Dangerous Hero

‘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 to become a Labour member in the borough, tipped him to become the council’s next leader.

By then, fearful of the Marxists’ threat to Britain’s social fabric, Conservative Central Office had appointed a professional investigator, Peter Shipley, to monitor relations between Labour MPs and the far left. Ever since James Callaghan had ended the listing of proscribed organisations, left-wing Labour MPs had joined lobby groups that were outwardly reputable, including the World Peace Organisation, but that were in fact secretly financed by Moscow. Among the British associations Shipley investigated was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), established by Fenner Brockway, a veteran Labour MP and a paid Soviet agent. In 1981 the MCF, managed by Tony Gilbert, a communist agent also controlled by Moscow, counted Corbyn a member. Corbyn met Gilbert frequently, but establishing his political sympathies towards Moscow was beyond Shipley’s remit. All he recognised was the far left’s flaws.

Zealous and serious, all those in the group around Corbyn appeared to march under the same banner, but they disagreed constantly about ideology. They were brothers-in-arms rather than soulmates, and as individuals showed no particular warmth towards each other. One exception was the relationship between Tony Benn and Corbyn. Benn’s radical socialism had polarised Labour. His ascent gave many Marxists and Trotskyites hope that the Labour Party they had abandoned during the 1960s was worth rejoining. To establish their shared ambitions, Tariq Ali, Reg Race and others met Benn in the Commons along with Corbyn, who said little, although everyone knew he could be relied upon to make the logistical arrangements for Benn’s imminent battle against Denis Healey in the election for Labour’s deputy leadership, the result of which was to be announced at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on 27 September 1981.

In the days before the vote, Corbyn assured Benn of victory. Combined with the defection of many Labour councillors to the SDP, the deselections and intimidation were certain, he predicted, to deliver the bulk of the constituency votes to the left. Corbyn also reckoned that Benn was assured of trade union support, including NUPE’s. He was right about the constituencies (81 per cent voted for Benn), but wrong about the unions. Although Benn could attract huge crowds – even during an unannounced stop at a motorway service station nearly a hundred people had gathered to hear him make an impromptu speech – he also inspired hatred. The Times columnist Bernard Levin titled him ‘Mr Zigzag Loon’, while Denis Healey dismissed him as ‘an artificial lefty’. The majority of the unions, including Haringey’s branch of NUPE, voted against Benn, whom they saw as an extremist, but to the moderates’ shock Healey’s overall victory was wafer-thin – 50.4 per cent against 49 per cent for Benn. Corbyn’s disappointment was intense. In the days following, Conservative Central Office became so convinced that the hard left was broken that Shipley’s contract was not renewed. The Tories were profoundly mistaken. On reflection, Benn’s narrow loss gave the left hope. In the nature of Corbyn’s long road, there was never defeat, just one more precursor to another start, another campaign.

‘What next?’ Corbyn asked. Wounded by his defeat but pleased by the party’s imminent split, Benn decided to host a monthly discussion group with Britain’s leading Marxists on Sunday evenings at his home in Holland Park, west London. Among those invited to what he later called the Independent Corresponding Society were Ralph Miliband (the father of David and Ed), university teachers of sociology Hilary Wainwright and Robin Blackburn, and Tariq Ali. In the hierarchy of the left, Benn and Ali had inherited the political skills of the ruling class. They were also intellectuals – self-disciplined agents of social engineering – which Corbyn was certainly not. While Corbyn sat meekly as their NCO, a team player rather than a manager, their ideological theorising passed over his head. But he found comfort in their descriptions of the best tactics against the capitalists.

In a series of debates, the group considered whether peaceful reform was possible through Parliament and what Tariq Ali called ‘class collaboration’ (the old Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie would eventually unite with the working class). Parliament only became relevant, Ali argued, when subjected to pressures from outside groups, and should eventually be abolished. Distrustful of elections, since the mid-1960s Miliband had preached that Parliament should be totally ignored. The masses, he argued, should disregard both the trade unions and the Labour Party, because socialism could be built only by armed struggle. ‘The elite always sells out,’ he told the gathering, and urged Benn to support revolution followed by the creation of democratic soviets, or communities.

This was not yet Corbyn’s thinking. Although energised by disdain for Parliament and impatient with liberal democracy, he accepted Benn’s philosophy that ‘to change the world you need to join the Labour Party and work from within’. By hard work, Benn said, Labour’s Methodist roots would eventually be replaced by true socialism with no need for violence. While Benn’s programme for socialism lacked the historical and cultural perspective of Michael Foot and other intellectual worshippers of the great socialist heroes, he was obsessed by the need for democracy within the party. Structures and machinery were fundamental to his programme to transform Labour, and then the country, into a Marxist idyll. Without studying either economics or finance, Corbyn absorbed Benn’s slogans about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, and adopted the belief that ‘The role of private capital should be ended.’ Beyond that, he was intellectually adrift. ‘He didn’t understand the relevance of Marxist theory about markets or a planned economy,’ said one of the participating academics. ‘You can’t be an unconscious Marxist.’ Corbyn’s ignorance did not diminish his passion for Marxism: he was totally committed to the confiscation and redistribution of wealth to produce equality – but knowing the philosophical explanation was beyond him. As he retold stories in praise of Salvador Allende to the group – his principal contribution to their discussions – he came across as the most committed of Marxists. Strangely, he never mentioned his experiences in Jamaica or Guyana.

In later years, the impassioned discussions about Marxist dialectics and modern capitalism would be described as substitutes for Corbyn’s missed university education. They were hardly that. Nevertheless, he did learn from Benn and Miliband that socialism would be built by mobilising workers to take over the ownership and control of key industries, and the importance of organising people in their workplaces and housing estates to struggle against the capitalists. Thereafter, employees and their trade unions would negotiate government investment and production plans with the managers, rather than be subject to employers, bankers and Parliament. Tellingly, in 2017 Labour’s election manifesto would reflect Benn’s promise to give workers the statutory right to buy their own companies at discounted prices with taxpayers’ money. Thirty-six years earlier, in February 1981, Benn and Corbyn imagined Labour sweeping the Tories aside to implement just those policies. Their dream was encouraged in late 1981 by the miners’ threat to strike in protest at the government’s decision to close uneconomic pits. Fearing the same defeat as Heath, Thatcher surrendered. Soon after, Arthur Scargill was elected as the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The left felt further emboldened. Across the country, other militants similar to Corbyn were seizing control of Labour associations, galvanising the trade unions to replicate the miners’ industrial challenge to Thatcher, and giving the impression of engaging in subversion.

In 1982, Corbyn, now thirty-two, ranked among the leaders of the left in the capital. Recognised by the Economist as London Labour Briefing’s ‘general secretary figure’ and by the Hornsey Journal as joint editor of its newspaper, he boasted that the organisation was ‘moving the leadership of most London authorities well to the left’. Reflecting that influence, he was elected as Hornsey’s representative to Labour’s regional executive, appointed the chairman of its finance committee, and also sat on a number of the London party’s subcommittees. For the next council elections, he had ensured that half the Labour candidates in Hornsey were associated with London Labour Briefing. All of them echoed his call for ‘a full-frontal attack on the government’, and obeyed his directive that they would vote to ‘defy the law and the unelected judges’ to increase rates, cut bus fares and back a twenty-four-hour general strike. Even so, within Haringey’s Labour caucus his supporters were still a minority. In a vote in February 1982, the majority blocked his attempt to break the law and act outside ‘the constitutional mechanism of Parliament’. They feared, however, that their victory was temporary, and that the ‘anarchists’, led by Corbyn, would stage a coup. Their anxiety was noticed in Westminster. Acting on Foot’s instructions, his lieutenants purged the far left from the NEC. Right-wing Labour MPs, led by Bob Mellish, the chief whip, dismissed Corbyn as a ‘middle-class Trot’ with little contact with the working class.The Bennites were forced to retreat.

All those criticisms bounced off Corbyn, as did the endless complaints of Haringey’s residents. Their list was damning. Parents were angered when a go-slow by council bus drivers, supported by Corbyn, left their handicapped children stranded at home; the homeless protested that his refusal to accept government money for rebuilding houses meant that 1,500 council properties had been left unoccupied; a quarter of the council’s street cleaners were permanently absent on ‘sick leave’; buildings had been flooded after the rubbish on Haringey’s unswept streets had blocked the drains; and a Labour group report had exposed a ‘bonus racket’ rewarding council employees for not working. Haringey’s councillors admitted that they had lost control of their employees, mostly members of NUPE. Corbyn expressed no regret. Management and detail were of no concern to him. Nor was he sympathetic to the anger of white applicants for council jobs that Bernie Grant’s aggressive campaign against racism intentionally discriminated against them. In his world, immigrants’ interests were paramount. They were the victims of oppression. Any who disagreed, including Haringey’s disgruntled residents, were the enemy. Just as he was unable to deal with his own personal life, he was unable to resolve many causes of other people’s misery. He was an activist, not a manager willing to immerse himself in detail to improve the lives of all Haringey’s inhabitants.

In spring 1982, as part of his single-minded quest to seize power, Corbyn was elected chairman of the Hornsey Labour Party, and immediately reignited his battle against the moderates. On 24 March a party meeting erupted in physical violence as he once again attempted to ram through Tariq Ali’s membership, despite the opposition of the national executive. Moderates erupted in anger that a notorious Trotskyist, contrary to the rules, was even notionally admitted to the party. Blows were exchanged, and eyewitnesses reported that ‘bedlam spilled out on to the street’. In the midst of these and other fights, Corbyn theatrically presented Ali with a party membership card. His conduct, according to George Page, London’s Labour Party leader, was ‘the most extraordinary study of bias and manipulation of rule and customs I have ever witnessed’. Corbyn wore that criticism as a badge of pride. After the national council elections in May, he believed, Britain would be one step closer to Michael Foot’s election as prime minister. Margaret Thatcher, he was convinced, could not recover from the deep unpopularity she had attracted during the previous months, following cabinet splits and an economic crisis – private polling by the Conservatives showed the Tories’ support had fallen to just 20 per cent. ‘The Tory vote will disappear,’ Corbyn predicted, ‘and I think we shall win.’ In his manifesto for re-election in Haringey he pledged ‘the smashing of the capitalist state’ – not an unusual declaration in those fevered times. ‘I don’t have any personal ambitions,’ he added. That was untrue, and struck his council colleagues as laughable.

Six weeks later, after Labour had won the council elections, Corbyn moved once again to topple Robin Young, his key enemy among the moderates. On the fourth attempt, having at last gathered sufficient support after a succession of purges and deselections, he was successful. ‘I was persuaded to go,’ Young admitted ruefully. ‘They were a funny lot, the hard left.’ Mindful of the impending nomination of Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Islington North, Corbyn next marshalled Haringey’s twenty hard-left Labour councillors against the remaining thirteen moderates, and appointed Angela Greatley, an aspiring quangoist, as the council’s ‘patsy’ leader. He himself returned to chairing the uncontroversial planning committee, and awaited the next general election with confidence. The invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April dashed his hopes.

Military dictators had ruled Argentina since 1976. To crush the opposition, thousands of civilians had disappeared in the so-called ‘dirty war’. Some victims, including socialists, had been pushed out of military helicopters over the Atlantic, their babies and young children then handed to childless supporters of the regime. By any measure, Corbyn should have opposed General Leopoldo Galtieri’s dictatorship, and welcomed the opportunity to liberate oppressed Argentines. Instead, he opposed Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of a naval task force to recapture the islands as a Tory plot. In his hatred of America and Britain, he supported anyone who was their enemy – Stalin, Mao, Castro and now Galtieri. According to Corbyn’s logic, while he did not condone the dictators’ murders, they were not to blame for all the excesses that had occurred under their rule. That was the fault of the imperialists – America and Britain – for subjugating the poor. In Galtieri’s case, his crimes could be excused as the price for liberating the Falklands from Britain.

Regardless of the islanders’ overwhelming wishes to continue the legal settlement established in 1833 that the Falklands were part of the UK, Corbyn demanded that Thatcher ‘pursue peace’ and negotiate their surrender to the Argentinean dictator. ‘We resent the waste of unemployed men who are being sent to the Falklands to die for Thatcher and Galtieri,’ he stated in a motion tabled in Haringey council, and continued, ‘A tide of jingoism is sweeping the country … It is a nauseating waste of money and lives.’ The ‘grotesque’ war, he said, was conceived to keep the Tories’ ‘money-making friends in business’. To explain why he ignored the rights of both the Falklanders and the Argentines to live in freedom, he declared that Thatcher was ‘exploiting the situation’. Allowing people to live under military tyranny, he said, was preferable to removing despots by force. The cost of the war would be better spent on housing, hospitals and wages in Britain, or to feed the starving in Africa. He saw no contradiction in his attack on the British armed forces rather than the Argentine dictator. ‘He’s always lived according to his principles,’ explained Chris Mullin, a sympathetic Bennite MP. To Corbyn’s dismay, in the Commons Michael Foot supported the government, and in a bravura speech blamed the ‘guilty men’ at the Foreign Office for the Falklanders suffering Argentinean oppression. Only a handful of Labour MPs voted against the dispatch of the task force.

In Haringey, the consequence of rule by Corbyn was an accelerated exodus of businesses and residents. The escapees feared yet another 40 per cent rates hike to fund another 50 per cent increase in administrative staff. Among the 4,500 additional employees were two ‘anti-nuclear officers’, charged with ‘promoting peace’ in the borough. On Corbyn’s initiative, Haringey had been twinned with Grenada, then led by a Marxist government; and with his encouragement another large group of gypsies had moved onto the site of a pony club for handicapped children. The gypsies used the field as a dump for commercial waste. ‘It’s become a filthy rat-infested mess,’ complained Robin Young, ‘and the source of dysentery among schoolchildren.’ A year later, the council paid over £45,000 (£90,000 today) to clear the site. Once again, Corbyn refused to apologise. ‘The decision not to evict the people,’ he told the council, ‘was correct.’

Haringey had become Britain’s highest-spending local authority, with the highest rates for residents and businesses. Its few remaining moderate Labour councillors, angry about the chaos, appeared powerless. Outraged by the discovery of another £1 million fraud executed by council employees who were supervised by the Public Works Committee formerly chaired by Corbyn, they were shocked by his reaction to a bomb explosion outside the local Labour Party headquarters which had severely damaged the door and outside wall. ‘He blamed the police for not being more vigilant,’ said a resident about the unsolved crime. ‘That’s the same Corbyn who criticised the police presence in Haringey as a threat to ethnic minorities.’ The critic was referring to his condemnation of the ‘increasingly repressive nature of London policing’. The blast exposed a familiar characteristic of Corbyn’s management: there was no correlation between recruitment and efficiency. Although he had presided over a record number of new members joining the party, the constituency was mired in debt and there was no money to repair the bomb damage. The party was forced to close the building.

That December, Corbyn faced a moment of reckoning when Haringey’s Labour moderates threatened to join with the Tory opposition to defeat his latest proposal to increase spending. ‘You are like little Hitlers,’ the Hornsey Journal accused Corbyn, Bernie Grant and their cabal. ‘Like him, you will eventually be rejected by forces of democracy.’ To Corbyn’s good fortune, the newspaper lacked the resources to publish a muckraking exposé. Nor could the editor penetrate the wall of secrecy surrounding Corbyn, who always refused to speak to the ‘capitalist press’.

The major obstacle to Corbyn’s ambition to become a parliamentary candidate was his continued support of Tariq Ali’s membership of the Hornsey branch – endorsed on Corbyn’s insistence by the borough’s general committee. After the NEC rejected Ali’s third bid, Corbyn was warned that the branch would be disbanded if he issued him with another membership card. This was not the best time for Corbyn to oppose the party leadership, and at his request Ali withdrew his application. He would later describe Corbyn – quoting E.P. Thompson’s judgement on the socialist poet and textile designer William Morris – as ‘unsteady among generalisations, weak in analytic thought, his response to life was immediate and concrete’. And that was a friend talking. Corbyn was not a willing martyr, but he was vindictive. Max Morris (no relation), the chairman of the ward that was opposing Ali’s membership, was ousted by an influx of thirty Trotskyists at an ‘emergency meeting’.

There was good reason for Corbyn to hasten the end of the saga. Unexpectedly, the Labour MP for Islington North, Michael O’Halloran, switched his support to the SDP. In the next general election, he announced, he would stand as their candidate. Most of the constituency’s moderates joined him in defecting, giving the left a sudden advantage. This was Corbyn’s chance. He badly wanted the seat, but accepted the advice of Val Veness, for some time now a powerbroker in the local party, that his nomination would have to be handled discreetly if he was to secure the support of both the party and the constituency at large.

He approached Clive Boutle, a linguist and publisher, to organise his campaign for selection. Boutle left their initial two-hour discussion about strategy convinced that Corbyn was ‘left-wing, experienced and not self-important like others’. In the selection process, Corbyn was introduced as Val Veness’s preferred candidate. In exchange, she applied to be the Labour candidate in Hornsey, where his influence would be crucial.

Corbyn’s emergence as a candidate surprised Toby Harris. Like others, he had not realised his ally’s burning ambition for national recognition. To Harris and other enquirers, Val Veness claimed that Corbyn was a ‘reluctant’ candidate who she had had to persuade to apply for the seat. ‘They seem certain to pick an extremist,’ a Labour moderate predicted, ‘who will be fully in step with the mad majority.’ Others reckoned that ‘left-wing revolutionaries’ like Val Veness were ‘unacceptable to Michael Foot’.

In the final race, a month before the June 1983 general election, the choice was between Corbyn and Paul Boateng, a barrister educated in Ghana. Corbyn won the contest by four votes. Aware that Michael O’Halloran for the SDP could expect substantial support, he promised in his campaign to prevent mass unemployment following the inevitable recession if the Tories were re-elected. The working class, he was convinced, would be attracted by higher taxes, more powers for trade unions, unilateral disarmament and the renationalisation of shipbuilding, aerospace and steel. George Cunningham, the SDP MP for Islington South, urged electors to consider the reality of socialism. He portrayed Islington’s Labour council as resembling an East European communist authority. While council tenants waited ‘months’ for repairs to their homes, Labour officials spent huge amounts of public money to promote their political ambitions, and wasted more on illegal projects. ‘The Labour Party in Islington,’ Cunningham told the Commons, ‘has gone a long way down into the swamp of corruption.’ While chasing around the constituency, Corbyn ignored such criticisms.

That year’s Labour manifesto was famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’; certainly the electorate was terrified by the party’s extremist pledges and Militant Tendency’s noisy demands for the draconian confiscation of wealth. Across the country, Labour secured its lowest percentage of the vote since 1918 – just 27.6 against the Tories’ 42.4. Those working-class voters who owned cars and homes voted 47 per cent to 26 per cent for the Tories. As usual, the left interpreted their defeat as victory. Tony Benn, who lost his seat in Bristol South-East, welcomed the result, because ‘for the first time since 1945 a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. This is a remarkable development by any standards.’ Corbyn himself avoided the rout. Despite the SDP winning 22 per cent of the vote in Islington North, and Labour’s share falling by 12 per cent, his exhaustive campaign won him a majority of 5,607. Four miles to the north-west, John McDonnell was defeated in Hampstead by the sitting Tory MP, Geoffrey Finsberg. McDonnell had also contrived to lose Labour’s seat in his own branch, Hayes and Harlington. Neville Sandelson blamed McDonnell’s persecution when he was deselected after thirty-two years as the constituency’s Labour MP. He stood as the SDP’s candidate, splitting Labour’s vote and allowing Terry Dicks to become the constituency’s first Conservative MP since 1950.

Corbyn and McDonnell blamed Michael Foot for Labour’s defeat. The party leader, said McDonnell, was a right-wing ‘welfare capitalist’. Even the manifesto’s promise to impose socialist protectionism and ban the import of foreign cars was too liberal. Labour would have won, both men believed, by promoting the complete renationalisation of the British economy, the ruthless confiscation and redistribution of wealth and the disbandment of the military to transform Britain into a pacifist, nuclear-free, non-aligned nation. Convinced of that error, Corbyn spoke at Marxist meetings about working through Labour to democratise Parliament out of existence. In public speeches he ridiculed the moderates’ suggestion that the far left had failed to recognise the working class’s appreciation of consumerism, of mortgages to buy their council homes and of the abandonment of restrictions on foreign travel. He told his allies in London Labour Briefing about his determination to reverse Thatcherism’s plot to destroy ‘class solidarity’. After all, he was now an MP, on a national stage that offered unlimited opportunities.

5

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad (#ulink_c6570589-88fc-52ee-bba5-d6782662a740)

Dressed in a dirty jacket, creased trousers and open-necked shirt, Jeremy Corbyn arrived in Westminster unmoved by the British electorate’s rejection of Labour. He joined thirteen other far-left MPs who sympathised with East Europe’s communist governments and supported trade union militancy to break Margaret Thatcher’s government. He told the Venesses that he considered Parliament ‘a waste of time’. Westminster’s agenda bore no relevance to his Islington constituents, especially the immigrant communities. ‘I don’t like this place,’ he told Keith Veness as they walked through the arched corridor from St Stephen’s Entrance to the central lobby. As they passed the huge paintings depicting the glories of British history, Corbyn added, ‘It’s all phoney, set up to make you feel intimidated.’ The advantages for him personally were a good income and a job for the foreseeable future, with the opportunity to indulge his interests, especially foreign travel.