Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  The departure of the moderates’ last defender prompted Jon Lansman to bid to become McNicol’s successor. Ironically, even he did not understand the nature of what was being plotted, Labour’s Godfather was not Momentum’s creator, but Len McCluskey. The union leader demanded that Jennie Formby, now his former partner, replace McNicol. Meekly, Corbyn acquiesced and Lansman surrendered. Unite’s control of Labour tightened. Admission to the party, the selection of MPs, and the composition of election manifestos all now fell under Formby and McCluskey.

  The conspirators skilfully confused the opposition. Like McDonnell, Lansman presented himself at the party conference as a ‘social capitalist’, a sham phrase designed to give the impression that a Trotskyist could work with capitalists for society’s benefit. In a speech to a fringe meeting of ‘Labour Business’, Lansman boasted to an audience of sixty businessmen about his childhood involvement in his grandparents’ East End rag-trade business, his family’s property investments, and, to gild the fantasy, his ‘commercial genius’ in creating Momentum as ‘a start-up business’. Momentum, he said, ‘wants to work with business’.

  None of his audience, mostly low-level managers of small businesses and local entrepreneurs, appeared to realise that this apparently sympathetic organisation was a Trotskyist group. They applauded Lansman with the same conviction which minutes earlier they had shown when McDonnell had delivered the same message: businessmen and the City had nothing to fear from a Corbyn government. ‘We want to work with you,’ he said. Amid the beauty of Liverpool’s regenerated docklands, the audience had seemingly forgotten that the Titan city of the nineteenth century had been destroyed by Marxist-led strikes after 1945, then wrecked again during the 1980s by the Labour council whose deputy leader was McDonnell’s ally Derek Hatton. The city had been rebuilt by the arch-capitalist Michael Heseltine, but it remained a shadow of its past imperial self. They also appeared not to realise that thirty-two years previously Hatton had been expelled from the Labour Party for demanding the same Marxist agenda as McDonnell was presenting in 2018.

  That evening, at the Pullman Hotel inside the conference centre, Milne and others were polishing Corbyn’s speech for the following day. They decided that his approach had to be less doctrinaire than McDonnell’s. To Labour’s misfortune, the government’s official statistics showed that both household incomes and employment had hit record highs, pensioner poverty was decreasing, and ever more young people were entering higher education. Attempting to outbid the government would barely generate favourable headlines, but that was less relevant than restoring Corbyn’s reputation. An insurrection against his anti-Semitism by party members during the summer had dented his celebrated authenticity.

  To end months of turmoil, he agreed to bite the bullet. Milne would insert into his speech a substantial passage appealing to Jews to treat Labour as ‘your ally’. Corbyn would admit that anti-Semitism had caused ‘immense hurt and anxiety in the Jewish community and great dismay in the Labour Party’. That would be the limit of his olive branch: just a few twigs. Unyielding as ever, he would not admit to one truth: that his fate depended on overcoming the serious doubts raised during the preceding months about his character and political values. There would be no specific apology, but an appeal to ‘draw a line under the issue’.

  That same evening, ninety people crammed into a small room in the conference centre for a meeting hosted by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Protected by two heavily armed policemen in the corridor outside, they would be unimpressed by Corbyn’s appeal, especially Luciana Berger, who in her address described the vindictive abuse directed at her by party members. After recalling Labour’s anti-Semitic hatred in 2018 she introduced the eighty-eight-year-old Susan Pollack. Seventy-four years previously, like 424,000 other Hungarian Jews, Pollack had been transported in a railway cattle truck to Auschwitz. Unlike her parents, the attractive teenager was spared an immediate death in the gas chambers. For months she watched the smoke pour from the chimneys of the four crematoria: evidence of the incineration of five thousand Jews every day – a fact disputed by Paul Eisen and the other Holocaust deniers with whom Corbyn willingly associated.

  The mass deportation of Hungary’s Jews in which Pollack had been ensnared in 1944 had been masterminded by Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Over lunch in Budapest’s Astoria Hotel, Eichmann had boasted to SS major Wilhelm Hoettl that rounding up and murdering Hungary’s Jews in just eight weeks would rank among the Final Solution’s most efficient operations, albeit by that stage of the war Germany’s ultimate defeat had become inevitable.

  ‘How many Jews have we killed in total?’ Hoettl casually asked.

  ‘Including this lot,’ replied Eichmann after a moment’s calculation, ‘six million.’ Staggered by that number, Hoettl would cite the conversation during his testimony at the Allies’ trial of leading Nazis for war crimes in Nuremberg the following year. Incriminating his former superiors, the unrepentant Hoettl had correctly calculated, would save his life. By sheer chance, Susan Pollack had not been one of the six million.

  Her ordeal had ended at Bergen-Belsen. As the end of the war approached, with the Red Army nearing Auschwitz, many of the surviving inmates had been force-marched to Germany. ‘A British soldier saved me,’ she told her audience. ‘They had just liberated the camp. He lifted me up and fed me. One more night and I would have been dead.’ One of her listeners asked her for her thoughts on Corbyn’s attitude towards Jews. ‘I say to Mr Corbyn,’ she replied, “‘Stop the anti-Semitism.”’ Her audience, bruised by the revelations of the previous months, could only murmur their agreement. Not one of Corbyn’s circle heard Pollack deliver her account, which had been allocated a slot at 8.30 p.m., at the very end of the conference’s fringe events.

  Twenty minutes after that meeting, just outside the conference centre, Corbyn was walking down a curved staircase onto the packed dance floor of the Revolución de Cuba restaurant, the venue for the annual Daily Mirror conference party. Loudspeakers blared ‘Ooooh Jeremy Corbyn’. On a TV screen, a loop replayed Theresa May’s robotic ‘dancing’ on her recent trip to Africa. Less than two minutes later, Corbyn left the restaurant. His short address to the Mirror journalists and other guests was limited to a familiar pledge to make Britain ‘fairer and more equal’. Nothing more. He did not mention the threats he would make to the media in his speech the following day. ‘Here, a free press has far too often meant the freedom to spread lies and half-truths,’ he would say, ‘and to smear the powerless, not take on the powerful.’ He would blame ‘the billionaires who own the bulk of the British press [and who] don’t like us one little bit. No, it could be because we’re going to clamp down on tax dodging. Or it may be because we don’t fawn over them at white-tie dinners and cocktail parties.’ He suppressed his anger about the media’s criticism of himself, and in particular that summer’s condemnation of his anti-Semitism.

  The following day, Corbyn’s pledge to Britain’s Jews was received by the delegates with a sprinkle of unenthusiastic clapping. His animated pledge to the conference a few minutes later justified their scepticism. On appointment as prime minister, he promised, he would instantly recognise the Palestinian state. Wild cheers greeted those words, despite the fact that there was no such entity.

  In the hours after his speech, the opprobrium that had dogged Corbyn since early March 2018 subsided. Against the odds, the conference had been a success. As a man of principle, he hated compromise and surrender. He had lost the Jewish vote, but the sea of Palestinian flags waving in the conference hall represented a far bigger constituency. The incalculable question was whether he could fully recover from the summer’s setbacks. The Tories, despite their civil war over Brexit, remained 4 per cent ahead in the polls, with Theresa May’s personal ratings still substantially higher than his.

  On his way back to London from Liverpool, Virgin’s trains were running nearly ninety minutes late, the result of faulty signals. Those delays, tweeted Corbyn
confidently, would not happen once the railways were nationalised. The question was whether he realised that Network Rail, responsible for signalling, was already a nationalised business.

  Over the following weeks, Theresa May led Conservative Party members into open warfare among themselves. In her customary secretive manner, reflecting her insecurity, she had put together a withdrawal deal from the EU without sensitively negotiating the crucial terms with the Brexiteers or Remainers in her own party, or consulting the DUP about the ‘backstop’ – to prevent the imposition of a ‘hard’ border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic – even though her government depended on the Ulster Protestants for a majority in the Commons. Neither strong nor stable, May led an irretrievably split cabinet as she approached the ‘meaningful vote’ in the House of Commons on 11 December to secure Parliament’s approval for the agreement. She faced certain defeat, an abyss she refused to acknowledge. The alternative to her deal was either a hard Brexit or remaining in the EU. Every option offered either chaos or humiliation.

  Daily, the spectacle of a prime minister tossed around by a rabble of Tories deadlocked about the nation’s fate allowed Corbyn to ridicule ‘a shambolic government’. Few disagreed with him. His tactics, agreed with McDonnell and Milne, were to sit tight, waiting for the Tories to make a fatal mistake, and meanwhile to urge the electorate to focus on the catastrophic mess created by extremist Tories blind to the country’s social and economic problems. Once the government had self-destructed, Corbyn’s team calculated, Labour would step forward as the nation’s saviour. As the seventeenth-century English poet John Dryden warned in his great political poem ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, ‘Beware the fury of a patient man.’

  But patience, many Labour MPs believed, was a strategy mired by contradictions. Corbyn’s preference for leaving the EU was opposed by the majority of his party – both MPs and the membership, which favoured a second referendum. To avoid losing support, he called for a general election, and only if that failed, a second referendum to oppose the solution to the impasse. Unable to agree a consistent policy, he also floundered when he spoke about his pledge to renegotiate May’s deal, admitting that he had not actually read the 585-page draft agreement. Since all the EU leaders had pronounced that the deal had been finalised, and could not be renegotiated, his boast about his ability both to negotiate an exit from the EU and simultaneously to enable Britain to remain in the customs union and the single market lacked conviction. The recitation by the party’s front-bench spokesmen of those unrealistic demands did not enhance Labour’s credibility as an alternative government, and May retained a 10 per cent lead over Corbyn in the opinion polls. And yet, if the Brexit imbroglio was put aside, the undertaking by Corbyn and McDonnell to control capitalism’s excesses and failures resonated among the young, and even among some middle-class Tories outraged by their party’s fratricidal warfare and disgusted by its silence about the nation’s poor and uneducated.

  On Monday, 10 December, the Tories moved one step closer to self-destruction. Faced by certain defeat in the Commons over her deal with the EU the following day because of fears that the ‘backstop’ would sacrifice Britain’s sovereignty in perpetuity, Theresa May postponed the ‘meaningful vote’ until January 2019. Two days later, over forty-eight Tory Brexiteers formally challenged her leadership, accusing her of having botched the withdrawal negotiations from the outset, and prompting a vote on her position. By 9 o’clock that evening, she would know whether her premiership was over.

  Soon after making a defiant statement outside 10 Downing Street, May headed to the Commons for the weekly prime minister’s questions. Corbyn was waiting. Facing each other across the dispatch box were two similar politicians – both stubborn, and deaf to all voices bar those of a coterie of trusted advisers. In such a political crisis, a divided British minority government might expect to be dealt a mortal blow by the leader of the opposition, followed by a successful vote of no confidence and a change of government. Corbyn’s strength was the apparent unity of his backbenchers. Most of the 172 rebel Labour MPs had buried their animosity so as to avoid being held responsible for sabotaging the prospect of a Labour government. Even mainstream social democrats had given up the fight. The party’s new rules, they knew, made the left impregnable. Corbyn’s Labour was the only alternative to the Tories. However, a new weakness had emerged. A great deal depended on Corbyn’s performance, yet in the days before the vote he addressed no public meetings and gave no TV interviews. Except for prime minister’s questions, he had rarely spoken in public, prompting wild speculation among some Tories that he was seriously ill.

  In the event, Corbyn’s animated anger as he read out his prepared questions to May dispelled the gossip, but singularly failed to deliver the mortal blow. The wounded premier’s confident responses flummoxed him. His moment was lost. Eight hours later, having promised to resign before the next general election, May secured a victory of sorts. In the party’s leadership election, two hundred Tory MPs voted in her favour, while 117 called for her resignation. It might have been expected that the opposition of about 40 per cent of her own MPs should have ousted May. Her fate depended on Corbyn tempting the DUP and Brexiteer Tories to support a motion of no confidence in the government, triggering a general election.

  The scenario was not altogether fanciful.

  For weeks, some extreme Tory Brexiteers, fearful of the referendum result being reversed, had become tempted to join Corbyn in voting against their own government. Not only had May signed the ‘backstop’ against official advice and without consulting the DUP, but she had botched the 2017 general election, failed to achieve any social reforms, and clearly lacked the imagination and character required of a successful leader. The DUP, with good reason to distrust her, were also pledged to vote against May.

  Their combined inclination to turn on the prime minister was upended by Corbyn himself. First, he refused once again to negotiate with his opponents. Hatred suffocated his own self-interest. Second, in an attempt to seduce floating voters, John McDonnell had tried to mitigate his own promise of ‘irresistible change’ by mouthing soothing platitudes about cooperating with industry and supporting the government’s tax cuts for the middle class. To McDonnell’s frustration, Corbyn refused to kick the ball into an open goal. Rather than obfuscate for political advantage, and so grab power, he reasserted Labour’s ideological purity. There could be no tax cuts, he insisted, until the welfare benefits freeze was removed. McDonnell was left fuming, wondering whether Corbyn wanted to be prime minister at all. But even he could not avoid revealing his own Trotskyist beliefs. In the midst of the Tories’ crisis, he pledged to legalise sympathy strikes by British workers for any cause in the world, guaranteeing a return to the industrial anarchy of the 1979 ‘winter of discontent’. Wavering Tory Brexiteers were shocked by the Labour leaders’ unvarnished commitment to communism. Any ideas of supporting Corbyn so as to save Brexit disappeared, at least for the moment.

  On 19 December, Corbyn’s dilemma was exposed. Urged by his party to initiate a vote of no confidence in the government, he resisted because he knew that after a government victory he would be under pressure to push for a second referendum, which he opposed – as did May, who was desperate to retain the loyalty of Brexit voters. Neither leader would openly declare on which side they would campaign in a second vote. Corbyn dithered for hours, until his advisers produced a solution. He should table a vote of no confidence in May personally for delaying the ‘meaningful vote’. Only the far-left activists in Corbyn’s office, dismissive of parliamentary procedure, could have failed to ascertain that the speaker would refuse to call a motion which lacked any constitutional importance. Mocked by his own MPs for his indecision, and by May for backing a ‘stunt’, he faced a boisterous prime minister in the Commons.

  ‘I have to say,’ declared May, looking at Corbyn with a glint in her eye, ‘that it is a bit rich for the Right Honourable Gentleman to stand there and talk about [the governme
nt’s] dithering. Let us see what the Labour Party did this week. They said they would call a vote of no confidence, and then they said they would not. Then they did it, but it was not effective. I know it is the Christmas season and the pantomime season, but what do we see from the Labour front bench and the leader of the opposition?’ With that she launched into comic mockery before snapping at Corbyn, ‘Look behind you. They are not impressed, and neither is the country.’

  Furious as usual about any criticism from a Tory, Corbyn glared angrily at May and mouthed the words ‘Stupid woman.’ The government benches erupted. Four hours later, at the very same time as Fiona Onasanya, the Labour MP for Peterborough, was convicted for persistently lying to avoid a speeding ticket, he returned to the Commons to claim that he had said ‘Stupid people,’ and not ‘Stupid woman.’ The contrary judgement by professional lip-readers, he implied, was wrong. To divert attention from this latest fiasco, he announced the next day in an interview in the Guardian that he supported Brexit and opposed a second referendum. With that shot, the majority of Labour MPs became targets of Tory remainers urging them to unite with them to defeat both May and their own leader, and to prevent Brexit.

  The nation entered the new year of 2019 amid unprecedented uncertainty. Both major parties, led by their extremist wings, were promising to make Britain poorer. Yet the divisive argument over Brexit, which was disrupting relationships in families and between friends, was being conducted in the best tradition of British democracy – without riots or bloodshed. History suggested that, eventually, a solution would be forged and the nation would be reconciled. But that seems far off at the time that this narrative reaches its end on 4 January.