Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Leaderless, the moderates could only hope for a ruinous general election defeat. One after another, they recorded their fears. ‘I’m in despair at this calamitous situation,’ confessed David Blunkett. ‘I can’t honestly see how we’re going to get out of it … That’s my worst possible nightmare – a Labour Party that doesn’t connect to the lives of ordinary working people.’ Fuming on the sidelines, Tony Blair warned that Britain would become a one-party state. Peter Mandelson said he was praying for an early election, in which Labour’s inevitable heavy defeat would lead to Corbyn being deposed. Many Tories were also urging Theresa May to break her pledge and call a snap vote. In the most recent opinion poll, she had scored 44 per cent against Corbyn’s 19. Labour needed to win an additional 140 seats in England and Wales, with 40 per cent of the vote, to form a majority government – and that was impossible without Corbyn and Momentum attracting Tory voters with compromises they refused to consider. Professor John Curtice, Britain’s pre-eminent psephologist, predicted that in a general election the Tory majority would increase from twelve to forty-four. May was tempted, but a warning note was sounded by a handful of Tories. In 1992 John Major had won a record fourteen million votes, but the Tories’ lead in the opinion polls was wiped out soon after by a financial crisis, and then its unity was splintered by Europe. Now, twenty-four years later, the same could happen in the wake of Brexit.

  In the past, Corbyn had feigned to be unconcerned by the polls. Now, his transition from a protester to the leader of a political party committed to an election victory meant that he scrutinised the indicators of the public’s voting intentions. Reality broke in on 8 December. Labour had recently been routed in two by-elections – in Richmond and Sleaford – and another was imminent, caused by the resignation of Jamie Reed, the Labour MP for Copeland. Over the previous thirty-five years no sitting government had won a by-election in a constituency that had been held by the opposition, but Labour was unusually vulnerable in Cumbria. The constituency’s principal employer was the Sellafield nuclear power plant. As an implacable opponent of nuclear power, Corbyn had advocated its permanent closure, at the expense of thousands of local jobs. Contradicting his beliefs would break a lifetime’s habit, explained his admirers. ‘It is appalling,’ he had said in 1998, ‘that countries that desperately need money for education, health and development spend money on nuclear weapons.’

  Despite the danger of electoral suicide, Corbyn’s best offer to Copeland was ‘an investment plan’ for a nuclear-free zone. With a new poll giving him a 16 per cent chance of becoming prime minister, he agreed under pressure from his staff to give ground on at least one major policy. He chose immigration. ‘Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement,’ he announced. But then he added off-script, ‘I don’t want that to be misinterpreted. Nor do we rule it out.’ Just before Christmas, Diane Abbott acknowledged that Corbyn had a year to turn the party round, no more. Her forecast was echoed by Len McCluskey, although he gave him two years. Corbyn’s consolation was to win, for the seventh time, the Parliamentary Beard of the Year competition. ‘I started wearing a beard when I was nineteen and living in Jamaica,’ he told the audience. ‘They called me “Mr Beardman”.’ That small untruth was evidently too good to be given up.

  Life was so much easier among trade unionists. At the Aslef Christmas party in Conway Hall, Corbyn was surrounded by his closest comrades – among them Tosh McDonald, the union’s president, famed for leading ruinous strikes, and its general secretary Mick Whelan, who had threatened the government with ‘ten years of industrial action’. One area where the three were notably united was in their opposition to British Rail’s modernisation plans. Corbyn supported the strikes against driver-only trains by a thousand RMT train drivers on Southern Rail, despite their disrupting the lives of 500,000 commuters. He knew that the unions’ argument that driver-only trains were unsafe was bogus – a third of all British trains ran without a guard, and most commuter trains into London were driver-only. Some London lines operated without any driver, and not a single accident had been caused by the new technology. But modernisation offended Corbyn’s gospel. Labour’s next election manifesto, he pledged, would ban driver-only trains and order the reintroduction of guards. Protecting workers’ monopolies and restrictive work practices was true socialism. In return, over the previous year the rail unions had donated £185,000 to Labour. With sincerity, Corbyn led the standing ovation for Aslef’s president, and pledged to ‘replace the capitalist system with a socialist order’.

  There was less comradeship at the Christmas party for Labour’s MPs, a karaoke evening held at the Westminster Kitchen Bar, a restaurant across the river from the Houses of Parliament. Many of the songs were deliberately chosen to insult the party’s current leader – Ruth Smeeth sang Tony Blair’s anthem, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, and Mike Gapes intoned the Beatles’ ‘Back in the USSR’. Corbyn took it all in good part, and his benign expression reflected how secure he felt. He welcomed Trotskyists joining Momentum, which by then boasted 15,000 members, joining the 100,000 new Labour members. They were his trusted allies to change Britain. Like Donald Trump, newly elected as America’s president, he represented both the new populist era and the revival of a bygone age. Like Trump, he lampooned his critics as manufacturers of fake news, and like Trump he championed the underdogs, the losers in society. Unlike Trump, however, he had failed to win new voters, rebuild his party or win credibility among the wider electorate. Labour under a Trotskyite leader appeared doomed.

  * Blanchflower’s own credibility was questionable after he asserted, quite wrongly, that ‘the UK appears to be already in recession’ following ‘a major economic crisis caused by the shock Brexit vote’.

  † In 2014 the railways received £3.8 billion in subsidies and £3.7 billion for track infrastructure. This was at the same level – 29 per cent – as in the final year of the nationalised British Rail.

  15

  The Coming of St Jeremy

  At the beginning of 2017 the news was bad. Instead of reviving the working-class vote, Labour was certain to lose Copeland, a seat it had held for eighty years. The Mirror described the looming defeat as ‘Labour’s deep hole’. Salvation had depended on Corbyn abandoning his opposition to nuclear power, but he repeatedly refused to compromise. Finally, to save the seat, John McDonnell said that Labour had given the workers ‘assurances’. As usual, that was not true. In July 2012 he had predicted that within the first hundred days of the next Labour government, ‘You announce no more nuclear power … we have built up support for those policies.’ Corbyn’s future depended on holding Stoke-on-Trent Central in another by-election on the same day, caused by Tristram Hunt’s resignation.

  To relaunch Labour for the two battles, Corbyn pitched himself as the scourge of the super-well-off. ‘The economy is rigged for the rich,’ said Steve Howell, Seumas Milne’s new deputy, a former member of the Communist Party and an admirer of Soviet Russia and East Germany. In an attack on ‘fat-cat Britain’, Corbyn promised to impose a maximum earnings limit. ‘If we want to live in a more egalitarian society and fund our public services, we cannot go on funding worse levels of inequality,’ he declared on BBC radio. In socialist Britain, the workers could determine their bosses’ pay, and even Premier League footballers would have their earnings cut. His models for success were the government wage caps in Cuba, Venezuela and Egypt.

  The reaction was not entirely favourable. Richard Murphy, Corbyn’s tax adviser, called the idea absurd. David Blanchflower described it as ‘totally idiotic’. Multinational corporations, he went on, would move their headquarters abroad, and footballers would refuse to come to English clubs. Corbyn did not understand how globalised markets would throttle draconian controls of the type last used by Harold Wilson. The digital world had marginalised the nation state. Venezuela’s fate was ample proof, only Corbyn ignored it. By the end of the day, his spokesman said that he had ‘misspoke’. The embarrassment was compounded by McDonnell’s proposal
that everyone earning over £1 million should publish their tax returns ‘to rebuild trust in our society. People don’t have trust in the establishment. I just want openness and transparency.’ McDonnell’s championship of ‘transparency’ went awry after the Tory Party examined Corbyn’s own 2015–16 tax returns, and discovered that he had omitted the entire additional £58,000 he had been paid as leader of the opposition.

  That blip, probably the result of incompetence rather than a wish to defraud, was less damaging than his indecision about the EU. With Labour split almost as badly as the Tories, Corbyn could not fix on an agreed policy. He confused the customs union with the single market, and was undecided about that: on a single day the previous December, he had changed his position four times. There was good reason for his cartwheeling. While he supported Brexit, two-thirds of Labour’s electorate had voted remain; and whereas most Labour MPs were remainers, most of their constituencies voted for Brexit. Marxism provided no answer to a problem that could be resolved only by compromise, and ultimately a parliamentary vote.

  For a few weeks, Corbyn could not decide whether Labour MPs should be ordered to vote with the government in support of applying to leave the EU. On referendum day he had declared that Britain should do so instantly. Now, seven months later, he prevaricated. Discussions in the shadow cabinet left everyone perplexed. One morning he had agreed to control immigration and not support the train drivers’ latest strike, but that same afternoon he reneged. Immigration should be uncontrolled, his office announced, but then he went ahead and supported the strike. On the vote to invoke Article 50, the instrument for Britain’s departure from the EU, he finally imposed a three-line whip to vote with the government. Fifty-two MPs defied his order, including seventeen frontbench remainers. Four shadow cabinet ministers resigned. Even pro-Corbyn MPs opposed a hard Brexit. His prevarications sapped his authority. The usually supportive Guardian journalist Owen Jones was among the disillusioned. Surveying the chaos, he blamed Corbyn for ignoring good advice. ‘A coherent strategy, a coherent vision and a clear message never emerged,’ he would write. ‘It is soul-destroying to watch great ideals and policies being dragged down not by their own merits, but through a lack of strategy and basic competence.’ This did not just apply to Brexit. Among Corbyn’s misjudgements was his promise of universal free school meals, the beneficiaries of which would include the rich. The dilemma for Jones was fundamental: ‘If Corbyn fails the cause will fail with him.’ Without a rescue plan, he concluded, the leader would have to go.

  On the eve of the Stoke and Copeland by-elections, Corbyn’s Westminster office was even more chaotic than usual. To his good fortune, Ukip’s challenge in Stoke was mired by sleaze, and Labour won. But in Copeland, Corbyn had so alienated Labour supporters that the Conservatives won with a majority of 2,147. If the 6.7 per cent swing were repeated nationally, the Tories would have a majority of over a hundred seats. ‘Labour’s collapse among working-class voters is catastrophic,’ concluded YouGov in a new opinion poll.

  Asked if he were to blame, Corbyn replied, ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Thank you for your question,’ he replied and walked on.

  Holly Lynch, the Labour MP for Halifax, told Corbyn to his face that her current slender majority of 428 would be wiped out because of him. ‘I’ve just been re-elected,’ he shrugged. As usual, he refused to take responsibility. McDonnell blamed disunity among Labour MPs for the defeat in Copeland. He also accused the Blairites of conspiring with the Murdoch empire, citing in evidence Peter Mandelson’s admission, ‘I work every single day to oust Corbyn.’ In McDonnell’s imagination, Mandelson was secretly orchestrating a coup, so he invited the supposed traitor for tea to forge unity. ‘I know I have got a pugnacious approach,’ McDonnell volunteered in a moment of rapprochement. Corbyn offered no similar concessions. ‘Comrades,’ he told a conference in Scotland, ‘let us never forget it’s not called the struggle for nothing.’ Believers knew, he said, that the capitalists would eventually be defeated and replaced by workers’ control. A YouGov poll found that just 13 per cent wanted Corbyn as prime minister, compared to 51 per cent for May. The Tories, at 43 per cent, were eighteen points ahead of Labour, which was predicted to lose the skilled working class, and, as in 1983, to win no more than 27 per cent of the vote. Some of its MPs again spoke about ousting Corbyn to save the party.

  The temptation was too great for Theresa May. On 18 April she announced a snap election for 8 June, to ‘remove the uncertainty’ over getting Brexit legislation through Parliament. ‘Crush the Saboteurs’ was the Daily Mail’s headline. Under electoral law, a premature election required a two-thirds majority of the Commons, and Labour joined the Tories to vote in favour. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee slammed Corbyn for approving an election that would surely see Labour crushed. ‘Will this be the last disastrous service he does to his party?’ she asked. The Tories, she feared, would successfully portray him as a metropolitan Marxist and terrorist ally. Jonathan Freedland in the same paper understood May’s decision: ‘It’s about the surest bet any politician could ever place … May will win and win big.’ In The Times, Philip Collins was equally convinced: Corbyn had ‘no charisma and little intellect … it is a recipe for catastrophe and the only question is how bad it gets. Labour is putting a cast-iron solid dud in front of the British people.’ Some Labour MPs despaired about the inevitable massacre – the polls showed that even those with majorities of eight thousand were at risk. Others were gleeful that the election would end Corbyn’s reign. Few were more antagonistic than John Woodcock, who had won his Barrow and Furness constituency in 2015 with a majority of just 795. In a recorded video he pledged, ‘I will not countenance ever voting to make Jeremy Corbyn Britain’s prime minister.’ In unison, everyone ignored John Curtice’s revised prediction. May, the pollster reckoned, could find it hard to increase the number of Tory seats, let alone win a majority of a hundred, because only seventeen Labour seats were marginal, compared to forty-nine Tory ones.

  That truth was made more evident within hours of May’s announcement. Corbyn arrived in Croydon, a Tory marginal with a majority of 165. Looking dapper in a suit, and with his beard trimmed, he uttered a prepared line: ‘I want an economy that works for all’ – a perfect Tory slogan. By the end of the first day of campaigning, May’s Brexit theme had been pushed aside: inequality had become the issue. ‘This election,’ said Corbyn, ‘is the establishment versus the people. Instead of a country for the rich we want richer lives for everyone.’ Fluently, he recited his familiar sermon against greed, the cosy cartels and the crooked bankers. The faithful applauded thunderously. After a life on the fringe, the thrill of fighting to be prime minister had injected a sizeable adrenaline dose into the sixty-seven-year-old Corbyn.

  To control the campaign, he separated his election team from the staff at Labour headquarters. The Marxists around Corbyn distrusted those who had served Blair and Brown to preach the required degree of socialism. Three communists wrote the manifesto: Steve Howell, Andrew Fisher and Andrew Murray. Without a blush, Seumas Milne chose ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ as Labour’s campaign slogan – Tony Blair’s mantra. Unmentioned but noted were the Labour candidates who refused to feature Corbyn’s photo on their election leaflets, and promised on the doorstep that Corbyn would not win. Never before had Labour entered an election so divided.

  On May Day, John McDonnell stood in Trafalgar Square surrounded by communist banners, Stalin’s photo and the flag of Assad’s Syria. Few could understand his benign attitude towards Stalin’s reign of terror, but like his predecessors during the 1930s – Ramsay MacDonald, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb – he believed that Stalin’s atrocities had been exaggerated. ‘Much better be ruled by Stalin,’ G.D.H. Cole, a Labour economist of that interwar era, had written, ‘than by the restrictive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism.’ Similarly, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had believed that the ‘sacrifice of millions of
lives’ was justified to build a communist state. Some eighty years later, mimicking that host of legendary spirits, McDonnell repeated their philosophy. Defeating the capitalists required violence and also loyalty to comrades, especially those targeted by the hated media.

  Some of the criticism was mere buffoonery. Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, told the New York Times, ‘I think the fake news headline which would give this country the most joy would be “Jeremy Corbyn Knifed to Death by an Asylum-Seeker”.’ In the same vein, Corbyn was denounced by Boris Johnson as a ‘mutton-headed mugwump’, a reference to US Republicans who had deserted their party in 1884 to support the Democratic candidate. More serious, in Corbyn’s opinion, was the media targeting of his closest allies. Labour’s Constitutional Committee had concluded that Ken Livingstone’s anti-Semitism had brought the party into disrepute. After he refused to apologise he was barred from holding office for two years, but allowed to remain a party member.

  Corbyn could be judged by his support for Livingstone. He welcomed his ally’s anticipated return in April 2018, and declared that the media had maliciously weaponised anti-Semitism against him. Jewish MPs were appalled. Even the Guardian called Corbyn’s promise of zero tolerance towards anti-Semitism ‘a lie’. ‘Shameful decision today,’ tweeted Yvette Cooper. Under pressure during a TV interview, Corbyn bad-temperedly accused the media of being ‘utterly obsessed’ with the status of his leadership, and refused to criticise Livingstone.