by Tom Bower
As passions rose, Corbyn became convinced that the anger over Grenfell would topple May. Thatcherism, he spouted, was disintegrating. ‘Britain’s old order is crumbling,’ repeated Owen Jones, always quick to climb on board. Rather than allow ‘a few politicians pulling levers at the top’ to organise relief and discover the truth about the tragedy, he and Labour’s leaders smelled the whiff of revolution. Grenfell’s tenants, said Corbyn, represented the ‘power of the dispossessed’. Here was an instant army of downtrodden victims eager to challenge the ruling class. To harness their power, he presented them with identifiable enemies and answers. ‘The brutal and inescapable truth,’ he said, ‘is that the fire simply would not have happened if the occupants had been wealthy.’ Those who had been made homeless should be immediately rehoused by requisitioning all Kensington’s empty properties, especially those ‘owned by the rich’. Four years earlier, Corbyn and McDonnell had supported legislation to empower squatters to occupy uninhabited buildings, and to be protected by lawyers financed by legal aid. The reality of Corbyn’s ‘kinder, gentler politics’ was his admission that, had Labour won the election, the state would have weaponised grief and confiscated over a hundred local homes. Or, as McDonnell urged the ‘politicised, mobilised population’ – to take control.
Consistent with his opinion that democracy had broken down, McDonnell called on the trade unions to ‘mobilise one million people to protest in London on 1 July’ to force May to hold another election. The Trotskyite shadow chancellor never ceased to encourage instability. He also urged the rail unions to restart their strikes against driver-only trains. He might have felt a moment of trepidation when a ‘May Out’ march by ‘Grenfell victims’ from west London to Parliament Square on a ‘Day of Rage’, 21 June, attracted fewer than three hundred people, mostly Trotskyists imported from around the country; but any doubts were brushed aside by the opinion polls. Grenfell had pushed Labour 8 per cent ahead of the Tories.
Corbyn’s lead was boosted by his appearance at the Glastonbury Festival three days later. While May was watching the annual Armed Forces Day parade, Corbyn stood on Glastonbury’s stage to introduce Run the Jewels, an American hip hop duo notorious for loving ‘drugs and bitches’ and urging their followers to ‘carry a blade and a firearm’. The Labour leader visibly glowed as he received a rock-star welcome from 150,000 fans joyfully chanting ‘Ooooh Jeremy Corbyn.’ Enjoying this demonstration of his immense popularity, he apparently forgot that those waving ‘We love you Jeremy’ banners had paid £238 each for their tickets to the festival. Above their cheers, he shouted that Theresa May would be forced into an early election. Her staying in office, he bellowed, was ludicrous. ‘He told me he would be in Downing Street in six months,’ Michael Eavis, the festival’s eighty-one-year-old founder, confided to friends in his hospitality tent. ‘He really is the hero of the hour.’ On the platform, Corbyn smiled. He was a saint. His life story was of failure metamorphosing into success. Victory and Downing Street were just a matter of time.
Tory MPs were apoplectic about BBC commentators praising Corbyn’s Glastonbury appearance as ‘brilliant’. Reading the media reports about ‘giddy optimism’, ‘the cult of Corbyn’ and ‘hysterical support’, the man himself might have been forgiven for not being able to believe anything else. The adulation – the mugs, badges, T-shirts and scarves all bearing his name – as well as the perks of leadership, was intoxicating. Convinced that the government would soon collapse, Corbyn planned to spend the summer campaigning in seventy-five Tory marginals. Excitedly, the staff along his Westminster corridor indulged in confident chatter about the Tories’ desperation. None paused to consider that May had set off for a three-week holiday in the Alps, while no one told Corbyn that Glastonbury had employed seven hundred litter pickers on zero-hours contracts, about half of whom were prematurely fired before the end of the festival.
On 1 July, McDonnell’s ‘one million march’ through London attracted 20,000 people. His threat of a summer of strikes had not materialised. As usual, his predictions of imminent power were empty threats. But the momentum could not be slackened. To keep the comrades marching towards victory, Owen Jones exhorted: ‘There can be no going back … A retreat to Labour’s old formula would be a tragedy and a fatal mistake … Labour’s role is to tear down a bankrupt social order, not defend it.’ Three months later, the reality was still ignored at the party conference in Brighton. From the platform, McDonnell spoke as ever about ‘mobilising the counter-power – creating extra-parliamentary resistance – to lead a popular movement to retaliate against hostile private business, the City and the media’. To keep the pot boiling, he cried: ‘Comrades, we must win!’ To his way of thinking, the final triumph was only moments away.
16
Game-Changer
The tense standoff between Corbyn and his critics reignited in March 2018. The reason, once again, was his past.
On 4 March, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter Yulia were found near to death in a park in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Britain’s security services established that they had been poisoned by novichok, a chemical nerve agent. Scientists at Porton Down, Britain’s centre for chemical warfare, established that the poison had been manufactured in a secret Russian government laboratory. Britain’s intelligence services concluded that Skripal had been the target of an attempted murder directed by the Russian state.
On 12 March, Theresa May outlined those findings to the Commons. Two days later, she announced that the intelligence services’ conclusion, endorsed by the governments of Britain’s NATO allies, including President Trump, would result in sanctions being imposed on Moscow’s diplomats in London. The spotlight switched to Corbyn. How would the former Morning Star columnist respond? Automatically, he consulted Seumas Milne, and together they composed an ideologically watertight response.
British intelligence, Corbyn told the Commons, was unreliable. Considering their errors before the Iraq war, there was no reason to trust the scientists in Porton Down. He urged May not to ‘rush way ahead of the evidence’, but to take a ‘calm and measured’ approach. She must avoid a ‘McCarthyite intolerance of dissent’ against Russia that risked a ‘drift to conflict’ and a ‘new Cold War’. Resolutely, he refused to accept the Russian state’s involvement. Having cast doubt on Moscow’s culpability, he switched the blame onto the Conservatives for accepting £800,000 in donations from Russian oligarchs. Few were persuaded about the equivalence between Moscow’s attempted murders in Salisbury and shady money, but Corbyn’s prejudice would become even clearer a month later, after British intelligence reported that President Assad had launched a chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma. Just as with the Skripals, he accepted Russia’s denials of responsibility.
Corbyn’s ridicule of Britain’s security services came only weeks after the exposure by the Sun of his relationship in 1986 with the Czech intelligence officer Ján Sarkocy. Corbyn was portrayed as having been a Russian agent. Furious, he accused the press of publishing ‘lies and smears’, and threatened that once elected he would control the foreign ownership of Britain’s media. ‘We’ve got news for them,’ he warned Rupert Murdoch and others. ‘Change is coming.’ Portrayed as anti-British and pro-Russian, he watched as his poll ratings fell – and he was then hit by another demon from the past: the taint of his anti-Semitism.
With Corbyn’s blessing, Naz Shah’s suspension from the party had been lifted, and Ken Livingstone’s was about to expire without further investigation. Both were protected by Christine Shawcroft, who was responsible for the NEC’s disputes panel. All the allegations of anti-Semitism, Shawcroft had said, were attempts to ‘smear’ Corbyn. The Jews, she implied, were to blame. Livingstone’s fate was the litmus test of the NEC’s willingness to eradicate anti-Semitism. Corbyn gave the answer: ‘Ken has a right to be heard in his defence,’ he said, anticipating his ally’s return to the party.
By then, David Collier, an assiduous internet researcher, had
discovered Corbyn’s positive comments on websites which described Jews as stealing children to sell on the black market, and variously asserted that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and in Paris were orchestrated by Mossad to justify Western intervention in the Middle East.
Amid growing impatience about Corbyn’s protection of anti-Semites and the constant fear, particularly among female Jewish Labour MPs, of abuse, on 23 March Luciana Berger resurrected her unanswered query about Corbyn’s defence three years earlier of the anti-Semitic caricatures of bloodsucking Jews in ‘Freedom for Humanity’, the mural by Mear One in Tower Hamlets. Before he sent his commiserations to the artist, Corbyn must have asked himself why the mural was so offensive that the council had demanded its removal. A millisecond’s glance at it would have revealed the caricature of bloodsucking Jews. Clearly, Corbyn had not found the anti-Semitism offensive, or he would not have sided with the artist. Now he did reply to Berger. He had protested against the mural’s removal, he said, as it was an affront to the right of free speech. ‘I didn’t notice the anti-Semitism,’ he added. The Jewish community erupted. Repeatedly, said the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Corbyn had ‘sided with anti-Semites rather than Jews’. Corbyn ‘cannot seriously contemplate anti-Semitism because he is so ideologically fixed with a far-left world view that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities’. They continued, ‘At worst, it suggests a conspiratorial world view in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy.’
For Jews, Corbyn’s approval of the mural’s right to remain was the turning point. One lesson of the Holocaust had been the folly of Europe’s Jews in complying with the Nazis’ orders. With little resistance, they had walked into the ghettos, then obediently boarded trucks and trains for transport to their destruction. Since then, Israel’s survival in the face of Arab invasions had shown that Jews were not weaklings or cowards. Yet, because they had prospered, Israelis were blamed for all the Arabs’ tribulations – incessant wars, oppression, poverty and inequality. By approving Mear One’s mural, Corbyn had wrapped up the Arab world’s misfortunes and Palestinian rights as exclusively the fault of the Jews and their paymasters. That was a step too far. Britain’s usually reticent Jews decided a line had to be drawn.
An unprecedented demonstration was summoned outside Parliament on 26 March. By then, Corbyn had refashioned his excuse about the mural. ‘I sincerely regret,’ he said, ‘that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on.’ The thousand protesters heading for Parliament Square doubted him. They believed he had looked at the mural and seen no problem with its message – Jews were global financiers keen to exploit the world’s oppressed.
‘Enough is enough!’ chanted the crowd. The thirty Labour MPs and peers who stood among the demonstrating Jews knew the risk they were taking. Momentum activists in their constituencies would demand their deselection, and they could expect no support from Corbyn or the majority of the NEC. Among the MPs present were David Lammy, John Woodcock, John Mann, Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger.
Familiar voices defended Corbyn. Diane Abbott accused Jews of a ‘smear campaign’, and Chris Mullin, the former Bennite Labour MP, tweeted, ‘Sorry to see Jewish leaders ganging up on Corbyn.’ A Zionist mob, Mullin suggested, was causing grief to an innocent man. Ken Loach demanded that the thirty MPs who joined the demonstration should be ‘kicked out of the party’, and accused the Jews and MPs of weaponising anti-Semitism. All three were confident that they were speaking on behalf of the majority of Labour members. Eighty per cent, according to one opinion poll, believed that anti-Semitism in the party had been exaggerated to damage Corbyn. Israel, most believed, was a worse influence than Iran. Shocked by that hatred, Margaret Hodge, previously reluctant to recognise what was happening, accused Corbyn of having ‘allowed himself to become the poster boy of anti-Semites everywhere’. Anti-Semitism, she said, had only become legitimate in the party after he was elected leader.
To forestall further criticism, Corbyn wrote to Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies, and other Jewish leaders conceding the ‘hurt and pain’ caused by the anti-Semitism, and said he would ‘redouble’ his efforts to ‘bring this anxiety to an end’ so that Labour would ‘do better’ on the issue. He also invited Jewish leaders to meet him. ‘Jeremy is utterly committed to driving anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party,’ said his office while his staff sifted through his Twitter and Facebook links to remove any endorsements of anti-Semites. In advance of his meeting with the Board of Deputies, the Evening Standard published an article by Corbyn giving ‘an apology’ for ‘pockets of anti-Semitism’ in Labour. ‘My party and I are sorry for the hurt and distress caused,’ he wrote.
His ostensible regrets were undermined four days later. In a show of defiance, he celebrated Passover, the most important religious holiday in the Jewish calendar, at a dinner organised by Jewdas, a heretical group of vocal anti-Zionist Jews and deniers of the existence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. He embraced Jewdas, well aware of its description of Israel as ‘a steaming pile of sewage which needs to be properly disposed of’. That was the prelude to an unusual Commons debate in the late afternoon of 17 April. To embarrass Corbyn, the government decided to devote three hours to anti-Semitism, the first time the subject had been debated in Parliament’s history.
Quoting the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the communities secretary Sajid Javid set the scene by repeating his stark warning: ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again.’ Looking straight at Corbyn, Javid said, ‘Enough is enough.’ Thereafter, one MP after another stood to condemn Labour’s anti-Semitism. Many were reduced to tears as Luciana Berger ended her speech with the words of Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi: ‘An assault on Jews is an assault on difference, and a world that has no room for difference has no room for humanity itself.’ Soon after, Corbyn walked out of the chamber. He failed to hear Ruth Smeeth’s description of the hatred heaped upon her by his supporters. ‘The gallows would be a fine and fitting place for this dyke piece of Yid shit to swing from,’ one Corbynista had written. ‘Hang yourself you vile treacherous Zionist Tory filth, you’re a cancer of humanity,’ wrote another. Corbyn also missed Margaret Hodge declaring, ‘I have never felt as nervous and frightened of being a Jew as I feel today.’ Nor did he return to hear Diane Abbott’s summing up. She attempted to minimise her fellow Labour MPs’ suffering by equating it with the abuse directed at her, rebuked the Tories for making use of anti-Semitism in an attempt to gain ‘party political advantage’, and defended her friend: ‘Nothing is gained by accusing the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition of being an anti-Semite.’ She was ignored. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, ended the debate with a message directed at Corbyn: ‘He has an obligation to take action. We expect nothing less.’
One week later, on 24 April, filled with considerable doubts, Jonathan Arkush and his delegation arrived in Corbyn’s office. At the last moment, Seumas Milne had tried to change the terms of the meeting, suggesting a round-table discussion for the following day to include members of Jewish Voice for Labour, an anti-Zionist group that believed Corbyn was the victim of Jewish defamation. Setting up Jew to fight Jew suited Milne, but was vetoed by Arkush. The round-table discussion was abandoned.
Milne was in the room when the group arrived. On their previous visit, he had sat silently glowering at a separate table. This time he was positioned beside Corbyn, intending to participate. Jennie Formby, the party’s new general secretary, sat on the leader’s other side.
The pleasantries were brief. Then Arkush asked the blunt question: ‘Why do you portray Israel as a uniformly bad place? Why can you not acknowledge a single positive attribute?’ Corbyn looked at Arkush in silence, then in discomfort. He disliked being challenged. In a monotone, he replied from a prepared statement, suggesting, Arkush observed, that he was ‘too unemotional or intellectually incapable to understand the complaint that he had failed to combat anti
-Semitism. He did not engage, either to agree or disagree. He looked as if he was shrinking into a shell from which he did not want to come out.’
The conversation moved on to Israel’s fate. Arkush said he had noticed that Corbyn ‘approved the dictum “From the river to the sea” – the Palestinian state would extend from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean’. That meant the elimination of Israel. Corbyn did not comment. ‘He refused to say what would happen to the six and a half million Israeli Jews,’ recalled Arkush. ‘That didn’t seem to trouble him.’ He also drew attention to an inconsistency: ‘You’ve said that you believe in the two-state solution. That means you’re a Zionist.’ Corbyn looked shocked, but said nothing. ‘Zionism,’ Arkush continued, ‘is nothing more than the UN’s fundamental right of people to self-determination.’ In the exchange that followed, he noticed how, sitting with his head cupped in his hands, Corbyn appeared ‘bored, uninterested and condescending. He could not articulate any defence of ideological points of view, but he was going to hang on to them. He would not accept the legitimacy of the other side of the argument.’
Arkush’s thoughts were interrupted by Milne, who declared: ‘Israel is an example of ethnic cleansing. Israel was born in bloodshed in 1948.’ Labour, he implied, would not accept Israel’s right to exist. There would be no compromise. Corbyn nodded his agreement. Arkush was shocked. ‘Any definition of anti-Semitism must cover the slur that the creation of Israel was a racist project,’ he said. How, he wondered, would Jennie Formby respond to Milne’s outburst.