Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
The world’s attention was focused on Bobby Sands, a twenty-six-year-old IRA member leading a hunger strike in the Maze prison outside Belfast. Naked and near death, Sands had just won a by-election to become a Member of Parliament. For Corbyn and the far left, his defiant martyrdom symbolised the resonance of their struggle. The next stage was to deliver the Target 82 coup in the GLC elections in May.
Ken Livingstone believed that all his work over the previous two years to replace moderate Labour candidates would win his faction a marginal majority within the Labour group in the GLC. But every vote was important. To his irritation Kate Hoey, the candidate in Hornsey, unexpectedly resigned to stand for Parliament. Livingstone renewed his appeal to Corbyn to stand, but he again declined, not least because of the way he was approached. ‘Politics is like biting lumps out of people,’ Livingstone had told him. Biting people was a practice Corbyn resisted – both verbal attacks and violence. He preferred others to do the dirty work. If he engaged in front-line warfare alongside Livingstone he would be exposed, not least to journalists who might begin investigating his past. That would interfere with his parliamentary ambitions and more. Instead he found a new candidate, David Hart, the son of Judith Hart, a left-wing Labour MP, who was duly voted in. Hart celebrated his victory with Livingstone, one of fifty Labour councillors against forty-one Tories. Within twenty-four hours Andrew McIntosh, the party’s moderate GLC leader, had fallen victim to the Target 82 plotters: just as planned, Livingstone marshalled a bare majority of the Labour councillors – many his hand-picked leftists – to usurp McIntosh and win election for himself as Labour’s leader. McIntosh, who six years earlier had been ousted as a councillor in Hornsey by Corbyn, had failed to learn his lesson. ‘He wasn’t a proper politician,’ scoffed Livingstone.
The new GLC leader had much in common with his loyal acolyte. Like Corbyn, he too was portrayed by the media as a ruthless revolutionary living for politics and happy to be separated from his wife. ‘Ken’s not interested in ordinary human relations,’ said one Labour councillor, ‘simply in getting to the top of the greasy pole.’ He wasted no time in putting his agenda into action: remaining moderate Labour members of the GLC were appalled by his imposition of higher rates to pay for cheap transport fares and, after Bobby Sands’ death had incited the IRA to burn a mother of three children to death, his instant declaration of support for the IRA. Corbyn, by contrast, cheered Livingstone’s audacity. Phase One was completed: the GLC was theirs. Thatcher was next.
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‘Where’s that member of Militant who just won in Hayes?’ asked Livingstone jocularly about a trusted comrade in the headquarters of the Greater London Council opposite Parliament.
‘That’s me!’ replied John McDonnell. ‘And I’ve left Militant.’
Livingstone admired McDonnell’s ‘macho form of class-based politics’. The Trotskyite’s fondness for a violent revolution to topple the capitalists, said Livingstone, had been learned during his training as a supporter of Militant Tendency. Emerging from the shadows to become Livingstone’s deputy at County Hall, McDonnell was soon voicing his disgust that moderate Labour GLC councillors dared to criticise his boss. Their so-called colleagues, he sneered, were traitors for advocating ‘middle-of-the-road policies’. ‘Traitor’ was a word he was to use often in the years to come.
Born in Liverpool in 1951, the son of a docker, McDonnell had moved with his family to Great Yarmouth in the late 1950s. His father became a bus driver and his mother worked at the local British Home Stores, for a time at the biscuit counter. Good at maths, the flame-haired ten-year-old sat next to a girl named Judith Daniels at St Mary’s Roman Catholic primary school. In later years, McDonnell suggested that he had whispered a maths answer to her to save her from a severe caning, but in reply she ridiculed his exaggeration. His whisper, she said, ‘saved me from a gentle tapsy from an inspirational nun’. The small lie was similar to Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to build up the story of his early years, but in other respects their narratives were very different.
After passing the 11-Plus, McDonnell went to Great Yarmouth Grammar School, but left early due to trouble at home and at school. After briefly considering the priesthood, he arrived in Burnley to be employed first as a manual worker at Silent Night Beds and then at Mullard’s in Simonstone, making TV screens for Philips. Shortly before his twentieth birthday he met Marilyn Bateman, a local nursery nurse four years his senior, at a miners’ club. They married and moved to a small terraced house in a cul de sac in nearby Nelson. At nights he resumed studying for History A-Level at Burnley Municipal College. Three years later the McDonnells moved with their two daughters to west London, to establish a business fostering up to ten children in their home. McDonnell enrolled in an evening course in politics and government at Brunel University. During the first year, his political beliefs hardened.
At the beginning, his militancy was ambiguous. Barbara Goodwin, his tutor on government, recalled him as the least extreme in a group of eight students. ‘He was regarded as a class traitor for defending Labour against the Trotskyites,’ she recalled. Later, David Shapiro, his personal tutor, declared him ‘academically unteachable. He was already a Marxist and it was all water off a duck’s back. But he was pragmatic and sensible.’ After graduating in 1976, McDonnell was employed as a researcher at the National Union of Mineworkers. By then he had become well known at the Hayes and Harlington branch of the Labour Party for leading a campaign to oust Neville Sandelson, the sitting Labour MP. The public-school-educated, cigar-smoking Jewish barrister was pro-Europe. ‘He can’t understand the grassroots trade union activists,’ claimed McDonnell, who forced a vote that Sandelson should retire or be deselected. The MP survived by three votes, to be re-elected in the 1979 Labour bloodbath.
During the following three years, McDonnell left the NUM to work in the TUC’s welfare section. As secretary of the TUC’s book club, he selected each month’s read. ‘It’s Das Kapital,’ he told the other staff at the TUC’s headquarters in Bloomsbury. ‘That’s the only book we’re going to study.’ He found himself alone in the room. Before Labour’s defeat in 1979, he had gravitated towards the Trotskyites. Sitting in a café in Lambeth with George Galloway and the Workers Revolutionary Party leader Gerry Healy, he discussed the creation of the Labour Herald, a glossy magazine to be financed by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Although he was a thug, rapist, fraudster and anti-Semite, Healy attracted many idealists to the WRP, including Keith Veness. ‘McDonnell was a proper Trot in a way that Corbyn was not,’ observed Galloway. Veness confirmed the judgement. With a hatchet face and jutting chin, McDonnell was confrontational, spouting Marxist jargon about constant agitation in his advocacy of violent disruption. Appointed as the new magazine’s editor, he regularly appeared at WRP meetings to promote revolution, after which would come the mass nationalisation of the British economy and the abolition of all private land ownership, without compensation. With his new role, his life changed. His Trotskyist sympathies qualified him to become head of policy at Camden council, and his marriage ended. While his estranged wife continued to run the fostering business, he lived with Julia Fitzgerald, a Camden councillor, in a flat in Kentish Town.
During the following year, McDonnell plotted with Corbyn, Knight, Grant and Livingstone to take over the country’s government. After the victory in 1981, he focused on anything that would challenge the government. Disguise was one chosen weapon. ‘Cut your hair, dress properly, wear a tie and act the part,’ he advised Toby Harris. ‘He was always professional to win power,’ says Harris, a member of the London Government Assembly, an elected group representing the London boroughs. Corbyn was very much part of the group, alongside McDonnell, Livingstone and Veness, and was the ‘organiser’ of London Labour Briefing. After his election as Labour leader in 2015 he would deny any official role for London Labour Briefing, but he is listed in the group’s literature as responsible for the sale of tickets to a social event that offered curries during a discotheque evening, and two years later was named as overseeing the group’s mailing list. Labour moderates in Haringey were appalled by Corbyn, but the local newspaper, noting the election of more far-left councillors and Corbyn’s brazen resubmission of Tariq Ali’s third application