Nigel Cawthorne - Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left

Jeremy Corbyn

Leading from the Left

Nigel Cawthorne

Nigel Cawthorne 2015

Nigel Cawthorne has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2015.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Coming from the Left

This is the first biography of veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps because, like his mentor and long-time friend Tony Benn, he believes that politics is about policy, not personality. Shortly after securing the nomination to enter the Labour leadership race, Corbyn told the media: I dont do personal, Im more interested in ideas and politics.

With his beard and his raft of radical opinions, it was easy to paint him as an anachronism, the sort of old-fashioned lefty thought to have died out in the 1950s, if not the 1930s. However, even Boris Johnson has praised him for his authenticity. In a Labour Party full of relatively anaemic, gelatinous and vacillating opportunists Jeremy Corbyn looks passionate and principled, said the Mayor of London.

Like Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Lenin, Che Guevara and even Karl Marx himself, Corbyn is not a product of the working classes. He is a socialist out of commitment and conscience. His father David Corbyn was an electrical engineer and his mother Naomi was a Maths teacher at a girls grammar school. However, they were politically committed and met on a committee which called for the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Mum and Dad met campaigning on the Spanish civil war, said Corbyn. Both were active peace campaigners. They died in 1986 and 87. Dad would be a hundred now.

True to the cause, rather than returning to the family home when his mother was on her deathbed, Corbyn was at a left-wing political meeting in the Midlands with his brother Piers. Piers later said that they thought Mum would have said just get on with it, so thats what he did.

Jeremy Bernard Corbyn was the youngest of four brothers. The others all went on to become scientists. He was born on 26 May 1949 in Chippenham, Wiltshire, a market town in the southern Cotswolds, and was brought up in rural Shropshire. As a boy, he liked working on local farms. Even in his north Islington constituency, he maintained links with his rustic upbringing, growing fruit and vegetables on his allotment in East Finchley.

He had been on the waiting list for years before a plot finally came up in March 2003 the week the Iraq war broke out. Although he was busy protesting against the US-led invasion, he took on the plot anyway, burning down derelict sheds that were there and planted growing potatoes, beans, soft fruit and apples:

I try to grow things that dont require a lot of watering because I dont get up there regularly enough, he said. I always make time for my allotment. You like a dry summer because the weeds dont grow. You water what you need to water and the weeds can sod off.

Chris McKane, chairman of the East Finchley allotment holders association, said: He doesnt grow anything fancy broad beans, sweetcorn and potatoes, all organic. Hes a good cultivator, very good with a mattock.

Corbyn has been interested in environmental issues since his youth and believes in giving communities greater powers to local energy schemes, as they do in Germany, and he calls for houses with gardens for everyone, adding that anyone who wants to be a beekeeper should be a beekeeper.

He acknowledged there would be problems in giving everyone a taste of the rural idyll he was brought up in:

To give everyone a house and garden is very difficult in urban areas, he said. But we can achieve something, and Ive been involved with converting ground-floor car-parking spaces to growing areas on council estates in my area, giving people access to small growing areas. Children growing potatoes and tomatoes in their own soil is something they never forget.

At home, he and his brother were encouraged to discuss current affairs and Jeremy was given a book of George Orwells essays as a present at the age of sixteen. Both he and Piers joined the local Wrekin Labour and Young Socialists party.

They were all politically engaged, says Jane Chapmen, who, as Jeremys first wife, got to know the family later. There was always a lot of political discussion round the dinner table. His parents belonged to the local Labour Party so from quite an early age, he was politicized.

Piers was further to the left than his younger brother. He later joined the Communist Party and a member of the revolutionary International Marxist Group before joining the Bermondsey Labour Party, whose candidate was then gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell.

But while Jeremy was solely interested in politics from an early age, Piers developed other interests. Fascinated with the weather and climate patterns, he began constructing his own observation equipment at the age of five. Showing the same single-minded dedication as his brother, Piers studied physics at Imperial College. Graduating with first-class honours, he went on to become a weather forecaster. Piers then became a sceptic on global warming, denying that climate change is the product of human activity. He maintains that its to do with sunspots.

We talk quite a lot. Dont always agree. Its a family, you know, said Jeremy.

Their brother, Andrew, is also far to the left of Jeremy. He became an expert in the oil business advising in Mozambique. When the countrys Marxist President Samora Machel was killed in 1986, the cash-strapped Labour Party could not afford to send a representative and it fell to Andrew Corbyn to relate the partys condolences at the funeral.

Donald Anderson, MP for Swansea East and the partys foreign affairs spokesman responsible for Africa should have been there. Anderson had drawn up detailed plans to attend the funeral. The Foreign Office had offered assistance with accommodation in southern Africa and had arranged a programme of meetings with political figures. But when the MP went to the leader of the oppositions office in the Commons, party leader Neil Kinnocks staff said there was no spare cash to pay the 1,500 airfare.

Anderson then took his request to the Labour Partys headquarters at Walworth Road in south London and came away empty-handed. With nobody representing the party officially, it was left to Corbyn to pass a letter of condolence to the Mozambique foreign ministry.

The whole business was quite humiliating, said a Labour source. It was important for Anderson to go there because this kind of state event allows an invaluable opportunity for informal talks with senior politicians from many countries. Instead, we end up being represented by one of the Corbyn brothers.

Jeremy was educated at the prestigious Adams Grammar School in Newport. Founded in 1656, during the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell, by William Adams, a wealthy member of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, a senior livery company in the City of London, it is one of the countrys top boarding schools. Old boys include several senior politicians, but they are generally Conservatives. However, one Old Novaportan as former pupils of Adams Grammar dubbed themselves who might have inspired the young Jeremy was Robert Charnock (166396). He was hanged after conspiring in an unsuccessful plot to kill William III near Turnham Green in February 1696. The blunderbuss he intended to use to assassinate the King is on display in the Tower of London.

One of the political figures Corbyn said he most admired also comes from that era.

I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne, he said. Very interesting character, because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different. And there is a report that I cant find any proof of one way or the other, that in late 1648 he had a three-day parley with Cromwell at the Nags Head in Islington. I cant find the record of it. But I wish I could get it. Then I could get a plaque put up for it.