Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ