by Tom Bower
Shortly after he left St Paul’s, the media reported anger across the nation at his behaviour. His office immediately declared his pride in the Battle of Britain pilots, accompanied by a reference to his mother’s endurance during the war. Few were fooled, not least because his parents spent the Blitz in the safety of Wiltshire. ‘Has he killed us on Day One?’ yelled McDonnell. ‘John’s in crisis mode,’ admitted an aide. By then, several servicemen had mentioned how Corbyn, as he left the cathedral, had snatched sandwiches set out for the veterans, which he would eat on his journey to the TUC conference in Brighton.
Corbyn was flummoxed when he arrived at the conference. Unaccustomed to such high-level duties, he got lost behind the stage, walked late into the spotlight, then delivered a confused speech about the Tories as ‘poverty-deniers’, and an attack on Western capitalists’ culpability for workers’ injuries in Chinese factories. By the time he returned to London, his conduct in St Paul’s was dominating the news. Unsympathetic newspapers had discovered a Morning Star column he had written in 2002 describing white Britons as reactionaries steeped in smug xenophobia. ‘Football supporters singing “Rule Britannia”,’ he wrote, ‘would not realise that they are parroting nineteenth-century imperial propaganda and racial superiority.’ None drew the contrast with his enthusiastic rendition of ‘The Red Flag’, a murderers’ anthem. But some did recall that his last speech in Brighton, near the site of the IRA’s attempted murder of Margaret Thatcher, was to praise a Sinn Féin politician who had shot a British soldier during the Easter Rising in 1916.
To limit the damage, McDonnell took control. Trimming and repudiating his and Corbyn’s past, essential to their survival, had become his speciality. Corbyn’s silence in St Paul’s, he explained, was the effect of being overcome by such a moving event. An interview was hurriedly arranged for Corbyn to say that he would sing the National Anthem on the next occasion. ‘Of course I am a patriot,’ he insisted. The firefighting coincided with his admission that he ‘welcomed’ members of revolutionary organisations, including Trotskyites and other banned extremists, into the Labour Party. ‘I’m not concerned in the slightest,’ he told a TV interviewer. The uproar intensified. ‘Sorry, I didn’t do well today,’ he told his staff.
That evening, the past again caught up with McDonnell. A member of BBC TV’s Question Time audience accused him of being an ‘IRA terrorist sympathiser’ for saying twelve years earlier that the IRA should be ‘honoured’ despite killing and injuring nearly eight thousand people. ‘If I gave offence,’ said McDonnell, ‘and clearly I have, from the bottom of my heart I apologise, I apologise.’ His intention, he claimed, had been to sustain the peace process, albeit by praising violence. ‘I’m a plain speaker,’ he said. To modify his image, he toned down his message. Until then, he had proposed to borrow an extra £500 million for industry and infrastructure. Now, to show that Labour would ‘live within our means’, he supported the government’s ‘charter for fiscal responsibility’ and planned to eradicate the deficit. Labour’s highest tax rate, he announced, would be 50 per cent rather than 60. That night, there was tumult in Corbyn’s office. McDonnell’s familiar machinations to conceal his true intentions had gone too far. He was ordered to recant. The following day, the façade was abandoned. ‘You can’t understand the capitalist system,’ said McDonnell, ‘without reading Das Kapital. Full stop.’
On day seven of his leadership, Corbyn wandered around Westminster exhausted and bewildered. Managing hostility was testing for a man unaccustomed to scrutiny, and whose skirmishes in Haringey bore no comparison to Westminster’s all-out warfare. ‘The Labour Party,’ wrote the Lib Dems’ Vince Cable, ‘has chosen [a priest] with absolutely no idea how to realise what his congregation wants.’ The Guardian columnist Owen Jones, an important ally of Corbyn’s, had noticed in the run-up to victory that ‘many felt anxious’ about whether the new leader had the ‘ability to take on such a demanding position’. Helpful advice, Jones would later lament, was being ignored. ‘Terrible missteps played directly into the Tory narrative.’ Corbyn’s ‘missteps’ increased his vulnerability. Just fifty-one MPs were needed to start another leadership election, and he would certainly not find thirty-five to nominate him again. In the standoff, the moderates constantly discussed overthrowing Corbyn, but, still without an alternative leader, had failed to act.
For a man who required adulation, the anxiety produced by constant criticism became intolerable. In a new opinion poll, only 15 per cent of potential Labour voters described themselves as supporters of their leader. Corbyn looked to Milne and McDonnell for advice. His survival dominated their conversations. Milne was well aware that he was serving an indecisive man prone to change his opinion depending on whoever he had last spoken to. Corbyn’s malleability played to his own strengths, but also required careful handling. Too many outside the room judged Corbyn ‘thick’. At meetings, Milne sat expressionless when Corbyn asked the room nervously, ‘What’s wrong?’ In response, there was silence. As Milne and McDonnell, both students of Lenin, understood, it was vital to be patient. Theirs was the art of proffering compromises to moderate MPs, while the National Executive resolved that every concession would be revoked once the danger of revolt receded.
To protect himself from a coup, Corbyn agreed to compromise over NATO, nuclear power, Trident, and welfare benefits. Contrary to his ideological antagonism towards the EU, he agreed to campaign to remain in the EU referendum that had been called for 23 June 2016, ‘regardless of the outcome of David Cameron’s renegotiation’. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee, a high priestess of Blairism, hailed ‘this unexpected Indian summer of warmth and comradeship under an auspicious red moon’. Although Toynbee and her newspaper opposed Corbyn’s leadership, his swift makeover aroused no alarm. ‘Details,’ she wrote, ‘are thin exactly on how he would balance the books … and why not? It’s a long way to the next manifesto.’ The Guardian praised his pledge to increase taxes to ‘invest’ in housing and welfare, although the paper’s own £80 million investment in technology was contributing to its annual £60 million deficit. Reluctant to antagonise Seumas Milne, a friend of the editor, the paper supported his attack on the right-wing media’s ‘resistance to the democratic mandate’ of Corbyn. Their character assassination, wrote Milne, amounted to treason. The nation, including the 11.3 million who had voted Tory in May, should applaud the wishes of 265,000 Labour supporters.
Few in the Labour Party, including some writers on his own newspaper, properly understood Milne’s close collaboration with his leader. In the weeks after Corbyn’s election, most outsiders were still unaware that Trotskyite groups were disbanding so their members could qualify to join Labour in targeted constituencies. Among those expelees returning to the party was Dave Nellist, a former Labour MP. Many came from Momentum. Their attempt to rejoin was supported by Len McCluskey, who saw the move as helping to purge the party of moderates – still unfinished business. Leaving his office (decorated with a large portrait of Lenin), the union leader set off to tell a meeting, ‘We may lose some people along the way. All I can say to that is “Good riddance.” I’ve got a little list here in my inside pocket with names of people I’d like to see go.’ He was voicing the private thoughts of Corbyn, McDonnell and Milne. In public, all four spoke about a broad church and repeated the Brighton sermon about kindness. In private, they had begun to orchestrate a campaign of hatred on the internet. The conspirators were helped by the list of party members’ names, email addresses and telephone numbers that had been handed to Jon Lansman during the leadership election. It was now used by Momentum, Trotskyites, communists and McDonnell’s Labour Representation Committee to flush out their foes. The first traces emerged in mid-October: Hilary Benn was voted off the NEC and replaced by Rebecca Long Bailey, a loyalist. Next, Corbyn supporters challenged moderate Labour councillors in Portsmouth, Lambeth and Brighton. Corbyn denied any responsibility. ‘I want to make it crystal clear,’ he told questioners, ‘I do not support changes to make it
easier to deselect MPs.’
His perfected trick was to appear above the fray, in no way involved in the dirty work undertaken by others. He relied on Momentum to politicise local problems, create dissent and, as Jon Lansman explained, develop the ‘new politics made by Jeremy’. But, as Lansman adroitly added, while Momentum was ‘incredibly supportive’ of Labour, the group was ‘not under its control’. Whatever the truth of that nice distinction, in a pincer movement between the party and Momentum, the coup to take over the party was under way. The showcase to rally the believers would be the annual conference in Brighton.
In its 115-year history, Labour had never faced a similar problem. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxism was derided in Russia for having caused misery to millions, yet Corbyn was heading for the party conference to preach the virtues of a discredited ideology. Undisguised Marxists had already arrived in Brighton to distribute leaflets demanding the ‘intimidation’ of Blairites, the ‘reselection’ of MPs, and, targeting one individual, the expulsion of Peter Mandelson as a ‘traitor’. That label again.
Corbyn’s conference speech would need to address a coalition of feminists, environmentalists, Europhiles, teachers and trade unionists – all repulsed by New Labour. United by defining themselves against others, they were attracted to their maverick new leader who spoke about democratic community participation, demolishing the leadership of personalities and empowering the grassroots against the political class. In what would be called ‘a progressive alliance’, they were the dispossessed angered by the cult of individuals, consumerism, markets and profits. Their common purpose was to transform Britain irreversibly. The market economy would be destroyed forever. Corbyn’s record was their lodestar. They were not concerned by his words at a rally at the start of the conference, when he had criticised the producers of the hit BBC TV show The Great British Bake Off, who had just sold the programme at a higher price than that offered by the BBC to Channel 4. As prime minister, Corbyn warned, he would ban both the sale of TV programmes to the top bidder, and the BBC from buying programmes from independent producers. This promise to return to the 1970s excited some of his new followers. Others demanded that he go further to ‘democratise’ the BBC, imposing the power of citizens and staff to dictate its policies and administration. Two years later, in a speech in Edinburgh, he duly argued exactly that.
In preparing for his conference speech, Corbyn planned to renege on the compromises he had made to his shadow cabinet. To crown his victory, he hoped to bind the party against Trident, since ‘a nuclear-free world is a good thing’. He intended to proclaim that his election represented a mandate to remove the scourge of capitalism and to introduce ‘a politics that is kinder, more inclusive’. He would promise ‘a real debate, not necessarily message discipline all the time. But above all, straight-talking. Honest.’ And, still thinking of the St Paul’s debacle, he inserted into his speech a short paean of patriotism: ‘I love this country and its people.’ Reflecting his passion for Palestinian rights, he included a furious attack on human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, but remained silent about the same horrors in Iran. He pledged that all schools would be brought back under the control of local education authorities. The party was certain to cheer his pledge to abolish parental choice. Since both he and McDonnell were educated at grammar schools, and Seumas Milne, a Wykehamist, sent both his children to selective schools rather than a nearby comprehensive, he preferred to skate over how children’s education would be improved by returning to the failed model. The politics were more important than performance. For the rest, he adopted a speech written by Richard Heller, a freelance speechwriter, in the early 1980s that had been repeatedly offered to every Labour leader since Michael Foot, and always rejected as too extreme.
The mood in Corbyn’s office in the days before his appearance was apprehensive. The media were certain to scrutinise his plan for the economy. Peter Kyle, the new Labour MP for Hove who had supported Liz Kendall in the leadership contest, had asked Corbyn, ‘How does your economic policy differ from Ed Miliband’s?’
‘It’s quite simple,’ Corbyn had replied. ‘I’m against austerity.’
Many laughed, until they realised that was the sum of his understanding. For the rest, he relied on McDonnell. Their friendship was being tested amid suspicion that the shadow chancellor was already plotting to inherit the leadership. A telltale sign was his creation of a separate office down the corridor at Westminster. Corbyn ignored the rumours of a prospective coup, not least because Seb, his twenty-five-year-old second son, was working for McDonnell, as was Andrew Murray’s daughter.
Among those who doubted McDonnell’s loyalty was Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union. ‘Untrustworthy’ was his judgement after experiencing McDonnell’s aggressive manoeuvres to insert Trotskyists into the GMB’s executive. That was exactly the failing that McDonnell intended to conceal. To distance himself from his Who’s Who declaration of interests – ‘fermenting the downfall of capitalism’ – he intended to dress in a bank manager’s blue suit and deliver judicious words in comforting tones, thus presenting himself as a trustworthy technocrat offering prudence rather than revolution. That image became more important after the emergence of a recording of a speech he had made to trade unionists in 2011, in which he could be heard encouraging his audience to spit in their employers’ tea. Getting past such blips required reticence, but excited Marxists besieged him with advice. On the extreme end was Paul Mason, the former BBC TV economics editor, who was confident that Marx’s prediction that capitalism was ‘finished’ was already proving true. In his opinion, Apple, Google and all the other privately owned technology corporations were destroying the world’s economy. He urged McDonnell to advocate their dismemberment, accompanied by stimulated hyperinflation to destroy world debt. Also convinced that capitalism was on the brink of a worldwide crisis, Seumas Milne suggested that McDonnell make an outright pledge to cripple the City. To replace casino capitalism by state control, he believed, all banks should be nationalised so as to stop ‘the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich’. From the chaos, a new order would emerge.
McDonnell wholeheartedly agreed with both visions. By taxation and regulation, he wanted to destroy the City of London. To create pure Marxism, he would forsake the City’s annual £70 billion profits and dismiss the ‘class-ridden kleptocrats’ who were managing Britain’s financial services. Symbolically, he would move the Bank of England to Birmingham. Next, he would ‘end’ – or confiscate – the private ownership of production and property. Instead there would be ‘public, co-operative and stakeholder ownership’. In Another World is Possible: A Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism, a sixty-four-page paperback, McDonnell described his plan to crush private share ownership and eliminate the ‘unregulated, law-of-the-jungle, inherently class-ridden (capitalists) exploiting workers with low wages’ while they pocketed £93 billion in unholy subsidies. He was unconcerned if the fat cats abandoned Britain and moved to New York or Singapore. To hasten their departure, he intended to levy a so-called ‘Robin Hood tax’ on all the City’s financial transactions. Those who remained would pay up to 70 per cent in income tax, plus a wealth tax and increased inheritance taxes. His targets, however, remained anonymous. He hated the lot of them. McDonnell could not name a single business mogul or Tory MP he respected. Above all, he told his staff, ‘We’re going to stuff Osborne.’
Umentioned was the French experience, which would accurately predict what such policies led to. After presidents François Mitterrand and François Hollande had imposed similar taxes, financial professionals had fled to London, causing a slump in France.
Before heading for Brighton, McDonnell had decided against spelling out his true agenda. Instead, he would promote a moderate rise in taxes to ‘invest in infrastructure’ and finance an ‘Innovation Policy Council’. Whitehall officials would be trusted to outsmart Silicon Valley’s free marketers to ‘boost research and developm
ent spending’ in technology. But his disguise went only so far. To please his followers, he could not resist inviting the world to recognise the genius of Karl Marx. McDonnell believed that the British would be inspired by the philosopher’s prediction of the 2008 banking crash. In purposefully anodyne language, he lamented Marx’s misfortune to be ‘unfairly linked to brutal totalitarian regimes’, and would urge his audience to sympathise with Marx’s ‘branding problem’. In another phrase he particularly liked, he would appeal for a mass movement of the far left, attracted to ‘socialism with an iPad’, and believing in his promises of increased welfare benefits, higher wages, a shorter working week and rent controls.
McDonnell gave his speech; it crashed. The audience disliked his monotone delivery, devoid of any bloodcurdling threats to capitalists. The angriest critics were Neale Coleman and Andrew Fisher, who let fly in Corbyn’s Brighton hotel room. McDonnell, they complained, had failed to offer a Marxist analysis of the class conflict. After reading printouts from the internet, Corbyn had to agree. Surrounded by his Praetorian guard, he was genuinely angry.