The Great Reveal

The first couple of books published on Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader have focused on revelations, variously bitchy and exasperated, about the strategic and ethical failings of key individuals. This was inevitable. Books on recent political history, whether autobiographies or eyewitness accounts, need juicy tidbits to garner media coverage just as much as tell-alls about the royals do, or thinly-disguised novels about minor French philosophers. The academic histories that will be written in time may take a more structural approach, but given the habitual bias of British political history towards "character", I wouldn't bet on it. Though Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire's Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn is clearly unsympathetic to the left (the title rather gives it away), while Owen Jones's This Land: The Story of a Movement appears like a classic attempt to salvage the positive from a political episode of hope curtailed, they share a common belief that politics is inseparable from personality.

The press coverage of these two works has tended to delight in the more scathing analysis of Pogrund and Maguire, while Jones has once more been told in no uncertain terms by his journalistic peers that he is unwelcome. My interest here is not in either book (they're unlikely to prove of lasting value), nor in the predictable response of the commentariat. What I'm going to discuss is how revelations about character are treated in political discourse and specifically how this applied to Corbyn. Though journalism presents itself as the first, rough draft of history, it's form and assumptions tend to reflect polished historiographical practice when it comes to political commentary. Pundits aspire to the aphoristic, Olympian judgement of a Michelet or an AJP Taylor (a historian who moonlighted as a journalist) rather than the urgent impressionism of the reporter. There is also a tendency to see politics as drama, reflecting the focus on leading characters, though in the simplistic sense that everything is either a tragedy or a comedy of errors.

Jeremy Corbyn is, it is probably safe to say, fairly set in his ways. Though he may have smartened up his attire on becoming leader of the Labour party in 2015, he didn't transform overnight into a different, steelier character. He was always idealistic, conflict-averse and frankly a bit wet. Despite the attempts to paint him as a tumour in the body politic, he is clearly an inoffensive chap whose main character flaw appears to be peevishness. Few would have expected him to reveal a hitherto-hidden talent for management on his election to the leadership; fewer still a strategic cunning sufficient to the moment of Brexit, a political challenge that brought down two Conservative Prime Ministers in three years and may yet bring down a third within five. And yet the initial dismissal of Corbyn didn't develop into a coherent critique of his shortcomings. While forensic analysis, executive competence and a backstory in managing a large, complex organisation are now considered de rigueur in the leader of the opposition, there was little attempt to criticise Corbyn for the absence of these qualities and qualifications during his early months in office. 

The opposition to him, both within the PLP and among the media, was political. It's interesting to recall that much of the criticism was not about his own beliefs but the company he kept. The accusations of personal antisemitism or Russophilia came later. The essential charge was that he was too leftwing and therefore couldn't unite the party. Of course "party" in this context didn't mean the membership, who returned him with an increased vote after the 2016 leadership challenge, and the unity demanded was simply a euphemism for the continuing dominance of the PLP right. The revival of the antisemitism row after the unexpected 2017 election result, and the emergence of the People's Vote campaign with its emphasis on Corbyn's personal culpability for Brexit, marked the shift from attempts to rule him unacceptable because of his politics to attempts to rule him illegitimate because of his character. But charges of dithering or obliviousness were secondary to the assumption that he was a secret antisemite and Lexiteer. In other words, he was more criminal genius than managerial incompetent.

One thing that has stood out in the recent revelations about Corbyn's time as party leader is how little new material there is, and how little of it rises above office backbiting. For example, that Seumas Milne and Tom Watson were both in their different ways lazy, or that Karie Murphy could be abrasive. Even the claim that Corbyn and McDonnell weren't on speaking terms for a while seems positively innocent, like schoolkids falling out, particularly when you remember the poisonous relations between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The nearest thing to a political revelation in the Pogrund and Maguire book is that Ian Murray bottled joining Change UK at the eleventh hour, which is both unsurprising and ridiculously inconsequential. At the level of salacious gossip, there is nothing to compare with past or recent claims about David Cameron, from the apocryphal pig's head initiation ceremony to the temptation of al fresco adultery. For all that attempts to finally nail Corbyn as an antisemite have come to naught, his critics won't give up trying. Or even seeking to extend the blame to John McDonnell, if only to cement the association of Jew-hatred with the left in the public mind. 

The benchmark for a politician with a disreputable history is, of course, Boris Johnson. A man sacked for lying, not once but twice; who infamously colluded with a friend who wanted to beat up a journalist; and whose extramarital affairs and children have proved difficult to enumerate. But the proper charge against Johnson is not that he is louche or amoral but that he is a lazy chancer who can't cut it in the job. Even conservative commentators and backbenchers are pointing out that his poor performance as Prime Minister was entirely predictable, given his self-indulgent track record as London Mayor and his underwhelming (if brief) stint as Foreign Secretary. They now excuse their prior support with some wibble about him being "a winner", rather than admitting that they were nailed-on to secure a majority in the 2019 general election once Labour fatally committed to a second referendum and the Liberal Democrats and SNP ruled out a Corbyn-led coalition. The Tories could have elected Jacob Rees-Mogg as party leader last year and would probably still have won. 

According to Philip Collins, "The sorry spectacle of Boris Johnson in 10 Downing Street is a repeat of the lesson that Gordon Brown and Theresa May ought to have taught us. Nobody ever changes. Office does not transform character: it reveals it". Is everyone a mystery until they get to Number 10? Brown and May were elected party leader by MPs who had already seen their characters revealed in high office, as a resentful Chancellor and an obtuse Home Secretary respectively. Collins's pompous judgement also ignores context: that both Brown and May were constrained by extraordinary events and their own parties. The clamour for austerity in 2010 and the popular disaffection with New Labour that had been building for a decade undid Brown, while the impossibility of Brexit on terms that would unite the Tories short of outright deception (the chickens now coming home to roost) put paid to May. If these events revealed aspects of character, it was Brown's loyalty to New Labour and May's inability to lie convincingly, neither of which really amount to moral deficiencies.

Corbyn was elected leader by the Labour membership not because they thought he would be managerially competent but because they wanted to change the attitude and policies of the party. Everything that has happened since has sprung from that choice by the membership: the delegitimisation of Corbyn, the marginalisation of the PLP left, and the recapture of the party apparatus by the right. Though the members have now opted for Starmer's competence, they did so (however naively) on the basis that he would stick to the same policy platform. Given his willingness to junk the remain cause, I see little reason to believe that he will hesitate to junk his famous 10 pledges, nor that he and David Evans, the new General Secretary, will be cautious in restraining or expelling the left, whether on the back of the EHRC report on antisemitism or any other grounds. This instrumentalism and mutability will be lauded by the press as evidence of statesmanship rather than opportunism or insincerity.

Had Corbyn been tougher, he could plausibly have achieved more in terms of party democracy and policy, from forcing mandatory reselection to resisting a second referendum, but it would almost certainly have come at a greater cost. The Change UK defections would have been larger in number and the rump PLP would still have been divided between remainers and leavers. History may well show that Corbyn's aversion to conflict actually prevented a split even more damaging than that of the SDP in 1981. A more cynical leader might have spotted the threat of the antisemitism charge earlier and headed it off, but nothing short of a conversion to Zionism would have stilled his critics. A more assertive and intellectually confident leader might have built on the 2017 campaign to normalise the policy initiatives that seemed to come as such a shock to so many in 2019, though the timing and focus of the election would likely still have led to a setback, even had the party stuck to its guns on a soft Brexit. Corbyn's limitations probably made little difference to the course of events, and the "chaos" of the leader's office was a symptom of the wider problems inside and outside the party rather than his personal signature.