William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Lewis Goodall 2018
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Lewis Goodall author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Graphs redrawn by Martin Brown
Image here by In Pictures Ltd/Corbis via Getty Images
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Source ISBN: 9780008226695
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008226701
Version: 2018-08-28
For Grandad, for teaching me
Contents
1 What Went Before: New Labour and the Left
2 The Curious Case of Jeremy Corbyn
8 Fear and Loathing in the Labour Party
9 The Night Everything Changed: The 2017 General Election
10 What Comes After: The Next Election and the Future of the Left
I work in a profession in which my working days are essentially a series of sugar hits. In TV news, our deadlines are short, our working days long but our time horizons truncated. While most people’s jobs and projects can spread out for weeks, if not months at a time, in ours the complications, the highs, the lows, the screw-ups are compressed into a single day. For us, a week is a long-term gig. As a consequence my brain has been rewired by a thousand two-minute lives, three hundred three-minute packages, ten score of online instant analyses.
Writing a book then, all 130,000 words of it, has been a major challenge, the ultimate slow burn. And then, every time I was able to concentrate for long enough, everything would change. In the time I’ve been writing, Jeremy Corbyn has gone from zero to hero (and some would say back again). Every time I thought I understood what was happening, political life would find a way of making me reach for the delete button, once again. In three years, the Labour Party has moved from extinction to the precipice of government, and therefore this book, its premise and its contours have fluctuated almost as much as Corbyn’s reputation. What began as an obituary became a living history of rebirth. At the same time, and to my surprise, it became infused with my own history. For this I am indebted, principally to my family, especially my mum and dad, for giving more political insights and wit and wisdom than I could glean from a lifetime in Westminster. I also have to say an enormous thank you to Tom Killingbeck, my editor, for encouraging me to strike out beyond my working life, beyond Westminster and the corridors of power, and for encouraging me to explore my own story – and how both were mutually reinforcing. I owe him special gratitude for his patience – especially given he inherited the book from his colleague Joe Zigmond, to whom I am very grateful for believing in the idea in the first place. The same is true of my agent Claudia Young – she took half an idea, in the Newsnight green room, and helped develop it into the book you’re holding. Iain Hunt, also of William Collins, handled the final stages of the edit brilliantly. I’d also like to thank the dozens of people, politicians, journalists, aides, activists and the rest, who spared the time to be interviewed. I hope they feel everyone, of every opinion within the Labour Party and without, has had a fair shake.
Special thanks must go to my employers, Sky News, especially the former head of politics Esme Wren, for giving me the space and time to write the book – and so many opportunities more generally, many of which have fed into the contents of these pages. In that vein I’m also grateful to the whole of the senior Sky News management team, especially Esme’s successor Dan Williams, Jonathan Levy, head of newsgathering, and John Ryley, the head of Sky News, for their interest and willingness to throw me new challenges. My colleagues, too, in the Millbank bureau are