Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  To Johnson’s distress, he also insisted on speaking only in generalities, and, on Milne’s advice, chose to star at the British Kebab Awards rather than attend a major remain rally. At the end of that evening he joked that he preferred the salad and not the meat. Pro-Europe Labour MPs were outraged by his sarcasm, and by his refusal to endorse a letter signed by over two hundred Labour MPs that stated, ‘The Labour Party is united in arguing that we are better off remaining in the European Union.’ Incandescent at that latest refusal of Corbyn to engage in the campaign, Johnson was even more indignant about his leader’s appearance in a fur coat on The Last Leg, a Channel 4 comedy show. Not only did Corbyn deliberately look unserious, but, to harm the campaign still further, he told the audience that he was only ‘7 or 7.5 out of 10’ in favour of Europe. ‘I’m not a huge fan of the EU,’ he said, smiling.

  The referendum result on 23 June shocked everyone. Almost every British region except London and Scotland voted leave, including an estimated two-thirds of white working-class voters, especially in Labour’s traditional northern heartlands. The puzzle on that momentous night was to locate Corbyn. He had disappeared – his staff assumed he had gone home to sleep, and had turned his telephone off.

  Early the following morning, sterling fell to a thirty-one-year low, the FTSE share index tumbled 8.7 per cent, and David Cameron decided to resign. After getting up late, Corbyn was seen laughing over breakfast with his team. Although Milne and McDonnell admitted to voting leave, Corbyn would deny that he had done so.* After a telephone conversation, Keith Veness believes that he did vote leave, not least because he sounded so delighted.

  Before Corbyn arrived at his office that morning, he publicly demanded that the government should immediately apply for Article 50, the process that would terminate Britain’s membership of the EU. He saw no reason to prepare for negotiations or for a transition period before Brexit. He wanted Britain out of the EU without establishing any relationship with the customs union or the single market, and emphatically ruled out a second referendum. To those who accused him of deliberately influencing the vote by encouraging immigration, he replied that Brexiteers suffered from ‘a lesser understanding of diversity’. His flippancy sparked another outbreak of anger among Labour MPs, especially the remainers. Hilary Benn was seen holding his head in despair.

  While Corbyn cheered the result, two Labour MPs, Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey, had formally submitted a motion of no confidence in their leader. Both accused him of having failed to promote the EU’s benefits for workers. ‘His heart wasn’t in it,’ said Coffey politely, adding that he should resign, just as Cameron had done. The dam was broken, and other MPs quickly signed the motion. Among the first was Tristram Hunt, the historian MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Labour, he said, needed a credible leader for the snap election that was likely to be called within the year. Another pro-European mentioned ‘the deepest peacetime crisis in our country for decades, and our party cannot afford to continue with self-indulgence’. By the time the shadow cabinet met later that day, about fifty-five MPs had signed the motion. ‘It’s not good enough,’ said Ian Murray, the shadow minister for Scotland. Pointing his finger at Corbyn across the table, he snarled, ‘You should resign.’ While others joined the attack, McDonnell and Abbott remained silent. Only Emily Thornberry offered any defence.

  Surprised by the hostility, Corbyn shrunk back. Insiders recognised the pattern of behaviour. In a crisis, his frame froze and his smile became glazed, as he was unable to conceal his dismay. His fate was listed for discussion three days later by the PLP. On Milne’s orders, Corbyn later told Channel 4 News, ‘I’m carrying on.’ Under no circumstances would he resign. Although the Blairite challenge had split the parliamentary party, he said, the referendum had exposed the Blairites as wrong. The electorate had rejected Peter Mandelson and the London elite. With the party under his control, and most trade unions on his side, he was convinced he would survive. Even if the nation was wavering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, he was standing firm.

  The following day, Saturday, Corbyn addressed a Gay Pride demonstration in London. Unlike the cheers he had garnered the previous year, this time he was booed. To shouts of ‘Coward!’ he reluctantly left the stage, saying quite inaccurately, ‘I did all I could.’ Soon after, he heard that Hilary Benn had asked other members of the shadow cabinet to join in a mass resignation if after a PLP vote of no confidence he still refused to resign. Among those who agreed with Benn was the Brexiteer Frank Field. But he did not personally confront Corbyn – with Milne and McDonnell as his protectors, few were given that chance.

  On Saturday night, Corbyn’s office heard that the Observer would report that Benn was canvassing shadow ministers. Katy Clark telephoned Benn. He did not take the call. At 1 o’clock on Sunday morning, Corbyn called him. ‘Do you have confidence in me?’ he asked. Speaking in a tone eerily similar to that of his father, Benn replied that his answer was ‘No,’ and that the leadership crisis had to end. Following the call, Corbyn announced that he had dismissed Benn. ‘Hilary was really surprised,’ recalled an eyewitness. ‘He never thought he would be fired. He was fired for standing up for his beliefs by the man who prided himself on doing that all his life.’ Benn’s surprise summarised the moderates’ naïvety, and their fate.

  Early on Sunday morning, to stifle the revolt, McDonnell, Thornberry and Abbott bombarded the radio and TV studios to justify Corbyn’s position. Their efforts were pointless. Soon after 8 a.m., the first of eleven shadow cabinet ministers announced their resignations, starting with Heidi Alexander, the shadow minister for health. ‘I hated being a member of Jeremy’s shadow cabinet,’ she would say, ‘because it was entirely dysfunctional. He would agree one thing at the shadow cabinet meeting and then his political assistant [Katy Clark] would telephone the next day to say “I know what he really thinks” and that he really meant the opposite.’ She added, ‘I wasn’t part of a coup but just wanted to be part of a team.’

  Just before 9 a.m., McDonnell found himself disinvited from BBC TV to make way for Benn. ‘I wanted Jeremy to succeed,’ Benn told the audience, ‘but it is clear he’s not succeeding and we have a wider duty to the party, and I think the country needs an effective Labour opposition.’ Even as he was broadcasting, other resignations were announced, including Lord Falconer, Seema Malhotra (an aide to McDonnell), Vernon Coaker, Chris Bryant and Gloria De Piero – all Blairites. Their letters blamed Corbyn for Brexit and for endangering Labour’s credibility. Lucy Powell, the latest to quit, wrote, ‘Your position is untenable.’ The only turncoat was Andy Burnham. In his desire to become Manchester’s mayor, he pledged his support for his leader. Undaunted, McDonnell spoke defiantly on another TV programme: ‘We are on a path of building a majority government for Labour – I think they should calm down and listen to their members.’ His tactic to keep the flame alive was always to pronounce that Britain was on the verge of an election at which Labour was certain to be victorious.

  Besieged by journalists outside his house, Corbyn remained resolutely inside. Stiffened by Abbott, he was ordered to conceal his anger from the public. Keeping power was vital. Resignations were bourgeois self-indulgence. By mid-morning another twenty MPs, including the Eagle sisters, had resigned from their party roles, bringing the total to fifty-six. Corbyn was told to dismiss the revolt as a blip. Despite his ratings falling below 20 per cent, and with no chance of winning a general election, he tried to ignore the Mirror’s damning headline – ‘For the good of the party and the country, if you’re not going to be prime minister, you’re the wrong person for the job.’ He took comfort from the image on Sunday-morning television of Tom Watson, his obese deputy leader, wading through mud at the Glastonbury Festival, seemingly unaware of any crisis. Once told about it, he was unable to get a telephone signal to call London, and remained isolated from the battle. Corbyn hung on to one truth: the attempted coup lacked a leader, a platform or any party support. At 2 p.m. that Sunday, he emerged from his house,
but refused to speak to the press.

  Others did that for him. ‘Those Labour MPs plunging their party into an unwanted crisis,’ warned McCluskey, ‘are betraying not only the party itself but also our national interest at one of the most critical moments any of us can recall.’ In any leadership election, he insisted, Corbyn must be a candidate, or the party would split. He went on to threaten the rebel MPs with mandatory reselection. Another ally, Jon Lansman, urged members of Momentum to join the Labour Party for an imminent leadership vote. ‘We cannot let this undemocratic behaviour succeed,’ he said, adding that Momentum had collected 200,00 signatures in support of Corbyn. Secretly, he sought more money from McCluskey to secure control of the party and protect Corbyn. By nightfall, Watson had returned to London – only to be barred from Corbyn’s office while his leader was appointing unknown MPs to his shadow cabinet. ‘I’m deeply disappointed,’ Watson said of Benn’s dismissal. He refused to endorse Corbyn.

  At 9 a.m. on Monday, the three men finally met at Westminster. Watson insisted that Seumas Milne leave the room, then did not mince his words to Corbyn, who looked ‘broken, puzzled and sorrowful’. Watson told him that having lost the PLP’s support, and destined to lose an imminent general election, he should step down. Watson was devoted to the Labour Party, but to Corbyn it was irrelevant. This was a battle for power – Marxists versus Blairites. The counter-coup would be crushed. Watson’s report to friends after the meeting confirmed his irresolution. He judged that Corbyn’s intelligence was limited and his emotions permanently concealed, but he couldn’t gauge whether his tenacity was feigned or genuine – and he was uncertain of the next step.

  The four ‘soft’ left MPs who followed Watson into the office – Lisa Nandy, Owen Smith, John Healey and Kate Green – managed to get face to face with Corbyn, but it was still not he who did the talking. Just as they began to speak, John McDonnell entered the room and answered the questions they addressed to their leader. The previous September, McDonnell had said that Corbyn was reluctant to run for the leadership. Now, he said, he refused to resign. While Corbyn remained silent and immobile, McDonnell pleaded for loyalty, but failed to stop the four from leaving the shadow cabinet. After the meeting, Healey wrote to Corbyn that he was ‘deeply disappointed with the discussion and by your failure to recognise that the turmoil after the referendum vote, a likely autumn election, the responsibility to hold the Labour Party together and the very wide – and ever widening – concerns about your leadership, require a fresh leadership election’. He received no reply.

  Around that time, Jess Phillips (who had left the Labour Party during Tony Blair’s reign, then returned in 2010 and five years later won a Birmingham seat for Labour) spotted Milne ordering coffee in the ground-floor atrium in Portcullis House, a modern office block for MPs opposite Big Ben. Ten days earlier, a week before referendum day, Jo Cox, the forty-one-year-old Labour MP for Batley and Spen, had been brutally murdered in the street by a right-wing fanatic. Labour MPs remained shocked. Phillips, a critic of Corbyn, approached Milne and told him about an online threat to point a blowtorch at her neck. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ said Milne dismissively – he too, he said, had been the target of threats. ‘This is fucking personal!’ Phillips shouted in front of other MPs. Milne rushed upstairs. He would never admit that he bothered with the ‘personal’.

  The same applied to Corbyn. As he sat in the Commons chamber to hear Cameron’s timetable for Brexit, he pretended to be unfazed by all the hostility. Taunted by calls to resign from the Labour benches behind him, and by jeers from Tories, he kept his cool. In the circumstances it was remarkable, but then he had overseen innumerable fractious meetings in Hornsey and Haringey, and had endured twenty-three years as a loner at Westminster, so his self-control was natural. ‘The country,’ he told the House, ‘will thank neither the benches in front nor those behind for indulging in internal factional manoeuvring.’

  Later that day, Labour MPs gathered for a PLP meeting, which quickly split into two contentious groups. Corbyn rose. Outnumbered by critics, he asserted that he would not resign – and sat down. ‘For your sake,’ said Robert Flello, the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, ‘but most importantly for the people who need a Labour government, do the decent thing.’ Flello assumed that as a result of his speaking out, Momentum activists would seek to remove him. So did Ian Murray, who to protect him and others told Corbyn, ‘Call off your dogs.’ Hard-left activists, he complained, had threatened his staff.

  Others were even more blunt. ‘You can’t offer leadership,’ Helen Goodman told Corbyn, ‘you’re not a leader.’ Jack Dromey, MP for Birmingham Erdington, spoke of the party being ‘on the brink of a catastrophic defeat from which Labour may never recover’. To cheers, Alan Johnson attacked Corbyn’s aides for refusing to support the remain campaign. ‘At times it felt as if they were working against the rest of the party,’ he said. ‘Your office did not even turn up for weekly meetings.’ A lone supporter, Barry Gardiner, a pedantic Cambridge graduate and MP for Brent North, started to defend his leader, but was interrupted by boos. Still Corbyn refused to bow, but he decided to escape. Rising quickly, he walked out of the room. MPs began to spill into the corridor. ‘It was like a lynch mob without a rope,’ said McDonnell. As Corbyn arrived back in his office, an eyewitness recorded, ‘He looked the most unhappiest [sic] I’ve ever seen him. He internalised his grief.’

  Outside the committee room, emotions were high. John Woodcock overheard Kevin Slocombe, Corbyn’s official spokesman, tell a journalist that the MPs’ threats were ‘a corridor coup’ and ‘irrelevant’. Outraged, Woodcock shouted back, ‘It’s extraordinary that you stand and slag us off to the media in a highly distorted account.’ Close by, Chris Bryant, the shadow leader of the House, told another journalist about Corbyn, ‘The writing on the wall is eight metres high, and if he can’t see it he needs to go to Specsavers.’ Letting off steam was no substitute for ousting the leader. Meanwhile, a thousand Corbyn supporters waving Socialist Worker placards and wearing T-shirts sporting slogans like ‘Eradicate the Right-Wing Blairite Vermin’ had gathered in Parliament Square. McDonnell, Abbott and Corbyn went out to meet them. ‘Jeremy Corbyn is not resigning,’ McDonnell announced.

  Encouraged by the success of far-left parties in Spain, Italy and Greece, Corbyn’s troops were posing as the vanguard of a new era, but their euphoria was fleeting. The following day, Tuesday, 28 June, an overwhelming 172 Labour MPs voted at yet another PLP meeting for Corbyn to go. By now, sixty-four frontbenchers had resigned. Just fifty MPs supported him. Corbyn visibly sank in his chair. In his office, McDonnell wailed, ‘It’s all over,’ and suggested that Corbyn offer some sort of olive branch. Even Abbott feared he would be forced to resign. The villain, she suspected, was McDonnell, who she believed was organising a coup of his own. ‘He’s having talks with Jon Lansman,’ she told Corbyn. ‘He’s not looking after your best interests.’ Their safety net was that McDonnell would find it difficult to win a leadership election.

  It was Milne and McCluskey who rescued Corbyn. Both appealed to the leader’s faith. The left had waited a hundred years to control the Labour movement, and surrender was unimaginable. Nor was there scope for compromise or ‘outreach’ to the rebel leaders. They determined that the saboteurs who sought to de-legitimise him would be squashed. To manage the crisis, Karie Murphy barred some rebels from entering the leader’s office. Even Andy Burnham was denied entry. At approved meetings, Abbott stood vigil to prevent her one-time lover tipping over the edge. Looking washed-out, Corbyn repeated, ‘I’m not going to resign. I’m not going to damage the cause.’ No one could decide whether he was a skilful strategist or an unimaginative simpleton. Finally emerging from his office into the corridor, he showed renewed defiance. ‘Today’s vote by MPs,’ he said, ‘has no constitutional legitimacy.’ Unleashed, Momentum activists had begun to denigrate the 172 rebel MPs on Twitter, accusing them of betrayal and issuing stark threats of deselection, violence and even murder.
Fearing for their safety, some MPs hesitated before leaving their offices.

  During that prolonged hiatus, Tom Watson was certain that Corbyn could not be saved. ‘He’s going to resign,’ he guaranteed newspaper editors. ‘Go Now!’ roared the Mirror’s front-page headline, unusually signed by the editor Lloyd Embley, a Labour loyalist who urged a ‘persuasive contender’ to come forward and save the party. ‘Will he be prime minister?’ asked Kevin Maguire, the newspaper’s left-wing columnist. ‘No.’ The same forecast was offered by the Guardian: ‘The Corbyn experiment is effectively over.’ Few doubted that Labour’s malaise was terminal. The choice, the Guardian reckoned, was between different captains of the Titanic. ‘Labour,’ it went on, ‘is struggling to find an identity.’ In reality, the party had an all too clear future identity: it would be Marxist, and its members would be re-educated to appreciate the new route to socialism. Both the Guardian and the Mirror misunderstood the party’s new direction.

  To show that Corbyn was in command, Milne invited Sky News’s cameras to record the first meeting of the new shadow cabinet. Corbyn was flanked by the remain-supporting Cat Smith, an MP for just thirteen months, and by Tom Watson, even though he was still urging his leader to resign.

  ‘This seems a bad idea, Seumas,’ said Corbyn, spotting the flaw of being squashed between two critics.

  ‘I’m not sure this is a great idea either,’ agreed Milne.

  ‘Can we do something later?’ Corbyn asked the Sky journalist. ‘OK?’

  Fifteen minutes later, the Sky team returned to the room. The scene had changed. Corbyn was now flanked by Emily Thornberry and Steve Rotheram, his parliamentary assistant. Watson had disappeared completely – he was not even in the room. Airbrushing had been a familiar tactic in Stalin’s era. Cynics would compliment Milne for mimicking the control freakery prevalent under Blair.