by Tom Bower
‘Are you rolling?’ Corbyn asked the journalist. ‘We’re going to do a short piece which I’ll record,’ he continued, ‘then the microphone will be turned off and then there’ll be some pictures of our beautiful faces.’ Reports about the transition of a contrived but customary photo opportunity in the leader’s office into chaos did not surprise Lewisham East MP Heidi Alexander. ‘Whenever he appeared on TV to explain Labour’s position,’ she reflected some weeks later, ‘the result was confusion or despair.’ At shadow cabinet meetings, she observed, Corbyn would read out his position from a typed sheet of paper. ‘I hated being part of something so inept, so unprofessional, so shoddy.’ Good people recruited to his office soon left. ‘It was a joke.’ Corbyn rejected her criticism. His method, he explained, was to listen and summarise the conversation: ‘It’s a style she might be misreading.’
The following day he returned to the Commons for prime minister’s questions. The fury in the Labour ranks behind him had intensified. Several Labour MPs muttered loudly that he had voted leave. After Corbyn mentioned the referendum result, the wounded Cameron told the House, ‘I know the Honourable Gentleman says he put his back into it. All I can say is that I’d hate to see him when he’s not trying.’ Then, genuinely angry about Corbyn saying that the result would cause workers insecurity and poverty, he snapped, ‘It might be in my party’s interest for him to sit there – but it’s not in the national interest. And I would say: “For heaven’s sake, man, go!”’
Few politicians could have withstood such vitriol. Corbyn returned to his office and again contemplated resigning. Over the following hours, McDonnell kept him hostage. ‘No matter how bad it gets,’ he would later say, ‘determination is what you need. We’re doing something we’ve been working for thirty, forty years of our lives. And this opportunity has come. We didn’t expect it. But now it’s come we’re making the most of it.’ As he often did, he quoted the left-wing Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, this time his adage ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’
To destroy wealth and established power, Gramsci had written, socialists should ignore the state and Parliament, and attack the ruling elite. As students of revolutionary history, McDonnell and Milne resolutely discounted surrender as an option. They took comfort from knowing how the Bolsheviks had suppressed many rebellions before establishing their authority. By the evening, Corbyn, without apparent irony, issued a statement attacking the 172 MPs as disloyal. The snap response from the majority was unapologetic: he himself had voted against Labour 617 times since 1983, and had supported Tony Benn’s attempt to overthrow Neil Kinnock in 1988. The loyalty of the 172 was to their constituents and the 9.4 million Labour voters, many of whom would refuse to back the current leader. In his riposte, Corbyn quoted the support of 248,000 party members. It was a stalemate, with still no Labour moderate daring to make an issue of either Corbyn’s Marxism or his anti-Semitism. Instead, their fire was directed at John McDonnell.
Until Corbyn’s election as leader, McDonnell had never concealed his appetite for revolution. He interpreted even moments of average turmoil as a prelude to Armageddon. ‘This is a classic crisis of the economy,’ he had told a group after a bank failure back in 2013, ‘a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation. For Christ’s sake, don’t waste it. You know, let’s use this to explain to people this system is based on greed and profit and does not work. We’ve got to demand systemic change. Look. I’m straight. I’m honest with people. I’m a Marxist.’ His audience had cheered. Three years later, a recording of the speech emerged. To his face on BBC TV, Tory MP Anna Soubry accused McDonnell of being ‘a very nasty piece of work’. Dressed in his adopted banker’s uniform – blue suit, white shirt and tie – McDonnell soberly protested that his announcement of his communist leanings ‘was a joke’, and not for the first time denied that he was a Marxist. His audacity was noteworthy. Earlier that year he had told the New Yorker in a joint interview with Corbyn that although neither of them wanted to totally destroy capitalism, he did admit that one weapon they would use would be a wealth tax. ‘People have had enough of neoliberal economics,’ agreed Corbyn in the interview. ‘They don’t want to live in an unequal society any more.’ Marxism, they volunteered, was the answer. But now, under siege, both men denied their core beliefs. Repudiating them had become critical to Corbyn’s survival.
At that moment, few understood that Corbyn himself was the issue. Rather than draining the swamp, he had brought it with him. Among the many stains blighting his past was his subscription between 2013 and 2015 to ‘Palestine Live’, a Facebook page popular among Holocaust deniers. Noted for its vicious anti-Semitic statements, it was just one of forty virulently anti-Zionist accounts Corbyn was following. His interest had been raised by his secretary Nicolette Petersen. In 2010 she had been instructed to submit to Palestine News a guide of how to deselect Labour candidates and MPs who were ‘friends of Israel’.
Corbyn believed that Zionists were a malign influence across the world, but would not accept that his anti-Zionism had blended into anti-Semitism. Commissioning Shami Chakrabarti’s investigation was intended to uphold that conviction and smother the backlash. The reason for her investigation had been complaints about at least ten explicit anti-Semitic attacks on Labour MPs and Labour supporters by party members. She decided not to investigate a single case. Rather, she described them as ‘unhappy incidents’. To dilute any criticism even further, she refused to define anti-Semitism. Unusually for a lawyer, she avoided the distinction between justified criticism of the Israeli government’s policies and the overtly anti-Semitic conflation of Jews, Zionists and Israel. She also deliberately discounted the adoption of the internationally approved definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in May 2016. ‘I thought we should set the bar higher,’ she said later. By those limitations, she effectively ignored the left’s demonisation of Zionist Israel.
Towards the end of her inquiry, she interviewed Corbyn. ‘I put to Jeremy the list of people he had met and shared platforms with in the past,’ she would say, ‘and he had good answers. He was searching for peace and trying to get reconciliation.’ She concluded that his anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitic, but only passionately supportive of Palestinian rights. Faced with accusations by Luciana Berger and many other Jewish MPs and peers that her inquiry was biased, she would reply that while she would not judge Berger, she did not know if she was ‘conflating’. It was an odd choice of word. Berger could have accused Corbyn of anti-Semitism, Chakrabarti was suggesting, just because she disliked Corbyn. In other words, she was ‘weaponising’ anti-Semitism. While criticising Berger, Chakrabarti asserted her own purity: ‘I wouldn’t work for Jeremy if I thought he was anti-Semitic.’
As she was writing her report, Chakrabarti discussed her conclusions with Milne – but she would deny that he vetted or influenced her. ‘In Shami’s opinion,’ recalls an insider with the authority of a witness, ‘she had delivered what Milne required to end the dispute. But she had failed to grasp the seriousness of the Jews’ despair. She was out of her depth.’ In the opinion of Jews who personally claim to have experienced Milne’s ill-treatment of them, as well as of non-Jewish eyewitnesses, Chakrabarti ignored Milne’s insensitivity – she would say that he did ‘not have a visceral hatred of Israel and is not anti-Semitic’. Either way, her investigation was over, her job done. Milne assured Corbyn there was nothing to fear.
On 30 June, near the Aldwych in central London, Corbyn stood beside Shami Chakrabarti as she introduced her report to a hall packed with his supporters. Watching from the side were Milne and members of Momentum, and scattered among the audience were a small number of Labour MPs. In the spotlight stood Chakrabarti, smiling as she was congratulated by Corbyn. He had good reason to be relieved. She had reported that although there was ‘occasionally a toxic atmosphere’, Labour was not ‘overrun by anti-Semitism’. To reach that conclusion she made n
o mention of Corbyn calling Hamas and Hezbollah his ‘friends’, ignored the Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone controversies, and disregarded Josh Simons’s four-page account of repugnant comments by Corbyn’s advisers. ‘Thanks very much for this,’ she had emailed Simons. ‘I’ll take this very seriously.’ His evidence was ignored. To complete her work, she incorporated only an anodyne part of Jan Royall’s report on Oxford’s Labour Club, and did not cite Royall’s conclusion of finding ‘clear’ evidence of ‘the ancient virus of anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. With those omissions, Chakrabarti absolved Corbyn of any responsibility, recommended that any future suspensions from the party be kept secret, ruled out lifetime membership bans, and declared that any Labour Party members who were guilty of anti-Semitism should not be disciplined.
At the end of her brief speech, Corbyn spoke. ‘Our Jewish friends,’ he said, aware of the implications of his comparison, ‘are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those self-styled Islamic state organisations.’ In equating Israelis with ISIS, Corbyn was clearly stating that the barbaric atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists were no different from violence committed by Israelis against Palestinians, albeit that the brutalities were authorised by a democratic state in which Palestinians served as members of parliament and as judges in the supreme court, studied alongside Jews in universities, and were treated in the same hospital wards.
Before Corbyn had finished speaking, the former chief rabbi Lord Sacks accused him of spouting ‘pure anti-Semitism’. Considering Labour’s ‘recent troubles’, said Sacks, ‘it shows how deep the sickness is in parts of the left of British politics today’. Any comparison of Jews and ISIS terrorists, he continued, was ‘demonisation of the highest order, an outrage, unacceptable’.
Among those seated in the hall was Ruth Smeeth, the Jewish Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, while standing in the aisle nearby was Marc Wadsworth, a Momentum member. Wadsworth was handing out a press release calling for the deselection of MPs – ‘traitors’ – opposed to the leadership. He refused to give a copy to Smeeth, as in his opinion she ranked among the party’s enemies. Her treachery was ‘proven’ when she asked a Daily Telegraph journalist seated next to her to read out the press release. To Smeeth’s surprise, Wadsworth snapped at her that not only was she ‘working hand-in-hand’ with the right-wing media by speaking to the journalist, but she was also a Jew. Smeeth burst into tears. ‘I was attacked,’ she said later, ‘by a Momentum activist and Corbyn supporter who used traditional anti-Semitic slurs to attack me for being part of the media conspiracy.’ As the hapless MP visibly struggled with her emotions, the insult was compounded when, at the end of his presentation, Corbyn walked through the audience and greeted Wadsworth. ‘I outed Smeeth,’ Wadsworth told him proudly. ‘Bloody talking to the Torygraph.’ Glancing at Smeeth, Corbyn saw that she was in tears, shared a laugh with Wadsworth, and walked out of the hall.
In the days after that incident, Smeeth received thousands of abusive messages, including death threats. ‘It is beyond belief,’ she later said, ‘that someone [i.e. Wadsworth] should come to the launch of a report on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and espouse such vile conspiracy theories about Jewish people while the leader stood by and did absolutely nothing.’ In his own defence, Corbyn said that he had been misunderstood.
Shami Chakrabarti agreed. Presenting herself as a bridge between Corbyn, the party and his critics, she drew comfort from his supporters, especially a small, vocal group of anti-Zionist Jews. Allegations that Corbyn was anti-Semitic, they said, were ‘smears against the leader’. Few Labour MPs offered support to Smeeth. Fearful of a backlash from Muslims in their constituencies, many did not want to risk deselection.
Beyond Parliament, within hours of the report’s publication Chakrabarti’s reputation was being shredded, partly on account of her failure to consider that Corbyn had not vocally opposed the forced segregation of Muslims at party meetings. She had also ignored male Muslim officials refusing to allow women to be selected as Labour candidates in at least two constituencies. In later interviews, including on the BBC’s Today programme, she would expose her poor understanding of anti-Semitism by failing to robustly condemn those who disputed Israel’s right to exist. Further allegations of her prejudices emerged, in particular over Moazzam Begg, a fundamentalist British Muslim who had been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. After his release she had called him a ‘wonderful advocate … for human rights and in particular for human liberty’. In Afghanistan, Begg had declared that ‘Israel’s crimes far outweigh the Taliban’s who are in their own country. Zionist Israelis aren’t.’ On his return to Britain he associated with Cage, an organisation that defended British members of ISIS who had executed innocent civilians. Chakrabarti was not embarrassed by her admiration for such a figure. By then she was also associated with Phil Shiner, a lawyer who had been found guilty of inventing hundreds of allegations of the abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers. Some would later say that she was as naïve about Begg and Shiner as she was about anti-Semitism.
The outburst of bitterness towards Chakrabarti and Corbyn took McDonnell by surprise. ‘It’s like warfare in Lord of the Flies,’ he said. Amid new rumours that Corbyn might quit, Angela Eagle announced that she would stand for the leadership. Her declaration exposed the feebleness of those opposed to him. Not only did Eagle’s unengaging personality and modest intellect make her unsuitable as a political leader, she also lacked the experience to challenge Corbyn’s Marxism, and many of her supporters were Blairite peers without a vote. Even so, as a stalking horse for the anti-Corbynistas, she was a threat. Len McCluskey again stepped in. A new leadership election, he warned, would start ‘a civil war that will be bitter and ugly and may never allow the party to reunite again’. Since there was an overwhelming majority of Labour MPs who opposed Corbyn, McCluskey’s warning would normally have been ignored, but few moderates were prepared to risk deselection by supporting a lacklustre candidate, especially as the interventions of Momentum activists were intensifying.
At that moment, the moderate Labour MP Peter Kyle was battling against Mark Sandell, a Momentum agitator who was attempting to have him deselected from his Hove constituency. Sandell’s next target was the Lewisham Deptford MP Vicky Foxcroft. The outcome was still uncertain. At the same time, Stella Creasy, an anti-Corbyn MP representing Walthamstow, discovered that Andrew Fisher had organised a Momentum rally in her constituency without telling her. Even Eagle’s core supporters feared the end of their careers. Others muttered that she had voted for the Iraq war. With little immediate support, soon after she made her announcement she decided to withdraw. In just hours, the crisis had fizzled out. As before, Corbyn’s strength was the absence of a convincing challenger.
Later that same day, to prove his patriotism, Corbyn went to Westminster Abbey for a service to commemorate the fallen in the Battle of the Somme. Across Parliament Square, his office was refusing requests from several MPs to meet him and press him to resign. ‘We’re not letting that happen,’ said a Corbyn aide. ‘He’s a seventy [sic]-year-old man’ who was owed ‘a duty of care … There’s a culture of bullying. Maybe it’s a Blairite/Brownite thing.’ The leader’s office was once again being fenced off, although in briefings Kevin Slocombe insisted that Corbyn was enjoying the fight. His miscalculation was to assume that the Jewish question had gone away.
An all-party committee had been convened to consider the allegations against the Labour Party, and its swift report, unlike Shami Chakrabarti’s, criticised Corbyn for allowing ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ to thrive in the Labour movement, permitting his party to become ‘a safe space for those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people’, and for his ‘lack of consistent leadership’ in challenging racism. The same MPs would condemn Chakrabarti’s report as a whitewash. The reaction of those accused was predictable: Corbyn dismissed the MPs as biased and Livingstone scoffed that their report was ‘rigged’, while Chak
rabarti sighed that Labour was not ‘much worse than any other party’, and that accusations of anti-Semitism had been used as part of Labour’s civil war. Her report and its aftermath appeared to suggest her sense that the Jews’ complaints were not credible.
The recriminations and plots within the parliamentary Labour Party were not festering in isolation. Westminster was the focus of a country plagued by recriminations about Brexit, anger about multiculturalism, and distrust of both politicians and businessmen. Britain’s traditional tone of tolerant debate had seemingly evaporated. Both major political parties were mired by chaos and ill-feeling. Discounted as irresponsible and heavily criticised for his conduct as one of the leaders of the leave campaign, Boris Johnson, the favourite to win the Tory leadership once Cameron stood down, suddenly withdrew from the race after being dumped by his former supporter Michael Gove.
That was the story that dominated the headlines, but on the sideline, Corbyn’s future still hung in the balance. In the hiatus, even the Observer, usually so loyal to Labour, concluded that he was ‘finished as a credible national politician. [The cost of his] ideological self-indulgence is electoral irrelevance.’ Amid fears that the party would split, Tom Watson met Corbyn on 4 July and once again asked for his resignation. Once again he was rebuffed. If there were another leadership election, said Corbyn, he would stand as the unity candidate. He doubted that the rebel MPs had either the courage or the leader to create a new party. Over the following day, Watson floundered. He was failing to broker a deal with his friend and former flatmate Len McCluskey, while McCluskey himself was secretly plotting with McDonnell to string out the crisis in the hope that it might be defused by splits among Corbyn’s opponents. That secrecy was only disturbed by the warfare at the next meeting of the PLP at the beginning of July.
