Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Pointedly, Corbyn boycotted the meeting, but his hard-left supporter Dennis Skinner, forever known as ‘the Beast of Bolsover’, provocatively mocked all his critics in the Commons. Party members, he scoffed, were more important than politicians. Incensed, former leader Neil Kinnock struck back: ‘We are going to fight and we are going to win.’ Thirty years earlier, he had defeated Tony Benn, Skinner and Militant Tendency. Now he was bruised that his victory seemed all for nothing. ‘I’m bloody angry. It’s bloody appalling,’ he spluttered. And that seemed to be the climax of the meeting. McDonnell laughed in relief. At a rally of the left in north-west London he scoffed, ‘The only good thing about it is, as plotters they were fucking useless.’

  * After publication of the first edition of this book, McDonnell made it clear that he had not admitted to voting leave, and had voted remain.

  14

  Squashing the Opposition

  Spared the pressure of an immediate leadership election, Corbyn began another makeover. After finally agreeing with his staff to stick to the scripts he was given, master the autocue and be coached for prime minister’s questions, he apologised for comparing ISIS to Israel during the presentation of the Chakrabarti report; and as for his calling Hamas and Hezbollah ‘friends’ in 2009, he said, ‘I regret using those words.’

  His actions belied his apologies. Buoyed by his critics’ vacillations, he asked for Naz Shah’s suspension to be removed, and simultaneously his office dismissed Josh Simons’s complaint that Chakrabarti had dismissed his submission as ‘false and part of the campaign against his leadership’. He also defended Jackie Walker, a black Jewish activist, writer and former vice chair of Momentum who had been suspended again from the party for saying that Jews were the ‘chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade’ in the West Indies. She had also spoken about Jews ‘celebrating’ the Holocaust, by which she meant that they were exploiting their own genocide for political advantage. It would be ‘wonderful’, she said, if Holocaust Day was not just about the Jews, an opinion endorsed by Momentum.

  In Corbyn’s opinion, none of those statements was anti-Semitic, and Walker’s accusers were mendacious patrons of Israel, intimidating an honest critic. He did not consider that Rothschilds’ bank, which he believed had been guiltily involved in the British Empire’s commerce, was minuscule, and only became ‘notorious’ in Nazi propaganda. Without requesting an apology, he agreed that she should be reinstated as a member and consented to share a platform with her at a Momentum rally. Those who criticised him were silenced by an eruption of anger towards America and Tony Blair.

  On 6 July, the fourth official report of the events leading up to the Iraq war was published. After a seven-year inquiry, a deeply unimpressive panel under Sir John Chilcot condemned Britain’s military, intelligence services and Tony Blair for mistakes leading to the invasion and occupation. However, the report failed to address Blair’s wholesale corruption of the machinery of government, so dozens of culpable civil servants escaped censure. Incapable of mastering the flaws of the report, Corbyn focused on the simple ‘disastrous decision’ to go to war, and blamed a ‘small number of leading figures in the government’ who were ‘none too scrupulous about how they made their case’, and apologised to the people of Iraq. His accurate predictions of disaster enhanced his status, but his credibility was challenged because he ignored the nature of Saddam Hussein. While the war itself was not justified, it had removed a brutal dictator who over thirteen years had disregarded seventeen UN resolutions while he gassed Kurds, murdered Iraqis and prevented inspectors from visiting his bomb factories. Corbyn’s partisanship riled his critics, and put an end to the final attempt between Watson and McCluskey to resolve the deadlock over his future. Menacingly, McCluskey accused Watson of ‘an act of sabotage fraught with peril for the future of the party’. In the Commons, Ian Austin heckled Corbyn as a ‘disgrace’ who should ‘sit down and shut up’.

  The revolt could no longer be contained. On 11 July, Angela Eagle decided after all to formally challenge for the leadership. Under the party’s rules, Corbyn would need to secure the nomination of thirty-five MPs if he were to be on the ballot. Unlike in 2015, none of his opponents would oblige on this occasion. The left’s tactic was intimidation. McCluskey warned the ‘rebel’ MPs not to use ‘legal means’ to exclude Corbyn from the ballot. If the anti-Corbynistas dared to insist on abiding by the rules, he threatened, the result would be ‘a lasting division in the party’, and worse. Countering his menace depended on Eagle showing leadership. But instead of rousing the rebels, she was silent.

  Corbyn’s obstacle was the NEC. Only it could change the rules. To save the party from Marxist control, Iain McNicol appealed to the NEC’s members to vote against Corbyn. His weakness, he knew, was the quality of Corbyn’s challenger. Sharing that despair about Eagle’s inadequacies, Owen Smith, an otherwise insignificant Welsh MP, offered himself as an alternative contender for the leadership.

  Neither Eagle nor Smith had much idea about self-promotion. While both were inconspicuous over the weekend, Corbyn starred at the Durham Miners’ Gala, 100,000 people cheering his defiance. And yet, beyond the faithful, his poll rating hit minus 41, a record. Labour’s fate, rather than the national destiny, dominated the media – although on the same day, 11 July, Theresa May was by default confirmed as the Tory leader and the new prime minister.

  Two days later, David Cameron made his farewell speech to the Commons. Corbyn showed no goodwill to the Bullingdon boy. As the ex-prime minister left the chamber in silence, he walked out too. Without a word to Cameron – magnanimity was not in his tool kit – he headed off to a meeting of the Cuba Solidarity Committee.

  The outcome of the NEC’s vote on whether Corbyn would be on the leadership ballot was uncertain. In the countdown, his bid to remove his enemies was ratcheted up. Shortly before the NEC met in Victoria, Jon Ashworth, the MP for Leicester South and a critic of Corbyn, received an email from Katy Clark telling him that he had been expelled from the NEC. This decision was overturned during a stormy meeting of the shadow cabinet. Miffed that at least one enemy was still there to confound him, Corbyn arrived at the NEC meeting along with Milne. The unusual sight of police officers at the building’s entrance reflected the general atmosphere of hostility. Inside, Corbyn was asked to leave the committee room while his position on the ballot was discussed. He refused, and also insisted that the vote should not, as normal, be secret. Two women members protested, fearing violent threats if their decisions were publicised. Many female Labour MPs, they said, were terrified by Momentum’s coercion. When Corbyn insisted on an open ballot, both women burst into tears. He was unmoved. Defeated in a vote, he finally agreed to leave the room.

  The slight was meaningless. Outnumbered by the trade unions, the moderates on the NEC lost by four votes. ‘I’m delighted,’ said Corbyn as he posed for selfies on the street. ‘That will strengthen our party in order to defeat this Tory government.’ He repeated his pledge of ‘kinder’ politics, but no compromises would be offered to win over disaffected moderates. His next target, he agreed with McCluskey, would be Iain McNicol. His proposed replacement was Jennie Formby, a former Unite official, a member of Militant, and the mother of McCluskey’s son. Formby’s appointment would also suit Karie Murphy, who expected her orders to be obeyed. Without ceremony, McCluskey was enthroned as Corbyn’s Godfather.

  The first opinion poll put Corbyn 20 per cent ahead of Eagle. On 19 July she quit the race to allow Owen Smith a clear run. The former employee of the pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer offered neither originality nor authority. Worse, he lacked a national organisation to compete with Momentum. Even Smith himself recognised this insurmountable weakness.

  Fearing impotence, he tried to reposition himself as further to the left than Corbyn. His ploy was threatened by over 100,000 new applications for membership, assumed to be from Corbyn supporters. To deter rogue voters, the NEC had increased the annual membership fee from £3 to £25, and claimed t
o have retrospectively barred 100,000 people who had joined in the previous six months. There was good reason to doubt such statistics. The party claimed to have removed Trotskyites and members identified by complainants for such actions as shouting ‘Zio!’ In reality, just 1,258 people had been barred, and Corbyn’s popularity was increasing remorselessly. The media was unimpressed. ‘The poison in Labour’s veins is so deep, so toxic,’ commented the Mirror, ‘that nobody can see a way of ending this harmoniously.’

  ‘I hold out the hand of friendship,’ said Corbyn, then announced that all MPs would face reselection before the 2020 election. To minimise the threat to his candidacy, his spokesman denied his support for mandatory reselection, but the purge had long begun. Hundreds of Momentum members, willing executioners, stormed into the annual meeting of Brighton and Hove’s Labour Party to deselect Peter Kyle. Momentum directed similar tactics against Thangam Debbonaire, the MP for Bristol West, while she was being treated for breast cancer. Other women MPs accused John McDonnell of urging supporters at rallies to demonstrate outside their constituency offices. As usual, McDonnell and Jon Lansman denied the eyewitness evidence of their followers’ threats of rape and even death. A brick was thrown through a window of Angela Eagle’s office. She directly accused Corbyn of allowing a ‘culture of bullying’ to develop. ‘It’s being done in your name,’ one of the victims told Corbyn. ‘I don’t allow bullying,’ he replied. Owen Smith spoke about a ‘bear pit’ of violence inspired by Corbyn and McDonnell. By doing nothing to stop the aggression, snapped former home secretary David Blunkett, Corbyn ‘condoned the force’. His face was visible at the foot of the scaffold.

  As the threats against MPs accumulated, Len McCluskey invoked a hoary canard: government agents, he claimed, were operating in disguise and using ‘dark practices’ to bring Corbyn and McDonnell into disrepute. ‘There’s a hysteria being whipped up by MI5 in the social media,’ he lashed out. He scornfully brushed aside Eagle’s fears: ‘She was just a pawn.’ On the same day, Seema Malhotra, the MP for Feltham and Heston, who had resigned from McDonnell’s team, discovered that his aides and Karie Murphy had twice broken into her Commons office. Murphy, she reported, had been ‘aggressive and intimidating’ to her staff. Corbyn, McDonnell and Murphy dismissed the unauthorised entries as ‘a small matter of miscommunication’. Margaret Hodge was struck by how much what was happening recalled the 1980s: ‘It is the politics of intolerance, bullying and intimidation.’ Corbyn resented the criticism, as he always did. To counter accusations of misogyny, he posed for the media with eight women: members of Momentum, Muslim activists, hard-left teenagers and his wife Laura.

  He ignored the wider electorate. ‘He speaks only to his tribe,’ complained a veteran Islington member. ‘He’s making no effort to speak to the wider public, to win them over.’ Further evidence of this was a speech in the Commons in which, in defiance of the party’s official policy, he once again opposed the renewal of Trident. Nuclear weapons, he said to heckles from Labour MPs, had failed to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and ISIS’s atrocities in Iraq. He made no mention of the nuclear threat from Russia, North Korea and Iran. He also disputed that bombing would defeat ISIS in Iraq or Syria. He preferred negotiation. In a free vote, 140 Labour MPs supported Trident and only forty-seven voted with Corbyn.

  Commentators criticised Corbyn’s ‘poverty of ambition’ for failing to win the political centre, but they misunderstood. As unwilling as ever to compromise, he planned to defeat the PLP, transform Labour into a genuinely Marxist party, and win sufficient electoral votes to become prime minister. Just the one victory would be enough. Thereafter, McDonnell boasted, their changes would be ‘irreversible’. The swift destruction of Britain’s capitalist economy, mirroring Hugo Chávez’s impact in Venezuela, cast doubt over the fate of Britain’s democracy: Venezuela was just the latest example of the fact that no Marxist government had ever been democratically removed from office. Just as Corbyn and McDonnell intended to revise the Labour Party’s rules to permanently protect their coup from any challenge by social democrats, they would change the British constitution to cement their victory. The result of the second general election would be a foregone conclusion.

  Corbyn’s second leadership campaign was far more relaxed than his frenetic first attempt. Dressed in slacks, a tieless crumpled shirt and Mexican sandals, he repeated the same speech at rally after rally. Consistently enthusiastic, his audiences were thrilled by his declaiming of socialist principles. Like religious converts, they embraced the endearing sixty-seven-year-old who claimed to be reading a book about Icelandic lore and admitted to his unfamiliarity with the TV presenters Ant and Dec. They rapturously applauded his pledge not to commit the British military to defend any NATO ally, but instead to disband the organisation as ‘a danger to the world’ that was deliberately ‘escalating tension’ with Russia. Others were enthralled by his long TV interview with the novelist and poet Ben Okri. Among the list of literary works he described as the source of his inspiration was Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, a confection created by his office to suit his audience. Few of them knew that the only books on his shelves at home dated from the post-war years and were about the Labour movement, and inherited from his parents. Similarly, after he admitted in another interview that ‘I haven’t been to the cinema in ages. I mean I don’t mind the cinema,’ his advisers told him to reply ‘Casablanca’ when next asked to name his favourite film. His only honest reply to Okri was when he was asked to choose between power and revolution. His reply – ‘Revolution’ – drew admiring gasps. His fans still cheered even when he could not correctly answer how many MPs were needed for a party to have a majority at Westminster.

  YouGov described the typical Corbyn supporter as a young, middle-class charity worker who spent fifty hours a week online, ate vegetarian curries and was interested in the NHS, homelessness and climate change. A Corbynista, according to YouGov’s survey, would describe him or herself as ethical and personally prone to depression. That stereotype of an oddball who was also against Trident, angered by climate change and stridently anti-business matched the party which Corbyn was refashioning to represent idealists and losers. In despair, moderates believed that Corbyn’s base was blind to their hero’s frailties – an opinion shared by his first wife, Jane Chapman. Convinced by her personal experience that his limitations were being overlooked, she decided to vote against her former husband.

  Ignoring the pinpricks, and proud to speak on behalf of YouGov’s stereotype supporter, Corbyn posed as the heroic crusader for social justice besieged by right-wing barons to launch a classic demolition job of his opponent. His attack centred on Owen Smith’s employment by Pfizer. Briefed by Corbyn’s office, BBC TV asked Smith why he had supported the NHS’s purchase of private services. The interviewer endorsed Corbyn’s argument that medical research should not be ‘farmed out’ to multinational pharmaceutical corporations, but undertaken by the NHS. Smith fell into the trap. Instead of defending his former career, he denied the facts that capitalist corporations rather than socialist governments had developed antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs and vaccines against shingles and malaria. The NHS had never produced a single drug. Having positioned himself on the extreme left, he refused to challenge Corbyn’s plan to make Britain’s drug companies state-owned. Nationalisation, Corbyn knew, appealed to his base, which favoured, as he put it, ‘a new egalitarian economic model’. He was unconcerned that most pharmaceutical corporations and their researchers would move abroad to escape political control and reduced incomes. Playing to his supporters, he further pledged that every employer of more than twenty-one people should be subject to a ‘compulsory pay audit’ to prevent discrimination against women, transgender people and ethnic minorities.

  The enthusiasm of Corbyn’s supporters masked what the country as a whole was feeling. The latest opinion polls showed that 51 per cent of voters supported Theresa May as prime minister, and just 16 per cent Corbyn. That sparked Tory
calls for a snap election, but May rejected the idea. Asked on BBC TV whether Corbyn would resign if he lost the next general election, John McDonnell replied, ‘That would be inevitable. Of course he would. Any Labour leader who loses an election usually goes.’ Corbyn contradicted his ally. ‘Nothing is inevitable,’ he said; the party would decide. Encouraged by the huge crowds, he was sure that any chance of his being defeated in the leadership election had evaporated. New anti-Corbyn groups, including Labour Tomorrow, which had a £250,000 war chest, were feeble. His criticisms of Britain – whether highlighting job insecurity at companies like Sports Direct or the greed of the arch-capitalist Philip Green – resonated even among those close to Theresa May. At least 255 constituencies endorsed Corbyn, while only forty-nine backed Smith.

  In the instability caused by Brexit, British politics had become contrary. No senior Tory politician challenged Corbyn’s manifesto, or asked him to identify a British corporation that required government investment. Ideology-lite Tories ridiculed Marxist promises of economic security, but lacked the intellect to argue for capitalism’s advantages. Accelerating the drift, the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson openly disparaged David Cameron’s record – the creation of 2.6 million new jobs, historically low unemployment (4.9 per cent), the fewest children living in workless households, the bottom 50 per cent paying just 10 per cent of all income tax while the richest 5 per cent paid nearly 57 per cent, and Britain enjoying one of the world’s fastest rates of growth. In the ideological vacuum, May’s team fashioned speeches in imitation of Labour’s ‘progressive’ goals of reducing poverty and injustice. For stealing Labour’s policies, they won Nelson’s praise.