyn, Jeremy’s somewhat sensible second son, to make the rich ‘fearful’ by ‘direct action’. His diet was too rich for Labour MPs.

  The one apparently pristine candidate was Jeremy Corbyn. Two years earlier he had told his local newspaper, ‘I want to be able to criticise my party and I couldn’t do that in a leadership race. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror.’ Even before he arrived at the post-election meeting he had jettisoned such contrived caution. ‘What about if I do stand?’ he asked. Then he announced unambiguously, ‘I’ve decided to stand.’

  ‘I thought we decided not to put up anyone from the left,’ said a surprised McDonnell.

  ‘Well, I have been lobbied by my constituents and trade unions, and we’ve decided that we need a debate,’ replied Corbyn. With his lifelong history of service, he implied, he was the ideal candidate. The only obstacle was obtaining the required number of nominations.

  ‘It was my turn,’ Corbyn told the Guardian shortly afterwards, suggesting that he was a reluctant runner who did not expect to secure the nomination of enough Labour MPs to stand. ‘A few weeds are going to be springing up in my allotment, but I’ll be able to get back to it shortly.’ To fit the image of loyal but unenthusiastic compliance, he said that he had agreed to McDonnell’s request. ‘All right, all right, I’ll do it,’ he had supposedly told his colleague.

  Four factors were in his favour. First, Abbott’s earlier candidacy had established that the left should be allowed to run a candidate, in order to encourage a debate; second, while widely abhorred for his disloyalty to his front bench, Corbyn evoked little personal animosity, for all his dirty tricks in Hornsey and Haringey; third, after so many years in the trenches, both he and McDonnell were energetic organisers; fourth, his victory was unimaginable.

  Corbyn’s first move was to issue a press release demanding a full debate. If MPs, who made up just 0.1 per cent of party members, did not allow him to stand, that would be undemocratic. Thereafter, he called every Labour MP, asking for their support. ‘He’s a good bloke,’ many agreed, mentioning that, unlike McDonnell, Corbyn was always polite, and never openly threatening. John Prescott weighed in: Labour MPs, he said, sho
uld lend Corbyn their votes to get him on the ballot. Only Corbyn, he suggested, could persuade the electorate that the party was not in the pockets of the trade unions, and destroy the Tory myth that Labour, rather than greedy bankers, had caused the financial crash. Gradually, Corbyn and McDonnell won over a few moderates who agreed to support his nomination, although none actually voted for him. David Lammy and Sadiq Khan, both of whom were vying to be the Labour candidate for London mayor, joined the nominees, as did Jo Cox, a feisty Yorkshire MP. Corbyn was on fertile ground with a handful of the most recent intake – prototype Corbynistas sponsored by Unite, led by Clive Lewis, an engaging regional BBC journalist, and Cat Smith, a thirty-year-old bisexual republican. Smith who had studied gender studies at Lancaster University, represented the new politics – not of class but of identity: race, gender and sexuality. Every issue was interpreted through her rigid prejudices, oddly dubbed ‘virtue-signalling’. Both Lewis and Stevens supported renationalisation, high taxation and the redistribution of wealth, including some confiscation of property.

  Just twenty-four hours before the deadline, Corbyn still needed at least ten more MPs if he were to be allowed to stand. McDonnell would claim that it was he who cajoled the necessary support, but for a man so abhorred by his fellow Labour Members, that assertion rings hollow. During those last hours, Frank Field succumbed to his own logical thinking. Although he was a fierce critic of Corbyn, he believed that Labour’s poor electoral performance was the equivalent of ‘a political carpet-bomb operation’. Corbyn had sincere views which ‘should be tested’ to avoid another defeat. Bombarded by social media messages, former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett also signed Corbyn’s nomination papers, although she had always been opposed to him. Thus, slowly, the numbers mounted, and by midday Corbyn was on the ballot. He had received thirty-six nominations. The majority of those would not vote for him, and all of them were certain that he would not be elected, including Beckett. In a career strewn with errors, especially as minister of agriculture under Blair, she would later say of her nomination, ‘I probably regard it as one of the biggest political mistakes I have ever made.’