Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
1994
Ooooh! Jeremmmmyyyy Corrrrbynnnn!
Almost everywhere I went, summer 2017
It’s very late September 2017, summer is clinging on by its fingertips, and, yet again, I’m waiting for Jeremy Corbyn. It’s the eve of the Labour Party conference in Brighton. It’s a home fixture for him here. Draw a Venn diagram of the Brighton population and Jeremy Corbyn supporters, and you’d find yourself colouring the section in the middle a very dark shade of Labour crimson indeed. This park – ‘the Level’, not far from the city’s famous Pavilion – informs its visitors upon entry that it is a ‘gender inclusive’ amenity. If Corbynism has a spiritual home outside his Islington redoubt, it is surely this great coastal city.
As ever, Corbyn is late. The crowd, a hundred deep or so, don’t seem to care. They seem high. Some of them probably are. Most of them, apparently, on sheer possibility, the unadulterated joy of being proved right. One man is dancing in a Pikachu costume while wearing a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt and no one bats an eyelid. Families have brought their kids on a rapidly darkening late September night and more still have brought their dinner, just to hear a near septuagenarian politician from north London, first elected before many there were even born, address the crowd and give the same speech he’s essentially been giving for twenty years.
I watch in the press pen, as I’ve done many times. Before he appears, he often has a posse of speakers introduce him. Not just one, not just two but usually, five, six, even seven. Believe me, when you’re on a deadline, you have no choice but to count them, in pure desperation, making feverish calculations about average speaking time. John McDonnell usually goes last. He has a few anecdotes thrown in from their three-decade bromance. He’s preceded by a consortium of local activists, mid-level trade union officials, long-standing councillors, the occasional new party member to remind us all just how inspiring young people find the old man. This one is no exception. The crowd sports a peculiar mix of adulation and detachment. After all, there’s only one man they’ve come to see. Pikachu dances on.
But then someone notices the merest flash of a cream suit. The word diffuses through the masses like quicksilver. A gradually excited roar rips through the crowd. Pikachu stops dancing. As well as being the media area, the cordoned-off section in which I’m standing is also reserved for disabled people. One lady, on a crutch, almost explodes with excitement when she sees the cream.
‘Jeremy! Jeremy! He’s here … oh my, he’s here!’ she screams in a Scottish accent.
I ask her why she’s so excited. She replies that she loves him.
‘But why?’ I ask again.
She offers a series of incredulities. She’s clearly never wondered why anyone would need to wonder. Nonetheless, she indulges me, considers for a moment, rolling the question around her mind and then: ‘Well, for a start, that one. The … the pig fucker. You know who I mean, I can’t even stand to say his name without wanting to rip someone’s head off, he makes me so angry!’
I ask her, why does he make her angry?
She takes another moment, apparently deep in thought. Then comes the answer: ‘I don’t know, he just does.’
There’s a flash of something across her eyes, just for a moment – is it uncertainty? And then, turning her head to see Corbyn emerging on to the stage, her huge smile returns, and she walks, slowly, unsteadily, but determinedly on her crutches, as fast as she can, to get as close as possible to the politician who makes her beam. Who makes her feel good.
We wait a long time for his speech. When he eventually comes on to the stage, he steps up to the microphone, holding his notes close to his long, pointy nose and Dumbledore glasses, almost like a menu. And he treats his diners to a pretty typical meal chez Corbyn. He meanders from one topic to the other with little in the way of thread. The subjects selected are united only by his belief in their place on the arc of his own moral universe, which, like his speech, is very long indeed. The big issue of the day, the geopolitical mantrap of Brexit, gets as much attention as the burning question of free music lessons for all under-elevens. The dozens holding EU flags aloft continue to hold them high. They see no disconnect between Corbyn the Eurosceptic, the only MP alongside Dennis Skinner to vote against every European treaty and piece of legislation in his 30 years in Parliament, and the folk hero that he has now undoubtedly become. Because he is bigger than any one issue, than any one cause.
He speaks as he always does, laconically in a single register. I’ve heard him so many times I feel I could deliver his speech myself. But, this time, I sense there’s something more. He’s savouring every syllable. He’s enjoying himself. And who could blame him? How close he must have come to resigning in 2016 as MP after MP shattered like spinning plates falling off their sticks, one after the other. How close Theresa May might have come to not calling the 2017 election, leaving him instead to fester and wade through the most intractable of political treacle, every moment now a living vindication of the right path chosen, the chill of what he might neither have known nor experienced enough to make him grateful. There’s a parallel universe where another Jeremy Corbyn is sitting on his allotment, staking his raspberry canes for the next year, wondering what might have been. Not just because Theresa May didn’t call the 2017 election but because, in a universe where in 2015, as virtually the last man or woman on the Labour left who hadn’t stood for the leadership, he’d consulted his wife, Laura, and decided he’d rather have a quieter life. None of this would have happened.
He finishes. He leaves. But not quickly because the crowds descend. The idea that he’s ‘like a rock star’ is clichéd but there are few other ways to describe it. People, like the lady on the crutches, seem genuinely overwhelmed to see him, to touch him, to exchange a few words: the (people’s) king’s touch – ridding them not of scrofula, but of the little pessimism they have left about life and about the journey that they’re all on together. Not long to go now and when victory comes, as it surely must, as night follows day, he’ll still be theirs. Their Jeremy. He’s real and he’s sending them away with even more hope than they had when they arrived. They are part of his army. His tribe. They call him by his first name because he feels like a friend, like he’s one of them but greater than them too. He gives them strength. Just before he leaves the stage, he stops, takes his phone out of his pocket and takes a picture of the crowd. He smiles.
The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party must be one of the most important turning points in the party’s 118-year existence. At the time of writing, in early 2018, the party is dominated at every level by the left. This is the first time this has ever happened. Moreover, if the 2015 leadership election was a moment for the party, the 2017 election, likewise, was a moment for the nation. It was also another episode when a crack appeared in every shibboleth, every sacred truth, every bit of cement and mortar of the fundamental assumptions of every political strategist, columnist and two-bit hack to have ever worked or wandered in Westminster – that is down to Jeremy Corbyn. A Labour leader ran on the left. What’s more, that leader ran on (what was considered to be) a left-wing platform. Then, he gained seats. Cue collective pundit breakdown.
Why now? Why did this septuagenarian who had crafted a happy life as assiduously tending to his allotment as he does the constituency in which it lies take his party, and then the nation, by storm? How had we got to this moment? If ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’, then what was it about this hour and this man? What has happened to Labour and to the country to make this his moment, a moment he must surely have thought would never come? Why were all those families out there that late September night in Brighton, a scene replicated in endless town halls, gymnasia and community centres from Stornoway to the Solent? Was it the man? Was it his ideas? It can’t have been his root vegetables. And what are those ideas anyway? This is important stuff, because the Corbyn Labour Party is pretty much the only left-of-centre party to be doing well across the Western world. If there is something about this man and his approach, it could be the panacea that ailing social democrats across Europe and North America have been looking for. To answer takes some delving into history and getting under the skin of a political party and membership buffeted by the most turbulent economic and