Dangerous Hero

Douglas Eden, a polytechnic lecturer and a member of the Hornsey Labour Party, watched as Corbyn manoeuvred patiently to secure control over the branch. ‘In his carefully self-controlled way,’ said Eden with bitter admiration, ‘he presented himself to the lower orders of society, the vulnerable and inadequate people who felt indebted to him, as working-class. Once he got power, he dominated the branch and got their votes.’ One of the early casualties was the branch’s moderate chairman Andrew McIntosh, who Corbyn eased out. ‘Andrew didn’t learn his lesson,’ recalled Eden, who openly described Corbyn to the Labour Party’s headquarters as ‘a patrician from a wealthy background’. In revenge, Corbyn marked Eden for similar treatment – an official complaint to force his expulsion.

By late 1973, Corbyn felt emboldened. The tailors’ union moved its headquarters out of London, so he resigned and moved on to become a researcher for Tony Banks (later MP for Newham North-West) at the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AUEW), one of Britain’s most powerful associations, with nearly 1.5 million members. Banks apparently assumed that the well-spoken ex-grammar schoolboy could produce the required research. Corbyn’s self-esteem and confidence rose, as did his salary. He would later boast that he even organised a picket of striking AUEW workers outside their own headquarters against the union’s moderate leadership.

In September 1973 Salvador Allende was killed by the Chilean military, supported by the CIA. Washington’s involvement aroused worldwide outrage. Naturally, Corbyn demonstrated against the CIA’s conspiracies. His antagonism would be justified after Senator Frank Church delivered volumes of evidence to Congress in Washington in 1976 about the CIA’s undercover operations. That, combined with the earlier revelations in what became known as the Pentagon Papers of the lies told by President Johnson and others about American involvement in Vietnam, and the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency after Watergate, strengthened Corbyn’s loathing of American influence. And then British intelligence, frustrated by a ferocious IRA bombing campaign, was exposed for torturing the innocent as well as the guilty in its attempts to identify murderers in Ulster. The eventual consequences of those sensational disclosures were unpredictable.

On 6 October, while Israelis were observing Yom Kippur, the three neighbouring Arab states, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, launched a surprise invasion intended to drive the Jews into the sea. After a fierce nineteen-day war, the intruders were routed. Any chance for a peace settlement between Israel and the Arabs was lost. Days later, Opec, the cartel representing the world’s dominant oil producers, quadrupled its prices. Global mayhem followed. Emboldened by the financial squeeze on Britain, the country’s miners sensed another opportunity to overthrow Heath. The government’s latest 16.5 per cent pay offer was rejected, and an overtime ban imposed. As ‘flying pickets’ dispatched by Scargill prevented coal deliveries to the power stations, Britain’s economy suffered, and by year’s end the miners were out on strike. With electricity supplies cut, Heath ordered industry to work a three-day week. Just as in wartime, streets were dark, offices were unheated and unlit, and ration books were needed to buy petrol. TV broadcasts finished early, and unemployment soared. A Tory government was overseeing a nightmare. In Scotland, shipbuilders on the Upper Clyde occupied their yards, and a wave of strikes immobilised the car industry. Left-wingers gleefully anticipated the collapse of capitalism. Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group (IMG), Gerry Healy, a Trotskyist who would head the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), and other far-left groups demonstrated to advance the revolution. Predictions were made that, just as anti-Marxists had overthrown Allende, so Heath would be toppled by the masses.

To save his government, Heath called an election for February 1974, posing the question ‘Who Governs Britain?’ The Tories were expected to win a landslide against a Labour election manifesto that promised ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power’. Corbyn’s role in that campaign was to prove decisive for his own future. Ignoring his obligations at the AUEW, he worked indefatigably as the agent for Irving Kuczynski, Labour’s candidate in Hornsey, described by the Tories as ‘communist-backed’, against the sitting Tory MP Hugh Rossi, a staunch Roman Catholic who was to be a junior minister under both Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Corbyn flooded the constituency with party workers, knocking on every door and posting leaflets for a candidate he did not particularly like. In the process, he himself was transformed. The unsocial outsider formerly employed by the tailors’ union had become an energetic, effective and popular organiser, utterly committed to scoring an electoral triumph.

In the midst of the campaign, officials employed by a government pay board, a socialist quango, ruled that the miners’ pay claim was justified by Lord Wilberforce’s inquiry in 1972. As a result of the chaos that ensued, the electorate turned. Angered that the deprivations caused by the three-day week – including shortages of petrol, sugar and bread, and hospitals without clean bed sheets – was all apparently pointless, the electorate became incensed with Heath. It was not only his cack-handed management of the economy: asked by a journalist to name his favourite dish, he had tactlessly replied, ‘Lobster Thermidor with two wine sauces.’ Harold Wilson, asked the same question, chose Cornish pasties with brown sauce.

Unexpectedly, although the Tories won a quarter of a million more votes, Labour emerged on election day as the largest party. Heath was ousted and Wilson returned as prime minister, knowing that he would have to call another election soon as he lacked an overall majority. However, for his supporters it was an important victory. The organised working class had overthrown a Tory government. Tony Benn would acclaim the result as a decisive moment. Rejoicing on the far left was met elsewhere with apprehension and dismay. The middle classes were visibly terrified by the prospect of widespread unrest, manifested by an outbreak of Marxists and anarchists squatting in empty houses, and the trade unions, led by Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, celebrating their return to power.

In Hornsey, Hugh Rossi survived Corbyn’s best efforts, albeit with a much-reduced majority. During the endless hours leafleting, canvassing and cajoling Labour’s supporters to the polls, Corbyn had met the woman who would become his first wife. Jane Chapman was twenty-three, an attractive university graduate researching the French textile industry in the 1920s for a doctorate at the London School of Economics. Soon after they met, Corbyn declared his feelings. ‘He professed love early on,’ she recalled, ‘and said that I was “the best of the best”, so I thought this must be the thing.’ Consumed by what she described as a ‘whirlwind romance’ over three months – ‘he constantly urged us to marry’ – she agreed, because ‘he was friendly and lively and seemed bright and not bad-looking’. Most important, both of them were devoted to changing Britain in a fundamental way. They would celebrate together at any sign that events were running in their favour: in April 1974 they were excited by the overthrow of Portugal’s fascist regime, and they rejoiced in the continuing defiance of left-wing organisations to government diktats: socialist councillors in Clay Cross in Derbyshire had been declared bankrupt after refusing to set low rates dictated by the Tory government, but their action made them martyrs to the left.

Corbyn and Chapman’s enthusiasm for their cause made an impression: their respective local Labour branches selected each of them to stand in the May 1974 council elections for Haringey, a north London borough that included Hornsey and that embraced both affluent areas in Muswell Hill and Highgate and severely deprived sections in the east, around the Tottenham football stadium. They were both elected. Two days later, on 4 May, they were married at Haringey Town Hall.

Neither set of parents was impressed by their child’s choice. Chapman’s mother, a lifetime Tory, was not pleased that her daughter, ambitious to be an MP, was marrying a poorly-off, uneducated trade union official. On her side, Naomi Corbyn disliked her new ‘alpha female’ daughter-in-law. It was wrong, she thought, to have such an obvious competitive element in a marriage. However, since the Corbyns avoided confrontation, nothing was said. Chapman became fond of her husband’s generous father, although she remained wary of his uncommunicative mother. From the outset the tensions were aggravated when Piers Corbyn arrived at the town hall looking even more scruffy than normal. Embarrassed by her son, Naomi swept him off to buy a shirt and a suit. They did not return until after the ceremony was over. Everyone then headed for the reception at Chapman’s father’s bowling club in Weston-super-Mare, 140 miles from London, before the newlyweds headed off for a brief honeymoon in southern Ireland.

They returned to a tiny ground-floor studio room in Etherley Road in Haringey, which they had bought with a mortgage from the Greater London Council. One year later, they moved to a bigger ground-floor flat in Lausanne Road, near Turnpike Lane. Several chickens, a cat christened Harold Wilson and a dog named Mango ran around the garden. Married life became a succession of meetings, demonstrations and campaigns. At 5.30 on some mornings they would head for a picket line to support strikers, then meet up again at the end of the day. Their social life was confined to meetings of the Labour Party, functions to support Troops Out and Cuba Solidarity, council meetings and demonstrations, while Chapman intermittently researched her doctorate in Paris and Corbyn ostensibly worked for the AUEW.

To Corbyn’s delight, as a councillor he represented mostly immigrants: Greek Cypriots, Asians and Afro-Caribbeans. He genuinely enjoyed mixing and socialising with the rainbow of communities in Haringey, assiduously attending their main social events and promising to look after their needs. However, that did not include the inhabitants of Chapman’s ward adjoining Stamford Hill, in the south of the borough, where the Orthodox Jews were the backbone of local Labour. To Chapman’s regret, while she showed interest in her husband’s constituents, he was indifferent to those in her ward, including her fellow councillor Aaron Weischelbaum, who was Jewish. ‘Jeremy,’ she explained, ‘was conflicted because he supported Palestine and the abolition of Israel so that Palestinians could recover their homes.’ Corbyn spoke of Israel as the worst example of American imperialism. Occupying land, in his opinion, was an obvious form of colonialism. This made Zionists racist, and therefore he opposed Israel’s existence. He condemned the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s promise in 1917 of a homeland for the Jews, and dismissed the effect of the Holocaust as explaining the Jewish people’s longing for their own country after 1945 to avoid future persecution. In Corbyn’s hierarchy of oppression, the descendants of slaves were the most victimised, while Holocaust survivors were at the bottom of the list. He did not distinguish between Jews in London and Zionists in Tel Aviv. To him, they were all guilty.

Among the surprises for Chapman was the absence of books in her husband’s life. Throughout the four years of their marriage, he never read a single book. He did not think deeply about ideology or political philosophy. Her initial judgement that he was ‘bright’ was mistaken. As an agitator, he relied on his wife for political friendship. ‘He didn’t get depressed. He was driven by his motivation to change society,’ she recalled. His handicap, he was acutely aware, was his lack of a working-class pedigree. By then his parents had moved to a new home in Wiltshire – chosen to enable them to pursue their burgeoning interest in archaeology. During Corbyn and Chapman’s visits for Sunday lunch, politics were politely discussed, but Corbyn’s parents never mentioned that they had been present at the Battle of Cable Street, or that David had ever considered going to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Their son’s introduction of those key events into the biographies of his parents would come much later. Both smacked of fiction.

To compensate for the limitations of his background and education, Corbyn played on his status as a councillor, trade union official and energetic activist. He became expert at working out how to win new votes, and would spend hours calculating where and how Labour could maximise its strength in Hornsey. Although he never read Trotsky’s writings, he adopted his ideas of process, and mastered the political skills to produce what Trotsky had called ‘a permanent state of unrest’ for eventual victory.

With both Corbyns’ support, Haringey’s ruling Labour group increased the rates by 23 per cent, making them the highest in the country. Shortly after, the borough’s housing workers went on strike for more pay. Consistent with socialist policy against any dismissals, Corbyn successfully urged his fellow councillors to award the hefty increase. In recognition of his commitment he was made a vice chair of the subcommittee on development, and would boast that the 42 per cent increase in the council’s overall budget, financed by local ratepayers, had allowed Labour to double the number of its staff. Annoying Haringey’s middle classes gave him particular delight. Faced with a huge housing problem after the arrival of thousands of Cypriot refugees in London, Corbyn proposed building homes on green parkland. Local residents were outraged. The rich, he scoffed, clearly disliked living alongside immigrants – but they would have no choice.

In October 1974, Harold Wilson called another election. With Irving Kuczynski standing once again as Labour’s candidate, Corbyn’s energetic campaigning, supported by the prime minister visiting the constituency, reduced Hugh Rossi’s Tory majority to 782 votes, both a success and a disappointment for Corbyn. Wilson returned to office with a narrow parliamentary majority of three.

Although electioneering was over, Corbyn remained in perpetual motion. Leaving home early in the morning, he would bounce between council meetings, Labour Party gatherings, demonstrations, leafleting and occasional trips to the AUEW’s office to justify his salary. His pride and joy was Hornsey Labour Party. Nominally only the ‘assistant/minutes secretary’, he had swelled the local party’s membership, making it, he asserted, the second largest in the country. The huge influx was divided between moderates and committed hard leftists, who attracted the attention of MI5, the domestic security agency. The branch’s agenda reflected Corbyn’s priorities. Shortly after the general election, three resolutions were passed: to condemn the exploitation of tea-pickers by British companies; to deplore the imprisonment of twenty-one Iranian students after a sit-in at the Iranian embassy in London; and to support the boycott by the Labour leader of Hornsey of a visit by Prince Philip to open a new housing development. ‘I believe you’ve got to stand by your principles,’ Corbyn told the local newspaper. He also put forward motions in Haringey council meetings to impose import controls, restrict individuals spending money abroad, and to oppose Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market. There were no motions to deplore Haringey’s poverty, low rates of income, or the council’s failure to build more homes.

The inspiration for many of Corbyn’s ideas was Tony Benn, the new industry minister. Born in 1925 to an aristocratic family, Benn had been elected an MP in 1950, and was a social democrat as a minister during Wilson’s first term. By 1974, he was moving far to the left. One of a number of Labour Members disillusioned with Wilson’s excessive caution in promoting a socialist agenda, he became popular among Marxists, regularly visiting militant shop stewards at shipyards and factories to encourage class consciousness. At those meetings he railed against Britain’s membership of the European Common Market as a threat to parliamentary sovereignty. European socialists were condemned as revisionists, while East European communists were praised. To build socialism, in 1975 Benn created the National Enterprise Board (NEB) to take over Britain’s biggest twenty-five corporations and nationalise the City’s financial institutions. NEB officials, Benn believed, could manage industry in the public interest. To demonstrate the success of socialism, he diverted taxpayers’ money to support unprofitable corporations.

Among the beneficiaries was British Leyland in Birmingham, one of Britain’s biggest car producers. Neither Benn nor Corbyn understood Leyland’s plight. The company had been managed for years by Donald Stokes, a corrupt salesman, while its managers had ignored their foreign competitors’ technical improvements. Their attention was too often focused on surviving the anarchy on the production lines. Leyland’s Longbridge plant was blighted not only by ruinous restrictive practices imposed by competing trade unions, but also by daily strikes. These were organised by Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson, a towering Marxist shop steward who apparently delighted in furthering the ruin of Britain’s motor industry. Neither Corbyn nor Benn ever criticised Robinson. In their world, trade unions were sacred. To that end, on the AUEW’s behalf Corbyn presented Benn with a blueprint to reconstruct the motor industry by increasing shop stewards’ powers. Benn was delighted with Corbyn’s work, an accurate reflection of its limitations. Neither considered the consequence of the constant strikes: defective products. For the first time since 1945, Germany and France produced more cars than Britain, and the country’s vehicle imports rose from 14 to 57 per cent of the market. Neither Benn nor Corbyn was alarmed. ‘He immatured with age,’ was one of Wilson’s less offensive comments about Benn.

As Jane Chapman discovered, her husband’s grasp of economics at the national level was no better than his understanding of their domestic finances. His lack of interest in money was reflected by his complete silence about improving their standard of living. He never talked about buying a bigger home, a car or increasing his income. He had few material requirements. To her surprise, since they had married so soon after meeting, when he returned home at night he would happily open a can of beans, swallow them cold and declare himself satisfied. Occasionally he returned late from a meeting of the Hornsey Labour Party with friends to sing IRA songs while they all got drunk on beer. He would sit on the floor in his greasy, unwashed pea-green jacket, bought at an army surplus shop in Euston, oblivious to her irritation. They rarely went out together. Invitations to dinner with the Venesses were refused. Corbyn, they were told, did not socialise.

Chapman spent lonely evenings in their small flat with Mango, the dog, and Harold Wilson, the cat, as her only companions while Corbyn went about extending his circle of political contacts. Among them was Tariq Ali, a Marxist intellectual originally from Pakistan, and Bernie Grant, a bombastic Black Power Marxist from Guyana and a Haringey councillor. ‘It’s racism to control immigration,’ Grant told Corbyn, adding that it was discriminatory to prevent anyone from the West Indies from settling in Britain. Corbyn adopted that opinion. Similarly, he did not openly protest about Grant’s view that boys and girls should be segregated in school, and that girls should be sent home when they were menstruating. Grant’s interest in questions of race was inconsistent, however: asked by Reg Race about the cultural oppression of immigrant women in Tottenham, he replied: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ In their conversations, Grant and Corbyn rarely mentioned economic or social policies. They focused on community and ethnicity, subjects that were not only congenial to Corbyn, but at the heart of his political ideology. Anti-capitalist and disdainful of markets, he wanted citizens to live together in Soviet-style communes or self-supporting districts, as he had seen in Jamaica and South America. Joining in the black-and-white battle of morality against immorality, of good versus bad, underpinned his feelings of self-worth. Thanks to Grant, he was appointed chairman of the council’s new Community Development Sub-Committee, with responsibility for using public money to build community centres for immigrant groups. Within a year he was accused of ‘reckless spending’ by his fellow councillors, and of recruiting ‘community workers’ without giving them specific jobs. To Haringey’s Tory councillors, permanently in opposition but nevertheless vocal critics, Corbyn appeared to be signalling that he was left-wing on all issues, despite his lack of any coherent programme.

Mirroring Tony Benn, he agreed with the government’s response to rocketing oil prices. To avoid inflation, the American and German governments had cut spending, but Denis Healey, the British chancellor, did the opposite, increasing public spending by 31 per cent in his first year, and by 29 per cent the following year. Most of the money went to state employees, whose wages rose by 32 per cent. To Corbyn’s glee, Healey simultaneously raised income taxes for top earners to 83 per cent, and added an extra 15 per cent tax on unearned income. Some individuals were paying between 92 and 101 per cent in taxation. Healey’s mantra, ‘Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak,’ matched Corbyn’s nostrums. Both men seemed oblivious to the consequences. While inflation in Germany was 7 per cent, in Britain the figure soared to 27 per cent. Rather than face Labour’s punitive taxes and lose their savings to hyperinflation, thousands of the country’s most talented professionals, scientists and engineers emigrated to America and the Far East in what was called ‘the brain drain’, a phrase coined in 1960. The loss to Britain was little short of catastrophic. By the end of 1975, Wilson’s schemes to control capitalism had crippled private investment and Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy. Joe Haines, his media spokesman, later summed up Labour’s policies as ‘trying to make water run uphill – against the facts, against events, against common sense and against human nature’.

Corbyn was deaf to such complaints. Taxing the rich was right; he disputed the possibility of any permanent damage. In the cause of building socialism, he also opposed modernisation, including widening a main road that ran through his borough. During a delegation’s visit to Bill Rodgers, the new junior minister at the department of the environment, he had gone into a long harangue. Rodgers had retorted, ‘You are tiresome, Councillor Corbyn.’ Far worse humiliations followed. He was fired by the AUEW: his research was judged unacceptable. Corbyn would explain his sacking by saying that he had been a target in the clearout of leftists. His boss, he claimed, had decided that his celebrating the American withdrawal from Vietnam, continually attending political meetings or standing on picket lines across the country, was unwelcome. In reality, without an academic background, he lacked the skills to present a cogent analysis of political and economic issues. ‘He never told me he was sacked,’ recalled Chapman, whose own career was advancing: she had been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Dover and Deal, a Tory marginal.

Once again, fortune intervened. NUPE, the trade union for public employees led by Alan Fisher, an ambitious left-wing firebrand, was recruiting officials to increase its membership among the underpaid. Replying to an advertisement, Corbyn arrived in Charing Cross for an interview. Reg Race, at that time the NUPE official in charge of the process, looked at the bedraggled applicant, whom he had never seen before.The Brylcreemed panel of men conducting the interviews, Race knew, would never consider someone wearing unpolished shoes, no jacket, and an un-ironed grey shirt, open at the collar. ‘Go down The Strand, buy a tie and smarten up, or else you’ve got no chance,’ he advised.

On this occasion Corbyn did as he was told, and in truth the union had every reason to employ him. He was tirelessly active and a committed socialist, respected by both the Hornsey Labour Party and the Haringey Labour group. He was duly hired as the organiser for two London boroughs, Barnet and Bromley, a job that gave him responsibility for the area’s low-paid Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) workers, mostly school dinner ladies and caretakers. Given an old green car, he toured his domain in what Keith Veness, also a NUPE official, called ‘a sinecure job’. Corbyn was in seventh heaven. He had status and a good income. As an outstanding recruiter – the union’s membership would increase from 50,000 to 250,000 over the following seven years – and a keen organiser of strikes, he quickly won popularity with the union’s five hundred dinner ladies. However, he had nothing in common with the macho Cockney dustmen swearing over their pints down the local. In an attempt to win their acceptance he renamed himself ‘Jerry’ – no dustman would bond with a Jeremy – and, to avoid their hard-drinking sessions, would make his excuses and go off early to join another picket line.