Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  The intensity of these political battles finally destroyed Corbyn’s marriage. Just before Christmas 1979, Chapman walked out of the family home. ‘He didn’t see it coming,’ said Toby Harris. Keith Veness agreed that Chapman ‘just gave up on him’. Nothing about Corbyn was an enigma. The monochrome was reality. As she packed her belongings, Corbyn told his wife, ‘You should read Simone de Beauvoir and never write your autobiography.’ Clearly, ever the non-reader, he had heard about de Beauvoir from someone, and had failed to understand the author’s philosophy. Women, de Beauvoir complained, were regarded as ‘the second sex’, and defined by their relationship to men. To rescue themselves, they should elevate themselves by exercising the same choice as men – precisely what Chapman had decided to do. Corbyn’s reference to her autobiography also jarred, because the flat was filled with boxes of leaflets, minutes of party meetings and newspaper cuttings – all kept, he explained, for when he decided ‘to write my memoirs’.

  Corbyn was exhibiting all the contradictions of an unresolved personality, disconnected from the real world. His self-portrayal as a universal ‘do-gooder’ was at odds with his inability to care for his wife, or indeed any female companion. He was quite incapable of understanding why his marriage had collapsed. ‘He thought I left him on a feminist kick,’ recalled Chapman, ‘but it was because I wanted some fun. His lack of emotional awareness didn’t change. My emotional life as part of a relationship was forgotten.’ Finally she realised that his judgement at the beginning of their relationship that she was ‘the best of the best’ was because ‘I was the only woman who admired him and would put up with his political obsessions’. There was no parting gift. ‘I got neither the dog nor the cat,’ said Chapman, ‘because I moved into a single room in a West Indian’s flat. I had nowhere else to go.’ Nearly twenty years later, Corbyn invited Chapman for tea in the Commons. ‘You should lighten up,’ he advised her, convinced as usual that he had been in the right. If anyone lacked a sense of humour, thought Chapman, it was her former husband.

  Shortly after his wife’s departure from Lausanne Road, Corbyn encouraged Keith Veness and another local party activist to join him in posting leaflets around a council estate and starting to canvass for the next local elections. At about 11.30 in the morning he announced, ‘We need to collect more leaflets,’ and drove them back to his flat. The three of them walked in to discover a naked woman on the bed. Diane Abbott, Corbyn proudly announced, was his new girlfriend. ‘He wanted us to see her in his bed,’ recalled Veness. ‘She was shocked when we entered.’ She had quickly wrapped herself in a duvet.

  Abbott was the antithesis of a white, middle-class English woman. Born to Jamaican immigrants in 1953 (her father was a welder, her mother a nurse), she went to a grammar school in London, then to Cambridge. As the first female black student from a state school at Newnham College, she enjoyed a hectic social life. Articulate and determined, she became firmly hard left, committed to the class struggle. She would always blame ‘the system’ for the educational failure of black British children, never their parents or her own community. After graduating with a lower second in history she was hired by the Home Office, but swiftly moved to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) as a race relations officer. Belying the human rights group’s name, her fellow employees rummaged through her desk and found her private diary. One entry recorded her sexual fantasy of being manhandled by her lover Corbyn, ‘a bearded Fenian and NUPE national organiser’, and also descriptions of a motorbike holiday with him around France and a passionate romp in a Cotswold field, which she described as her ‘finest half-hour’.

  Corbyn’s passion for Abbott ended any hope Jane Chapman might have had that their relationship could be restored. He had found a political soulmate who shared his anger at Callaghan’s treachery, regarded Britain as the country that ‘invented racism’, and echoed his praise for the IRA. ‘Every defeat for the British state,’ Abbott would say, ‘is a victory for all of us.’ Feisty and, in her early years, good-looking, Abbott persuaded Corbyn to change his habits to suit her, at least for a while: he enjoyed social evenings with her and friends at restaurants and dinner parties. ‘We had a working supper in our living room one time,’ recalls Barbara Simon. ‘Jeremy brought Diane, who didn’t come across as noisy and brash. She must have found the scene of two warring factions in Hornsey intimidating.’ Simon had equal sympathy for Corbyn: ‘Women were chasing him and he got trapped.’

  Despite his and Abbott’s sexual and political closeness, Corbyn spent Christmas Day 1979 alone. ‘What will you do?’ Toby Harris had asked him. ‘I’m going to the Suffolk seaside and letting my dog run along the beach,’ Corbyn replied. Others described his despair because there were no political meetings on Christmas Day, as he could not face his family.

  He returned to London to pursue his vocation – politics. As leader of Haringey council’s left-wing caucus, he could not be ignored. The safe option was to elect him chairman of the planning committee, a role without any budget. Unlike his predecessors, he did not attract even a suspicion of favouritism – he appeared wholly incorruptible. He refused all invitations for drinks with possible lobbyists, and would not even meet developers. His hatred of the middle class was as fervent as ever: he encouraged plans to build council blocks among private houses, and when people protested he dismissed them, scoffing: ‘The arrogance of all those doctors and lawyers, talking about the environment when what they’re scared of is black kids.’ To further spite Muswell Hill’s middle class, he allowed gypsy families to set up an encampment on local playing fields.

  Corbyn’s high profile locally was not mirrored across the capital. Only Ken Livingstone, a better speaker and a consummate networker, had the ability to take control of London’s left. After his defeat in Hampstead in the 1979 general election, Livingstone recruited Corbyn, Keith Veness and Ted Knight for ‘Target 82’, a secret timetable he submitted to the Trotskyist Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory (SCLV) to take control of the GLC after its elections in May 1981. After long discussions, their fellow members in the SCLV dismissed the plan. The Trotskyites, Livingstone grumbled, were ‘gross, grovelling toadies’ – a slightly odd insult, as one of his hobbies was keeping newts.

  ‘I’m pissed off with factional Trots,’ agreed Keith Veness. Like the other three, he wanted to concentrate on gaining political power rather than engage in internecine warfare, the usual fate of most far-left groups. Breaking with the SCLV, some time in 1980 Veness invited Livingstone, Knight, Corbyn and Bernie Grant to his Highbury home, and together the group created a new cadre, London Labour Briefing. ‘We’re an open conspiracy to get rid of the right wing,’ Corbyn declared. ‘It’s a two-stage insurgency,’ added Veness. ‘First grab control of the GLC, and then Thatcher’s government.’ The first step towards Target 82, they agreed, was to take over the London Labour Party and secure the nomination of fellow Trotskyists as Labour candidates in the GLC election. Acting to a strategy outlined by Trotsky, the minority would eventually make itself a majority. Trotsky himself, wrote the historian Robert Conquest, was ‘a ruthless imposer of the party’s will who firmly crushed the democratic opposition within the party and fully supported the rules which gave the ruling group total authority’. Abiding by those tactics, the Target 82 group agreed to remove their enemies as quickly as possible, consolidate their control, and never give it away.

  The launch of London Labour Briefing was staged at the GLC’s headquarters in County Hall. It attracted two hundred people, and was regarded by Livingstone, its prime organiser, as a ‘great success’. Like all such groups, Briefing’s credibility depended on publishing a newspaper. ‘Even if it’s not read,’ said Veness, laughing, ‘we’ve got to have one.’ The editorial board of the weekly news-sheet included Corbyn as the group’s general secretary, the reliable dogsbody prepared to undertake the unglamorous chores. Their aim was to deselect moderate Labour councillors and take over constituency parties, which would vote for Tony Benn as Labour l
eader when Jim Callaghan, as was expected, resigned. In the alphabet soup of initials of the rival left-wing groups, London Labour Briefing was affiliated to the London Representation Committee (LRC), a group chaired by John McDonnell, a member of Liverpool’s Trotskyite Militant Tendency. The LRC urged ‘mass extra-parliamentary action’ to disrupt the economy, and published hit lists of Labour MPs it described as ‘traitors’. McDonnell openly enthused about riots as the precursor to an uprising. That difference did not prevent him and Corbyn bonding during the endless meetings favoured by the left.

  In their joint cause, Corbyn eagerly began to organise his supporters in Hornsey to force out his enemies. He particularly targeted Douglas Eden, not least for his having mocked him as ‘public-school-educated’. ‘It was a grammar school,’ Corbyn told the Hornsey Journal, adding that it was ‘now happily a comprehensive’. This was another small untruth. The school remained fee-paying for selected children. If it burnished his left-wing credentials, Corbyn was still willing to lie about trivialities.

  Chairing the inquiry into Eden’s loyalty, Corbyn allowed the social democrat to speak in his own defence for forty-five minutes – then promptly announced his expulsion. Eden protested to Reg Underhill, Labour’s national agent at party headquarters, that he had been ‘hounded out by Corbyn’. Underhill, who was leading the hunt against Trotskyist infiltration, notified Haringey’s branch secretary that she had failed to follow the proper procedures, and the inquiry should be reheld. Unabashed, Corbyn started the expulsion process again, with the same result.

  Eden’s fate was replicated across London. As moderate members were forced out of the party, Corbyn, Knight, Livingstone and McDonnell were elected to the national executive of the London Labour Party, and immediately began the deselection process of moderate councillors who had been put forward as candidates for the May 1981 GLC elections. Under the banner of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, every candidacy was to be openly contested, ostensibly to allow greater democracy but in fact to allow the left to take over. This would, to use Tony Benn’s catchwords, transform Labour into a ‘pluralist grassroots party of the masses’, one that would exclude dissenters, especially social democrats. In Brent East, where Livingstone hoped to snatch the parliamentary nomination from a moderate MP, he, like Corbyn, had forged close relations with immigrant groups by pledging to remove the restrictions on migrants settling in Britain. In return, over a hundred Asians – many of them unable to speak English – were enrolled as party members in the constituency and obediently voted against Livingstone’s rivals. A similar pattern emerged in Islington. ‘If voting changed anything,’ sniped one moderate, ‘they’d abolish it.’

  Livingstone asked Corbyn if he planned to stand in Haringey for the GLC, and was surprised when Corbyn said he did not. As a full-time NUPE official, he explained, he would find it difficult to attend the GLC’s daytime meetings. The truth was different. Corbyn was sceptical about joining an authority with limited powers, and was still harbouring his secret ambition to become an MP. His allies were unaware that because of his extremism he had already been rejected as the prospective parliamentary candidate in Enfield North. Next, he had unsuccessfully applied in Croydon, but a chance encounter in the Croydon party’s headquarters with his old friend Val Veness, who was also applying for the seat, changed his life. ‘I didn’t realise you wanted to be an MP,’ she said. ‘I might be able to help you. But it’s got to be kept secret.’ Keeping secrets had never been a problem for Corbyn.

  For years, Keith and Val Veness and their claque had been trying to remove Michael O’Halloran, the Labour MP for Islington North. Despite being accused of corruption and incompetence, O’Halloran had allegedly been installed, then protected, by ‘the Murphia’, the local Irish mafia. O’Halloran accused the Venesses of bombarding him and his family with personal abuse in their attempts to hound him out. In the standoff, the Venesses had agreed with their group that if O’Halloran were removed, none of them would seek the nomination to replace him. The left therefore needed a candidate to counter any moderate applicants. Secrecy, they decided, was essential if they were to outwit their opponents. When Livingstone persisted in his attempts to secure Corbyn’s nomination to the GLC, he was told sharply by Val Veness, ‘Keep your hands off our candidate.’ He backed down, accepting Corbyn’s promise that he would work tirelessly to execute the coup at the GLC and also act as the agent for Kate Hoey, a member of the Marxist IMG, to win the Labour GLC nomination for Haringey.

  During that frantic period of plotting, Corbyn paid little attention to Diane Abbott, who by then was working as a TV producer in London. ‘She was noisy, ambitious, lefty and overweight,’ was Jonathan Aitken’s impression during their encounters in the television world. In her excitable manner, Abbott fretted that Corbyn and Chapman were still meeting each other at Haringey council. Chapman recalled a ‘nervous, tense and slightly hostile’ Abbott knocking on her door one evening, and when Chapman answered making her demands clear.

  ‘Get the hell out of here,’ said Abbott. ‘You’re in the media and everywhere and I want you out of town.’

  ‘I can’t,’ replied Chapman. ‘I’ve been elected to office.’

  Abbott was clearly disgruntled.

  Later, Chapman explained, ‘She wanted a clear run. I was in the media a lot then because of my political work and she wished I wasn’t.’ Abbott was also fed up with Corbyn’s way of life; just as he had ignored Chapman, he was now ignoring her. Although she had enjoyed many relationships, none had led to as intense a friendship as she now had with Corbyn, but that too was failing. At twenty-seven, she wanted marriage and eventually children. Corbyn wanted neither.

  One morning, Bernie Grant called Keith Veness. ‘Diane’s had enough of Jeremy. She’s moving out. Come and give us a hand.’ Veness arrived at Lausanne Road in a large van. The flat was strewn with papers and clothing. ‘It’s hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn’t come home for two weeks,’ said Abbott defensively. She, Grant, and Veness set about packing away her things. Suddenly the door opened, and in walked Corbyn. ‘Hello, mate,’ he said to Grant. Then he saw Veness carrying out Abbott’s possessions. After hearing why the two men were there, he walked away without comment; he was off to a meeting, he said. Appalled by the way Abbott, a fellow child of the Caribbean, had been treated, Grant chased after Corbyn. ‘Get real,’ he said, knowing full well that Corbyn remained insult-proof, and would certainly feel no guilt. Later Corbyn would recall, ‘Diane always says to me, “You learned everything you know in Shropshire, and unfortunately you’ve forgotten none of it.”’

  In his political life at least, Corbyn was feeling empowered. Inflation was still rising, and Tory cuts were causing high unemployment and widespread distress. Daily, he would rush off to join picketing strikers or anti-government marches through another city centre against cuts and apparent Tory heartlessness towards the sick and unemployed. In March 1980, convinced that Labour’s 1979 election defeat could be reversed by direct action, Corbyn and twelve other left-wing Haringey councillors urged Robin Young not to bow to government pressure to limit rises in the rates in order to control inflation, then running at 14 per cent. Young refused to act illegally, and set a 36 per cent increase, a phenomenal hike, but insufficient for Corbyn, who wanted nearer 50 per cent, and refused to support the Labour council. Young had no illusions about the forthcoming encounter: ‘Corbyn built his own Berlin Wall and stood on the other side. He introduced hatred and divisions between us. He got it so that the left would not speak to the right, and after that battle we barely spoke. He hated anyone who didn’t subscribe to his view. He wanted them out.’ In the vote over the rates increase, Corbyn led his group of thirteen fellow-travellers to side with the Tories. The Labour moderates won – just. ‘They were pretty horrible people,’ recalled Young, but he did not dare discipline his rival. Two months later the group made a renewed attempt to oust Young, and again failed.

  By then Corbyn’s relationship with
Tony Benn had become unusually close. ‘Benn would come to love Corbyn as his son,’ reckoned George Galloway, a twenty-six-year-old Dundee-born Marxist and a rising star in the Scottish Labour Party. Corbyn was devoting much of his time to supporting the ambitions of Benn, who embodied the aspiration of many idealistic young socialists, for the party leadership. For Benn, corporate capitalism was incompatible with democracy, and formed the main threat to civilised life, a philosophy embraced by Corbyn. At Labour’s Blackpool conference in September 1980, Benn won a vote in favour of unilateral disarmament and cowed Jim Callaghan into allowing the mandatory reselection of MPs, a critical part of the strategy of ‘democratising’ the party. The left was gaining power.

  Popular discontent about early Thatcherism created fevered excitement among Corbyn’s associates, who believed that the government was heading towards a cliff edge, with the cabinet divided over her abandonment of the post-war consensus. Losing public support, and even her customary self-confidence, Thatcher was expected by the left to capitulate to their demands. Instead, she turned defiant. At the Tory party conference she scolded: ‘To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.’ That phrase had been written for her by Ronald Millar, her speechwriter and a well-known playwright.