by Tom Bower
‘You’ve gone too far,’ he told his friend. ‘You sounded like George Osborne. Just read the Guardian’s report.’
‘We need to be credible,’ McDonnell replied, defending himself. Corbyn’s purism, he said, was harming the party’s chances of winning an election, and he urged him to fashion a deal with the Blairites. Diane Abbott, present as always to protect Corbyn, interrupted. Any change, she said, was unacceptable. McDonnell switched to immigration. To win more votes, he said, Corbyn should be less strident. Abbott interrupted again. On principle, she always disagreed with McDonnell – violent Trotskyists did not appeal to her – and on immigration she agreed with the new party line: no compromise. Corbyn was implacable. Their argument would continue until McDonnell surrendered. ‘From now on, clear your speeches with Corbyn’s office,’ he was told.
To compensate for his shadow chancellor’s equivocation, Corbyn stiffened his own speech, a team effort drafted by Milne, Coleman, Simon Fletcher and others, with an appeal to fight ‘the forces of repression’. Despite the party’s splits and the unconvincing brave faces of defeated Blairites on the platform, the mood of his audience was buoyant, and surprisingly receptive to the message that Britain was on the brink of disaster. The Tories were blamed for stagnating wages, dismal productivity, falling living standards and a growing deficit – up from £820 billion in 2010 to £1,500 billion in 2014: ‘Some people have property and power, class and capital and even sanctity,’ he told his followers, ‘which are denied to the multitude.’ The audience’s standing ovation confirmed him in his righteousness, even if some murmured that the Conservatives had little to fear.
Steeped in the ways of Islington politics, Corbyn had for years represented people without savings and with low life expectancy. Less than 30 per cent of his constituents owned their homes, compared to over 65 per cent across the rest of the country. ‘The British people don’t have to take what they’re given,’ he repeated – six times – in his speech. He was thinking of the refugees in his borough, threatened by cuts to their benefits. Six weeks earlier, three thousand migrants, mostly from Libya, had attacked fences guarding the entrance to the Eurotunnel near Calais, causing thousands of lorries to be stranded in Kent and France. David Cameron had described the migrants as a ‘swarm’ across the Mediterranean; and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, cautioned that Europe could not protect itself from millions of ‘marauding’ African migrants who posed a threat to the Continent’s standard of living and social structure. Outraged by such ‘inflammatory’ and ‘scaremongering’ language, Corbyn told his cheering audience to open their hearts to unrestricted immigration as ‘nothing but a plus’.
Instinctively, he could not resist praising Venezuela as ‘a cause for celebration’. Hugo Chávez’s devastated country remained his model of a socialist idyll, glorified since the dictator’s death in 2013. By following Chávez’s path, he told the conference, Britain would be transformed. Not surprisingly, he omitted the latest effects of Chávez’s populism: unemployment in Venezuela was rising, and as the government printed money to finance ‘investment in infrastructure’, inflation was heading towards 1,000 per cent. Immersed in a cycle of power cuts and rationing, Venezuela’s hospitals had run out of medicines, infant mortality was rising, queues formed at 3 a.m. for basic food, and there was not even lavatory paper. Despite possessing the world’s largest oil reserves, the country was being plunged into penury. As Margaret Thatcher said, ‘Eventually, socialists run out of other people’s money.’ Corbyn ignored the evidence of Venezuela’s spiral into darkness. Socialists, he repeated, must never flinch from the struggle. He had apparently forgotten his own homily, preached about fifteen years earlier: ‘We should never forget our history, and learn from it.’
Sticking to the faith, he spoke about restoring Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution, to achieve ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, and an end to the private ownership of shops. Supermarket chains should be replaced by people’s collectives. No one dared question his future agenda. They were focused on his more immediate plans, some of which they did not approve. The unions vetoed his promise of a debate about Trident, and others forced him to abandon an Iraq ‘apology’ by pointing to the hostility to such a move in opinion polls.
Then there was the continuing problem that Corbyn was an exceptionally poor speaker. During the unusually hectic preparations for his speech, he had been assured by Milne that the headlines would focus on his offer of socialism through ‘a kinder, gentler politics’. His address, however, received very different coverage. ‘As a piece of oratory,’ commented the Guardian, ‘it lay somewhere between mediocre and abysmal.’ The Tory media dismissed Corbyn’s familiar ramble; but unexpectedly, after the Mirror’s editor met him for thirty minutes, the newspaper tempered its criticism and predicted that the new Labour leader could one day be prime minister. The next opinion poll showed the opposite: Cameron was 24 per cent ahead. Tellingly, in 1980, one year after her first general election success, Margaret Thatcher’s party had been 24 per cent behind Labour in the polls. Those who assumed Corbyn must feel vulnerable were mistaken. Journalists who were allowed to meet him during those days mentioned his ‘arrogance’. He made no attempt to seduce or charm people he regarded with contempt. That particularly included journalists. All British newspapers, he judged, if not Donald Trump’s ‘enemies of the people’, still peddled lies. He left Brighton combative, besieged, truculent.
The Tories, arriving in Manchester for their conference eager to celebrate the election of the first Conservative majority government since 1992, were relishing Labour’s self-inflicted wounds. Diehard Tories could not understand the attraction of returning to the gruelling 1970s. Defeating Corbyn at the next election, wrote Tim Montgomerie in The Times, ‘should be a cakewalk for the Tories because the middle class has too much to lose’. Few at the Manchester gathering understood the Labour leader’s appeal to the millions of disillusioned people struggling against ‘in-work’ poverty, or that younger voters were untroubled by Corbyn’s refusal to push the nuclear button.
Any Tory joy was anyway short-lived. The delegates became disheartened by George Osborne’s promotion of the government as ‘the builders’, with a social programme to reduce inequality. Pushing Labour to the left was clever politics in a city without a single Tory MP or councillor, but it confirmed that Tory beliefs were unclear. ‘I’m not a deeply ideological person,’ Cameron had said in 2005, casting doubt on his principles. That doubt remained.
In his keynote speech, the prime minister played the patriotic card. After excoriating Corbyn’s description of bin Laden’s death as a ‘tragedy’ equal to the tragedy of over three thousand people in New York being murdered by terrorists, Cameron warned: ‘We cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.’ He was politely cheered. His oratory did not embarrass Corbyn, who was simultaneously addressing a demonstration in the same city. On the contrary, Corbyn’s youthful audience bonded with him over their shared hatred of the establishment. Earlier that day, some of his audience had screamed ‘Jewish Tory scum!’ at delegates entering the rival conference. Others had sent online abuse to Blairite MPs, especially women. ‘Kill yourself, you bigoted scum,’ Jess Phillips was told. Corbyn stayed silent. Letting others attack his enemies was a win-win tactic. But to keep their support, he decided, required him not to betray his supporters by compromising his faith. On that score, appearances were critical.
As leader of the opposition, he was to be sworn in as a privy councillor. That required him to kneel in front of the monarch and swear ‘by Almighty God to be a true and faithful servant unto the Queen’s majesty’. As a republican, he believed that the monarchy should be abolished when the Queen died. His office told the palace that he refused to take the oath, an unprecedented snub. Instead of arriving at the palace on the appointed day, he authorised a spokesman to disclose that he had a ‘pr
ior engagement’ – at his wife’s insistence, he was on a walking holiday in Scotland.
However, unless he took the vow, he was ineligible to receive top-secret security briefings. One week later, he agreed to a compromise: he would swear the oath without kneeling, and would kiss the Queen’s hand. Contrary to his pledge before his election, he also accepted a government car and a £58,000 pay rise.
He still had his principles, however, and drew the line at wearing the white tie and tails required for a state dinner at Buckingham Palace for President Xi Jinping of China. McDonnell and Seb Corbyn were summoned. ‘You’re the leader,’ said McDonnell. ‘We can’t have arguments about things that don’t matter.’ Seb joined in: ‘We’ve got a case to be made to the British public. We can’t be diverted by these trivia.’ At first the great leader was implacable. ‘No,’ he said. ‘People would say that I’ve sold out to the establishment.’ But gradually his resistance was worn down. A tape measure was produced and an aide, Gavin Sibthorpe, was dispatched to hire the necessary outfit.
‘I’ll wear it if I can cycle to Buckingham Palace,’ said Corbyn defiantly.
‘You can’t,’ said an aide, ‘because there won’t be enough time. You’re meeting Xi first, and the dinner follows after that. You can’t get back and change.’
At the last moment, Corbyn fell into line. Six months later, he showed he had learned his lesson, and effusively congratulated the Queen in the Commons on her ninetieth birthday.
In anticipation of the Labour leader’s meeting with Xi, the Chinese ambassador had visited Corbyn’s office at Westminster to be briefed. Corbyn, he was told, wanted to raise human rights and steel-dumping. On the day, both issues were duly raised, but Xi’s inscrutable face gave Corbyn no clue as to whether he was being taken seriously. Xi must have been perplexed by his explanation of Labour’s ‘future direction’. Thanks to its embrace of capitalism, China was now remarkably prosperous, yet Corbyn intended to abandon capitalism, the foundation of Britain’s wealth.
Laura Corbyn had played no part in the ‘white tie’ saga, but now she stepped in on the matter of her husband’s wardrobe. On her orders he appeared at prime minister’s questions in a dark suit, a clean light-blue shirt bought at House of Fraser, and a red tie. His beard was trimmed. That November, dressed to look like the other attendees, he wore a red poppy to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph, and sang the National Anthem. The result was mixed. In the next opinion poll the Tories were at 37 per cent, with Labour just five points behind; but Cameron’s approval was at 41 per cent and Corbyn’s at 22. The poll results coincided with the formal appointment of Seumas Milne as Labour’s director of communications and strategy. His arrival had been complicated by lengthy negotiations over his pay-off from the Guardian, and the question of his new title. Charming and pleasant as a colleague, he was proudly inflexible as a Labour theoretician.
Milne introduced ideological discipline to Corbyn’s office. Suspicious of Neale Coleman and Simon Fletcher, he objected to their nomination of Sarah Owen as Corbyn’s political secretary. Her two supporters had chosen the soft-left former adviser to Alan Sugar to build bridges between Corbyn and three crucial groups – MPs, moderate trade unions and the NEC. Milne persuaded Corbyn and McDonnell to appoint Katy Clark, a hard-left bruiser, instead. Clark was expected to reach out to the party’s leftist hard core and to distrust the rest. To assist her, Corbyn appointed the Trotskyist Andrew Fisher, who was advised to delete blogs describing his enthusiasm for violence.
Clark’s arrival aggravated the office chaos. Meetings arranged to start at 9 a.m. were delayed because no one arrived until eleven, and some staff, without explanation, did not come to work at all. ‘They were lazy and pissed on £100,000 a year,’ said a member of Corbyn’s team. If, by chance, sufficient numbers had arrived by midday, the next hurdle was to find Corbyn. People were dispatched around Westminster, calls made and scripts prepared. The leader, his aides discovered, lacked the mental agility to chair a meeting without a clear brief of what he was to say. In an attempt to end the shambles, Simon Fletcher listed a series of topics to be discussed before the end of October. Every one of them would still be outstanding the following February. The problem was not helped by the stubborn refusal of Nicolette Petersen, Corbyn’s personal secretary, to move into his new office. She liked her old one, and Corbyn refused to order her to move: demanding obedience was still foreign to him. To some, sanity prevailed only when Laura Corbyn arrived with food and dispensed sympathy to those with complaints. Although not knowledgeable about politics, she understood her husband’s way of life and his inability to care for his staff.
The prospective rebellion against Corbyn simmered until, just two weeks after the Brighton conference, moderate Labour MPs exploded. The cause was McDonnell’s announcement – on Corbyn’s orders – to reverse his support for the government’s budget. Without explanation, McDonnell committed Labour to borrow-to-spend, the old Gordon Brown strategy. He also denounced Labour MPs who voted to deny welfare benefits to illegal immigrants. Over twenty of them refused to go along with McDonnell’s somersault. ‘Embarrassing, embarrassing,’ he had to admit in the House. ‘A shambles,’ said a moderate MP at the next PLP meeting, conjuring the image of McDonnell drunkenly lurching from pillar to post. ‘You’re like a student union president,’ Ian Austin rebuked Corbyn. ‘Being a leader means you have to lead.’
11
The Purge
Labour’s moderates were reluctant to propose an alternative leader until they were confronted by the ultimate moral quandary – a question of life and death. In the aftermath of more atrocities in Syria, a number of Labour MPs intended to support the government’s proposal to bomb the perpetrators. To prevent more suffering, argued Jo Cox, the British Army should intervene, as it had in Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. As an opponent of the army, Corbyn replied that he would never support military action. The establishment struck back. General Nicholas Houghton, the chief of the defence staff, declared on TV that if the Labour leader became prime minister he would worry about the credibility of Britain’s deterrence. Corbyn protested at Houghton’s prejudice. ‘It is essential in a democracy,’ he said, ‘that the military remains politically neutral at all times.’ Constitutionally, he was right – except that since he was an extra-parliamentary agitator himself, his stance was hardly convincing.
Four days later, his position became more difficult. At 9.51 p.m. on 13 November, a Reaper drone guided from Nevada fired a Hellfire missile over Raqqa in northern Syria, seven thousand miles away. The target was Mohammed Emwazi, alias ‘Jihadi John’, a British Muslim member of ISIS who had boasted on video about beheading two British hostages. Emwazi was vaporised. Cameron described the death of the ‘barbaric monster’ as ‘self-defence’. The spotlight switched to Corbyn. He had never publicly expressed any outrage about Emwazi’s crimes, and two years earlier had called drone strikes against ISIS fighters ‘an obscenity’. Executing those murderers, he believed, was wrong. Now he repeated that killing Emwazi was obscene, and ‘the ultimate in sanitised warfare’. (It was unclear what was wrong in making warfare sanitised.) Bringing him back to Britain for trial, he said, would have been ‘far better’.
‘Look,’ tweeted the Labour MP Ian Austin, with deep sarcasm, ‘why couldn’t the police go and arrest Emwazi? It’s not as if it’s a really dangerous war zone and I’m sure he’d have come quietly.’
The ridicule bounced off Corbyn. If only the imperialist West had not interfered in Muslim countries, he said, there would be no bloodshed. ‘A succession of disastrous wars,’ he planned to say at a conference, ‘has increased, not diminished, the threats to our own national security.’
On the eve of making that speech, late on Friday, 13 November, he was told that a Muslim group had carried out a series of attacks in Paris, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds more. Ninety had died while attending a rock concert at the Jewish-owned Bataclan theatre. Among the dead were the disabled, shot while immobilised in their w
heelchairs. Corbyn’s first response was to complain that the massacre was getting more media coverage than the effects of a simultaneous bomb blast in Beirut. Some were surprised by his reaction. After twelve journalists were slaughtered in the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015 for publishing a derogatory cartoon of Mohammed, Corbyn had tabled a motion in the Commons expressing his sympathy for the journalists. Ten months later, he had evidently had second thoughts. After hearing details of how the French police had shot dead the seven Muslims responsible for the Paris murders, he sat through a series of meetings over the weekend to consider his response. ‘We needed time to think hard about how to look sensible,’ recalled an adviser. Charlie Faulkner, Angela Eagle, Hilary Benn and other shadow cabinet ministers were summoned. By Sunday night Corbyn finally announced, ‘We must condemn the attack and go to the French embassy to show solidarity.’
The following day, Seumas Milne arrived at the office. Corbyn, he declared, must do the circuit of TV studios in Millbank. Corbyn obeyed, but, unwilling to disappoint his supporters, in his fifth successive interview, he vented his true feelings on the BBC: ‘I’m not happy with the shoot-to-kill policy. Surely you have to work to try and prevent these things happening.’ Shooting gunmen, he said, even as they killed innocent people, was ‘quite dangerous’, ‘counter-productive’, and would lead to ‘war on the streets’. The real blame, he continued, lay with the West’s interventionist wars. Western imperialism had produced ‘the people’s poverty’ in Muslim countries, and, he implied, it was the West that was to blame for the mayhem in Paris. At Scotland Yard, police chiefs questioned whether Labour was on their side. ‘Has it not come to something,’ Cameron asked the House of Commons, ‘when the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is not sure what the police’s reaction should be when they are confronted by a Kalashnikov-waving terrorist?’ There was no obvious solution to Corbyn’s predicament. Although the invasion of Iraq, and other Western wars in the Middle East, had undoubtedly caused damaging repercussions, his extreme inflexibility lost him credibility. Accordingly, his demand for an apology from Cameron was ignored.
