Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Shortly after, Keith Veness and his wife Val confronted the same thoughtlessness. Claudia, who had come from a middle-class family used to a certain degree of comfort, was always complaining about the shortage of money.

  ‘I’ve told Jeremy that he should stop being an MP and get a well-paid job,’ she confided.

  ‘What can Jeremy do to earn more money?’ Veness asked.

  Val added, ‘The miners get much less than Jeremy.’ But Claudia, she realised, did not appreciate her husband’s hair-shirt lifestyle. She had even wanted a cleaner, but Corbyn had vetoed that. Did Claudia have bourgeois tendencies, Val wondered.

  None of Corbyn’s constituents could have imagined the tension when he arrived at meetings with his family to speak about Ireland, a subject of no interest to Claudia. By contrast, he had a self-proclaimed (if questionable) passion for Arsenal Football Club. Claudia was worried about hooliganism at the team’s home matches at Highbury, while Corbyn, according to Keith Veness, regarded the game as ‘crude and awful’, and much preferred not to go. So Veness took Corbyn’s sons to matches, while their father went to political meetings.

  ‘Jeremy wasn’t interested in football,’ recalled Veness, contradicting Corbyn’s boast of passionate support for Arsenal. ‘Except, that was, on Cup final day.’

  By late 1996 the marriage was all but over, and with nothing left in common, the two had drifted apart. To Corbyn, Claudia’s list of complaints was familiar. Ever since 1967, when he had met Andrea Davies, his first girlfriend, at the Telford Young Socialists, a succession of women had made the same observations: he never changed his ways, and he rarely thought about them. Throughout the years he wore the same shabby clothes, ate the same bland food and stuck to the same political convictions he had begun to absorb in Jamaica, where he had spent fifteen months as a teenager in the 1960s. Admirers hailed his inflexibility as proof of his uncompromising principles, and to some the purity of his other-worldliness was endearing. Detractors blamed his limited intelligence and lack of education for his failure to appreciate others. On his own account, amid a constant round of demonstrations, speeches and political manoeuvres, he claimed to avoid causing any personal insult. Further, to avoid criticising any of his partners, he would insist that politics was about ideas, not personalities.

  Reg Race had helped him realise his first political dreams in the early 1970s. Ever since, Corbyn had trusted his advice, especially once his friend became the financial supremo at the Greater London Council (GLC) during Ken Livingstone’s turbulent reign in the 1980s. But as they forged a bond on the left of the Labour Party, Race had discovered Corbyn’s ignorance about the bureaucratic requirements of government, and his simple-mindedness about finances. While the committed revolutionary strove to challenge powerbrokers across the world on behalf of the oppressed, he seethed about any personal criticism in his own home. With so much to hide, he condemned any revelations about himself as abhorrent.

  However, on the day in 1996 on which Race described Corbyn’s financial crisis, the focus was entirely on him. Even if a rich benefactor had volunteered to pay off all the debts (and that was improbable), he would soon have fallen behind again. He had little choice, Race told him, but to sell the family home. Claudia agreed. Reluctantly, so did Corbyn – and thereafter broke off his relations with Race. The messenger was to blame. After this experience, Race questioned Corbyn’s character and his propriety to influence the direction of the Labour movement.

  In early 1999 the Corbyns’ home was sold for £365,000 (£730,000 today), and they downsized to a house in Mercers Road, a shabby street in Tufnell Park, off the Holloway Road. On the day of the move, Corbyn was told by Claudia to empty the fridge. He forgot. He also forgot to clear the garage. Late in the afternoon, while their former home’s new owner, dressed in a camelhair coat, fumed on the pavement, the garage door was opened to reveal rubbish crammed to the ceiling. Corbyn had regularly picked wood from neighbourhood skips, and also collected railway junk as he criss-crossed the country on trains. Boxes of safety lamps, metal signs, track signals and other paraphernalia had been stuffed in any old how. Late in the day, everything was finally shuttled across to the basement of Mercers Road, creating a new world of clutter.

  The move brought one advantage. The building had been converted into bedsits, making the estrangement between Claudia and Corbyn easier. She and their three sons took the top floors, where she lived with a young South American dubbed ‘the toy boy’, while Corbyn, in the basement, had relationships with a series of younger women.

  The couple’s estrangement was kept secret for almost two years. Late in 1999, while Corbyn was at a peace conference in The Hague, a journalist contacted Claudia and asked whether the two had separated. Instead of telling the complete truth, she explained that their twelve-year marriage had ended in 1997. She said that she had wanted their eleven-year-old son Ben to go to Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Barnet, but that Corbyn had stipulated that he should go instead to Holloway School, a local comprehensive notorious for achieving, for three successive years, the worst GCSE results in the country, and listed as ‘failing’ by Ofsted, the office for standards in education.

  From The Hague, Corbyn confirmed Claudia’s account. Defending his ideological purity against selective schools, he implied, was more important than his son’s education – or his marriage. To avoid being branded a hypocrite, he said he preferred his son to be badly educated than to be given an unfair advantage. Labour’s Islington council, he knew, despite receiving additional government funds, had failed to improve Holloway. The school was plagued with discipline problems and classes in which up to twenty languages were spoken, the white pupils being especially disadvantaged.

  In a series of interviews, Claudia reinforced the same message. ‘My children’s education is my absolute priority, and this situation left me with no alternative but to accept a place at Queen Elizabeth Boys’ School. I had to make the decision as a mother and a parent … It isn’t a story about making a choice, but about having no choice. I couldn’t send Ben to a school where I knew he wouldn’t be happy.’ To the public Corbyn appeared to have acquiesced in his wife’s wishes, but, like so many communists, he had put his political principles first, and ended the marriage: he could not live with a woman who did not accept his beliefs. The only dent to that image of ideological purity was Claudia’s revelation that Corbyn had agreed for another of their sons to spend two years at the local Montessori nursery, at £600 per term.

  If that had been the last word on the subject, the notion that the marriage had broken up over Corbyn’s principles might have been plausible. He favoured, he said, France’s strict laws on the privacy of public figures’ family lives – laws which have been exploited to conceal rampant corruption among French politicians, including former presidents. But Claudia, possibly with Corbyn’s encouragement, went further. ‘He is first the politician and second the parent,’ she said. ‘He definitely felt it would have compromised his career if he had made the same choice that I did. It’s very difficult when your ideals get in the way of family life … It has been a horrendous decision.’

  Sixteen years later, the whole tale was expanded. Rosa Prince, Corbyn’s semi-authorised biographer, described, with Bracchitta’s help, a tormented family: ‘Corbyn and Bracchitta went round and round in circles for months. She would not send Ben to Holloway School and Corbyn could not bear for him to go to Queen Elizabeth’s … In choosing Queen Elizabeth’s, Bracchitta was aware that she was ending her marriage … Once again, Corbyn had put politics above his relationship.’ That version is clearly incorrect. The marriage ended because of Corbyn’s behaviour – his financial incompetence, his thoughtless absences, his neglect of his family and his apparent misogyny. ‘He told me that the marriage had ended long before the school bit,’ Ken Livingstone recalled. ‘We had a chat at the time and he said his marriage had fallen apart over other things, not the school.’ Like Reg Race, Livingstone had discovered that Corbyn’s ‘a
uthenticity’ was fictitious – a confection for political appearances. He had posed as a man who refused to sell out, albeit he was never heard to advocate higher standards of teaching.

  The posturing became even more apparent in July 2016, one year after Corbyn became Labour’s leader. He appeared in a televised interview with the novelist and poet Ben Okri. The premise was Corbyn’s love of literature, but this was totally fabricated. He had only ever read very little. Equally misleading was his declaration: ‘You have to be honest with people. You have to say what you believe to be the truth. If you hide the truth you are very dishonest.’

  Up to the present day, Corbyn has concealed or distorted the nature of his close relationships, his personal life and his prejudices. The communists understood the value of those Lenin called ‘useful idiots’ – the well-intentioned idealists in the West who blindly supported the Soviet agenda. Lenin also mastered one critical ruse to grab public support. ‘A lie told often enough,’ he said, ‘becomes the truth.’ He had gone on to adopt Dostoyevsky’s wise observation in Crime and Punishment: ‘They lie and then worship their own lies.’ Considering his long involvement with Corbyn before his ambition to lead Britain materialised, in 2018 Reg Race made a measured judgement about his former friend. Realising that Corbyn was guilty of that same deception, he concluded, ‘He’s not fit to be leader of the Labour Party, and not fit to be Britain’s prime minister.’

  1

  Rebel With a Cause

  The Corbyns could trace their roots in England back to the eighteenth century and beyond. Farmers, priests, a tailor, a chemist and a solicitor conformed to a traditional middle-class background which in 1915 produced David Corbyn. David met his future wife Naomi Josling in 1936, at a meeting about the Spanish Civil War, when both were twenty-one-year-old students at London University. Naomi was studying science.

  On 4 October that year Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, organised a march through London’s East End to assert his power. Met with fierce opposition by socialists and local inhabitants, the ensuing ‘Battle of Cable Street’ entered folklore, especially among British Jews, as an example of their resilience. According to Jeremy Corbyn, David and Naomi’s fourth son, both his parents were present at the famous confrontation, in which 175 people were injured. Those who later met his parents have cast considerable doubt on this claim. Similarly, Corbyn would boast that his father considered volunteering to fight in Spain, but that is also unlikely. Neither parent was an adventurer: rather they were hard-working, intelligent professionals. Their son, it appears, added Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War to their life stories to camouflage his comfortable middle-class roots.

  David Corbyn, a skilled engineer, was employed by Westinghouse Brake & Signal Co., a British manufacturer of electrical devices used by the railways. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, his then employers, English Electric, moved their factory to the West Country, to avoid German bombs. The family settled in Chippenham, a historic market town between Bristol and Swindon. David’s income increased, and he was able to buy a large stone house surrounded by a garden, fields and woods in Kington St Michael, a village three miles north of the town. In that pleasant environment, Corbyn’s three older brothers were born – David, Andrew and Piers. All of them were clearly intelligent: David would become an electrical engineer and Andrew a mining engineer, while Piers pursued his childhood hobby to become an acknowledged weather expert.

  By the time Jeremy was born, on 26 May 1949, the Corbyns owned a car, an unusual luxury in the immediate post-war years, but the whole family dressed scruffily, and were renowned for their unconventional lifestyle, not least because in a Tory area both parents were members of the local Labour Party. In that era there was nothing unusual in socialists sending their children to private primary schools to guarantee a good education and success at the 11-Plus exam. Indeed, most of the ministers in Clement Attlee’s Labour government had been either privately educated or sent to grammar schools. Nor was it unusual that the Corbyns moved to another area after their second son, Andrew, failed his 11-Plus. He successfully re-sat the exam and entered Haberdashers’ Adams grammar school in Newport, Shropshire. Jeremy would follow him there four years later. The family’s new home, Yew Tree Manor, a five-bedroom seventeenth-century farmhouse, was exceptionally luxurious compared to that of most families, who struggled through post-war austerity with shortages of food and fuel and urban winter smog. Living an unconventional, slightly chaotic lifestyle, Naomi Corbyn, a grammar-school maths teacher, maintained a vegetable garden, while her husband converted their garage into a workshop where he would turn wood and build toys and carts.

  The four sons were not detached from political or literary life. Naomi read modern fiction and contemporary history, and gave her youngest son a collection of George Orwell’s essays for his sixteenth birthday. Jeremy never claimed to have read them, although in 2016, he said he had been influenced by The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a novel written in 1910 by Robert Tressell, the pseudonym of Robert Noonan, a house painter. The book describes the politically powerless underclass in Edwardian England, and its ruthless exploitation by employers and by the civic and religious authorities. Corbyn’s reference to the novel fitted his narrative after he became Labour’s leader, but in truth, as a teenager he did not read any literature. Rather, he sat in his bedroom poring over Ordnance Survey maps of the surrounding countryside and gazing at a world atlas, dreaming of future journeys. In the corner was a hand-operated Gestetner duplicator, used to produce leaflets for the local Labour Party. By that time he was already a political animal.

  At school, he was regarded as an outsider. Unlike his three elder brothers, he was a poor student, uninterested in sport, insouciant and gauche. ‘He was not noticeably clever,’ recalled Lynton Seymour-Whiteley, his finely-named Latin teacher. Striking out against the school’s mainstream, Corbyn joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Young Socialists at Wrekin’s Labour Party, and the League Against Cruel Sports, the last an unusual show of contrariness in a Tory shire famous for hunting and shooting. Considering that the school motto was ‘Serve and Obey’, his refusal to join the Combined Cadet Force, and instead to hoe a vegetable plot, was principled defiance, and a singular reason for being remembered. In 1967 he sat his A-Levels, passing two exams with a grade E, and failing the third. With no chance of following his three brothers to university, he risked being marooned in Shropshire. On his last day at school, John Roberts, the headmaster, harshly predicted that fate: ‘You’ll never make anything of your life.’ In embarrassment, his mother would later tell people that it was her youngest son’s poor handwriting that had prevented his getting to university. Without any status, he was a downstart. He came to loathe achievers, especially undergraduates with ambitions to get to the top, disdained those who enjoyed material wealth, and showed little respect for religion. Most of all he hated the rich and successful, and identified with losers. In his self-protection he became conspicuously stubborn.

  He drifted into odd jobs for nearby farmers and a local newspaper, but his main focus was to organise the Wrekin Young Socialists. May Day in 1967 was marked by taking a home-made red banner to the top of the nearby Wrekin hill, tying it to the trig point and singing ‘The Red Flag’. Soon after, the Young Socialists held their annual dinner at the Charlton Hotel in Wellington. Clean-shaven, Corbyn arrived in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, looking like a typical middle-class teenager. Except that he faced an uncertain future.

  His salvation was his parents’ suggestion that he apply to join Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), a Foreign Office initiative funded since 1958 to send young male volunteers to work in Britain’s former colonies for £12 pocket money per month and free board and lodging. Most recruits were graduates, not eighteen-year-olds with poor A-Levels. Corbyn’s luck was to be sent as a ‘cadet teacher’ to Kingston, Jamaica. He was contracted by VSO to stay on the island for two years. On 28 August 1967 he boarded a
BOAC Boeing 707 with about thirty other volunteers for the twelve-hour flight.

  The contrast between Shropshire and Kingston was dramatic. Jamaica had become independent in 1962, but that had done little to change the extreme divisions between rich and poor. ‘It was impossible not to be influenced by the gulf between the iconic haves and the have-nots,’ recalled Michael Humfrey, the head of the island’s Special Branch. ‘That would certainly have affected Corbyn deeply.’ The ‘haves’, especially the twenty-one families who dominated the island, lived in luxury, while the ‘have-nots’, who inhabited three areas about a mile from Corbyn’s school – known as Dunkirk, Tel Aviv and McGregor Gully – survived on a subsistence diet, without mains water or electricity, under zinc roofs resting on cardboard walls. The gap was aggravated by racism – whites at the top, followed by the Lebanese and those with light-brown skin, known as the ‘high browns’, then the Chinese, with blacks at the bottom. Jamaicans, quipped the locals, had ‘an eye for shade’.

  Corbyn was based at Kingston College, an elite grammar school for 1,600 fee-paying and scholarship pupils. Contrary to his version, the college was not in a ‘deprived’ area, nor in this period did he, despite his assertion that he was known throughout the school as ‘Mr Beardman’, grow a beard. Contemporary photographs show him mop-haired and clean-shaven, and none of his pupils or fellow teachers recalls him with a beard.

  His one task was to teach Caribbean geography four times a week to third-form boys, all of whom had passed the 11-Plus, in classes of about thirty-five. Later, he would exaggerate that there were seventy pupils in his class. ‘It was a really defining moment of my life,’ he would say, ‘because I was thrown in at the deep end as an eighteen-year-old.’ He kept ahead by the time-honoured ruse for beginner teachers of reading the textbook in advance of the lesson, then reciting it. In years to come, he would not admit to the school’s elite status. Dissembling further, in January 2018 he told GQ magazine that he had been ‘working at schools and theatres and taught polio-stricken children in camps for the victims’. In truth, he worked at just the one school, helped with a single production in one theatre, and only briefly appeared at one camp for polio victims. There was a charity for such children attached to the town’s university, and a local organiser recalls ‘one white man helping’, but did not identify him as Corbyn. His only job was to teach. Years on, he would boast that his experiences taught him to control a crowd and to deal with a crisis. His students recall the opposite.