Dangerous Hero

In a campaign leaflet issued by Corbyn, Knight pledged to strengthen the legal protection of strikers, to ‘weaken the capitalist police who are an enemy of the working class’, pay ‘not a penny for defence’, and repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which gave the police emergency powers to deal with suspected terrorists. As IRA supporters, Corbyn and Knight opposed any law specifically targeted at the Irish which empowered the police to stop people entering or leaving Britain, and to control the membership, activities and finances of proscribed organisations like the IRA. Going well beyond Labour’s official policy, the two men also advocated mass nationalisation of banks, industry, major shops and newspapers – all without compensation. These promises were important, but in targeting the immigrant vote Corbyn made race an issue by recruiting Martha Osamor of the United Black Women’s Action Group to spread the word that Labour would abolish immigration controls. In his election speeches across Hornsey he accused Thatcher of promoting ‘racism and fascist forces’. To create a false image of the National Front storming through the borough, he and Knight constantly staged protests under the banner ‘No Nazis in Hornsey’. The far left and immigrant groups admired this side of his campaigning, but when he refused to pay homage on Remembrance Day to those who had died in the two world wars, he was criticised even by moderate Labour supporters for ‘exploiting the anti-fascist platform for left-wing political ends’. Tories directly accused his canvassers of telling West Indian immigrants that they would be sent home if Labour lost the election. Haringey’s one black councillor supported the Conservatives’ protest – which was perhaps not surprising, because he was a Tory.

In his unquestioning allegiance to Knight’s utterances – even supporting the extremist demand that all local shops be nationalised – Corbyn for the first time exposed his attitude towards Jews. In July 1976, Israeli special forces had carried out a raid at Entebbe airport in Uganda to rescue 102 hostages on board a hijacked aeroplane. It was a spectacular success, but during the election campaign, Knight publicly criticised the operation, and Corbyn agreed. ‘His support for Knight,’ said David Barlow, a middle-of-the-road Labour councillor in Haringey, ‘an awful candidate who was destroying Lambeth council, showed that Corbyn was dubious.’ Jews who were otherwise Labour supporters refused to vote for Knight. Some were also uncertain about Corbyn, by then a prominent local politician in Haringey and now identified as Knight’s henchman.

Galvanised by the industrial unrest, Corbyn and Knight grasped the opportunity to lead a left-wing takeover of the entire London Labour Party (LLP), covering the capital’s thirty-two boroughs, with over a thousand Labour councillors and fifty-one out of ninety-two MPs. They made no effort to conceal their Trotskyist agenda. Corbyn began writing regular articles for the Socialist Organiser, a weekly newspaper representing the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League, and was frequently seen marching under the banner of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory with Alan Thornett, a leader of the Workers Socialist League. Corbyn and Knight worked closely with Ken Livingstone, a forty-four-year-old GLC councillor well known for disrupting neighbouring Camden council’s housing department (Livingstone was the department’s chairman) with rent freezes, strikes and compulsory purchase orders. ‘Jeremy’s just like me,’ Livingstone would say. ‘You get what you see.’ Socialist Organiser was Livingstone’s mouthpiece for the ambitious Trotskyite group inside the Labour Party. While Livingstone was selected as the Labour general election candidate in Hampstead, and Knight in Hornsey, Reg Race became the candidate in Wood Green, the adjoining borough.

Corbyn’s continuing embrace of Trotskyites alarmed several of his colleagues. In a plea to Jim Callaghan to stop the left’s takeover of ‘many of our inner city parties’, Douglas Eden, a member of the Hornsey branch for fifteen years, identified Corbyn – along with forty-three Labour MPs and twenty-six parliamentary candidates, including Knight – as one of the ultra-leftists who ‘overtly associated themselves with extreme Marxist activities’. Corbyn and the others, wrote Eden, were ‘unrepresentative of Labour voters’ and had ‘no scruples about associating themselves with totalitarian organisations’. Naming the ‘public-school-educated Cllr Jeremy Corbyn and his fellow-traveller’ Chapman, Eden attacked the ‘fascist left [who] manipulate any public office they hold to further their own undemocratic ends’.

Among his examples was Jane Chapman’s removal of three moderate Labour governors of Creighton School, a Haringey comprehensive, which she carried out without notice or hearing. Allegedly, the governors had tried to open the school during the caretakers’ strike, and were accused of ‘not giving support at a critical time to the strikers’. Despite their denials, they were replaced by three ultra-leftists including Bernie Grant. ‘Are there any moderates left,’ asked many Labour voters in Haringey, ‘to stop these empire-building fanatics, or have they been eliminated by the “deadly duo”?’

The reckoning was unexpectedly swift. In March 1979, Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence in Callaghan’s government, which was passed by just one vote (311 to 310), triggering a general election to be held in May, six months before the end of the five-year term. In April, just weeks before the election, Labour’s ruling group in Haringey fired five left-wing chairmen, including Corbyn, Chapman and Mark Killingworth. In what the moderates called ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, their spokesman explained: ‘We were fed up with these individuals. The elite was making a mess of certain jobs.’ Corbyn was naturally outraged: ‘The council leadership have given us a tremendous kick in the teeth despite all the good work we have done.’ Killingworth blamed the departing chairman’s self-interest: ‘I didn’t like his ambition and conspiracies. He created the “organiser” job so he could be powerful and then allowed the Trotskyites to infiltrate the constituency without us knowing.’ Not surprisingly, the local Tories highlighted Labour’s ‘wild extravagance’ and pronounced, ‘The party is over.’ That proved to be true on 3 May, the day Margaret Thatcher swept to power with an overall majority of forty-three. Labour lost a total of fifty seats.

Corbyn was shocked. He had even printed a leaflet announcing Hornsey as a Labour win. Every copy had to be dumped. Hugh Rossi, supported by traditional Labour voters changing their allegiance, secured by far his biggest majority – 4,037, up from 782 in October 1974. In endless post-mortems, Corbyn failed to draw the link between the strikes and how people had voted. Instead, he blamed Callaghan for refusing to destroy capitalism. By imposing a wage limit, the ‘non-believer’ had ‘betrayed the working class’. As a result, the party’s natural constituency had refused to vote Labour. ‘You’ll see,’ Corbyn told his acolytes. ‘The Tories will be out in four years after the people see the truth.’ The only immediate consequence was a court summons for Corbyn and Knight for breaking electoral law by overspending in the campaign by £49.

Corbyn rightly saw Thatcher’s pledge to reverse his community-style socialism and resurrect individualism and the market economy as a threat. Her instant dismissal of the government-appointed regulators of wages and prices, her introduction of laws to prevent trade unions organising wildcat strikes, the denationalisation of inter-city coaches, the abolition of exchange controls so that Britons were allowed to take more than £50 a year out of the country, and the sale of council homes all enraged him. Her promise to cut government expenditure despite inevitable unemployment was, in Corbyn’s world view, a declaration of war. He demanded ‘a massive campaign against the cuts’. Together with Ken Livingstone, Bernie Grant, Ted Knight and Keith Veness, the knights of the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, he plotted to reverse Labour’s political fortunes.

Haringey was one of the Tory government’s prime targets. Over the previous five years, the council had employed an additional thousand people and accumulated a £6 million deficit, yet its services were deteriorating. Now, Thatcher forbade all councils to increase their debts, and at the same time reduced their government grants. Most councils sought to improve their efficiency, but Corbyn protested that less money meant cuts in services. Without appreciating the irony, he told the Labour group, ‘We must positively defend and protect services which have already been badly hit.’ He took no responsibility for the uncollected rubbish, closed schools and unrepaired council homes. Instead, as the leader of the left, he launched a counter-attack, demanding that the Labour group defy the government by setting illegally high rates. ‘We’ll be personally surcharged,’ the moderates retorted, fearing that their privately-owned homes would be seized to pay the fines. Corbyn continued to demand the sacrifice, without revealing that his own flat had been bought with a GLC mortgage, and was therefore safe from repossession.

Robin Young, Labour’s new council leader, discovered that there was nothing gentle about Corbyn’s politics. ‘He was very ambitious but always careful not to get into trouble with the party,’ Young observed, echoing Mark Killingworth’s assessment, adding that ‘he always disguised his grabs for power’. Toby Harris also noticed that while Corbyn presented his arguments in calm and considered terms, he deliberately generated hostility towards moderates, while managing the inevitable disputes among the left about demands and tactics to present a united front. His success, observed Barbara Simon, the Hornsey party’s general secretary, owed much to his being ‘good-tempered, patient and hard-working’. But despite his qualities, Corbyn still led only a minority of councillors. Undeterred, in 1980 he sought to topple Young by standing against him in the Labour group’s leadership election. Once again, he employed a mild manner to disarm his opponents. ‘He never had stand-up rows,’ Killingworth noticed. ‘He was more cunning than that.’ Without being confrontational or physically threatening, Corbyn expressed his bitter intolerance of his ideological enemies in quiet tones. ‘He would propose motions about housing, rates or council employees in party meetings,’ recalled Killingworth, ‘with extreme demands but worded as if only the Tories could oppose his ideas. And he cleverly presented himself as seemingly detached while encouraging his supporters to threaten his opponents with no-confidence motions. Those meetings were really nasty.’ Nevertheless, on this occasion Young came out the victor.

The intensity of these political battles finally destroyed Corbyn’s marriage. Just before Christmas 1979, Chapman walked out of the family home. ‘He didn’t see it coming,’ said Toby Harris. Keith Veness agreed that Chapman ‘just gave up on him’. Nothing about Corbyn was an enigma. The monochrome was reality. As she packed her belongings, Corbyn told his wife, ‘You should read Simone de Beauvoir and never write your autobiography.’ Clearly, ever the non-reader, he had heard about de Beauvoir from someone, and had failed to understand the author’s philosophy. Women, de Beauvoir complained, were regarded as ‘the second sex’, and defined by their relationship to men. To rescue themselves, they should elevate themselves by exercising the same choice as men – precisely what Chapman had decided to do. Corbyn’s reference to her autobiography also jarred, because the flat was filled with boxes of leaflets, minutes of party meetings and newspaper cuttings – all kept, he explained, for when he decided ‘to write my memoirs’.

Corbyn was exhibiting all the contradictions of an unresolved personality, disconnected from the real world. His self-portrayal as a universal ‘do-gooder’ was at odds with his inability to care for his wife, or indeed any female companion. He was quite incapable of understanding why his marriage had collapsed. ‘He thought I left him on a feminist kick,’ recalled Chapman, ‘but it was because I wanted some fun. His lack of emotional awareness didn’t change. My emotional life as part of a relationship was forgotten.’ Finally she realised that his judgement at the beginning of their relationship that she was ‘the best of the best’ was because ‘I was the only woman who admired him and would put up with his political obsessions’. There was no parting gift. ‘I got neither the dog nor the cat,’ said Chapman, ‘because I moved into a single room in a West Indian’s flat. I had nowhere else to go.’ Nearly twenty years later, Corbyn invited Chapman for tea in the Commons. ‘You should lighten up,’ he advised her, convinced as usual that he had been in the right. If anyone lacked a sense of humour, thought Chapman, it was her former husband.

Shortly after his wife’s departure from Lausanne Road, Corbyn encouraged Keith Veness and another local party activist to join him in posting leaflets around a council estate and starting to canvass for the next local elections. At about 11.30 in the morning he announced, ‘We need to collect more leaflets,’ and drove them back to his flat. The three of them walked in to discover a naked woman on the bed. Diane Abbott, Corbyn proudly announced, was his new girlfriend. ‘He wanted us to see her in his bed,’ recalled Veness. ‘She was shocked when we entered.’ She had quickly wrapped herself in a duvet.

Abbott was the antithesis of a white, middle-class English woman. Born to Jamaican immigrants in 1953 (her father was a welder, her mother a nurse), she went to a grammar school in London, then to Cambridge. As the first female black student from a state school at Newnham College, she enjoyed a hectic social life. Articulate and determined, she became firmly hard left, committed to the class struggle. She would always blame ‘the system’ for the educational failure of black British children, never their parents or her own community. After graduating with a lower second in history she was hired by the Home Office, but swiftly moved to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) as a race relations officer. Belying the human rights group’s name, her fellow employees rummaged through her desk and found her private diary. One entry recorded her sexual fantasy of being manhandled by her lover Corbyn, ‘a bearded Fenian and NUPE national organiser’, and also descriptions of a motorbike holiday with him around France and a passionate romp in a Cotswold field, which she described as her ‘finest half-hour’.

Corbyn’s passion for Abbott ended any hope Jane Chapman might have had that their relationship could be restored. He had found a political soulmate who shared his anger at Callaghan’s treachery, regarded Britain as the country that ‘invented racism’, and echoed his praise for the IRA. ‘Every defeat for the British state,’ Abbott would say, ‘is a victory for all of us.’ Feisty and, in her early years, good-looking, Abbott persuaded Corbyn to change his habits to suit her, at least for a while: he enjoyed social evenings with her and friends at restaurants and dinner parties. ‘We had a working supper in our living room one time,’ recalls Barbara Simon. ‘Jeremy brought Diane, who didn’t come across as noisy and brash. She must have found the scene of two warring factions in Hornsey intimidating.’ Simon had equal sympathy for Corbyn: ‘Women were chasing him and he got trapped.’

Despite his and Abbott’s sexual and political closeness, Corbyn spent Christmas Day 1979 alone. ‘What will you do?’ Toby Harris had asked him. ‘I’m going to the Suffolk seaside and letting my dog run along the beach,’ Corbyn replied. Others described his despair because there were no political meetings on Christmas Day, as he could not face his family.

He returned to London to pursue his vocation – politics. As leader of Haringey council’s left-wing caucus, he could not be ignored. The safe option was to elect him chairman of the planning committee, a role without any budget. Unlike his predecessors, he did not attract even a suspicion of favouritism – he appeared wholly incorruptible. He refused all invitations for drinks with possible lobbyists, and would not even meet developers. His hatred of the middle class was as fervent as ever: he encouraged plans to build council blocks among private houses, and when people protested he dismissed them, scoffing: ‘The arrogance of all those doctors and lawyers, talking about the environment when what they’re scared of is black kids.’ To further spite Muswell Hill’s middle class, he allowed gypsy families to set up an encampment on local playing fields.

Corbyn’s high profile locally was not mirrored across the capital. Only Ken Livingstone, a better speaker and a consummate networker, had the ability to take control of London’s left. After his defeat in Hampstead in the 1979 general election, Livingstone recruited Corbyn, Keith Veness and Ted Knight for ‘Target 82’, a secret timetable he submitted to the Trotskyist Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory (SCLV) to take control of the GLC after its elections in May 1981. After long discussions, their fellow members in the SCLV dismissed the plan. The Trotskyites, Livingstone grumbled, were ‘gross, grovelling toadies’ – a slightly odd insult, as one of his hobbies was keeping newts.

‘I’m pissed off with factional Trots,’ agreed Keith Veness. Like the other three, he wanted to concentrate on gaining political power rather than engage in internecine warfare, the usual fate of most far-left groups. Breaking with the SCLV, some time in 1980 Veness invited Livingstone, Knight, Corbyn and Bernie Grant to his Highbury home, and together the group created a new cadre, London Labour Briefing. ‘We’re an open conspiracy to get rid of the right wing,’ Corbyn declared. ‘It’s a two-stage insurgency,’ added Veness. ‘First grab control of the GLC, and then Thatcher’s government.’ The first step towards Target 82, they agreed, was to take over the London Labour Party and secure the nomination of fellow Trotskyists as Labour candidates in the GLC election. Acting to a strategy outlined by Trotsky, the minority would eventually make itself a majority. Trotsky himself, wrote the historian Robert Conquest, was ‘a ruthless imposer of the party’s will who firmly crushed the democratic opposition within the party and fully supported the rules which gave the ruling group total authority’. Abiding by those tactics, the Target 82 group agreed to remove their enemies as quickly as possible, consolidate their control, and never give it away.

The launch of London Labour Briefing was staged at the GLC’s headquarters in County Hall. It attracted two hundred people, and was regarded by Livingstone, its prime organiser, as a ‘great success’. Like all such groups, Briefing’s credibility depended on publishing a newspaper. ‘Even if it’s not read,’ said Veness, laughing, ‘we’ve got to have one.’ The editorial board of the weekly news-sheet included Corbyn as the group’s general secretary, the reliable dogsbody prepared to undertake the unglamorous chores. Their aim was to deselect moderate Labour councillors and take over constituency parties, which would vote for Tony Benn as Labour leader when Jim Callaghan, as was expected, resigned. In the alphabet soup of initials of the rival left-wing groups, London Labour Briefing was affiliated to the London Representation Committee (LRC), a group chaired by John McDonnell, a member of Liverpool’s Trotskyite Militant Tendency. The LRC urged ‘mass extra-parliamentary action’ to disrupt the economy, and published hit lists of Labour MPs it described as ‘traitors’. McDonnell openly enthused about riots as the precursor to an uprising. That difference did not prevent him and Corbyn bonding during the endless meetings favoured by the left.

In their joint cause, Corbyn eagerly began to organise his supporters in Hornsey to force out his enemies. He particularly targeted Douglas Eden, not least for his having mocked him as ‘public-school-educated’. ‘It was a grammar school,’ Corbyn told the Hornsey Journal, adding that it was ‘now happily a comprehensive’. This was another small untruth. The school remained fee-paying for selected children. If it burnished his left-wing credentials, Corbyn was still willing to lie about trivialities.

Chairing the inquiry into Eden’s loyalty, Corbyn allowed the social democrat to speak in his own defence for forty-five minutes – then promptly announced his expulsion. Eden protested to Reg Underhill, Labour’s national agent at party headquarters, that he had been ‘hounded out by Corbyn’. Underhill, who was leading the hunt against Trotskyist infiltration, notified Haringey’s branch secretary that she had failed to follow the proper procedures, and the inquiry should be reheld. Unabashed, Corbyn started the expulsion process again, with the same result.

Eden’s fate was replicated across London. As moderate members were forced out of the party, Corbyn, Knight, Livingstone and McDonnell were elected to the national executive of the London Labour Party, and immediately began the deselection process of moderate councillors who had been put forward as candidates for the May 1981 GLC elections. Under the banner of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, every candidacy was to be openly contested, ostensibly to allow greater democracy but in fact to allow the left to take over. This would, to use Tony Benn’s catchwords, transform Labour into a ‘pluralist grassroots party of the masses’, one that would exclude dissenters, especially social democrats. In Brent East, where Livingstone hoped to snatch the parliamentary nomination from a moderate MP, he, like Corbyn, had forged close relations with immigrant groups by pledging to remove the restrictions on migrants settling in Britain. In return, over a hundred Asians – many of them unable to speak English – were enrolled as party members in the constituency and obediently voted against Livingstone’s rivals. A similar pattern emerged in Islington. ‘If voting changed anything,’ sniped one moderate, ‘they’d abolish it.’

Livingstone asked Corbyn if he planned to stand in Haringey for the GLC, and was surprised when Corbyn said he did not. As a full-time NUPE official, he explained, he would find it difficult to attend the GLC’s daytime meetings. The truth was different. Corbyn was sceptical about joining an authority with limited powers, and was still harbouring his secret ambition to become an MP. His allies were unaware that because of his extremism he had already been rejected as the prospective parliamentary candidate in Enfield North. Next, he had unsuccessfully applied in Croydon, but a chance encounter in the Croydon party’s headquarters with his old friend Val Veness, who was also applying for the seat, changed his life. ‘I didn’t realise you wanted to be an MP,’ she said. ‘I might be able to help you. But it’s got to be kept secret.’ Keeping secrets had never been a problem for Corbyn.

For years, Keith and Val Veness and their claque had been trying to remove Michael O’Halloran, the Labour MP for Islington North. Despite being accused of corruption and incompetence, O’Halloran had allegedly been installed, then protected, by ‘the Murphia’, the local Irish mafia. O’Halloran accused the Venesses of bombarding him and his family with personal abuse in their attempts to hound him out. In the standoff, the Venesses had agreed with their group that if O’Halloran were removed, none of them would seek the nomination to replace him. The left therefore needed a candidate to counter any moderate applicants. Secrecy, they decided, was essential if they were to outwit their opponents. When Livingstone persisted in his attempts to secure Corbyn’s nomination to the GLC, he was told sharply by Val Veness, ‘Keep your hands off our candidate.’ He backed down, accepting Corbyn’s promise that he would work tirelessly to execute the coup at the GLC and also act as the agent for Kate Hoey, a member of the Marxist IMG, to win the Labour GLC nomination for Haringey.

During that frantic period of plotting, Corbyn paid little attention to Diane Abbott, who by then was working as a TV producer in London. ‘She was noisy, ambitious, lefty and overweight,’ was Jonathan Aitken’s impression during their encounters in the television world. In her excitable manner, Abbott fretted that Corbyn and Chapman were still meeting each other at Haringey council. Chapman recalled a ‘nervous, tense and slightly hostile’ Abbott knocking on her door one evening, and when Chapman answered making her demands clear.