by Tom Bower
At the nearby Sanctuary House hotel, supporters roared as their new leader arrived with Len McCluskey. In his speech to teachers, doctors and young professionals, the pale-faced victor held up a tea towel adorned with Tony Benn’s face. As usual, he spoke about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Durham Miners’ Gala, media intrusion, and giving power back to the trade unions. He embraced McCluskey, who had contributed money, accommodation and staff to his campaign, then sang his signature tune, ‘The Red Flag’. He made no mention of reuniting the party. After bidding farewell, he joined a refugee solidarity march through Westminster. His next stop was Labour headquarters in Victoria Street. Eating a baguette and looking dazed, he walked through a silent crowd fearful for their jobs. Oblivious, he spoke to Iain McNicol, the party’s general secretary. The two antagonists had little to say. McNicol acknowledged that the left was now within the citadel, but pointedly told the new leader that he was subject to the party’s constitution. Corbyn nodded. He lacked the votes on the NEC to replace McNicol, but the party took second place to his 250,000 supporters. McNicol could wait.
Next he headed to Troia, a Kurdish restaurant on the South Bank, to join his family and about fifty allies. There he asked Tariq Ali, ‘Did you ever think I’d be the leader of the Labour Party?’
‘No,’ replied Ali.
‘Nor did I.’
In a speech to the gathering, Seumas Milne called Corbyn’s victory ‘a chance to change the balance of power and break open the political system’. Seizing control of Britain was the priority, he added: ‘The challenge is to translate the insurgency into political power.’ He was convinced that, because Labour had changed, Britain too had been changed, and ‘for good’. All that stood in the way of total victory was the majority of anti-Corbyn MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party. That hurdle would be cleared. Like Corbyn, Milne was dismissive of a snap YouGov poll reporting that a mere 17 per cent of the electorate believed Labour could win the next election, only 25 per cent trusted Corbyn to manage the economy and defence, and 50 per cent of those polled did not trust him at all.
‘You’re too nice to be leader,’ Ken Livingstone told Corbyn. ‘No one’s scared of you.’
‘John McDonnell will do all the scary stuff,’ Corbyn replied.
By the time later that day that he was greeted in Islington by a huge crowd shouting ‘Jez we can!’ eight shadow cabinet ministers had resigned. He promised his supporters that his ‘wonderful’ party would deliver ‘a more equal, a more decent Britain’. ‘We want to install in Number 10 one of the best socialists,’ said McDonnell. The meeting ended, yet again, with Corbyn’s lusty, sincere rendition of ‘The Red Flag’– an ensign shortly to fly over Britain.
Beyond Westminster, the Trotskyite Mark Serwotka shared the excitement: ‘Corbyn needs six and a half million union members to ensure we have a vibrant campaign through strikes, demonstrations, occupations and everything else on the streets to topple this government.’ Others spoke of adopting Marx’s ‘51 per cent strategy’: start on the extreme and recruit from the daft left, then the soft left, until finally you secure a majority.
The following morning, Corbyn rejected the BBC’s request for interviews. Instead, he made his annual visit to the headquarters of the Camden and Islington Trust for mental patients behind St Pancras station. As usual on the trust’s open day, he spoke solicitously to each patient, ignoring the media in the street outside. ‘They’re out to get you,’ said a member of staff, referring to the Blairites. ‘I know,’ replied Corbyn. ‘That’s why I’m staying close to my friends.’
The following day, he made his way down the official opposition corridor at Westminster. To prove his purity, he chose to occupy a small office by a staircase rather than the large room usually allocated to the leader of the opposition. All the telephones, he ordered, were to be switched to answerphone. His staff were told to have no contact with the Tory whips, Downing Street or the speaker, all of whom, he explained, were bad people. The normal business of government and Parliament was junked. Next, he returned to Labour headquarters, where his team were provided with cakes and warm wine in the hope of silencing talk of a Corbyn ‘coup’ or a Blairite ‘mutiny’.
The new leader’s attempts at reconciliation soon evaporated. Back at Westminster, everyone was awaiting the announcement of his shadow cabinet. Discussions had started two weeks before the result, so Corbyn could promise the list within forty-eight hours of his election. Lenin would have expected him to act ruthlessly, but Milne told Russia Today, a favoured TV venue for his opinions, that although Labour MPs and frontbenchers were too right-wing, and ‘there needs to be some recalibration’ of the parliamentary party, it would not be ‘in a bloodbath way’. Corbyn reluctantly agreed. Closeted with his new chief of staff Simon Fletcher, and Rosie Winterton, the chief whip, he had been persuaded to be placatory. ‘For avoidance of doubt,’ Milne said, in order to display the new leader’s fluency in the art of wooing, his ‘leadership will be about unity, drawing on all the talents – with women representing half of the shadow cabinet’. He added, ‘We have won on the basis of policies, not personalities, without rancour.’
While Corbyn wrestled with the appointments, his office became chaotic. Telephones rang unanswered, messages remained unacknowledged and letters unopened, and arrangements for meetings disappeared because there was no diary. The few scheduled meetings that did take place were abandoned after Corbyn failed to appear, often because he was averse to making decisions. ‘The atmosphere was fraught, tense and unhappy,’ observed Harry Fletcher, ‘because the staff were terrified of having power.’
Corbyn’s first meeting with the PLP started in silence. ‘Look, I know that I am not what all of you wish,’ he told the sullen audience after a few words of thanks and a lame joke, ‘but something amazing happened last week. I want to hear everyone’s views.’ Asked whether he would wear a pacifist white poppy to the Remembrance Sunday commemoration, he replied, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen this year.’ That provoked heckles. His retort was familiar: ‘I have never made personal insults or been rude about anyone, and if anyone is rude to me, I ignore them.’ He sat down to some applause. Even his critics hoped that his promise of listening and promoting compromise would materialise.
The serial rebel who now demanded loyalty faced a Herculean task. Arch-Blairites including Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna morphed their Common Good group into ‘The Resistance’, and openly discussed how and when to trigger another leadership contest. Getting the necessary signatures – 20 per cent of the MPs – would not be a problem. ‘The sooner the fightback begins the better,’ wrote Roy Hattersley, a veteran of the successful battle to defeat Tony Benn in the 1980s. He knew better than most about Labour’s litany of failed coups, yet even he was blind to the absence of an alternative moderate leader.
Several MPs resigned from the shadow cabinet, while others rejected the offer to serve. Some suspicious Members were lured by Corbyn’s promise of a broad church. ‘I don’t know exactly where [he] will lead us,’ wrote Tom Watson, elected deputy leader, ‘but I’m looking forward to finding out.’
‘Equivocate,’ was Seumas Milne’s advice. ‘The Great Milne’, as Corbyn described his adviser, suggested he should avoid sensitive issues.
‘Can we speak about Trident?’ one MP asked Corbyn.
‘It’s been nice meeting you,’ the new leader replied, as ordered, and hastened away. His ambition to scrap Trident, Len McCluskey had warned, would be opposed by the trade unions. Unite’s members built the submarines, and 40,000 members of the GMB union depended on the defence industry for their jobs. Compromise had featured little in Corbyn’s life, but he now discovered that unless he made concessions to allow shadow cabinet ministers to oppose him on the EU, NATO and Palestinian terrorists, the front bench would be half empty.
There were two other stumbling blocks. Many objected to McDonnell’s appointment as shadow chancellor. ‘If you appoint John,’ a newly appointed adviser told Corbyn, ‘yo
u’re going into the bunker and not reaching out. You’re getting into factionalism.’ The shadow cabinet, he insisted, needed balance. But Corbyn did not intend to reach out. McCluskey also urged that McDonnell should not be appointed, but Corbyn resisted. McDonnell was his counsellor and friend.
The second snag was Tony Benn’s son, Hilary. ‘He disagrees with you about everything,’ another adviser told Corbyn. ‘The EU, Trident, the Middle East and Russia. They’re flash points. It’s wrong to appoint him.’ Once again, Corbyn resisted.
Assurances were offered, and from a mixture of motives Hilary Benn was appointed shadow foreign secretary, Andy Burnham shadow home secretary, and Lord Falconer, a Blairite, shadow justice secretary. Falconer accepted the role with misgivings, agreeing with Peter Mandelson that Blairites should wait before joining a coup. No woman was given a senior post, a failure criticised by Jess Phillips, the robust MP for Yardley. After describing the hours she had spent during the previous Parliament arguing with the government in the committee stage of the Welfare Bill to improve benefits and housing provisions, she loudly denounced Corbyn: ‘I have never seen him rolling up his sleeves or doing anything to help. I have never seen Jeremy do anything but talk … He just made himself look good [by turning up to vote].’
Phillips understood Corbyn’s antipathy to parliamentary committees. He had always disputed that change could be achieved through Parliament. ‘All the shadow jobs are equally important,’ he told Phillips about the absence of a woman in a senior post.
‘Then why don’t you just swap them all around?’ she snapped back.
Diane Abbott rushed to Corbyn’s defence. ‘Don’t be sanctimonious,’ she publicly rebuked Phillips. ‘You’re not the only feminist in the room.’
‘Fuck off!’ Phillips replied. Sexism, racism and victimhood permeated the new leader’s office.
Corbyn’s debut at prime minister’s questions came on Wednesday the following week. Dressed in a grubby jacket, creased trousers, a badly ironed shirt and a colourless tie, he entered the Commons chamber to sit between McDonnell and Abbott. Labour MPs were noticeably silent: not one cheered or offered encouragement. ‘It was the first time I’d been on the front bench ever, in any circumstances,’ Corbyn later reflected, ‘and I looked around and the place was ram-packed. I’d never seen it so full, and I thought, “The majority of people here do not wish me well.”’ At the end of the thirty minutes he departed without glory but without serious damage.
Back in his office, he again struggled to complete his shadow cabinet. ‘We’re taking a fair amount of shit out there about women,’ Simon Fletcher told him. ‘We need to do a Mandelson. Let’s make Angela shadow first minister of state.’
‘Yes,’ said another of those present. ‘Do the Angela bit now.’
Embarrassingly, that conversation was overheard by journalists. Suddenly desperate to appoint one woman to a senior position, Corbyn made Angela Eagle his deputy, despite having neither respect for nor a relationship with her. That night he was filmed scowling at his humiliation, but he proved his authority by appointing McDonnell shadow chancellor. ‘He’s a very close friend of mine,’ he said. ‘He is a brilliant guy on economics and the ideas that go with it. I think it’s very important that the leader and shadow chancellor are thinking in the same direction and we’re certainly doing that.’
Others had different readings. David Blunkett believed that McDonnell’s presence would mark a return to the 1980s. Back then, he recalled, there was ‘thuggery, the attempt to intimidate, to bully, to manipulate the internal processes of the Labour Party in the interests of the few while proclaiming that this was for the benefit of the many’. There was a lesson, he warned: ‘What we need to be aware of is the danger of the iron fist in the velvet glove.’
Len McCluskey denied that scenario: ‘I am convinced that there will be no purges or witch-hunts, contrary to alarmist media speculation. Not only would that be against Corbyn’s nature, it runs counter to [Corbyn’s] intention to democratise Labour policymaking.’ Everything in Corbyn’s and McDonnell’s past, McCluskey must have known, contradicted that assurance. And it was the past that caught up with both of them.
Corbyn first. Before his victory was confirmed, the Jewish Chronicle, on its front page of 12 August 2015, identified all the anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and Palestinian terrorist representatives with whom he had associated. Stephen Pollard, the paper’s editor, had previously called Carmel Nolan, Corbyn’s media spokesperson, to ask the new leader to write an article about his commitment to anti-Semitism and his support for Britain’s Jews. Corbyn rejected the offer. Pollard pressed Nolan. Why, he asked her, had Corbyn called Hamas ‘our friends’? And why had Seumas Milne told a meeting in 2009 that Labour had a duty to support Hamas ‘in a practical way’ because Britain had committed a ‘crime’ in promising a homeland to the Jews? Did Corbyn endorse that opinion? Reluctantly, Nolan engaged. The result was the newspaper’s publication on its front page of seven questions, together with Corbyn’s replies. His answers were either outright denials or cop-outs. ‘He’s attended countless meetings,’ was Nolan’s explanation, ‘and he cannot check the background of everyone he has met.’
Subsequently, the paper highlighted Corbyn’s participation in October 2014 in a wreath-laying ceremony at a Palestinian cemetery in Tunis. Photographs showed him holding a wreath to be laid near the grave of three members of Black September, the terrorist group that had hijacked planes, murdered dozens of hostages and planted bombs across the West. Two of the group were particularly notorious: Salah Khalaf and Atef Bseiso had been the masterminds of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in 1972 – the carnage included the castration of an Israeli weightlifter. Other photos showed Corbyn holding out his hands in Muslim prayer, and later standing beside Maher al-Taher, a terrorist leader responsible for a series of murders including an axe attack in a Jerusalem synagogue one month later in which four rabbis had been killed. Some of the photographs had illustrated an article Corbyn had written for the Morning Star about the same trip. In his version, he had honoured the seventy-four victims of an Israeli raid on the PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985. In both accounts, he represented himself as a peacemaker among Palestinians committed to killing Jews – although he refused to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Pollard was not satisfied. In one of his replies Corbyn had said, ‘I think to bring about the peace process you have to talk to people with whom you may fundamentally disagree.’ Except that he did not disagree with the Palestinians. He had supported two of them who had detonated car bombs in London in July 1994. He had never wholeheartedly protested about Palestinian suicide bombers murdering Israelis. In further answer to Pollard, he replied that he could not be an anti-Semite because he was against racism and supported ‘a more tolerant and kinder society’.
For years, most people assumed that Corbyn was honest, but that image had been contradicted by his welcome in 2011 to the fundamentalist Muslim Raed Salah, who opposed every universal human right, as ‘a very honoured citizen’ at a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Salah had been convicted in 2008 for racist incitement in Israel. Asked if he had made a misjudgement in meeting Salah, Corbyn replied, ‘You’re putting a lot of words into my mouth about misjudgements.’ Describing the meeting, he explained: ‘We had quite a long conversation about multi-faith objectives.’ That was as questionable as his denial on BBC Radio 4 of having met Dyab Abou Jahjah at a Stop the War Coalition event in 2009. ‘I do not know who this person is,’ he said. The production of a photograph of the two in the House of Commons undermined that claim. Depicted as a friend of extremists, the man who prided himself on never losing his temper became noticeably irate for the first time in public. A new truth about Corbyn emerged. His nature was to reject any blame for an error. When exposed, he lost his temper. ‘Until my dying day,’ he said in an attempt to repair his image, ‘I will be opposed to racism in any form.’ But lyi
ng in the shadows were relationships with other anti-Semites. Corbyn did not anticipate the repercussions when they were exposed.
John McDonnell faced a similar reckoning over his enthusiasm for violence. He was asked about his praise of Ed Woollard, the student jailed for throwing a fire extinguisher at police in 2011, and the demonstrators who had ‘kicked the shit’ out of the Conservative Party’s headquarters. ‘John’s tongue-in-cheek remarks,’ one of his spokesmen explained, ‘have been taken out of context.’ Corbyn also defended McDonnell’s remarks, although he did say, ‘They are not the words I would use. I would prefer to use words that are parliamentary.’
Other illustrative past actions included a party in 2014 with the theme of ‘killing’ the royal family, which McDonnell had enlivened. As part of his guest speech, he told his fellow partygoers about a visit he had made to the Liverpool constituency of Esther McVey, a cabinet minister whose sin was to be a Tory. ‘Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?’ he quoted a supporter as asking, and basked in the laughter. Asked about McDonnell’s endorsement of a threat of violence to a woman, Corbyn just spoke about the party itself: ‘It was a great event. I really enjoyed it.’ McDonnell refused to apologise to McVey. He had no regrets, he snapped, for his ‘honest anger’. As the reproaches accumulated, Corbyn tried to distance himself. ‘I don’t do personal attacks,’ he said. ‘I tend to see the best in people all the time. Is that a weakness? I don’t know.’ He also denied in a Sky TV interview that he had served on the Trotskyite London Labour Briefing’s editorial board in ‘1984 or later’, contradicting the accounts of both Keith Veness and Reg Race, and the fact that his name featured in the paper as a member of the board.
Such reinventions caused complications. As the leader of the opposition, Corbyn received a pay increase of £58,000. His obligations included attending religious ceremonies, which he had always avoided. On the day after MPs heard that he might wear a white poppy on Remembrance Day, he was required to stand in the front row in St Paul’s Cathedral at a service to commemorate the Battle of Britain. To be surrounded by servicemen, clergy and Britain’s establishment in a public commemoration of the country’s national identity was anathema to Corbyn. Moreover, a recently discovered video from 2012 revealed that he had told a small group that it would be ‘wonderful’ if the British Army were abolished. As a man with a sense of his own destiny, he was impatient with military heroes being hailed for symbolising the best of British values. At best, he thought, patriots should be consigned to the margins. ‘I won’t go,’ he told his aides. After an intense argument with his closest advisers, he was finally persuaded that not appearing would be disastrous. None of them anticipated what would follow. Corbyn stood in the cathedral in stubborn silence, refusing to sing the National Anthem. He preferred to sing ‘The Red Flag’.