Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  For political reasons, Corbyn had always disputed that the vast majority of British terrorists were Muslims radicalised in city ghettos. To Muslim applause at many meetings across the country, he opposed the Prevent programme and condemned David Cameron’s description of madrasas as places where children had ‘their heads filled with poison’. In concert with his Muslim allies, he dismissed the government report by Louise Casey, director general of Troubled Families and previously deputy director of Shelter, that radicalisation could be partly cured by the supervision of Muslim faith schools and by encouraging integration. Since May had failed when home secretary to implement Casey’s recommendations, she relied on former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove to criticise Corbyn in the Daily Telegraph as ‘not fit for No. 10’ because he had been ‘hugging, supporting’ terrorists. As none of Corbyn’s supporters read the Telegraph, and Dearlove’s attack was ignored by the rest of the media, Corbyn once again escaped untouched. ‘I hear some people have said nasty things about me,’ he told a rally. ‘I forgive them all.’

  In the last days before the vote, May staged televised meetings with loyalists in a bakery, on a farm and in a factory. At each event, barely a dozen people were corralled around her. At the same time, Corbyn was addressing huge crowds in Birmingham, Brighton, Glasgow and finally in Camden, north London. Similar numbers had greeted him at over ninety rallies with chants of ‘Ooooh Jeremy Corbyn,’ to the tune of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’. Hundreds were still queuing outside the Camden venue when he finished his speech and headed for a glass of red wine in a nearby pub. Nothing he said over the previous seven weeks was memorable, no phrase was savoured as evidence of genius, but his audiences had departed in their thousands filled with enthusiasm.

  The campaign had also transformed Corbyn himself. The veteran protester understood that politics was no longer just a series of battles within the Labour Party, but actually about winning real power. His new ambition was to become prime minister. On polling day, 8 June, he returned home to watch the results coming in with Milne and Karie Murphy. He anticipated a Tory victory, but not a landslide. Murphy disagreed. She had already chosen the clothes she would wear on her trip with Corbyn to Buckingham Palace for his enthronement as prime minister. Immediately after the polls closed at 10 p.m., he heard the BBC’s prediction: no overall majority for the Tories, and a hung Parliament. He was ‘shocked’. He may not have won outright, but the ‘Corbyn surge’ had secured his leadership of the party. In their euphoria, he and his team convinced themselves that May would resign, and Labour would form a coalition government with the SNP.

  The following day’s arithmetic told a different story. The Tories had won 318 seats, a loss of thirteen. Labour had won 262 seats, including the gains of thirty-two ‘safe’ Conservative seats that took in Canterbury (Tory since 1918), Kensington (Tory forever), Croydon, Brighton, Reading and Portsmouth. Moreover, in the Labour seats specifically targeted by the Tories, Labour’s vote had increased. Diane Abbott’s majority had risen to 35,000, and Corbyn’s was 33,000, up by 12.7 per cent. Momentum took the credit in Hampstead and Kilburn, claiming that its thousand volunteers there had transformed Labour’s majority of forty-two in 2010 to 15,560 for Tulip Siddiq in 2017. Contrary to every prediction, Labour had won 3.6 million more votes than in 2015, giving them 40 per cent of the total. That was an increase of a record 9.6 per cent in just twenty-five months. Set against the prediction seven weeks earlier that Labour would win only a quarter of the votes, the difference reflected Corbyn’s personal success. Much of the swing was attributed to a ‘youthquake’ triggered by his promise to scrap student fees, and to urban middle-class professionals irate about Brexit and the Tories’ tolerance of the super-rich. (Later analysis would reduce the importance of the youth vote.)

  Reports from Conservative headquarters of Theresa May collapsing in tears, her ministers in disarray and a raft of anticipated resignations fuelled Corbyn’s certainty of a terminal Tory rout. McDonnell urged him to capitalise on the enemy’s instability by pronouncing victory. ‘Demoralise and divide them,’ he urged, ‘and force them back to the electorate, and this time we’ll have a majority.’ His bellicosity was encouraged by Karie Murphy. ‘Keep the excitement going!’ she shouted. ‘We’re going to win!’ Infected by their hyper-confidence, Corbyn gloated on leaving his house early that morning, ‘Politics has changed. Politics isn’t going back into the box where it was before.’ Labour, he proclaimed, had ‘won this election’. May should resign and make way for him. Stoking the fire, McDonnell told the public that morning, ‘I don’t think the prime minister is stable … I can’t see her surviving.’ He added, ‘The responsibility is on Theresa May now to stand down and let a Labour government take its place.’

  As usual with Corbyn and McDonnell, the truth was different. Labour was well short of the 320 MPs needed for a Commons majority. Worse, for the third consecutive general election it had lost to an increased Tory vote, 5.5 per cent more than in 2015. In 130 English seats, especially in traditionally safe Labour areas, there was a swing to the Tories because Labour voters mistrusted Corbyn. Most people over fifty-five, especially the working class, voted Tory. For those over seventy the figure was 69 per cent, despite Labour promising increased pensions and benefits. Tony Blair would have won over many of those disaffected older voters. The only conspicuous Tory victory was the defeat of the Scottish independence movement. Repelled by Corbyn, Scottish Labour supporters switched to the Tories. Just 401 additional votes in eight British constituencies won by Labour would have secured a Tory majority in the Commons. On the same basis, Labour would have needed 52,000 votes in the right places to win the extra sixty-four seats it needed for a majority. Corbyn’s calculation was different. If Labour had won just seven more seats, he argued, he could have formed a minority government with the SNP. The blame was heaped on the Blairites for undermining his reputation. But in those hours after the results, no one spoke about Labour’s defeat.

  At 8.15 a.m. Corbyn was thanking party workers at Labour headquarters for producing ‘an amazing achievement’. Once he had finished, Karie Murphy was blunt. True socialism had triumphed over Blairism, she asserted. If the moderates in the party had believed in Corbyn, Labour would have won an outright victory. The fate of those turncoats was now sealed. On the TV screens in the room, Emily Thornberry was accusing May of ‘squatting in Downing Street’ and calling on her to resign. But despite their despair, the Tories refused to surrender to Labour’s propaganda. Faced with that obduracy, McDonnell told his claque that they were victims of a coup.

  Among those disciples, Owen Jones echoed McDonnell’s outrage. ‘Progressive’ forces, he urged, should ‘take to the streets … Organise.’ Convinced that the Tories were in fatal disarray, he described Britain’s mood as being in transition from Thatcherism to true socialism. That shift, he believed, would accelerate as voters were exposed to the overpowering arguments in favour of removing the ruling class. ‘This is a dangerous time for the prime minister as she seeks to smother any challenge,’ Jones wrote, without a scintilla of doubt. Theresa May was clinging on ‘in the hope that her opponents lose or relinquish the initiative’. His justification for an uprising against the Tories was their ‘arrogance and recklessness’. He jeered at Corbyn’s critics at Westminster for suggesting that the middle class had increased Labour’s vote. Labour, he wrote, got its ‘largest support among working-class voters under thirty-five’. This finessed the truth that there had been a 12 per cent swing of all working-class voters to the Tories.

  With his familiar extremism, the former BBC economics editor Paul Mason concocted a conspiracy of ‘active sabotage’ by the ‘British elite’ to abandon Brexit in order to stop Jeremy Corbyn. ‘The global kleptocrats,’ he proclaimed, wanted ‘ten years of disruption, inflation and higher interest rates’ so as to create the ‘perfect petri dish for the fungus of financial speculation to grow’. With conviction he asserted: ‘The Tories decided to use Brexit to smash up what’s
left of the welfare state and to recast Britain as the global Singapore. They lost.’

  Amid the frenzied language from the left, Corbyn’s sober critics were perplexed by his success. ‘I was wrong,’ admitted Peter Mandelson. ‘An earthquake happened in British politics. I acknowledge he has been able to inspire a lot of voters.’ Wistfully, he added, ‘He’s not going anywhere.’ Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, was dumbfounded: ‘It’s obvious now that I no longer understand [my country]. It never crossed my mind, despite the baggage of his deplorable alliances and views, that 12.8 million voters would decide they really rather liked the idea of him in No. 10 … One has to wonder where the red line now lies that voters will not allow to be crossed.’

  Even the veteran Marxist journalist Martin Jacques was confused. Convinced, as all ‘progressives’ had been over the previous century, that capitalism or neoliberalism was in its death throes, Jacques was perplexed that despite allegations of falling incomes and rising inequality, the working classes had voted for Brexit and Donald Trump. One reason, he understood, was their loss of trust in conventional politicians, which had been fomenting ever since Thatcher and Reagan created a global free market. But to his distress, instead of Corbyn being the working class’s champion against bankers and Wall Street, they chose Brexiteers to lead their revolt. Jacques wondered: had the new populists damagingly highlighted the fact that Corbyn’s ‘feet of clay’ were a throwback to the 1970s?

  New cheerleaders offered a more positive interpretation. Polly Toynbee, previously a fierce critic, now hailed him as ‘the new man beaming with confidence, benevolence and forgiveness to erstwhile doubters’. In his ‘week zero’, she wrote, ‘his past is cauterised and there will be no point dragging it out again’, because ‘Labour can relish the political spectacle from now on while preparing for government.’ Briefed that Corbyn was offering moderates an olive branch, she accepted without demur his assertion that they would return to the front bench. ‘I’m sure we can reach an accommodation,’ he said, expecting disgruntled MPs to hold their tongues.

  At the first PLP meeting there was no hint of bloodletting. Welcomed by cheers, Corbyn spoke optimistically about unity. Later, in the Commons, Labour MPs again applauded his entrance. ‘Democracy is a wondrous thing,’ he baited the prime minister as she sat glum-faced and struggling to agree ‘a coalition of chaos’ with the Ulster Protestant DUP. Then the purification began.

  ‘No jobs for traitors,’ declared McDonnell, as intolerant as Corbyn towards those who refused to conform. Seeing Chuka Umunna interviewed on TV provoked all his fury. Umunna, McDonnell seethed, was not one of ‘our people’. He demanded that the Nigerian-Irish MP and another fifty rebels planning to defy a three-line whip and vote to remain in the European single market should be crushed.

  Momentum turned against those fifty MPs not only for their EU stance, but for failing to praise Corbyn during their election campaigns. Unite officials too challenged them for failing to pledge allegiance to their leader. The pressure was intense and unpleasant. Although she was on maternity leave, Luciana Berger was told by a Unite official who had recently been elected onto her constituency’s executive committee to ‘get on board quite quickly now’, and apologise to Corbyn. She duly succumbed.

  The intimidation of Berger was not unique. Many female Labour MPs, particularly Jews, complained of renewed abuse by the left. As in Haringey thirty years earlier, Corbyn did nothing to protect them. He inspired the attacks, then stood back. Now was the moment, he agreed with Jon Lansman, to revive the deselections interrupted by the election. Momentum members in local branches were empowered to remove Blairite MPs. To smooth the process, the left needed to dominate the NEC. Here Corbyn’s first step was to oust Tom Watson as Labour Party chair, an honorary title usually given to the deputy leader, and to have him replaced by Ian Lavery, a controversial former miner who supported deselection.

  Next for removal was Kezia Dugdale in Scotland. Although she had won seven seats for Labour, her campaign had focused on the SNP rather than on Corbyn. Her unforgivable crime, his supporters believed, was her failure to embrace him and so win more seats. She replied that Labour’s vote in Scotland had gone to the Tories for the first time because of Corbyn’s Marxism. In his book, to hold that view was treachery. One more push, he ordered, would sweep her aside. Exhausted by the intrigue and secrecy, Dugdale hesitated, unable to decide whether Corbyn was a clever strategist or a coward. Was he in control, delegating others to do his dirty work, or a puppet with others pulling the strings? Either way, she could no longer protect her position. She too was ousted, to be replaced by Richard Leonard, a Marxist.

  By then, Corbyn’s confidence about his destiny had been boosted by an unexpected disaster that played to his advantage. Seven days after the election, on 15 June, he witnessed a scene of class warfare that for him symbolised the rottenness of Tory Britain. Once again, he truly expected Theresa May to fall. Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-storey block of flats owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, had been destroyed by fire the previous day. The tower, officially home to about 250 people, had recently been refurbished by the council in response to a Labour government directive to improve the outward appearance of housing blocks. Starting in a faulty refrigerator on the fourth floor, the flames had taken hold because of a delay in calling the fire brigade. Then, uncontrolled by incompetently led firefighters, they had spread into the building’s new cladding before erupting into an inferno. In horrendous circumstances, seventy-one people died – although the precise number was unknown when Corbyn arrived at the scene.

  Mingling with grieving survivors, he identified with the message on Socialist Worker placards waved in front of the news cameras: ‘Tories have blood on their hands.’ Agitators pronounced that up to four hundred residents had been burned to death – slaughtered by austerity, Tory toffs, property hucksters, and racists. Councillors in Britain’s richest borough were damned for neglecting poor people in social housing. Among the litany of deliberate distortions dominating the media, the councillors were accused of having rejected a tender of £11.3 million to use safer but more expensive cladding, in favour of a bid of £8.6 million. In fact, to meet the tenants’ requirements, the council had increased the budget to refurbish the building from £6.9 million to £10.3 million. However, the protesters were right that cheaper cladding had been used. Relying on government-approved experts, the councillors had been told that the inferior cladding satisfied the existing fire regulations. They could not have known that, dating back to 1997, the statutory safety standards had been weakened by government orders, and that the manufacturers had possibly certified the cladding as safe on the basis of falsified regulatory tests. Grenfell was not unique. Dozens of local authorities, including nearby Camden, a Labour council, had used the same cladding on at least 306 tower blocks, and it had also been fixed onto at least 130 private developments.

  Emotionally, Corbyn hugged Grenfell residents of all nationalities, and accused Kensington council of social cleansing. In truth, over the previous twenty years the council had increased the number of tenants who had been granted social housing, while Islington had cut its numbers by 4,500. Corbyn had never protested on his own constituents’ behalf. Kensington’s councillors, however, were vulnerable to historic complaints. They had ignored warnings from Grenfell residents about shoddy workmanship and fire risks, although none had specifically mentioned the cladding or the corrupted building regulations. Slow and inept in its own self-defence, the council’s outstanding response to the surviving residents was drowned out by the agitators’ screams of odium, widely reported in the media, especially by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News and Kirsty Wark on the BBC’s Newsnight. As one, the media conjured up an image of rich politicians trampling on the traumatised poor.

  In the stampede to judgement, Corbyn looked wonderfully humane compared to Theresa May. When she visited the scene, fearing that Grenfell would bring her down, she avoided meeting the residents a
t all. The image was of desperate survivors, having lost their possessions, their homes and often family members, being ignored by a heartless Westminster insider. May had seemingly learned nothing from her electoral failure. Panic-stricken, she committed £80 million to rehouse the tenants within weeks, she said, setting an impossible timetable.

  Before Grenfell’s embers had cooled, Corbyn’s activists were inciting revolution. One day after the fire, crowds chanting ‘Murderers!’ stormed the council’s headquarters and pronounced with certainty that over two hundred people had died. By then, the police and fire services were convinced that the true figure was no more than eighty. Their estimates were dismissed by the left as a conspiracy, and rejected by Jon Snow on Channel 4. He was supported by David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham. Stoking anger against the Tories, Lammy wildly condemned the police estimate of deaths as ‘far, far too low’, and accused Downing Street of orchestrating a political cover-up to minimise ‘anger and unrest’. Diane Abbott added yet more poison. ‘Those hundreds of people who died,’ she said, ‘are a direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing.’ Nothing less than ‘murdered by political decisions’ was John McDonnell’s judgement. Just as Corbyn had cited police cuts as the reason for Muslim terrorism, McDonnell blamed the Grenfell deaths on ‘austerity … as the price paid in public safety … in the disregard for working-class communities’. Supervising the scene of the fire, Dany Cotton, London’s fire chief, denied that money or cuts to her service had in any way contributed to the deaths. In those early hours, no one dared mention the fire service’s ineptitude. The stage was dominated by the agitators’ yells for ‘days of rage’ against ‘corporate genocide’. Moderate Labour MPs were shocked. ‘That is the language of the hard left,’ snapped Margaret Hodge, ‘which is not done in my name.’ Corbyn dismissed her comments with contempt, an opinion shared by the Morning Star, which called her a member of ‘the devious, dinosaur faction’.