Читать книгу Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party - Lewis Goodall - Страница 24

In preparation for the show that night I spoke to one MP who had been reluctant: ‘Look, I had John McDonnell phoning me every fifteen minutes and physically begging me. What are you supposed to say? And, besides, he’s harmless enough.’

‘He’s harmless enough.’ Looking back, that one sentence encapsulated how Corbyn could get on to the ballot paper. To some extent it speaks to Corbyn’s reputation within the parliamentary party. He’d been around since 1983, avuncular, eccentric, spartan but with a charm in his own way. As Chris Mullin, a fellow Bennite traveller turned Blairite minister, was to say later, ‘Jeremy really is the sort of man who if you run into on a train he’d halve his sandwiches and share them with you.’

Corbyn’s fellow MPs therefore found him a far less worrying or frankly terrifying prospect than McDonnell, who many colleagues considered to be a Trotskyite, on the hard left and extremely doctrinaire. He was also considered much more pleasant company than Abbott, who fairly or unfairly was considered aloof by many of her fellow MPs. As one MP who nominated Corbyn told me later: ‘I’d never ever have nominated McDonnell. Just look at him. He’s a thug. Diana was and is extremely rude. Jeremy was always nice to everyone. To be honest we got conned.’

But that word ‘harmless’ spoke to a more profound truth, to another word that would aid the Corbynistas again and again in their hostile takeover of the Labour Party: complacency. Corbyn was the first member of the ‘hard left’ or Bennite wing of the Labour Party to run for leader since Benn himself in 1988. At one time, the Labour centrists would have done everything possible to avoid such an outcome. But this time it didn’t matter. Because the hard left was, in the view of much of the rest of the parliamentary party (and everyone else), almost entirely moribund. It had been dwindling in significance since the 1980s. There were only 15 or so reliable members of the ‘left’ in Parliament (forming the rather motley crew of the ‘Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’), and most of those – John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Dennis Skinner, Corbyn himself – had been hanging around for decades apparently not doing all that much. Some of them, like Skinner and to a far lesser extent Corbyn, had started to enter the Tony Benn stage of their careers, where they were teetering on the edge of national-treasure status: a charming, living homily to a land and time lost long ago.

Benn liked to remind people that he was still dangerous – ‘I received a death threat again the other day!’ – but frankly Corbyn would have been lucky if anyone had even noticed him, much less sent a death threat. They spent their days attending worthy public meetings and rallies, turning up on foreign-owned television and radio stations like the Iran-backed Press TV, decrying Western imperialism and carping from the sidelines on the political and moral deficiencies of their own Labour government. The narrative in the minds of most MPs and observers of politics was clear: the internecine battles of the 1980s were as likely to make a comeback as Rick Astley. The left had been vanquished as far back as 1981 and had slowly been bleeding influence and power both within the party and without ever since.

However, as with so much of our contemporary analysis, it could have benefited from a longer view. It was always fantasy to believe the left’s fox was permanently shot. Today, we can see instead that the 1990s and 2000s were simply a period when the left was unusually and misleadingly weak. Failing to realise that provided an entirely illusory comfort blanket that Labour MPs refused to pull from their eyes and see what was happening within their own party.

By looking at previous Labour leadership battles in a little more detail, the signs would have been there for all to see that, outside the halls and corridors of the Palace of Westminster, the left had been gathering in strength for some time. Even before the game-changing financial crisis there was discontent in the party’s ranks. Jon Cruddas, a backbencher who then passed as the left-wing candidate, did unexpectedly well in the 2007 deputy leadership contest. He ran on a ticket of fundamentally shifting the party’s approach to the economy away from the market excesses of the Blair years. He came a solid third, behind the winner Harriet Harman and Blairite candidate Alan Johnson – even then it was clear that the Blairite moment had already slipped. Less clear at first glance was the groundswell that was building up for left-of-centre ideas and for a more ‘authentic’ Labourism. Cruddas came top of the ballot on first preferences. He was only whittled down to third as second and third preferences came into play.

In the same year, John McDonnell tried to run for leader twice but, unpopular as he was with his own parliamentary colleagues, failed to make the ballot paper when he tried to run against Gordon Brown. One Thursday night, late in 2007, Andrew Neil remonstrated with Diane Abbott, then appearing weekly with him cosily alongside Michael Portillo on the This Week sofa: ‘It’s pathetic. Your lot can’t even get forty-five backers.’

But that was as much to do with Brown’s dominance (no one else could get any backers either) and some think that had McDonnell managed to get on, he’d have outperformed expectations, especially with the trade union section. This is presumably one of the reasons the Gordon Brown machine was so desperate to keep him off the ballot in the first place.

When Abbott herself ran three years later after the drubbing of the 2010 election, she needed ‘help’ from several colleagues to get on the ballot paper, not least from David Miliband, who hoped it would siphon votes from brother Ed, who was clearly making a play to the party’s left.

Most MPs I’ve spoken to agree that that experience proved the reddest of red herrings, which itself was a primary contributor to the party accidentally getting its own reddest of red leaders, five years later. The narrative at the time was that Abbott’s performance was dire, which proved the thesis that the left of the party was irrelevant. She did indeed come fifth of five, with less than 5 per cent of the vote, and was eliminated in the first round.

But dig a little deeper and she did much, much better than that. Abbott came third in the trade union section. She was only just behind Ed Balls in the membership section. What sent her languishing so resolutely was the party’s electoral-college system in place at that time, which gave a third of the college votes to Labour MPs and MEPs. She only got seven (presumably including her own). But had she been running on the reformed system that was to return Jeremy Corbyn five years later, she would have done considerably better, coming third with 33 per cent of the vote – ahead of Andy Burnham and Ed Balls. Moreover, Abbott ran less on an explicitly left-wing message than on one about diversity. She said she was getting into the race because ‘it’s 2010, we can’t have a situation where every one of our leadership candidates are white and male’. This was not an offer that proved especially resonant at the time.* Corbyn’s economic prospectus was to prove more powerful.

Her performance (and McDonnell’s a few years before) was a chimera. As one senior Blairite MP told me: ‘The Abbott example was the best thing that ever happened to the left and the worst thing to ever happen to us. It made them look weaker than they were and made us look stronger. We just thought we could put up a lefty for sport and whack them to show just how right our ideas were. We were so wrong it’s painful.’

Even if they had been aware that her performance wasn’t as weak as it looked, Labour MPs should have been warier about the changes that had taken place in the Labour Party since 2010. There had been lots of left-wing returnees from the Lib Dems (and other parties on the left), driven away by Iraq but now disgusted with the party’s collusion with the Conservatives. But even at the eleventh hour the signs were there if MPs had cared to look for them. A poll of party members published by the website LabourList in June 2015 (before Corbyn got the 35 votes he needed) showed him head and shoulders above all the other candidates, including Burnham, the presumptive favourite. The first glimmers of Corbyn’s most potent weapon, his social-media following, had also started to shine.

#NominateJeremy had been tweeted some 50,000 times in the days leading up to deadline day, designed to pressure wavering MPs. Even if those things were all you knew, given all of that, Corbyn should never have been the long shot that he was, and MPs should have taken note. Taking the long view, the Labour Party has always been an organic entity with a Darwinian battle at its heart. Both the right, the ‘soft left’ and the left have, at one time or another, competed for dominance. Their fortunes are often inversely linked. Occasionally one faction looks like it has become extinct and that one will, Lord of the Rings style, ‘rule them all’. But they never do, in the end.

The slow revival of the left had been a long time coming but it was real. Ed Miliband ran specifically as a break from New Labour, casting his brother, David, as the candidate of the Blairite right. Ed won with the support of the unions, but David won with the members. What the left desperately needed was a way of breaking out of the cage in which the party’s electoral system kept them imprisoned. Fortunately, in another example of how extraordinarily powerful forces can twist and weave with low farce and accident, their salvation would come from the unlikeliest of sources: Eric Joyce’s fist.