Tom Bower - Dangerous Hero

Corbyn’s opponents would not go quietly. Raucous meetings of the Hornsey Labour Party were testing Toby Harris, its chairman. ‘Corbyn was encouraging all the left groups to join. Some arrived with fake names, especially the hardliners. They were out-lefting each other, and he loved that, but he never identified with one group. He just distributed leaflets, announced the next demo, but never stood up as a leader to say what we should do.’ A general election was imminent – the five-year parliamentary term expired that year – and Corbyn was certain that Labour would win, especially in Hornsey, which was a marginal seat. All that remained was to select a candidate.

Corbyn was well prepared. His support was based entirely on an individual’s political beliefs, not on their personal relationship with him. So in the final run-off to select the Labour candidate he made no distinction between Reg Race, the friend who had secured his job at NUPE, and Ted Knight, a well-known forty-five-year-old unmarried Trotskyite. Knight was leader of Lambeth council, notorious for its debts, its corrupt workforce, and for failing to prevent serious sexual abuses at a young children’s home. Ostensibly, Corbyn supported Race’s nomination by introducing him to the members in every ward, but he seemed untroubled when Knight won selection by a single vote. With the support of the local party’s far-left professionals, recruited by Corbyn, he would be the Labour candidate. Corbyn, however, had private reservations. Always dressed in a dark suit, Knight addressed everyone as ‘Comrade’, delivered with a distinct hint of menace, and in private screamed obscenities. ‘He scares me,’ Corbyn admitted to Keith Veness. No genuine friendship was ever forged between the two, not least because they supported opposing Trotskyist factions.

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 thirty-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.