Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

Corbyn was no ordinary leader. After a career of principled obscurity lasting three decades, in which he had voted against his own front bench more than five hundred times, he had only run for the leadership in the first place because John McDonnell did not want to, and the younger Labour MPs on the hard left insisted they must have a candidate. Corbyn had only made it onto the ballot because grandees like Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan loaned him their votes to ‘widen the debate’. Yet he had swept to victory on a wave of revulsion at the compromises of the Blair and Brown years and the lacklustre performance of his rivals – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – who offered only incremental change when party members wanted revolutionary transformation of the political and economic status quo. Corbyn united the ‘Leninists’ – hard-left activists dreaming of a Bennite revival – with the ‘John Lennonists’ – young, idealistic activists, brimming with hope and what Barack Obama called ‘the fierce urgency of now’. Matt Zarb-Cousin, who worked for Corbyn, was typical: ‘I didn’t really have much of a home in the party, but then Jeremy stood for the leadership and I felt a sense of purpose in my politics that I had been searching for.’