‘Corbyn had flown too close to the sun’: how Labour insiders battled the left and plotted the party’s path back to power
Exclusive extract from new book says Corbyn’s appearance at Glastonbury was a key moment in the party’s long way back to power. And as one anti-Corbyn group tried to build a moderate coalition, it also needed a credible leader …
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A camera swung across the crowd and the image of a child sitting on his father’s shoulders, clapping his hands above his head, flashed up on the screens flanking the stage. Corbyn finished by quoting Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy:
The chant from the crowd bubbled up again, spreading across the elated throng, as Corbyn, who had just turned 68, waved out at the sea of bodies, and Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, joined him and wrapped an arm around him.
It was 24 June 2017 and the Labour leader had never been stronger. Some in Labour make fun of the idea that Corbyn supporters treat the 2017 general election like a victory when, in fact, it was a loss. But in reality, the Labour leader had defied his detractors who were expecting a repeat of Michael Foot’s 1983 election drubbing and instead watched Corbyn strip Theresa May of her parliamentary majority. Moreover, Corbyn had won 40% of the national vote, more than the 35% that handed Tony Blair a significant majority in 2005. In the short term at least, this unexpected result muzzled Corbyn’s most vocal internal critics, who had claimed that voters would always reject his brand of leftwing politics.
Meanwhile, some 130 miles away in a south London park, Morgan McSweeney was sitting on a bench, thinking about what the scene at Glastonbury meant for his new job. The day after the 8 June general election, he had left the Local Government Association to run a new parliamentary group funded by two donors: businessman and philanthropist Trevor Chinn and hedge fund owner Martin Taylor.
Labour Together, as the operation became known, was explicitly not about trying to defeat Corbyn through any internal coup – they now considered that to be impossible. But it would try to defeat Corbynism – and the Corbynite who would inevitably run in any future contest to lead the party.
Sitting on that park bench, McSweeney was among those who took the 2017 result very seriously and believed that Corbyn, whose politics he despised, could win the next election. Counterintuitively, he found the Glastonbury scene reassuring. McSweeney later told a friend that he saw this as Corbyn’s “Icarus moment”, in which he imagined the Labour leader standing backstage at Glastonbury with a choice: take that election result and turn to the country to cement the deal; or walk into the warm embrace of festivalgoers, who (McSweeney believed) were unrepresentative of the wider electorate. To him, Corbyn had just flown too close to the sun.
McSweeney made clear his mission to those gathered in [the Labour Croydon North MP Steve] Reed’s parliamentary office: “to move the Labour party from the hard left when JC steps down as leader and to reconnect the Labour party with the country [and] build a sustainable winning electoral coalition…” He then pointed to a slide of soldiers holding up huge shields, completely covering their bodies. “Operation Red Shield,” he said. The first job, he argued, was to protect supportive MPs from accusations of disloyalty. The next slide zoomed in on a Greenpeace logo. This would be their model, McSweeney told the gathered MPs: soft branding that made them seem warm and cuddly.
[Dagenham MP Jon] Cruddas and McSweeney even arranged a meeting with Corbyn himself to present the project as consensual. Sitting in the boardroom of the leader of the opposition’s offices, they told him about Labour Together, saying they were planning a “renewal” project. Reportedly, one of Corbyn’s aides leaned back in his chair, scrolling through social media and not paying much attention to what they were saying. Early plans focused on building a relationship with at least one trade union, positioning themselves on the left, and thus able to reach out to Corbyn supporters.
So, how much funding did this small parliamentary group attract, and why? Sources tell me that Reed met Chinn and Taylor through Cruddas and [the political thinker] Maurice Glasman, who were already receiving financial support for their “Blue Labour” ideas. Before 2017, Chinn and Taylor decided to “take a punt” and offered £75,000 to cover the cost of some early research and the first member of staff. When McSweeney took over the director role after the election, the group bid for more backing, winning around £150,000 over three years, with perhaps half a million by the time the Labour leadership campaign of 2020 got under way, after Corbyn’s resignation post the 2019 election.
It was also helped with the implicit backing of the deputy leader, Tom Watson, who told funders he was keen that a number of groups focused on Labour renewal should flourish. Watson’s association lent the group credibility with donors and attracted some of its early MPs into the fold.
But there were mistakes. Early on, Labour Together failed to declare £730,000 in donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen, resulting in an Electoral Commission investigation and a fine, though the group blamed “human error” and said they themselves had self-reported.
All involved were always clear that they would “need a candidate to win a future leadership election on the political platform we are developing”, but they each put a different level of emphasis on that motivation. For McSweeney and Reed, choosing the best person to try to win Labour back from the left was absolutely central. Reed wanted to draw in reams of data and apply rigorous analysis to decide who they should put forward; McSweeney wanted to find the character most likely to win a general election. But to Cruddas, who had led policy reviews for the former leader Ed Miliband, Labour Together was far more of an intellectual pursuit, to build a policy platform that could unite the party in the future.
Interestingly, in a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, McSweeney claimed that one of the key problems the group might encounter was “a Labour government” – making explicit that his concern was not whether Corbyn could win, but that if he were to become prime minister it would prevent the renewal they were focused on.
One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information. And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary. “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs.
After a few months working from a park bench, the group funded a small office in Vauxhall, and soon it reached out to former Labour advisers to work alongside them with a focus on online antisemitism. In an early review, they identified problem posts in hundreds of Facebook groups with links to either the party or leftwing politics. Some of these were aimed at Labour’s female Jewish MPs. They then farmed out the posts they uncovered to journalists who were themselves reporting on rising evidence of antisemitism on the left. Together with a row over whether the party would adopt all the examples linked to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the scandal was becoming increasingly destabilising for Corbyn.
One source said the aim was to “shame” people out of being part of Facebook groups with unacceptable content but argued that it wasn’t really working. So, next they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary. As part of a “Stop funding fake news” campaign, they took screenshots of articles they felt had either racist or fake content, then posted messages on Twitter aimed at brands that were advertising on the websites’ pages. Unquestionably, the readership of the Canary took a hit. In an editorial, the website noted that “people who don’t like our politics have encouraged our advertisers to blacklist us. That’s come at a cost”. Its contributors’ coverage, it argued, had been targeted at Israel and not Jewish people and it said it had been “smeared with accusations of antisemitism”. However, the result would be a “much leaner” Canary newsroom with a dedicated team of seven staff members, rather than a network of freelance writers.
As for the Guardian schmoozing, I witnessed that first-hand. At the time, I was the joint political editor at the newspaper and found myself invited with colleagues to a dinner in a private dining room in the basement of Browns in Covent Garden. We sat on red chairs with gold trimming, set around a long, thin table covered with a white tablecloth, listening to McSweeney, Cruddas, Reed, [Wigan MP Lisa] Nandy and [Birmingham Ladywood MP Shabana] Mahmood tell us about Labour Together’s plans for renewal.
They had brought with them another MP who was just starting to do more with the group – Keir Starmer. The project was pitched, as planned, with the soft, cuddly Greenpeace framing. They neatly side-stepped our more cynical questions about their plans for a future leadership. Alongside me that night was Guardian news editor Dan Sabbagh, who has since told me he immediately wondered if Starmer was their candidate. Even if McSweeney was wondering about Starmer as a possible leader as early as 2017, it was not spoken about and another hopeful also later emerged from the same group. Back then, the mere prospect of an opportunity to either take control of Labour’s leadership or win a general election still felt very distant.
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But McSweeney was clear about the type of coalition he would need to build within Labour to support a future leadership bid and was already reaching out to figures on the left of the party. In November 2017, sources describe a quiet and unassuming McSweeney turning up at Dartington Hall in Totnes for an awayday organised by the soft left group Compass, run by Neal Lawson. There were people there linked to the socialist magazine Red Pepper, and others closely allied to Corbyn.
Soon after seven MPs left [in February 2019, they resigned over Corbyn’s leadership and founded a new party, Change UK], Labour Together sent a document to prospective donors, which has since been leaked to me. It warned that the Labour party was “politically and morally in a crisis”, claiming the “Hard left […] will divide our party, condemn us to electoral defeat, attempt to drive out democratic socialists and corrupt our moral purpose in the interest of ideological aims.”
Whether it was written by McSweeney or not, I’m unsure. But the document set out three potential options for Labour’s “moderates”. The first, to set up a new party, was rejected because the paper argued that every option to keep Labour together should be exhausted first. “Once it is attempted there is no way back,” it warned, arguing there was insufficient evidence that a new party could flourish in the UK’s first-past-the-post system.
The second, to try to attract 220,000 new members to Labour and to challenge Corbyn, was also ruled out because by then Corbyn’s 68% support among members, while slightly down, was still too high to be challenged. And so, to the final option: to “win a majority position from within the current Labour party when Jeremy Corbyn leaves his position and/or is defeated in a general election. […] The route we are travelling is the third one”, the paper declared, before setting out why Labour Together believed it could find a winning candidate.
The document made clear what these moderates saw as their problem: a “hard left” in control of the party machinery, including Labour’s national executive committee and most regional boards. To achieve their aims, they would need to dominate the communication channels that members most trusted; capture the political territory that the “soft left” cared about most – for example, social justice; and avoid the looming threat of sympathetic politicians facing deselection by a membership that had lost trust in MPs.
On the fragile majority
What might the result at this summer’s general election have looked like without the surge from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK? At the time of writing, there is more analysis to do, but YouGov’s Patrick English tells me that Labour would have still won big, but with a much-reduced majority. Around 60 Conservative MPs would have been saved, he reckons, leaving Starmer with a majority of around 80 – closer to Boris Johnson in 2019 than Tony Blair in 1997.
Paul Ovenden’s job as director of political strategy in Downing Street will be to think relentlessly about voters. In the early weeks, he delivered a briefing to cabinet ministers arguing that working-class voters in marginal seats who switched to Labour from the Tories had delivered Starmer’s majority, but it was the 20% of 2019 Conservatives who switched to Reform UK who had turned the win into a landslide.
He also explained that Labour had slumped three points (from the 37% predicted by Labour’s own pollsters) to a 34% vote share in the final days of the campaign because of those who opted to vote “tactically” for the Lib Dems where they could beat Tories, but also others deciding to go with their “hearts” by voting for the Greens or independents in the certainty that Starmer would be prime minister either way.
The result is that Labour’s voter coalition is far more fragile than the overall numbers suggest. Academic Rob Ford described Labour’s 2024 strategy as a “masterpiece of electoral Jenga” in which Labour withdrew the blocks from its safer seats close to the base to throw everything at the marginal constituencies and build up the height of the tower. However, Ford warned that: “It will not take much to bring this teetering tower tumbling down.”
Labour understands only too well how stretched its majority is, and how quickly the political mood can change – the question now is whether, and how, these factors might affect the way in which the party governs.
Ovenden has told ministers that they must put Labour’s majority out of their mind and imagine that they are “nil-nil” in the next political race. Jonathan Ashworth, who lost in Leicester South and now leads Labour Together, agreed, warning of a massive shift in how much voters change their minds. “I am the talking, breathing proof that there is no such thing as a safe seat. We have gone from the red wall collapse in 2019 to a landslide victory in parliamentary seats – there is huge volatility these days and we cannot assume we will win the next general election,” he said.
And that is why Keir Starmer’s first speech to the Labour party conference as prime minister is about urging “no complacency”; arguing that, however big their 2024 win, there is no guarantee of a decade in power. If Labour fails to repair and rebuild trust, then, when it comes to 2029, they could well lose.
