Today Miliband’s allies find all this rum stuff. They (rightly) point out that many of the same people protesting now were neither to be seen nor heard at the time. Indeed, internally the changes went through largely on the nod. At the special conference convened at the ExCel Centre in late 2014, the reforms were passed by a doughty 86 per cent to 14 per cent margin. At the same time, the party had other problems. At the same point in 2014 the Scottish independence referendum was raging. The future of the kingdom was in jeopardy. These were the leadership rules for a contest most hoped was a long way off – it seemed a bit like a couple drawing up custody rules before they’d even walked down the aisle.
Moreover, in a truly catastrophic misjudgement, the Blairites and right of the party supported the changes. In an ironic twist that would make even Alanis Morissette blush, it was the left who were most sceptical.
At the time, it was generally perceived to be an attack on the power of the trade unions. Tony Blair – yes – Tony Blair welcomed the changes: ‘I think this is a defining moment. It’s bold and it’s strong. It’s real leadership, this. I think it’s important not only in its own terms, because he’s carrying through a process of reform in the Labour Party that is long overdue and, frankly, probably I should have done it when I was leader.’ This was partially drawn from a subtle distinction. Blair and his tribe had always been extremely suspicious of the organised element of the Labour Party, constituency Labour parties, their chairmen and chairwomen and the ‘activists’. The word activist made them shudder. It conjured images of long, late-night sittings of constituency meetings, debating subsection 3 of composite 1 of the CLP motion condemning the situation in the Wallis and Futuna Islands. They thought that CLP meetings attracted a certain type of person, the unrepresentative crank. By contrast, they had had enormous faith in the ‘member’. Perhaps the husband and wife who had paid their dues for years, might turn out for the Christmas raffle, hadn’t had much truck with the preoccupations and vicissitudes of the far left, and, indeed, would vote against them: in other words, the internal Labour Party version of the ‘real people’ about whom Blair was so fond of talking during his time in government. The Blairites and the right assumed that the ‘members’ would always guard them against the incursions of the left (as they largely were in the 1980s), rather than be the footsoldiers of their enemy. It was an astonishing miscalculation.
The Blairites and Milibandites can, however, find common cause in blaming the PLP. Today they both argue that the membership question would not have arisen had MPs understood their role as gatekeepers to the system and not nominated someone with whom they could not live as their leader in Parliament. This has truth. MPs simply did not understand the new rules properly. They had not quite clocked that they no longer had a third of the votes under the electoral college on their side.
Curiously they overvalued their importance and yet undervalued it at the same time. They weren’t just wine tasters, setting out a series of options. If MPs could not live with one of the candidates winning and leading them in Parliament, then they ought not to put them forward. MPs who dislike Jeremy Corbyn but nominated him have, therefore, only themselves to blame.
If we’re looking to answer the questions: ‘Why Corbyn? Why now? Why has this never happened before?’ then part of the answer has to be the system that elected him. Miliband had put all of the party’s chips with the members in a party where, for all the talk, members had almost never had much influence. I said before that the leadership of the party had for most of the party’s existence been the preserve of the party’s MPs. It’s more profound than that. Remember, for most of its history the Labour Party had been a federation of constituent organisations. For a long period in the party’s early days it wasn’t even possible to be an individual Labour Party member; you could only become one by joining one of its member bodies. One of the many phantoms that should be laid to rest about the way that the party has ‘returned to its roots’ under Corbyn is that it is once again a mass-membership organisation. Yes, membership numbers were greater in the party’s heyday (much greater than they are today), but it was not something that much preoccupied Ramsay MacDonald or Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson. Search through their speeches for references to the mass party membership and its importance and you will do so in vain. Most of those million or so members of the Labour Party of old were members not of the party itself, but through a union or affiliated organisation. They therefore expected little say in the party’s affairs. They took part in campaigning but not in party management or directly in policy. The party was top down, almost unashamedly hierarchical. That was the basis of many of the battles of the 1980s, with the left arguing that the party structures were moribund, atrophying and hierarchical, and in need of change. The merits and demerits of all this are beside the point. Rather, at a stroke, Miliband transformed the party. He changed the balance of power, accidentally but fundamentally. It would have been unrecognisable to any Labour leader from the twentieth century. Jeremy Corbyn was the first leader of his kind in the party’s history. So was the system that elected him. Those facts are not unconnected.
But it’s not the whole story. Nowhere close. Because Corbyn didn’t just win among the new members. He won among the old too. That means there was something more profound going on in Labour politics than just entryism. We cannot account for the rise of Corbyn in the party’s rule book alone. The political tectonic plates were shifting, in no small part thanks to another legacy of Mr Miliband, the general election result of 2015.
After the herculean task of getting on to the ballot paper, the bookies made him a 20/1 outsider. Unbelievably, Liz Kendall on that day was at 5/2 only just behind Andy Burnham. The bookies and MPs had failed to understand just how painful 2015 was and what had happened to the Labour Party.
One supporter, elated that finally a left-wing candidate had made it on to the ballot paper, tweeted her new hero this:
Jacky Burdett
@trivychatter
@jeremycorbyn well done – now the really difficult stuff – bonne chance X
11:08 AM – Jun 15, 2015
Those changes within the party, not of the new members but of the old, would mean that, unlike his nomination itself, Corbyn wouldn’t need it.
THE LONG MARCH OF MILIFANDOM HALTED: 2015
It’s easy to forget now but the 2015 general election result, when David Cameron won a majority of 12, was a tremendous shock; indeed, it was a rout.
As he addressed his election count at Doncaster’s metropolitan council offices, Ed Miliband told his supporters: ‘This has clearly been a disappointing night for the Labour Party.’ He could say that again. After five years, five slow, grinding, hard years, the party had lost 26 seats and gained a paltry 1 per cent of the vote share. It had lost seats across England to the Conservatives and lost 40 of its golden treasure chest of Scottish seats to the SNP, possibly for good. Labour MPs used to delight in tormenting Conservatives that there were more pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs. You don’t hear the joke so often these days.
Almost no one had predicted the majority Conservative result. The weekend before the poll I was working on a Newsnight programme from Birmingham. David Gauke, now a cabinet minister, then financial secretary to the Treasury, was on batting for the Tories. Conversation with Evan Davis quickly turned to the inevitable coalition negotiations that would come after the election:
GAUKE: We’re aiming for a majority Conservative government …
DAVIS: Look, let me stop you right there, we all know you’re not going to get a majority, that it’s impossible so let’s discuss the real issue …
How we rolled our eyes. How we pitied Gauke for having to parrot the absurd and trite government line. How stupid he must have felt, we thought. Turns out, joke was on us. Except of course that Gauke probably did feel stupid and was squirming in his seat. He, like the rest of the