The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer

Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell were long dismissed as irrelevant radicals. But their formative years on the margins were more important than anyone realised. By Andy Beckett

On 25 March 2015, six months before becoming Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke in Westminster about “human rights and security in the Democratic Republic of Congo”. A long, U-shaped arrangement of chairs had been set up in the grand Commons committee room. “I am pleased that we are having this half-hour debate,” he began, in the flat, almost anti-rhetorical voice that had become a parliamentary fixture since his election 32 years earlier. Unshowily, he revealed that he had visited Congo twice, that he had “a considerable number” of Congolese immigrants in his constituency, and that he had a grasp of the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. “Sadly,” he said, “the horrors of Congo are not new.”

There was a sense, rare in Westminster, of politics being about life-or-death questions that extended across continents and centuries. But Corbyn’s entire audience consisted of a Conservative junior minister, a Democratic Unionist party MP, and four other people, two of whom chatted while he was speaking. Corbyn carried on, seemingly quite unfazed; in early 2015, as for much of his political life, promoting apparently lost causes before tiny audiences was what he did.

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