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posted on 23/8/2020 14:12In an extract from their new book, Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire reveal how the wheels came off the election bus for an exhausted, irritable party leader and his warring aides - Nicolae

Labour’s chaotic ride to disaster

In the last days of August, Niall Sookoo, Labour’s director of elections, and Tim Waters, its head of data, had commissioned a poll from YouGov that turned the optimism of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle on its head. According to a poll of 20,000 voters, it would end the campaign with just 138 MPs — its worst result since 1918.

Sookoo invited those who would run Labour’s campaign to this private meeting to warn them of the calamity ahead. With McDonnell and his wife sat Ian Lavery and Andrew Gwynne, the national campaign co-ordinators, and Carl Shoben, director of strategy from the leader of the opposition’s office. Nursing hangovers from the first night’s festivities, they convened at 9am and gathered round a television with Danish pastries to watch the Labour leader sit down for his traditional conference interview on The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC. McDonnell fidgeted with the remote control but could not get the TV to work. By the time room service arrived to provide technical support, Corbyn’s interview was over.

Lavery was in no mood to listen, even though the poll suggested he would lose his own seat of Wansbeck, in the heart of the Northumberland coalfield, to the Conservatives. “People in the north just won’t vote Tory,” he boomed. “It just won’t happen!” Waters suggested that he had misunderstood the nature of the problem: remainers were abandoning Labour. The Liberal Democrats would almost quadruple their 2017 result and win 44 seats, overturning majorities of more than 20,000. They would also deprive Labour of enough votes in “leave” seats to let the Tories in through the middle. The Conservatives were even projected to win Vauxhall, where 78% voted Remain, thanks to a Lib Dem surge at Labour’s expense.

McDonnell listened in silence. His worst fears had been realised: despite his best efforts to cajole Corbyn into supporting a second referendum, Labour was repelling pro-EU voters. As Waters sat down, the shadow chancellor delegated the inquisition to his wife. Cynthia, like Lavery, struggled at first to believe what she had been told. She had spent much of her career at market-research companies and queried whether the research was watertight. An angry Lavery went further. YouGov, attendees recall him fuming, had been founded by card-carrying Conservatives, a charge he raised with Waters and Sookoo repeatedly. He insisted that they could not and should not trust a “Tory firm”.

But McDonnell had already made up his mind: Labour must do everything in its power to win back pro-EU voters. It would refrain from discussing the detail of Brexit and extol the virtues of giving voters the final say via a second referendum. It was a strategy Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s chief strategist, had long argued against, warning that the working class could desert Labour en masse. But he was not present that day. He was also increasingly outmuscled by Corbyn’s oldest comrade, who was by then plotting Milne’s demotion. “From that point out, our strategy was to hug the remainers,” says an official present that morning.

Many in the room still believed. The election of 2017 had shattered the old certainties, and Corbyn was determined to do so again. Even the doubters felt there might be a path to victory, if only, as Milne had told colleagues in August, they could move the argument beyond Brexit.

It would also require Corbyn to summon every drop of the energy that the preceding months of Westminster drama and internal scandal had drained from him. Those closest to him suspected he was in no state to do so.

As Marcus Roberts, a YouGov pollster, told the Today programme of Corbyn’s chances just before the campaign began: “The soufflé never rises twice.” Not only were Corbyn and his team deeply divided; Corbyn was no longer the politician he had once been: Brexit and the antisemitism row had sapped his confidence and made him the most unpopular Labour leader of the past 45 years. Paul Hilder, a data consultant to the campaign, warned — just as Labour MPs did after their weekly surgeries — that the leader had become a liability. He recommended that the party deploy a broader team of spokespeople to neutralise the damage a campaign that relied on Corbyn alone would do. Most striking of all, he proposed that Labour avoid putting its politicians centre stage at all. “Brexit meant that everyone just f***ing hated politicians,” recalled one aide. Those around Corbyn understood this argument, but had little option but to ignore it, for by then he was the only thing holding “the Project” together.

‘Saatchi of the left’ to the rescue
With unfortunate symbolism, Corbyn launched his campaign on October 31 — the day that Britain, thanks to legislation supported by the Labour leader’s office, would not be leaving the EU as Boris Johnson had promised. Despite the polls giving the Tories a 12-point lead, Corbyn appeared undaunted by the scale of the task to come. Taking to the stage at the Battersea Arts Centre in southwest London, he announced “the most ambitious and radical campaign our country has ever seen”. On Brexit, the speech was a familiar exercise in riding two horses at once. “Labour will get Brexit sorted by giving people the final say in six months . . . It really isn’t that complicated.”

But despite Corbyn’s outward insouciance, even the slogan behind him suggested he was on the defensive on the central issue of the campaign. Over the summer, McDonnell had commissioned Harry Barlow, an advertising executive who had worked for Ken Livingstone at the Greater London Council and was venerated by some as the “Saatchi of the left”, to come up with a tagline. It had to transcend Brexit and have as much impact as “For the many, not the few”. Taking inspiration from the campaign of Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister who had led her own Labour Party to an unlikely victory in 2017, Barlow suggested borrowing her slogan: “It’s time.” He envisaged it as a one-size-fits-all peg for each of Labour’s policies. A source explained: “It’s time . . . to transform our NHS. It’s time . . . for a real living wage. It’s time . . . for investment in education.” The problem was that the Tories could *******ise the formula for their own means. A spoof “It’s time . . . to get Brexit done” poster was repeatedly cited by worried aides. Milne also argued that it was unoriginal and lacked bite.

With that ruled out, Team Corbyn looked elsewhere. Hilder had come up with a suggestion that polled well: “We need to rebuild Britain.” Corbyn’s office vetoed it. Tony Blair, one of the few men the office resented more than Hilder, had used it as a recurring theme in the party’s 1997 manifesto. All that was left was another idea that had polled adequately: “Real change”. The two ideas were merged, without recourse to polling or focus groups, resulting in: “It’s time for real change”. Arun Chaudhary, a former campaign official to Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders who worked alongside Hilder, was said to be horrified by the “****show” on display. As Corbyn reached his peroration in Battersea, he mangled the agreed strapline: “Friends, the future is ours together. It is now time for real change!”

The horseradish challenge
Karie Murphy, executive director of Corbyn’s office, had spent the days that followed the botched coup against Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, telling Watson she had not been responsible. He did not believe her, but it did not matter. His abiding emotion from the night he learnt of the plot was, he told friends, one of relief. A process of conscious uncoupling from Westminster was under way.

In Brighton he reached the end of the road. The Corbynites had failed to oust him, but they had shown that he no longer had a reason to stay. His four years as deputy had not unfolded as planned: he had been an organiser, yes, but of a factional resistance, not a movement. When Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat leader, invited Watson to defect and run in Lewes, he considered it, a friend said, “for five minutes”. Politics was no longer fun. It was time to go.

In the final week of October, Watson met Corbyn to hammer out the terms of his departure. The discussion was held in secret. Arranging a time — kept off-diary — proved difficult. Corbyn had in effect been banned from meeting his deputy privately since the coup. Watson assured the leader’s office a 10-minute meeting would be worth his while.

Watson told Corbyn he had concluded his career was over. The events of conference had proven it. “Look, Jeremy, I’ve been thinking about this, obviously what went on at conference has been weighing on my mind, the deputy leadership stuff, but the decision I’ve made is beyond that, this is much wider than politics. I think it would be easier for me and easier for you if I was to stand down, so I’m just telling you that’s what I’m going to do.”

Corbyn, the man who had set the plan to assassinate Watson in train, later told aides he was not surprised. Only in the rarest circumstances would his adversary have requested a meeting. Yet in the moment he feigned surprise. Corbyn took a long pause before offering his response. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said. “You don’t have to do this.” Watson said that he was in a better place than he had been for years. He was not for turning.

Once it became clear his mind was made up, Corbyn made no attempt to change it. To do so was not only beyond him but at odds with the Project’s objectives. They haggled over the price. Corbyn would offer Watson a peerage, in keeping with the tradition that saw John Prescott, Roy Hattersley and Denis Healey elevated to the upper chamber. In return, Watson would allow the Project to fight the election on its own terms. They would break the news together.

Business attended to, the conversation mellowed. Corbyn asked about Watson’s children. Watson brought up their shared interest in horticulture. He suggested that he might say he was resigning to spend more time with his vegetable patch. They then discussed the challenges of growing horseradish, an invasive vegetable, at length. One person present recalls that the discussion took up more time than the practicalities of his resignation. Later that week, Helene Reardon Bond, Corbyn’s office manager, visited Watson’s office bearing a peace offering: a horseradish plant.

News of the arrangement became public on November 6, when Labour announced the decision during Boris Johnson’s campaign launch in Birmingham, the heart of Watson’s West Midlands fiefdom. His last act in Labour politics would be a show of unity with Corbyn. “Now is the right time for me to stand down from the House of Commons and start a different kind of life. The decision is personal, not political,” read Watson’s letter to Corbyn. The leader responded in idiosyncratic style: “I’ve always enjoyed our very convivial chats about many things, including cycling, exercise and horticulture. I hope the horseradish plants I gave you thrive.”

The news, which knocked Johnson’s launch off the rolling news channels, blindsided Westminster and with it Peter Mandelson. Watson had not forewarned his mentor. He knew that would allow Mandy to talk him out of it.

“You don’t know what it’s like. I have to turn up to these meetings, I have to go on these NEC [national executive committee] officers’ calls. I see the brutality, I see the vindictiveness,” Watson told him. “I see not just what they’re doing to the Labour Party — destroying it — but the sheer brutality with which they’re doing it and I can’t bear it. I just feel contaminated.”

I can’t take any more bullets
With parliament dissolved, Corbyn’s time on the road could begin in earnest. He went with McDonnell to the shadow chancellor’s home city of Liverpool to unveil Labour’s battle bus. Clambering aboard, he waved for the cameras. He flashed a thumbs-up as he fired the starting gun on his month on the campaign trail: “This message will go across the whole country!”

The day before, Corbyn had what one aide described as a “tantrum” when he learnt that — unlike the bus propelling Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats — his campaign wheels were powered not by an electric battery but a diesel engine of the sort that his own manifesto would promise to outlaw by 2030. In his exasperation, he wrote to close aides including Murphy, who was leading the campaign, from his personal Gmail account: “I see the [diesel] bus appears which I hope does not get too many negatives. As soon as rest of grid and operation notes are available can I get them so I can know a week ahead what is being planned and other requests that may appear can be factored in.” The response, from Marsha-Jane Thompson, an aide in his office, would do little to soothe him: “Once we win we can mandate investment in electric buses!” She then turned to the senior management team WhatsApp group: “JC unhappy that lib dems have an electric bus.” Aides quickly agreed it would not be feasible to change tack. Murphy responded: “Can someone let JC know this?” Thompson refused: “Can’t take any more bullets.”

Corbyn’s seemingly trivial objections underlined a deeper dysfunction. His detractors at Westminster often contended that he had no idea what he was doing. For once, the jibe was accurate — though not for want of trying on Corbyn’s part. Strategy for the campaign he was supposed to be leading had largely been decided — or, more accurately, disagreed on — in his absence.

Before arriving in Liverpool, Corbyn had demanded to know why he had even been asked to spend the morning in the drizzle at all, especially as the NEC was meeting at Southside, Labour HQ in London. “Hi JC,” came Thompson’s reply. “It was noticed but as Amy [Jackson, Corbyn’s political secretary], Andrew [Fisher, his policy adviser] and Seumas said in the meeting yesterday the advice was to have a speech to launch campaign as not appropriate for you to be at the NEC.” Corbyn shot back: “Yes that may have been the advice but it was never given to me at any time. I am therefore stuck between not being at the NEC or upsetting the events that have been organised when I was not consulted on any of it. Can we please make sure I am fully consulted in future and have the grid at least a week ahead. I realise everyone is working very hard to deliver but I am fully entitled to be consulted before these decisions are made.”

Corbyn could barely trust his closest lieutenants even when he was in the same room. Now he would be marooned more than 200 miles away as they met without him, with only two twentysomething junior aides for company. The following day, he repeated his plea. “I need to see the whole grid not just parts of it. Can you send it now?” Each day of the campaign began with a 7am conference call. McDonnell, the self-appointed chairman of the campaign, led the conversation. Murphy, Milne, Fisher, Gwynne, Lavery and Sookoo would also dial in. By the end of the first week of the campaign, Corbyn was insisting on participating as well.

The idea that their leader would interrupt his packed schedule to join this routine discussion would ordinarily be preposterous. He had not dialled in once in 2017. But for Corbyn, who had grown distressed while being denied access to information, it became an imperative. He began to dial in every day, regardless of his location. An aide recalled: “He came onto the call every morning asking for his diary.” It would often take hours of back and forth between Corbyn and Murphy, egged on by Corbyn’s impatient wife, Laura Alvarez, before he was satisfied that he had been given a sufficiently detailed agenda.

His refusal to use the diesel bus, meanwhile, meant he was travelling the country on trains. It made communication near impossible. Corbyn frequently cut in and out of reception and was forced to borrow the phones of those around him. He made one Sunday morning call as he tended to the marrows on his allotment, buffeted by wind which rendered his voice inaudible. The man on whose shoulders the hopes of the left rested had been reduced to spending vital hours of the campaign bickering over his right to see his own schedule. “It was like he’d had a breakdown,” said one aide. “He just wouldn’t drop the stuff about the diary and dialling onto the calls. It was his way of trying to regain control.”

More worrying perhaps was the nature of the calls he insisted on joining. McDonnell nominally led the discussions. Murphy would often step in. But she was wary of being made the fall guy by McDonnell and would remind participants that she was not in charge. (“It’s not my thing. Never made one strategic decision, all this, you know, this election guru — what a load of f***ing ********,” she says now.) Whereas in 2017, Milne had signed off all strategic decisions, now he was merely one of many voices in the room. Fisher, meanwhile, had refused to share the draft manifesto with him — or anyone he regarded as being in the Milne/Murphy Brexit axis — while Murphy responded by closely guarding the grid. Sookoo, who despised Milne, in turn refused to share his list of key seats with Milne, Murphy or Jackson. The three were forced to go behind his back during the early days of the campaign and get a copy from Lavery instead. Said one aide: “Nine-tenths of my bloody day was spent communicating on behalf of people who wouldn’t communicate directly with each other.”

As it turned out, that first fortnight of the campaign did not unfold in the way that either party had hoped or expected. Large parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands — and with them dozens of Labour-held Conservative targets — were submerged by floods. Johnson’s visits to comfort the afflicted went about as well as might have been expected. “I’m not very happy about talking to you, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll just motor on with what I’m doing,” came the reply from one middle-aged woman glad-handed by Johnson in flood-hit South Yorkshire.

McDonnell attempted to recapture the agenda. Corbyn, he proposed, would upstage Johnson by making a second visit to areas affected by the floods to highlight cuts to flood defences overseen by the coalition. There was one problem: Corbyn himself. He refused to go, yet again citing his diary and the fact he had not been kept in the loop. Thompson wrote: “JC currently doesn’t want to go with John’s suggestion of a visit today. So would need convincing by someone.” Anjula Singh, the director of communications, shot back: “What’s his objection?” No reply was forthcoming. The office was left to debate the best way of shaking Corbyn out of his sulk about the diary commitments. “He could have them WhatsApp in advance if possible? Stops any suggestion he isn’t getting them,” said Murphy. Thompson replied: “He has them given to him in his hand and his personal email . . . as he requested.”

With less than three weeks to go and Labour 10 points behind in most polls, some aides had arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that Corbyn was sabotaging his own campaign. He was often late and appeared to overstay at events to minimise his day’s commitments. During a visit to Stoke-on-Trent, Thompson relayed the assessment of another colleague: “JC was deliberately adding extra things and talking to people to delay and then spoke for 30 mins plus at the campaign stop once they had arrived 40 mins late.” Others feared that Alvarez was encouraging her husband’s worst instincts in order to protect him from the pressures of campaigning. Such was the disintegration of trust within Corbyn’s office that aides nicknamed her “Yoko”.

On the morning of his visit to Stoke, he had begun the day at a canal boat serving home-made Staffordshire oatcakes. According to one source, Alvarez was “in one of her moods where she decided Jeremy needed to be on TV with his wife”. As an ITV crew filmed Corbyn preparing an oatcake with the local parliamentary candidate, Alvarez defied protocol and marched up to Corbyn: “Make me one.” She then sat down and said to him in Spanish: “Make me one with honey. I want one with honey.” Two junior aides frantically intervened and attempted to remove Alvarez, who was obscuring the shot. She refused, giving the staff an upbraiding in full view of the rolling camera. “I’m trying to make him happy and you’re stopping it,” she snapped. “I’m his wife, you need to let me do this, you don’t understand what’s good for him.” Corbyn declined to intervene.

A cameraman whispered to one aide: “What the f*** is going on?” Another aide said: “This is really awkward, what do we do? There are like 10 cameras here, this is f***ing mental.” In the end, it took a nervous call to ITV that afternoon to prevent them from using the footage. The incident underscored one of the unhappiest conclusions of Corbyn’s office: in his poor state and during the long days, Corbyn had come to rely on Alvarez as an emotional shield.

Campaign not working
At 10pm on Wednesday, November 27, The Times published YouGov’s first seat prediction of the campaign. The model had successfully predicted a hung parliament in 2017. The Conservatives would win 359 seats and Labour just 211.

Milne and Murphy responded by turning to a man they knew could be relied on to do their bidding: Steve Howell, a former Guardian sports journalist and childhood friend of Mandelson, who had advised Labour during the 2017 campaign and written a book about his experiences, Game Changer, in which, some complained, he took credit for their work. Waters, enraged by the perceived snub to his expertise as head of data, gathered signatures for a letter to block Howell’s appointment as a consultant to the campaign. But as the final fortnight loomed, Howell elbowed his way in.

With almost manic energy, he started tabling ideas for winning back Labour leavers. In one meeting, he suggested that Corbyn name his Brexit negotiating team — and commit to including the likes of Lavery, who by then had made clear he would vote leave in a second referendum. The shadow chancellor’s camp blocked the plan. Howell also said Labour should produce more digital content with “trusted leave voices” such as Grace Blakeley, a 26-year-old New Statesman journalist. He was vetoed again.

At 3pm on Sunday, November 24, as Boris Johnson prepared to launch his manifesto in Telford, Labour’s campaign team had gathered at Southside to patch over their divides and agree a last minute new strategy for the final fortnight. Corbyn was not invited. Later in the day, he would be appearing alongside Lily Allen to launch the party’s cultural manifesto, and aides were cautious not to dent his morale as he entered the home straight. McDonnell chaired the meeting, which was in unanimous agreement on one thing: Labour’s campaign was not working. Even the basics, such as the slogan, were agreed to have been a disaster.

It fell to Andrew Murray, an adviser who was also chief of staff at Unite, to propose an alternative: “We’re on your side.” Some felt it had not been sufficiently tested in focus groups. He argued that it encapsulated Labour’s offer to leave voters — “We’re for ordinary people, while the Tories are for the rich” — and managed to get it approved. “This is bonkers stuff,” one person present recalls thinking. “You have to repeat one message throughout the campaign and here we are changing our slogan.”

Far more fundamental to the campaign than its slogan was Labour’s targeting strategy. The party’s original list of target seats included 66 seats they hoped to gain and 30 seats they needed to defend. Again, the room was unanimous that Labour had to rip up its plans and adopt a defensive approach: the party would retain its offensives but bump up the number of defensives to 67. Howell read out a list of seats the party would send last-minute resources to, most of which lay in the Midlands and northeast. Sookoo exploded. For weeks, he had been agitating for resources to defend seats in Labour’s heartlands. “I’m pleased for Steve Howell that he hasn’t been ridiculed and derided to the same extent that I was when I proposed the same seats,” he said venomously. The comments were directed at Milne, who said nothing and went red in the face.

One question lingered, however: what would Labour actually do over the next fortnight? Would it run away from or towards Brexit — and would Corbyn do anything differently himself? Howell, dialling in from his home in Cardiff, acknowledged the elephant in the room and said Labour had to do more to win over leavers by clarifying its Brexit policy. Few spoke in Howell’s favour. With Howell 150 miles away, McDonnell delivered the kiss of death. Earlier in the day, the shadow chancellor had infuriated several present in the room by telling Sky’s Sophy Ridge that he would not stay neutral in a second EU referendum. Now he spoke into the phone to Howell: “I don’t think you got enough support in the room for your proposal.”

The following morning, the BBC’s Iain Watson reported that Labour had adopted a new strategy with just two weeks to go until polling day. Despite the decision not to follow Howell’s proposals, Watson’s report bore Howell’s fingerprints to such an extent that it might as well have carried his byline. “Insiders told the BBC that in the first half of the election campaign, a key error was that the Liberal Democrat threat had been overestimated, while the willingness of Leave voters to switch from Labour to the Conservatives had been underestimated,” Watson wrote. “In the last two weeks of the campaign, this will change.”

Labour’s “new strategy” did not go much deeper than changing the window dressing. It had merely agreed to disagree, and soldier on. Earlier in the week, according to the WhatsApp group of senior aides, an exhausted Corbyn had instructed Murphy to book a rally in Middlesbrough but “cancel other stops”.

The red wall crumbles
The scale of the disaster that had befallen the Project became clear just after 11.30pm on election night, when Blyth Valley in Northumberland declared its result. The bashful face of the Conservative candidate Ian Levy, a bespectacled mental health nursing assistant, said it all as his victory was declared. In Downing Street, Johnson leapt to his feet and punched the air. Dominic Cummings surveyed the data. The exit poll and its prediction of a Tory landslide was accurate. The red wall was crumbling.

A little under two hours later, Lavery took to the stage and learnt he had just kept hold of Wansbeck. His majority cratered from more than 10,000 to just 814. Using lines primarily authored by Milne, he cast the Project as a victim of Brexit. “This isn’t about Jeremy Corbyn — this is about Brexit,” he boomed. “This is about the rerun of the 2016 referendum. You ignore democracy at your peril.”

As the Project sought to justify its humiliation, would-be contenders to the throne circled. For other opponents of the Project, years of resentment came to the fore, bursting the dam. On ITV, the former home secretary Alan Johnson, who had long blamed the Corbynites for sabotaging the Labour remain campaign he had helmed in 2016, let rip as Jon Lansman, founder of the pro-Corbyn Momentum movement, sat impassive in a Hawaiian shirt. “The working class have always been a big disappointment to Jon and his little cult,” he fumed. “I want them out of the party. I want Momentum gone. Go back to your student politics and your little left wing.” Corbyn, he spat, “couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag”.

Just after 2am, Corbyn arrived at Southside. Embossed on a wall were the words of Tony Blair’s clause IV: “By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.” As Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield fell to the Conservatives, and the Project’s reign disintegrated into new civil war, they read more like gallows humour.

© Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire 2020



- A Farewell to Kings -