Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ he sneered, were traitors for advocating ‘middle-of-the-road policies’. ‘Traitor’ was a word he was to use often in the years to come.

      Born in Liverpool in 1951, the son of a docker, McDonnell had moved with his family to Great Yarmouth in the late 1950s. His father became a bus driver and his mother worked at the local British Home Stores, for a time at the biscuit counter. Good at maths, the flame-haired ten-year-old sat next to a girl named Judith Daniels at St Mary’s Roman Catholic primary school. In later years, McDonnell suggested that he had whispered a maths answer to her to save her from a severe caning, but in reply she ridiculed his exaggeration. His whisper, she said, ‘saved me from a gentle tapsy from an inspirational nun’. The small lie was similar to Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to build up the story of his early years, but in other respects their narratives were very different.

      After passing the 11-Plus, McDonnell went to Great Yarmouth Grammar School, but left early due to trouble at home and at school. After briefly considering the priesthood, he arrived in Burnley to be employed first as a manual worker at Silent Night Beds and then at Mullard’s in Simonstone, making TV screens for Philips. Shortly before his twentieth birthday he met Marilyn Bateman, a local nursery nurse four years his senior, at a miners’ club. They married and moved to a small terraced house in a cul de sac in nearby Nelson. At nights he resumed studying for History A-Level at Burnley Municipal College. Three years later the McDonnells moved with their two daughters to west London, to establish a business fostering up to ten children in their home. McDonnell enrolled in an evening course in politics and government at Brunel University. During the first year, his political beliefs hardened.

      At the beginning, his militancy was ambiguous. Barbara Goodwin, his tutor on government, recalled him as the least extreme in a group of eight students. ‘He was regarded as a class traitor for defending Labour against the Trotskyites,’ she recalled. Later, David Shapiro, his personal tutor, declared him ‘academically unteachable. He was already a Marxist and it was all water off a duck’s back. But he was pragmatic and sensible.’ After graduating in 1976, McDonnell was employed as a researcher at the National Union of Mineworkers. By then he had become well known at the Hayes and Harlington branch of the Labour Party for leading a campaign to oust Neville Sandelson, the sitting Labour MP. The public-school-educated, cigar-smoking Jewish barrister was pro-Europe. ‘He can’t understand the grassroots trade union activists,’ claimed McDonnell, who forced a vote that Sandelson should retire or be deselected. The MP survived by three votes, to be re-elected in the 1979 Labour bloodbath.

      During the following three years, McDonnell left the NUM to work in the TUC’s welfare section. As secretary of the TUC’s book club, he selected each month’s read. ‘It’s Das Kapital,’ he told the other staff at the TUC’s headquarters in Bloomsbury. ‘That’s the only book we’re going to study.’ He found himself alone in the room. Before Labour’s defeat in 1979, he had gravitated towards the Trotskyites. Sitting in a café in Lambeth with George Galloway and the Workers Revolutionary Party leader Gerry Healy, he discussed the creation of the Labour Herald, a glossy magazine to be financed by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Although he was a thug, rapist, fraudster and anti-Semite, Healy attracted many idealists to the WRP, including Keith Veness. ‘McDonnell was a proper Trot in a way that Corbyn was not,’ observed Galloway. Veness confirmed the judgement. With a hatchet face and jutting chin, McDonnell was confrontational, spouting Marxist jargon about constant agitation in his advocacy of violent disruption. Appointed as the new magazine’s editor, he regularly appeared at WRP meetings to promote revolution, after which would come the mass nationalisation of the British economy and the abolition of all private land ownership, without compensation. With his new role, his life changed. His Trotskyist sympathies qualified him to become head of policy at Camden council, and his marriage ended. While his estranged wife continued to run the fostering business, he lived with Julia Fitzgerald, a Camden councillor, in a flat in Kentish Town.

      During the following year, McDonnell plotted with Corbyn, Knight, Grant and Livingstone to take over the country’s government. After the victory in 1981, he focused on anything that would challenge the government. Disguise was one chosen weapon. ‘Cut your hair, dress properly, wear a tie and act the part,’ he advised Toby Harris. ‘He was always professional to win power,’ says Harris, a member of the London Government Assembly, an elected group representing the London boroughs. Corbyn was very much part of the group, alongside McDonnell, Livingstone and Veness, and was the ‘organiser’ of London Labour Briefing. After his election as Labour leader in 2015 he would deny any official role for London Labour Briefing, but he is listed in the group’s literature as responsible for the sale of tickets to a social event that offered curries during a discotheque evening, and two years later was named as overseeing the group’s mailing list. Labour moderates in Haringey were appalled by Corbyn, but the local newspaper, noting the election of more far-left councillors and Corbyn’s brazen resubmission of Tariq Ali’s third application to become a Labour member in the borough, tipped him to become the council’s next leader.

      By then, fearful of the Marxists’ threat to Britain’s social fabric, Conservative Central Office had appointed a professional investigator, Peter Shipley, to monitor relations between Labour MPs and the far left. Ever since James Callaghan had ended the listing of proscribed organisations, left-wing Labour MPs had joined lobby groups that were outwardly reputable, including the World Peace Organisation, but that were in fact secretly financed by Moscow. Among the British associations Shipley investigated was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), established by Fenner Brockway, a veteran Labour MP and a paid Soviet agent. In 1981 the MCF, managed by Tony Gilbert, a communist agent also controlled by Moscow, counted Corbyn a member. Corbyn met Gilbert frequently, but establishing his political sympathies towards Moscow was beyond Shipley’s remit. All he recognised was the far left’s flaws.

      Zealous and serious, all those in the group around Corbyn appeared to march under the same banner, but they disagreed constantly about ideology. They were brothers-in-arms rather than soulmates, and as individuals showed no particular warmth towards each other. One exception was the relationship between Tony Benn and Corbyn. Benn’s radical socialism had polarised Labour. His ascent gave many Marxists and Trotskyites hope that the Labour Party they had abandoned during the 1960s was worth rejoining. To establish their shared ambitions, Tariq Ali, Reg Race and others met Benn in the Commons along with Corbyn, who said little, although everyone knew he could be relied upon to make the logistical arrangements for Benn’s imminent battle against Denis Healey in the election for Labour’s deputy leadership, the result of which was to be announced at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on 27 September 1981.

      In the days before the vote, Corbyn assured Benn of victory. Combined with the defection of many Labour councillors to the SDP, the deselections and intimidation were certain, he predicted, to deliver the bulk of the constituency votes to the left. Corbyn also reckoned that Benn was assured of trade union support, including NUPE’s. He was right about the constituencies (81 per cent voted for Benn), but wrong about the unions. Although Benn could attract huge crowds – even during an unannounced stop at a motorway service station nearly a hundred people had gathered to hear him make an impromptu speech – he also inspired hatred. The Times columnist Bernard Levin titled him ‘Mr Zigzag Loon’, while Denis Healey dismissed him as ‘an artificial lefty’. The majority of the unions, including Haringey’s branch of NUPE, voted against Benn, whom they saw as an extremist, but to the moderates’ shock Healey’s overall victory was wafer-thin – 50.4 per cent against 49 per cent for Benn. Corbyn’s disappointment was intense. In the days following, Conservative Central Office became so convinced that the hard left was broken that Shipley’s contract was not renewed. The Tories were profoundly mistaken. On reflection, Benn’s narrow loss gave the left hope. In the nature of Corbyn’s long road, there was never defeat, just one more precursor to another start, another campaign.

      ‘What next?’ Corbyn asked. Wounded by his defeat but pleased by the party’s imminent split, Benn decided to host a monthly discussion group with Britain’s leading Marxists on Sunday evenings at his home in Holland Park, west London. Among those invited to what he later СКАЧАТЬ