Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Isolated in his office, Corbyn feared that he was ‘being pushed off his pedestal’. That night, Monday, 16 November, there was silence as he entered the PLP meeting. Blaming the West for Muslim poverty when Arab dictators had squandered trillions of dollars of oil revenues over the previous sixty years was too rich for most Labour MPs. Asked three times whether he would in any circumstances approve drone strikes in national self-defence, Corbyn refused to answer. Finally he replied that he would need to read the legal advice. However, if a massacre like that in Paris occurred in Britain, he would refuse to authorise the police to shoot to kill. Nor would he support bombing ISIS in Syria. The MPs erupted. Desks were banged, and Corbyn was shouted down. ‘You’re a fucking disgrace!’ one Member yelled. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable,’ Hilary Benn told his father’s one-time protégé, ‘to shoot to kill where there is an immediate threat to life.’

  Corbyn’s sole defender was shadow employment minister Emily Thornberry, who epitomised those who snobbishly mocked the white working class. She didn’t help. ‘It’s like a virus taking the party over,’ said one mutinous MP after leaving the committee room.

  Corbyn was supported by the Stop the War Coalition. On its website, the group described the Paris attack as ‘reaping the whirlwind of Western support for extremist violence in the Middle East’. When asked about that statement on BBC TV, Corbyn replied: ‘I wouldn’t use that language’ – but he did endorse the sentiment. To John Woodcock, the Labour MP for Barrow and Furness, Corbyn’s stance was the same as ‘blaming the Jews for their deaths under the Nazis’. Corbyn, his face impassive, was unwilling to make any concession. Moral predicaments were alien to a Trotskyist. Events would not reduce his sympathy for any Muslim seeking to defeat the West. In his mind, force should never be used to stop the objectives of IRA, Palestinian or ISIS terrorists. Yet, at Milne’s request, Stop the War’s description was removed from the website – not because it was wrong, said Andrew Murray, but because of ‘how it could impact on Jeremy’.

  Murray, Len McCluskey’s chief of staff, had been a committed communist from a young age, and his admiration of Russia remained undimmed. He had invited Boris Kagarlitsky, a Putin spokesman, to address a rally on 27 August 2014, at which he denied any Russian involvement in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine the previous month. Kagarlitsky also denied the presence of any Russian troops in Ukraine, or indeed any Russian interference in the country. Since Milne sympathised with that opinion, he found no difficulty in arranging for Murray’s employment as an assistant in Corbyn’s office along with Andrew Fisher. Ostensibly, the two appointments were intended to improve efficiency, but in reality the party had reached a new crossroads. At Corbyn’s request, only trusted communists and Trotskyists would be employed in his office to manage the PLP. All that stood in the way of a complete takeover was the party’s National Executive Committee. In a desperate last gasp, Blairite MPs demanded that the NEC investigate Fisher. Ken Livingstone was outraged: ‘The people driving this are trying to undermine the leader who has just been elected, and that’s completely unacceptable.’

  At that moment, in advance of Iranian-armed Hezbollah troops invading Aleppo in north-western Syria, Russian planes were bombing militias opposed to President Assad – or, as the Morning Star reported, the city was being ‘liberated’. Rebel positions, including hospitals, were hit by napalm, chlorine and barrel bombs (a crude device consisting of an oil drum filled with explosives, typically dropped from a plane or a helicopter). Defending Russia, Milne accused critics of diverting attention from American ‘atrocities’ against ISIS. His ‘moral equivalence’ was shared by Corbyn, who opposed any reference to ‘Russian aggression’ in the party’s briefing notes. Peace, he said, depended on Russia’s victory and ‘opposing the West’. If Assad were defeated, Corbyn and Milne feared, a pro-American, pro-Israeli government would take over in Damascus. Both discounted the anger of exiled Syrians living in Britain towards the supporters of Assad’s war, and both depicted the fundamentalist jihadists as resistance fighters. Neither would consider any compromise with Labour MPs, who Corbyn ruled would be denied a free vote, while the party would also oppose Britain bombing ISIS. His edict raised the temperature. Two years earlier, before the first vote about bombing Syria, Corbyn had preached that ‘A free vote is the right thing to do.’ Now, his fellow MPs fumed, the rebel was demanding their loyalty. Corbyn’s habitual mutinies had been tolerated because he was of no consequence. Now the leader was rebelling against his own party – a battle to be won.

  On 17 November, MPs gathered in the Commons to hear David Cameron speak about the Paris murders. To indicate that he would not be cowed by the surrounding hostility, Corbyn sat slumped on the front bench, looking at his mobile phone and yawning ostentatiously. ‘You do not protect people by sitting around and wishing for another world,’ said Cameron. Behind the scenes, in a display of his influence, Milne explained that Corbyn would support shoot-to-kill if it were ‘proportionate and strictly necessary’. Of course, that was not necessarily true – but the impression of his advisers struggling to accommodate their leader’s noble principles did not harm Corbyn, although every step was fractious, especially on that day.

  A ceremony had been arranged at that night’s football match between England and France at Wembley to honour the victims of the Paris massacre. Corbyn turned down his invitation from the Football Association. ‘I’ve promised to attend a residents’ AGM in Islington,’ he said, ‘and I won’t let them down.’ Whether he was genuinely concerned for his constituents or unsympathetic to the French victims is uncertain. ‘They’d want you to go [to the match],’ said Seb of his Islington constituents, despairing that his father did not understand a leader of the opposition’s duties. Twenty minutes before the deadline, Corbyn finally agreed to attend.

  Within hours, that concession was eclipsed on the news by his appointment of Ken Livingstone to review the party’s policy on Trident submarines. By then Livingstone had retired from front-line politics to care for his young children while his wife studied to become a teacher. A few warned Corbyn about the danger of entrusting the ex-London mayor with any authority. His reputation as a politician was mixed. Some applauded him as a charismatic populist adept at exploiting situations by telling people what they wanted to hear: ‘Consistency is grossly overrated,’ Livingstone had once said. Others on the left disliked his propensity for evasion. Tony Banks and John McDonnell, Livingstone’s former allies at the GLC, had long ago labelled him a ‘dodgy politician’ and a ‘cynical manipulator’. ‘He’s clever enough to deceive people without them knowing it,’ Banks had observed. Corbyn did not agree. ‘Ken,’ he said, ‘is disliked because he’s famous outside Parliament. There’s a personal loathing of Ken that isn’t rational.’ With that, he set aside Livingstone’s reputation as a loner and opportunist who joined his own gang, not other people’s. He felt sure that he could trust his old colleague, and did not disown Livingstone’s controversial public statements: that Western propagandists had lied about Stalin’s murders of millions of innocent people; or that Tony Blair, rather than the four Muslim bombers, was responsible for the deaths of fifty-two people in London in July 2005. At the end of a brief conversation the two men agreed that Livingstone’s defence review would recommend the cancellation of Trident and Britain’s withdrawal from NATO.

  Corbyn’s loyalty, however, was soon tested. Kevan Jones, the shadow minister for the armed forces, criticised the appointment. Livingstone instantly retaliated: ‘I think he might need some psychiatric help. He’s obviously very depressed and disturbed. He should pop off and see his GP.’ Jones had spoken publicly about suffering depression. ‘It doesn’t matter what disorders he’s got,’ scoffed Livingstone when asked to apologise for his ‘gravely offensive’ slur. Eventually, he did show limited contrition, only to explain a few hours later on a TV appearance with Jones that he had apologised only because Corbyn opposed ‘all the offensive backstabbing and rows’. John
Mann weighed in, telling Livingstone ‘You’re an appalling bigot’ on his live LBC radio show. Corbyn was unmoved, not least because he shared Livingstone’s disdain for Mann and Jones, both of them ‘red Tories’ destined for removal by Momentum. And contrition had no place in an outright battle for power.

  Moderate MPs hated McDonnell even more than they did Corbyn. The latest investigations had produced evidence of the shadow chancellor’s endorsement in April 2015 of the disbandment of MI5, special police officers and the armed police. At first McDonnell robustly denied making that pledge, but his lie was exposed by a photo showing him smiling to the camera and standing by a placard published by the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory which was committed to abolishing MI5 and the military. The revelation put more pressure on Corbyn.

  Under the headlines ‘Corbyn’s Leadership Explodes’ and ‘Corbyn’s Nuclear Nightmare’, the media predicted that he wouldn’t survive. According to Philip Collins in The Times, ‘The end of his leadership is now only a question of when, not whether.’ ‘So this is what it looks like when a political party dies,’ wrote Dan Hodges in the Daily Telegraph. ‘It’s no longer a question of “if” but “how”, not “whether” but “when”,’ agreed Rachel Sylvester in The Times, describing the terminal breakdown of trust between Corbyn and his MPs. ‘This is definitely the end,’ wrote Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph. Even Len McCluskey criticised Corbyn for failing to give proper leadership and instead perennially saying the first thing that came into his head.

  To add to Corbyn’s plight, George Osborne laid an ambush. In his autumn statement, the chancellor unexpectedly hit Tory voters by increasing taxes on businesses and councils, increasing government spending and cancelling cuts to tax credits. The lurch to the left took McDonnell by surprise, but rather than changing his script, he mocked Osborne in the Commons for wooing China in the hope that it would invest in Britain’s new nuclear power stations. In a theatrical gesture, holding aloft Mao’s Little Red Book, he advised the chancellor to read it before selling state assets to Chinese corporations. He then tossed the book over the dispatch box. Osborne laughed, but McDonnell was serious. Labour MPs were stunned by the unvarnished exhibition of his communist ideals. At Corbyn’s request, Diane Abbott waded in. Mao, she said, deserved praise for ‘doing more good than harm’. Endorsing a dictator responsible for the deaths of an estimated seventy million Chinese deepened the divisions among Labour MPs and the gap between Corbynistas and the electorate. The Tory lead over Labour increased to 15 per cent.

  The crisis of Corbyn’s credibility was discussed at a meeting of the NEC. Patrick Heneghan, the party’s election guru, explained that Labour’s white working-class voters were unhappy about their leader’s refusal to sing the National Anthem, meet the Queen, and even to protect them from terrorism. The result would be a loss of seats in the May council elections, particularly in Scotland. That judgement was disputed by Kezia Dugdale, the youthful new leader of Scottish Labour. Although overwhelmed by popular support for the Nationalists, she saw hope for a limited recovery. SNP politicians were proving to be dishonest, and were failing to manage schools, the police and the construction of housing. But instead of supporting Dugdale, Corbyn gave the impression of not caring. He had refused to visit Scotland during the independence referendum in 2014, made careless mistakes about the ownership of Scottish railways and the defence industries, and encouraged Momentum to batter the moderate Dugdale for her failure to embrace the far left’s agenda. There could be no compromise with the right wing. To Labour MPs he seemed on a death mission – but they were in for a surprise.

  Towards the end of November, Heneghan’s message and the humiliations at Westminster were neutralised by a YouGov poll which found that Corbyn’s popularity among Labour members had increased to 66 per cent, while less than 20 per cent said he should resign. The chance of a putsch was reduced. Dutifully, the NEC asked MPs to show their loyalty. The effect of that request was to be judged on 26 November. The litmus test was Corbyn’s attitude towards ISIS.

  In the Commons, Cameron set out the case for bombing Syria: ‘We do face a fundamental threat to our security. We have to hit these terrorists in their heartlands right now.’ But he had his own rebels: twenty Tories threatened to vote against the government. The prime minister needed Labour support.

  ‘My socialist heart opposes war,’ Corbyn replied. The public, he knew, preferred non-involvement, and some agreed that Tony Blair should be prosecuted at The Hague for his role in the invasion of Iraq.

  ‘I’m accused of being a war criminal for removing Saddam Hussein,’ replied Blair, ‘who by the way was a war criminal – and yet Jeremy is seen as a progressive icon as we stand by and watch the people of Syria barrel-bombed, beaten and starved and do nothing.’

  Labour MPs were split. ‘Inaction has a cost in lives,’ Hilary Benn told Corbyn.

  The stakes were raised by Diane Abbott’s intervention. In his absence she entered Corbyn’s office and sat behind his desk. Once he returned, she demanded that he impose a three-line whip against the bombing. He agreed. To make sure that he did not waver, she announced on the spot that she would appear on TV to announce Labour’s opposition. ‘She squished Labour into a corner on it,’ recalled an eyewitness.

  Hilary Benn was appalled. Rather than be forced to bow to Abbott’s demand, he told Corbyn, he would resign as shadow foreign secretary, a threat he followed up with other sharp messages. ‘What will my friends think?’ Corbyn asked repeatedly, uncertain whether he should impose a three-line whip or allow a free vote. Unwilling to debate further with his MPs, he continuously asked Milne how he should reply to Benn’s numerous notes to him. Any answer was complicated by Milne’s habit of rewriting Benn’s memos before Corbyn saw them. Infuriated by such interference, Benn arrived in Corbyn’s office for face-to-face shouting sessions with Milne. With their disagreement unresolved, the battle escalated to a personal confrontation between Benn and Corbyn. Corbyn became noticeably tense, grinding his teeth as sweat formed on his brow. The appointment of Benn, he realised, had been a terrible mistake. Not only was he a destabilising influence, but his aide Imran Ahmed, Corbyn fantasised, was organising a plot to remove him. Ignoring Benn’s denials and protests, Corbyn declared that the death of innocents was preferable to compounding the West’s invasion of Iraq and the original sins of colonialism. ISIS, he repeated, should be asked to negotiate ‘a ceasefire’. Refusing to destroy the murderers put his fate once again on a knife-edge. In turn, Benn was warned by McCluskey not to ‘play with fire’ and attempt to stage a coup. But at least Benn did not resign.

  Much should have depended on Tom Watson, the deputy leader. In 2006 he had become famous as a ruthless fixer for successfully plotting on Gordon Brown’s behalf to accelerate Tony Blair’s resignation. That reputation had recently unravelled after glaring errors of judgement. He had generated national newspaper headlines by asserting that ‘clear intelligence’ existed of a ‘powerful paedophile network’ in Westminster, involving child abuse, torture and murder by politicians and other establishment figures. Among the many named as paedophiles by Watson’s now discredited source were former Tory home secretary Leon Brittan, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and Edward Heath. All his allegations would prove to be entirely false, the product of malicious fantasists. Those gross defamations marginalised Watson’s threat to Corbyn that a whipped vote on Syria would provoke a revolt by dozens of MPs. ‘It is the leader who decides,’ Corbyn told BBC TV, satisfied that his critics were fragmented. And as for his decision? ‘I will make up my mind in due course.’

  Contrary to his promise in September, Labour’s policy would not be decided by discussion. Abbott again insisted that Corbyn impose a three-line whip: a free vote would signal weakness. To mobilise support, the Stop the War Coalition pronounced that ISIS embraced the spirit of ‘internationalism’. The ISIS militia who threw gays off roofs in Raqqa, said Corbyn’s allies, were no different to the socialist volunteers who had fought in Spain
against Franco. Extreme events required extreme remedies. Corbyn was not troubled by equating socialists with Muslim fanatics, nor was he concerned by Momentum’s new round of threats. Those MPs disloyal to him, Momentum made clear, would find ‘no hiding place’, and would face compulsory reselection. To tone down these comments, Corbyn told Channel 4 News: ‘Any selection, reselection or deselection is at least three years away.’ Few were persuaded by that reassurance in the countdown to the Syria vote, set for Wednesday, 2 December.

  ‘Very draining,’ admitted a member of Corbyn’s inner circle over that weekend. On Saturday, Corbyn was unwilling to telephone any of the rebels. Personal persuasion had never been his style: everyone, he assumed, was as stubborn as himself. Milne insisted that Benn should face an ultimatum: surrender or resign. But before Corbyn left his home for Westminster on Monday morning, Milne admitted that their position was weak, and that instead of threatening Benn they might need to fashion a compromise. Outside Corbyn’s house was a group of journalists. ‘You’re very rude, the way you behave,’ he barked at the mute photographers. Stepping into his official car, he was clearly nervous.

  He entered the shadow cabinet meeting at 2 p.m. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he told his enemies around the table. Every MP would have to decide whether to obey the whip or risk deselection. ‘Disgraceful!’ shouted one voice. ‘You can’t throw us to the wolves!’ exclaimed Andy Burnham. A number demanded that Corbyn not impose the whip. Abbott urged him to fight on. Rather than face more abuse, he abruptly got to his feet and left the room. Back in his office, he emailed MPs and party members that he opposed ‘bombing Syria’. His choice of words was deliberately distorting. Cameron was proposing only to bomb ISIS positions, not the Syrian population in general. But Corbyn’s enemies kept pressing. Once again McDonnell persuaded him that nothing would be gained by staging an open fight at that moment. The reality of a large-scale rebellion was confirmed by Rosie Winterton, the chief whip, and by the end of the afternoon Corbyn capitulated. His surrender unleashed the cyber bullies to spew a barrage of hate on the internet against the rebel MPs. The compromise worked out with Benn was straightforward: Corbyn would open the debate, explaining his opposition, while Benn would speak at the end to support the government.