“Yeah, I do feel [sorry for him],” said Jeremy Corbyn, with only a little hesitation. “On a personal level it must be devastating. It is a horrible feeling. You suddenly realise that this person doesn’t trust you at all and really doesn’t wish you well at all, and you suddenly realise that any trust that was there actually disappears.”
There are few in politics who have had the experience of being the subject of a Labour party-style coup, the British equivalent of being dragged from your office to be put up against a wall. Letters of resignations from so-called political friends, condemnatory statements on social media, all dripped out for maximum effect with the end goal of pushing the target, once the subject of standing ovations and gushing plaudits, out on their tail.
Keir Starmer has had it this week. Tony Blair endured a rather mild version of it in 2006, and the ousting of Boris Johnson in 2022 was a proper all-party effort. But for the real deal in Labour history it is to Corbyn, leader from 2015 to 2019, that one must look.
It was on the evening of Saturday 25 June in 2016, a couple of days after the EU referendum, that Corbyn’s ordeal began. The Observer reported online that the Labour leader’s shadow foreign secretary was busy plotting a mass walk-out at the top of the party. “That was the one that was rather rapidly brought to my attention,” Corbyn said. “I immediately phoned Hilary [Benn] and didn’t succeed getting hold of him for the whole evening and finally spoke to him at one in the morning. I said, this story in the Observer, is it true?”
Benn confirmed that it was. “So I said, that makes your position absolutely untenable, that’s the end of it,” recalled Corbyn. “He said: ‘So you’re dismissing me?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ And that was it and I then called Seumas [Milne, Corbyn’s press secretary] to immediately put out a statement. And that was the start of it.”
Throughout Sunday, Corbyn took calls and letters from party colleagues telling them that they were leaving his shadow team. There were an unprecedented 21 resignations. “I was sort of ticking them off,” said Corbyn with a dry laugh. “Some were blunt and rude, some pleasant. In the afternoon, I went to the allotment. I got a few resignations in the allotment. I wrote them down and made notes at home: so I could call them the potato rebel, the beetroot rebel. It was a very, very intense period.”
A meeting of the parliamentary Labour party on Monday was “very rough, horrendous really. Basically, an hour of abuse thrown at me,” recalled Corbyn. “‘You should get out of the way, you brought all this on us, you brought all this on yourself.’ It was all personal and very, very abusive, not that I particularly care, because these things don’t worry me very much, but others got very upset by it.”
A motion of no confidence was passed by 172 to 40. Corbyn took the piece of paper bearing the result, folded it and put it in his draw, he recalled. He was not going to budge. But it was difficult, Corbyn admitted, not to take such a show of rejection personally. “It is [overwhelming]. You think, ‘Wow this is a big deal.’ Various friends rang up. Len [McCluskey, the then leader of the Unite union] for example said: ‘This is a coup against you and all of us. There is only one way to go, that’s fight it.’ I said: ‘I am not resigning.’ I was elected with a clear majority and it was up to the members to decide.”
During the recent storm, Starmer has described his wife, Victoria, as his “rock”. Corbyn, too, said that his wife, Laura Alvarez, was a vital steadying influence. “She is from Mexico and she thinks Britain is more corrupt than Mexico – in Mexico it is just more obvious,” said Corbyn. “She was really angry about the whole thing, really wound up by it. Absolute total support, as with my sons, and all of the wider family. My ex-wife comes from Chile, she just said: ‘It’s a coup, stop them. We have seen coups before.’”
Corbyn, who later beat the challenger, Owen Smith, by 61.8% to 38.2% of the membership, said he had taken succour during the crisis from shows of mass support. After the parliamentary Labour party meeting, thousands had assembled to cheer him on outside the gates of Westminster palace.
Starmer was seen on Monday, where he gave a speech that he hoped would rally the party to his side. It instead galvanised his newfound opponents in the party, who claimed it was more evidence of his lack of political touch and bravery. The prime minister has maintained a low-profile since.
It might be that he had been advised to hide away, said Corbyn, who is today the parliamentary leader of Your Party after the Labour party’s ban on him standing for Starmer’s party in the 2024 general election. But Starmer would be better to make himself seen and to make his case, Corbyn suggested. “There’s a temptation [to go into the bunker] because you’re always full of advisers, and sometimes the advice is contradictory,” he said.
“It is nearly always well meant, but it can be quite irritating and sometimes you have to do things instinctively rather than necessarily calculating to the end. If you’ve got instinct to do something, do it. You might get in trouble later on but at least you have been true to yourself.”
The runners and riders in a possible leadership election seem clear. Wes Streeting, has resigned as health secretary, saying that Starmer will not lead the party into the next general election. Andy Burnham has found a parliamentary seat in which he intends to stand in a byelection ahead of a leadership bid. The former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has told the world in a timely manner that she has been cleared of wrongdoing in relation to her underpayment of tax. “I wouldn’t vote for any of them,” said Corbyn.
Rayner is on the “trade union right of the party and so I think she will tend to pivot into that”, Corbyn said. “Whether she will get the numbers to be nominated, I am not sure,” he added, with reference for the need for each candidate to attain the support of 80 Labour MPs. “She is effective at public speaking, but she does have some, I think, issues on the policies that she will put forward.”
Burnham has a chance, said Corbyn, but a byelection win in Makerfield, in Greater Manchester, was not a “shoo-in”. As with Rayner, his support for more defence expenditure might not chime with the members, Corbyn said. “We need to put money into welfare and education and housing, not warfare,” he said. “And Streeting’s problem is [giving contracts to] Palantir and privatisation of the NHS.”
On reflection, Corbyn said he would actually vote. “Yeah, I would always vote. I would give myself a series of tests on economy, on opposition to racism, on peace and war, and environment. To stop the retreat on environment politics, stop the retreat away from public ownership, and stop the retreat away from the politics of peace globally; we can do better than funding war and subsidising the arms industry.”
“But yes,” he added, reflecting on the events of a decade ago, “you can’t ever totally divorce the personal from the political, even though many of us would like to.”