by Tom Bower
He was similarly protective of Diane Abbott. In an election interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Abbott had said that Labour would recruit ten thousand more police, at a cost of £300,000. When challenged about the figure, she revised the number of recruits to 25,000, then corrected herself again to say it would be 250,000 policemen – adding as an afterthought that that figure included policewomen. When asked whether 250,000 extra police was realistic, she replied, ‘I mean two thousand.’ Finally, after searching through her brief, she said the cost would be £298 million, then belatedly added an additional £130 million for training and inflation. ‘I’m not embarrassed in the slightest,’ Corbyn told journalists later, reiterating his distrust of the capitalist media burrowing into his past. ‘Let’s just keep going.’ Only McDonnell smiled. He loathed Abbott, and the feeling was mutual. Karie Murphy was dispatched to order Abbott to stop giving interviews.
The good news for Corbyn was Len McCluskey’s re-election as leader of Unite. On a turnout of 12.2 per cent of the union’s members, McCluskey received 59,067 votes against Gerard Coyne’s 53,544. Coyne complained about irregularities in the polling, and was instantly suspended from the union by McCluskey, who, secure for another four years, pledged £4.5 million to Labour’s election fund. In return, he successfully demanded that several Unite members be selected as Labour candidates. Among them was his ‘bag-carrier’ Dan Carden, chosen in Liverpool Walton. Reflecting his partisanship, McCluskey refused to back Siôn Simon as Labour’s mayoral candidate in the West Midlands because he was close to Tom Watson. Simon would lose to a Tory by six thousand votes of over half a million cast, for which he blamed McCluskey. The reckoning was harsh.
Three days after Abbott’s humiliation, Labour was routed in the local council elections, losing 382 seats. The Tories gained 563 seats, with 38 per cent of the vote, 11 per cent ahead of Labour. In Manchester, Andy Burnham was elected mayor, but abandoned his own celebration party after hearing that Corbyn was heading north to be photographed alongside him. Steve Rotheram won the mayoral battle for Labour in Liverpool, but told his supporters that Corbyn was ‘Marmite’ for voters – he was either liked or loathed, there was no in-between. ‘It’s difficult,’ Corbyn agreed, but refused to apologise for the council results. With the Tories soaring in the polls to 47 per cent of the electorate, Labour MPs openly speculated about their futures outside Parliament. Corbyn’s only potential lifebelt was John Curtice’s caution about extrapolating from the council elections to predict a Conservative landslide in the general election, because the council elections had been held in the Tory shires, not in Labour’s cities.
The pressure on Corbyn intensified, and the media demanded that he explain where he stood on defence. After denying in a speech that he was a pacifist, he refused six times in an interview to say whether or not he wanted Britain to leave NATO. Similarly, McDonnell denied on BBC TV that he was a Marxist, despite the evidence of a recording from 2013 in which he had admitted precisely that. Four years later, he would only admit, ‘There’s a lot to learn from Marx.’ Labour’s draft election manifesto reflected that philosophy: more and higher taxes, more welfare benefits, rent controls, widespread nationalisation, no university tuition fees, no immigration controls, the demilitarisation of Britain, support for the Palestinians against Israel, and the destruction of the City. In McDonnell and Corbyn’s vision, Britain would erect barriers to imports to protect British industry.
On 11 May, all these details were leaked. Labour MPs in marginal seats led the resultant panic. Few could agree about the identity of the culprit. Was it Corbyn, with the intention of bouncing the party into a Marxist manifesto? Or was it the anti-Corbynistas, trying to pre-empt the meeting that would finalise the policy document? To avoid answering that question, Corbyn agreed that the final programme should hint at ‘fair’ controls over immigration, remove criticism of Israel, and be positive towards NATO. But the financial plan remained unaltered. ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s and John McDonnell’s sums,’ wrote Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s acerbic press spokesman, ‘are clearly based on the same mathematics that Diane Abbott practises.’
The official launch of Labour’s campaign was staged at Bradford University on 17 May. Surrounded by Abbott, McDonnell, Chakrabarti and Milne, Corbyn entered the hall to wild cheers. His flock of five hundred loved his attack on grammar schools and fox hunting, and roared as he went all out for the biased media. Young Marxists were convinced that the public was shifting towards Labour. The independent Institute of Fiscal Studies estimated that, despite the higher taxes it would impose, Labour’s financial plan would be £30 billion short in revenues every year, the highest gap since 1949. Corbynistas were unconcerned. The next morning, the party’s ratings rose to 32 per cent.
On the same day, the Tories launched their manifesto. Risk-averse as ever, Theresa May never trusted those beyond her immediate circle, and the programme had been written in unusual secrecy. In turn, serving a woman without noticeable intellect, emotional intelligence or charisma, her advisers ignored the traditional Tory guarantees to cut regulations and taxes. Instead, the party pledged to increase both. Insensitive about the fact that home ownership had fallen from 73.3 per cent in 2008 to 63.5 per cent in 2016, May forgot those dreaming of their first home or longing for a move up the housing ladder, whose hopes had been extinguished by rising prices and stagnant incomes. Inexplicably, she also adopted Ed Miliband’s price cap for energy, which the Tories had convincingly ridiculed four years previously, and said she would cut welfare benefits. Only during the lacklustre manifesto launch did these vote-losing policies become obvious. Then it got worse. Under the slogan ‘Strong and Stable’, May embarked on a campaign focused on herself, isolated from the public and highlighting her inability to engage in unscripted debates or small-talk. Fatally for a leader lacking stamina, those flaws were exposed in a negative campaign she herself had chosen to last seven weeks rather than three.
Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ Australian election guru, expected voters to be appalled by the Labour leader’s sympathy for terrorists. ‘Corbyn has spent a lifetime siding with Britain’s enemies,’ said Ben Wallace, a Home Office minister. But Crosby did not reckon with Corbyn’s stubborn nonchalance. Five times he was asked to denounce the IRA ‘unequivocally’, and each time he refused. Instead, he condemned ‘all bombing’. He quibbled about his support for the IRA. ‘I did nothing wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I campaigned for peace in Northern Ireland.’ Too late, the Tories realised that most people just ignored the damnation of Corbyn as ‘an odious individual’ by Northern Irish politicians, or the songs of praise uttered by Gerry Adams. IRA terrorism had ended twenty years earlier. ‘People don’t care,’ Corbyn was told by his pollster. ‘Especially young voters. They want to know how you’ll improve their own lives.’
In theory, Labour’s tax-and-spend was the Tories’ strongest card. But May refused to engage with Corbyn about his offer of a speedy path towards Venezuelan-style socialism. She also chose to remain silent about McDonnell’s assertion that ‘Everything is fully costed,’ although he could not estimate the size of the increased deficit, or guarantee that the extra taxes would pay for his promises. The only certainty was that at least 400,000 City jobs would be lost as financial institutions abandoned London to avoid McDonnell’s taxes.
On 22 May, the last day on which people could register to vote, Labour promised to scrap university tuition fees in the autumn, a year earlier than previously promised. The total cost of £11.2 billion, said Corbyn, would be covered by taxation. Asked about the accumulated student debt of £100 billion, he replied, ‘I will deal with it.’ That was interpreted as meaning that Labour would cancel the liability. Believing the promise, at least 714,000 first-time voters were among the estimated three million people who registered on the electoral roll after Theresa May had fired the starting gun. In an appeal to youth, Corbyn proclaimed, ‘Fewer working-class young people are applying to university.’ The truth was that working-class applicants had increas
ed from 10 to 25 per cent of the total over the previous decade. After the election, McDonnell admitted that Corbyn’s pledge about student fees and debt was phoney. ‘I don’t want to promise something we can’t deliver,’ he would say. ‘We never promised to do so,’ said the Labour MP Angela Rayner. During the campaign, the Tories failed to extract that confession. Instead, on the same day that Corbyn uttered his tantalising guarantee, Theresa May crashed.
Her manifesto proposed to rewrite the financial contract between the generations. The pensioners’ winter fuel allowance would be cut, some pensions would be reduced, and the old would be compelled to sell most of their assets to pay for their personal care. That commitment to what became known as the ‘dementia tax’ caused uproar. Four days later May abandoned the plan, but by then her campaign had unravelled. Rather than ‘strong and stable’, as she liked to characterise herself, ‘the Maybot’ was exposed as indecisive and brittle.
Adopting Hugo Chávez’s tactics, Corbyn was meanwhile appealing to the disgruntled: trade unionists, public service workers, students, the conscience-stricken, and disappointed home-seekers – above all, to those aggrieved about their situation. In his exhaustive tour around Britain, he wooed crowds seeking salvation from deprivation – real or imagined – associated with health, housing, schools, race or gender. Mixing joyfully with the masses, ‘Uncle’ Jeremy played on people’s fears and anger to offer idealism and hope. He was the authentic anti-establishment politician with a moral cause: ‘You cannot trust the Tories. The worst pay squeeze in two hundred years,’ he declared. Few Britons understood his worship of Chávez (the first of what would eventually be two million Venezuelans were fleeing their country to find food and work, and to avoid murderous violence), but they did accept his narrative: that only the rich would benefit from May’s re-election. The Tory lead in the polls fell again.
Late on that day, 22 May, with Corbyn’s campaign rolling and May’s stuttering, a Muslim suicide bomber attacked young girls and their parents at the end of a pop concert in Manchester, killing twenty-three people. Corbyn’s instant reaction was to deny the truth, that Islamic terrorism was to blame. ‘Terrible incident,’ he tweeted. His communist advisers recognised the error. Credibility was at stake for a man vying to be responsible for Britain’s security despite voting thirteen times since 9/11 against anti-terror laws. The makeover was swift. The attack, he said just hours later, was ‘an abominable and atrocious act’. To correct any damaging impressions, he also condemned the IRA’s murders as ‘completely wrong’, and denied outright ever having met any member of the organisation. He then jumped on a train for Manchester.
With him was Karie Murphy. In her usual bullying manner, she told Andy Burnham and local Labour MPs during the journey that Corbyn would pose with them for the media, and participate in their vigil for the victims of the attack. The MPs refused to collaborate. To assert her authority, she yelled her orders, provoking some MPs to tears. When they reached Manchester, she bulldozed aside police objections to Corbyn visiting the arena, a crime scene, for media photos. Once again, Corbyn had eclipsed May on what should have been her own turf of law and order.
Days later, he took a step to assert his authenticity. Sensing that few cared about his relationship with the IRA, he reaffirmed his convictions in a public speech written by Milne and Andrew Murray, blaming first Britain and America and their intelligence failures for what had happened at the concert in Manchester; then the Tory government’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for funding extremists. British foreign policy, and not Muslims, he told his audience, was responsible for the atrocity. His solution was to remove barriers to Muslims entering Britain, and to welcome Islamic teaching. The Tories believed that this speech was an own goal, but their attacks on Corbyn’s sympathy for terrorism caused a backlash among young voters. Those uninspired by May identified with Corbyn’s empathy for the underdog. Capitalising on that emotion, Corbyn’s team accused the ‘nasty party’ of launching a ‘vicious campaign’ to score ‘cheap points’ by ‘brutal assaults’.
Then came Labour’s major counter-attack, Corbyn switching the focus onto Theresa May’s cut of 20,000 police officers when she was home secretary. He promised to increase police numbers by 10,000. None commented on the absurdity of Corbyn, a lifelong enemy of the force, offering to increase its strength. Helped by an army of activists knocking on doors and bombarding social websites, a surge of support reduced his negative ratings. Compared to the cool gamesmanship of Corbyn’s team, the Tories continued to flounder. Monosyllabically, May scrambled to rescue herself. Two weeks before the election, her advantage in the opinion polls slumped to 5 per cent.
The two leaders’ ultimate test was forty minutes of live TV – half in front of a studio audience, and half in an interview with Jeremy Paxman. In her unconvincing appearance, May stumbled. Next, in Corbyn’s segment, Paxman set out to tear his prey apart. Why, he asked, did the Labour manifesto not pledge to abolish the monarchy? ‘There’s nothing in there because we’re not going to do it,’ Corbyn said, smiling, then explained that he had no wish to impose his will on Labour. ‘I’m no dictator,’ he said disarmingly. Carefully rehearsed by Milne, he justified his association with the IRA as being in aid of ‘the peace process’, and described any future use of drones to kill Islamic terrorists as ‘hypothetical’. Lifelong principles melted away. To be elected required the very compromises he had spent thirty years in Parliament eschewing. He also concealed his ambitions to scrap Trident, remove limits on immigration and nationalise the banks. Asked after the programme whether Milne had coached Corbyn, a Labour spokesman replied, ‘Jeremy’s uncoachable.’ He also proved to be untouchable. Neither the studio audience nor the interviewer landed a serious blow. Paxman’s agitated interruptions put many voters on Corbyn’s side.
Next morning, the coaching unravelled. Corbyn had chosen free childcare as Labour’s theme for the day. Asked on BBC Woman’s Hour to say how much thirty hours of such childcare would cost, he came unstuck. ‘I presume you have the figures?’ he was pressed by Emma Barnett. ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied. There followed a long pause. Everything was costed, he repeated, unsuccessfully searching through his notes for a number. Minutes after the interview ended, Corbyn’s supporters attacked Barnett on the internet as a ‘Zionist shill’ and a Jew.
This further example of anti-Semitism was buried by Corbyn’s team having ratcheted up its media campaign. Over the previous weeks, Labour had presented slick online mini-dramas featuring attractive middle-class people troubled by student fees, their children’s inability to buy a home, and a fear of NHS cuts. The videos were tapping into people’s feelings with tempting idealism. Messages on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat overwhelmed any critical questions posed by the traditional media about Corbyn’s record. In a rigorous operation supplemented by troll factories based in Russia, the Facebook pages of Tory candidates were deluged with hate mail. Defamatory abuse generated by supporters was ‘liked’ and shared by thousands. Celebrities including Stephen Fry and singer Harry Styles posted messages urging their followers to vote Labour – except that the posts were fabricated by unnamed people. ‘Fake news’ targeted the prime minister’s husband Philip May, claiming that he was a director of G4S, a private security company that paid no corporation tax despite making billions of pounds from government contracts, and falsely alleging that it had benefited from corrupt relationships. Saira Hussain, an architect who placed the post, also boasted about having met Baroness Uddin, who in 2010 had been suspended by the Labour Party for falsifying her expenses. Hussain’s story about Philip May was a complete lie.
Across the country, Tory candidates were swamped by similar fabrications. ‘A lie told often enough,’ said Lenin, ‘becomes the truth.’ The reward was a poll prediction that Labour would gain seats, and May would fail to get an overall majority. Despite the threat of defeat, she refused to participate in a live TV debate with Corbyn. Fearful of speaking without a script, she assumed that he
would not agree to appear without her, but at the last moment his advisers persuaded him to snatch the opportunity and take a free run. He appeared with Amber Rudd, the home secretary, pulled in as May’s substitute. He did not shine, but Rudd failed to land a telling blow.
That good news for Corbyn was undercut by another terrorist outrage. On 3 June, two weeks after the Manchester massacre, three Muslim men rampaged through Borough Market in London, murdering eight young people and injuring forty-eight before police shot them dead. In the emotional aftermath, Corbyn’s Islamophilia once again threatened his standing. Memories were fresh about his refusal to outrightly condemn all the extremist madrasas (Islamic schools), preachers and groups like Hamas that motivated Muslim murderers, and his enthusiasm for ‘the wonderful faith of Islam’. But rather than sensing any vulnerability in his own position, he called for May to resign because she had cut police numbers. He knew his criticism was nonsensical – the real shortcoming had been inadequate intelligence from MI5 and MI6, two agencies that he had pledged to shrink or abolish outright. To that purpose, he had recently refused to discuss with Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions and a Labour MP since 2015, the provisions of the Investigatory Powers Bill to supervise the intelligence agencies. Abolition, not reform, had been his policy.
In the tumult, other voices were drowned out. Lord Carlile, for ten years the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism, accused Corbyn of seeking to mislead the public. Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, also contradicted his claims. A specialist police team, she pointed out, had arrived at Borough Market eight minutes after the first alarm, proving that London’s police were well-prepared. Corbyn ignored her testimony, adroitly shrugged aside Theresa May’s characterisation of him as unpatriotic and a friend of terrorists as ‘utterly ridiculous’ and ‘offensive’, and again blamed the government’s police cuts. May’s refusal to confront him head-to-head about his ideological convictions protected him from a potentially damaging contest.
