Doomed Smith challenge a dream for Team Corbyn
One long marcher on the Left now working in Team Corbyn says they can’t thank Owen Smith and his team enough.
They have delivered “a shot in the arm” for Mr Corbyn’s leadership. The infighting has been damaging but the end result is dreamy: an increased mandate, enemies scattered and winded, clueless about the way ahead, more than a few contemplating a life away from politics.
Many Labour MPs were against the whole idea of a leadership challenge. They include some who supported the walkout from the frontbench and the vote of no confidence.
Those tactics, some MPs claim, looked at one point like they had very nearly pushed Jeremy Corbyn over the edge. Mr Corbyn’s aides deny it, but many Labour MPs insist that Mr Corbyn and some of his closest team members were ready to throw in the towel after the uprising against him in the wake of the referendum result.
Then came a challenge Mr Corbyn was bound to defeat. Some in the parliamentary party, mainly people we used to call Brownites, thought Angela Eagle had been lent on by Blairites including Margaret MacDonagh, former General Secretary of the Labour Party, to mount a challenge.
There was resistance to Angela Eagle as candidate and Owen Smith became the eventual candidate. But by tomorrow lunchtime this will be exposed as more than just a doomed mission, more a massive strategic error that will cement in Mr Corbyn more strongly than ever.
A few hours after Mr Corbyn’s victory, expected to be bigger than his margin of victory last year, the National Executive Committee will sit. At its last meeting some of Mr Corbyn’s critics were pushing for Shadow Cabinet elections.
Some MPs who quit the front bench say they’re only willing to go back in to the team if they go back in decent numbers, voted in by their fellow Corbyn critics in Parliament.
That proposal didn’t get anywhere at Tuesday’s NEC. It could be discussed again tomorrow, but then it again it might not.
Mr Corbyn’s allies are acutely conscious that a Shadow Cabinet dominated by his critics could elect anti-Corbynites elected to the three places reserved for the Shadow Cabinet on the NEC.
The NEC has been the holy grail of Left campaigns since the 1970s. Control of that body means you control the party, the Left always felt. And having increased their power on the committee in a series of moves (that started with the removal of Hilary Benn at last year’s conference) they now feel they are on the brink of control.
The NEC this week may have been a setback for Team Corbyn when it was slightly blind-sided by the push to get Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour places on the NEC, places which the anti-Corbyn forces believe they will dominate. But Mr Corbyn’s critics think at best they have parity with his forces as things stand, at worst he’s got a very narrow majority.
As I write, I’m told that Jeremy Corbyn is meeting with Rosie Winterton, the Chief Whip. I understand Mr Corbyn’s team have made it clear they didn’t want a delegation from the Parliamentary Labour Party turning up – the meeting should be one-on-one.
I’m not clear whether people are now being patted down for weaponry when they meet, but you sense that’s the spirit in which people are meeting: wary rival gangs engaged in an existential battle which both sides believe could reach a definitive moment here in Liverpool.
What are the hopes of the anti-Corbynistas as Labour meets? Some talk of Round Three – taking on Corbyn again, preferably after an early General Election, which Theresa May doesn’t seem about to oblige them with.
Some talk of making a move on Unite’s national executive, pushing some Corbyn critics into elected office there – maybe, if he runs again, toppling Len McCluskey. “Slightly fanciful,” one senior Labour figure called that.
Then there’s the “just keep plugging away and something will turn up” view. One Labour figure said to me that he derives hope from episodes like the NEC on Tuesday: “Every time they (Team Corbyn – it’s always “them” and “us”) plunge the detonator they fail to make an explosion.” Errors by Team Corbyn could save the day, this theory runs.
But Team Corbyn have a lot of cards as of Saturday lunchtime. The party is also more flush with money than any time anyone can remember. That, many think, is a good moment to cull the ranks of party officials, starting with the General Secretary and working down to the regional officials and below.
selection threats hanging over many Labour MPs. selections, one close Corbyn aide said: “We’re not going to organise that … if that happens it will be spontaneous and it will happen in a number of cases.” Note the distancing and note the certainty.
On the bigger question of the political mission, the same Corbyn confidante said to me: “Failure in elections is not failure. We want to change the way the economy is run. You don’t win overnight.”
He went on: “We don’t want to win (the next general election) by becoming an alienating force. Blairism was excessively short-termist and made many of the (country’s) problems worse.”
They won’t worry about it, but a walk round the fringe stalls set up here already outside the Conference hall suggests corporate Britain is not here a-wooing.
Jeremy Corbyn’s troops are sick with the compromises sought with right-wing voters, “feeding the fires” over welfare and immigration, as one ally put it.
They want real change, and if that means missing out on the opportunity for a “Tory-lite” Labour administration, they’ll live with that.
This week in Liverpool could see their cause advanced considerably, many think irreversibly.