Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn have one thing in common beyond the astonishing coincidence that they are both members of the Labour party: the two men entered parliament after the 1983 general election. This was the one in which the party’s manifesto was described by one of its own MPs as “the longest suicide note in history”.
Blair came to share that opinion, having seen on the doorsteps of even a safe Labour seat how little its recipe of unilateral nuclear disarmament and nationalisation met the demands of voters. By contrast, Corbyn, 32 years after that debacle, has not moved a millimetre ideologically. This is called “being a man of principle”. Alternatively, he is like one of those Japanese soldiers found in the jungle decades after the country surrendered in the Second World War, oblivious to the dramatic change in their nation’s circumstances.
No, his campaign managers will protest, JC is the opposite of those isolated warriors: look how his public meetings are packed to bursting, so much so that he has had to address those outside with a megaphone. That is true — mystifying though it is to those Labour party colleagues who have heard Corbyn speak down the years and who know he is as relentlessly dull as obsessives tend to be.
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What is now forgotten is that in the doomed election campaign of 1983 Michael Foot was the undoubted star, if such a thing is measured by the size of audiences attracted and the volume of cheers that greeted his speeches.
This comparison was drawn with near poignancy by the Eastern Daily Press two weeks ago: “We think the last time a politician drew such a crowd in Norwich was when Michael Foot came to St Andrew’s Hall in 1983. Corbyn’s speech at the Open on Bank Plain attracted around 1,000 people. We challenged our readers on Twitter to remember a more packed venue for a politician in Norwich and one suggested Mr Foot’s rally.”
The paper conscientiously reproduced its article from May 23, 1983, which recorded: “Even though Mr Foot’s speech clashed with the FA Cup final, hundreds of people were still trying to find a way to squeeze into the hall when he stepped onto the platform.”
As that campaign drew to a close, Foot clearly became ever more baffled that despite the enthusiastic crowds he was drawing, the opinion polls suggested that among the voters as a whole he was trailing abysmally behind the Conservatives. A week after his Norwich triumph Foot told an adoring crowd in Birmingham: “I know that reports appear in the newspapers about the polls, but they should report faithfully mass meetings like this.”
Labour’s then deputy leader, Denis Healey, explained this apparent paradox in the account of the 1983 campaign in his memoirs: “Only one voter out of a hundred ever attends an election meeting, and he or she is nearly always already committed to one party or the other. Michael Foot and I . . . were speaking every night at public meetings of people whose minds were already made up.”
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The point about winning a general election under our system is that you need to persuade those whose minds are not already made up. But Jeremy Corbyn suffers from such an acute form of political tunnel vision, he has not the slightest idea of how to do that. Or even why.
I suspect Foot himself would have regarded the prospect of Corbyn leading his beloved Labour party with horror — and not just because the MP for Islington North is more in the mould of Tony Benn, whose disloyalty to his colleagues Foot eventually found repulsive.
In a recent issue of the Catholic Herald magazine, the veteran Irish journalist Mary Kenny recalls: “I was once present at a private film showing in Hampstead when the radical Welsh documentary film maker Kenneth Griffith aired his support for the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaigns and Michael Foot walked out.” By contrast Corbyn chose to invite two convicted members of the IRA to the House of Commons, only weeks after that terrorist organisation had almost succeeded in blowing up the entire British government in Brighton. Nor has he since found it possible to condemn the IRA’s campaign of bombing — in part because (unlike the British politicians who later negotiated with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) he identified with them as anti-colonialist revolutionaries.
In truth, almost any organisation that opposes the West seems to have a hold on Corbyn’s affections. Even if, like those he describes as “our friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah, their counteroffer is the most extreme sort of theocratic thuggery — for example, in Hamas’s case, throwing from buildings the trussed-up bodies of members of its secular Palestinian rival, Fatah.
As James Bloodworth, the editor of Left Foot Forward, a Labour-supporting blog, noted — after listing Corbyn’s championing of, or excuses for, autocrats such as the late Colonel Gadaffi and Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro — the would-be Labour leader’s “indulgence of tyranny is invariably where politics takes you if you . . . accept the view that the US is the world’s most malevolent power . . . Any movement that points a gun in its direction must invariably have something going for it.”
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But it’s not just America’s enemies that Corbyn finds irresistibly alluring. On the matter of the Falkland Islands, he demands that what he calls “the Malvinas” should be handed over to Argentina, notwithstanding the expressed view of its inhabitants in 2013 — by 1,513 votes to three — that they want to remain a British overseas territory.
Apparently he is quite a frequent visitor to the Argentine embassy. Nothing wrong with that, if he wants to get more briefings, though we might note in passing that Michael Foot supported Margaret Thatcher’s decision to send a taskforce to seize back the Falklands from the Argentine junta, which had invaded British sovereign territory.
This pattern of behaviour raises an unusual problem, should Corbyn — as bookmakers predict — be elected Labour leader next month. He would become leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Leave aside Corbyn’s republicanism — which is a perfectly respectable position — just how much could his loyalty be depended on?
It is one of the conventions of the British parliamentary system that when the government of the day is considering any form of military action, it gives the leader of the opposition access to the highest-level security briefings, so he (or she) understands exactly what is at stake and cannot complain about being kept in the dark. Thus, for example, last month David Cameron invited Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, to a high-level security meeting about the threat posed by Isis extremists, against whom an RAF campaign was being considered.
Given Corbyn’s recent difficulty in establishing clarity as to whether he prefers Isis to the American military, would Cameron be able to trust him as a secure recipient of security briefings? The same would go for anything involving Nato action, since Corbyn is much more antipathetic to that western defence alliance than he is to Putin.
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Doubtless Corbyn would respond that he wouldn’t want such briefings anyway. Yet he is applying, in effect, to be an apprentice to run the country. The fact it will never happen is consoling, perhaps especially to those who have the Labour party’s interests at heart.