Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
many times. I’ve witnessed the slow lingering decay of one Labour Party and the changeling replacement take shape behind it. I’ve seen the people he’s inspired and the people he’s frightened. I’ve seen a civil war fought and won. This is what I’ve learned about Jeremy, his army and his movement.
HOW IT STARTED
I’d wager that the majority of those who joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn in that fateful leadership contest in 2015 hadn’t heard of him before that summer. Hell, I’d say a fair number of Labour Party members who were already members in 2015 probably hadn’t either. I’d wager again that the vast majority of the 12 million voters who cast their ballot for him in 2017 hadn’t heard of him before he became Labour leader.
I had. I knew him not as a great tribune of the left, political shaman or mover and shaker on the parliamentary scene. No, I knew him as a man I might have phoned at a quarter to ten on a Friday night if the guest I’d really wanted had fallen through; and he’d always answer the phone. In the couple of years leading to the 2015 general election and subsequent leadership contest, I was working as a producer on the BBC’s Newsnight. If I had told my programme editor for that night that I’d booked Jeremy Corbyn for a discussion they’d have looked at me as if I were a Michelin-starred chef who’d just served up a happy meal. It was just too easy. He was just too … accessible. Save for Keith Vaz, he was the easiest booking in Westminster. And, beyond that, I can hear them say: ‘Who cares? What would he have to say? Who does he speak for? No one.’
So why did Corbyn stand? The left was determined to field a candidate. It had done so in 2010 with Diane Abbott. John McDonnell had stood twice before but later suffered a heart attack so didn’t feel it was possible this time around. As the newly elected left-wing group of MPs gathered, there weren’t many other options. But such was the severity of the electoral defeat, the group felt it was especially important that their voice was heard in a contest that was looking pretty anodyne. One of their number, Clive Lewis, told me:
‘When I came down here, obviously, we saw where the leadership election was heading. It was awful, it was dry, it was just three people trying to get over the line by saying nothing – just kind of seeming like the best leader. And we had, kind of like, a meeting and Jeremy and John and Diane were the campaign group at the time and got together. As is well known now, we had that meeting and Jeremy volunteered. I think Jeremy and John had thought about it before … Was I surprised he stood? No, because I think the expression he used was, it’s my turn, we’re going to have a lefty, I haven’t had a crack at it yet so why not? So it wasn’t a surprise in that sense.
‘I think he wanted to do his duty with the left and put forward his politics and remind people what the Labour Party was there for, which he has done. I think his ambition was, if you have been in opposition for all those years, the kind of daydreams of epic victories probably subside quite far back in your mind and you have to think how we can make the case, shift what is debated within the leadership election, to pull the centre of gravity of the debate, how to make those arguments for a different audience and that’s a platform: whether you win or you don’t. I think also, thirdly, it’s about how you build your social movement of the left. You do that by having a platform so anyone on the left who stood, whether it’s Diane or John, can use that as a mechanism – to organise and build platforms for your ideas and this one worked exceptionally well. I think the great surprise was how well he did. I think that was a surprise for everyone.’
That surprise meant that from 15 June 2015 booking Jeremy Corbyn on Newsnight became, each day, that little bit harder. Today, you’d have to wade through many, many Newsnights before Corbyn crops up. But deciding to stand wasn’t enough. Corbyn had to succeed where McDonnell had failed nearly a decade before: he had to get on the ballot. That he did was down to 35 people. Thirty-five MPs, heroes, unlikely revolutionaries or ‘morons’, depending on your point of view: the gatekeepers not only sleeping on duty but thinking the enemy so weak that when they awake they invite him in for a look around the castle.
To win a place on the ballot to run for leader it was necessary under Labour Party rules in 2015 to be nominated by 15 per cent of the party’s MPs. After the 2015 drubbing, when the total number of Labour MPs in the Commons was reduced to 232, that meant getting 35 to sign on the dotted line. That did not mean, however, that they were beholden to that candidate in the ensuing contest. I was sitting in the Newsnight office the morning Jeremy Corbyn crawled over the line having reached the required 35 nominations. Of the 35 only 18 would go on to vote for Corbyn in the leadership contest and around the same number had nominated him in the first week of nominations being opened. That was pretty much the limit of the reach of the left in Parliament. He would need a further 17 to sign his name on the ballot paper.
It went right down to the wire. One by one, MPs traipsed down to the offices of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The heart of Corbyn’s campaign manager was in his mouth: ‘An hour to go, we were in the high twenties and nowhere near,’ John McDonnell was to recall. ‘Then we got thirty-two and we got to thirty-three and we had five MPs that had promised us that if we got to thirty-four they would nominate. It got to ten seconds and then two of them cracked. I admit I was in tears begging them.’ Indeed, one by one those 17 signatures came, including from some very unlikely places. The Bermondsey MP, Neil Coyle, has spent much of the last three years eviscerating Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum day after day but his name was under Corbyn’s on the nomination paper. David Lammy and Jo Cox were firm Blairites, yet they put Corbyn forward too. They said they did so for several reasons. Some have since suggested that some of the candidates were playing games. Rival camps accused Andy Burnham, the early favourite, of quietly welcoming Corbyn. Having Corbyn in the race meant he would no longer be the most left-wing candidate and he couldn’t be presented as such afterwards. He also felt he could get many of Corbyn’s second preferences. Burnham’s people vehemently deny it. Others had more straightforward intentions. After a shocking, unexpected and stinging result, many MPs spoke of the need ‘to widen the debate’ with every wing of the party represented. Emily Thornberry told me: ‘I didn’t support Jeremy as leader – I supported Yvette – but I was concerned about the great level of caution that was being shown and this tendency for triangulation. And if having Jeremy in the race meant that we didn’t fall down a right-wing rabbit hole and some of the things that were being challenged by Jeremy, it was a positive contribution to the debate. I didn’t expect Jeremy to be elected but in hindsight I can see how it happened.’ David Lammy spoke for many who chose to nominate Corbyn at the time: ‘This is a contest and there will be a winner. I will be surprised if he becomes the leader because it is clear that we need to broaden our appeal and move beyond our current tribe. I believe in an open process. It is important that someone like Jeremy is part of the process.’
The thing is, it was a debate that, insofar as they’d thought about it at all, centrist MPs arrogantly and blithely assumed they would win easily. That is the obvious reason Jeremy Corbyn made it on to the ballot. The two slightly less obvious ones are (i) that Labour MPs didn’t grasp the new leadership rules and their own role in them, of which more later; and (ii) MPs’ own arrogance and lack of understanding of their own party as it was in 2015.
On the day he made it through the nominations, I sat in the Newsnight office, working on something else. It was just another new absurdity of the leadership race, something going on in the background, of not much significance to anybody, a symptom of a party in a headspin. The only person I remember speaking to who thought it was an important moment and, at that, an unalloyed disaster was the programme’s economics correspondent, the doughty, long-time obsessive of all things Labour history, Duncan Weldon.
Puffing on one of his trademark heavy-duty cigarettes, he spluttered: ‘It’s crazy. Absolutely crazy. It makes the party look insane. Why nominate someone you don’t think should be prime minister, only to widen the debate?’
He was one of the very few who recognised Corbyn’s potential. Most of the others who reacted negatively did so less because they thought there was any hope that Corbyn might win than because they thought that in the wake of an electoral defeat, when one of the perceived reasons for the loss was that the party leader was too left wing and