Please, Daddy, leave me my Corbyn blindfold. It's so comfortable

It has been obvious since the earliest days of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, that his supporters have been wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Indeed, it is their very inability to imagine any kind of flaw in their hero that marks them out as forming not so much a political current within the Labour Party, as a veritable Cult. Members have urged me to “have faith” in the leader or to “believe” in his vision for the future. That’s the very language of religion, and it leaves no place for the rational, questioning thought essential in politics.

Keir Starmer (l) and Jeremy Corbyn
Colleagues but not mutual admirers

Given that Corbynism was a Cult, it was obvious that when Jeremy led us to inevitable defeat, his worshippers would quickly set out to find explanations that cleared him of all responsibility.

In passing, I should say that the sheer scale of he defeat surprised me. I hoped right to the end that, even when defeated, we might at least deny Boris Johnson a majority. I knew that would take a miracle, but I kept hoping. It struck me as much more probable that Boris would emerge with a majority of up to 40. In fact, his majority was 80, while Labour was reduced to just 202 parliamentary seats, our worst result since 1935.

That will certainly see the Conservatives safely through to the next election and, quite probably, to the one after. Only twice, in single general elections, has Labour gained the more than 124 seats it would need for even a bare majority next time. Once, in the landslide it won under Attlee after the Second World War, it did so after a period in government as Churchill’s coalition partners; just once has it done it from Opposition, in 1997 under Tony Blair.

Labour has a mountain to climb from the pits where Corbynism has consigned it.

If the scale of our defeat was greater than I expected, I have also been surprised by the sheer relentlessness of the Corbynists in pursuing their alibis. The preferred line at first was that much-loved whipping boy, the media. Vicious, biased coverage of the election in particular, and Corbyn’s leadership more generally, had undermined Labour and handed Boris Johnson his victory.

But that was only one of many ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses. Today another seems to be gaining ground. It is that it was Labour’s endorsement of a second Brexit referendum that lost if for us. The argument goes like this:

• Labour did ‘very well’ at the 2017 election. I’ve put ‘very well’ in quotes because one Corbynist said exactly that to me today. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Labour lost in 2017, so ‘very well’ doesn’t seem terribly accurate. ‘Less badly than expected’ I will, however, allow.
• In 2019, Labour went to the country with the same leader and broadly the same manifesto, and it lost massively.
• The only thing that had changed in between was that Labour had endorsed the Second Referendum position. So that’s what caused the rout.

QED

Unsurprisingly, the argument does, however, omit to mention one or two other key factors. The stance on the referendum wasn’t the only change between the two elections. Here is a small selection of others:

• Corbyn had become better known to the electorate. The more they knew him, the less voters trusted him. By the time of the election, he was the most unpopular Opposition Leader since records began.
• The 2017 election had been flattering to Corbyn because Theresa May, then Prime Minister, turned out to be by far the weakest campaigner I had ever seen at the head of the Conservative Party. By the time of the 2019 election, she had been dumped.
• Boris Johnson, her successor, was utterly unscrupulous, entirely deceitful and ruthlessly effective in campaign mode and, as many of us forecast, ran circles around Corbyn.

So why are the Corbynists coming out with this line about its all being down to the Second Referendum stance?

It may not be unrelated to the fact that Keir Starmer has now emerged as at least the initial frontrunner to replace Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. He has a large lead in a poll of Labour members over his nearest rival, the Corbynist candidate. He is, of course, one of the chief architects of the endorsement of a Second Referendum

Naturally it suits Corbynists to paint him as the villain of the piece.

But it isn’t just to favour their candidate that they do this. It’s also because it is another piece in the Denial Wall they’re building around their Corbyn Dreamland. It was that nasty Keir that snatched our defeat from the jaws of victory. The Cult guru remains as flawless as ever.

We’ve seen that this belief takes some wilful blindness to inconvenient facts. That wilfulness is forcing me to revise my view that they wear rose-tinted glasses. It’s beginning to look to me as though they’re wearing a blindfold.

One that’s made of velvet, of course. It’s beautifully comfortable. Which is why they dread the idea of being forced to take it off.

Spirit conversation, or my mother on why Labour has to be a Broad Church

My mother, a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party and member for nearly four decades, liked to tell me her party was a Broad Church.

The Duomo in Milan: one of the broadest churches I know

One of the proudest moments of her long life was the day in 1945 when she learned, in a roomful of her Labour Party staff colleagues, that for the first time Labour had a majority in the House of Commons. Clement Attlee was about to become Prime Minister, heading what was, indeed, a broad-church government. On its left, were men around the fiery Welsh orator, Nai Bevan; on its right, those who lined up with the wily old Trades Unionist, Ernest Bevin; in the middle, the mainstream around Attlee himself.

Not the least of Attlee’s skills was the capacity to hold that disparate band together. Above all, that meant compromise, so that no one felt they were being denied more than they could bear, or that someone else was getting too much. Even Attlee couldn’t handle it for longer than six years and, eventually, the government was brought down from the inside by Bevan’s intransigence. It achieved a huge amount in that short time, however, not least launching Britain’s most cherished institution, now under existential threat, the National Health Service. Ironically, it was that same Bevan who acted as its midwife.

My mother would probably have been shocked to see how contemptuously the notion of a ‘broad church’ is treated these days. The dominant group within the Labour Party these days seems much more intent on homogeneity than diversity. They want everyone to be a supporter of their faction, even though that faction has just taken the Party to a historically massive defeat.

It would be a great pleasure to welcome my mother’s spirit here in Spain, if she chose to visit us from the other world. She would, I’m ensure, enjoy a Christmas in better weather than she’d been used to in England, but I imagine the conversation would quickly turn more serious.

“Unfortunately,” I’d have to tell her, “the Labour Party’s being run these days by people who think we shouldn’t have to compromise any more. They think it’s time for a Labour government more aligned on a single tendency within the movement – the one Nai Bevan represented in your time, and Tony Benn later.”

“But,” I suspect she’d reply, “they need the others too.”

“It’s hard for me to speak for the leadership, but I think they like the idea of something purer, less corrupted by compromise, firmer on its principles.”

“Doesn’t that mean narrower?”

“I suppose it does.”

“Well, there you are then,” she’d exclaim triumphantly, “if it’s narrow it won’t be able to put together a majority.”

I can just see the gleam in her eyes as she points out the fallacy in the position I’ve been trying to present.

“Funnily enough, it couldn’t. We’ve just had an election and Labour won a bit over ten and a quarter million votes. The Tories took just shy of fourteen million. We got 202 seats.”

“202? But that’s worse than 1983!” she’d exclaim, “and… that’s after nearly ten years of the Tories in office!”

I’d hang my head.

“That’s the worst result I’ve ever seen, not counting 1935 when I was only eleven and not really paying attention. Extraordinary. How could they do that badly?”

“Well, it’s lousy, I admit. It means we need getting on for a couple of million voters to switch from the Tories to us.”

“That’s a big ask.”

“I know. Maybe beyond a single election. But we might do it in two.”

“Only if you broaden your appeal. You can’t do it by being pure and narrow.”

“You think we should become a broad church again? That wouldn’t be popular with the characters running the party at the moment.”

“Then,” she would say decisively, “it’s time for them to get out of the way. Broad churches win elections. Narrow ones lose them.”

“You know that. I know that. But they don’t want to hear that.”

“Explain it to them.”

“I try. I’m not getting far,” I’d point out thoughtfully, as I start mulling over a new idea, “couldn’t you have a go? You know, haunt them a bit?”

“Not a bad idea. I could try. I’ve always been good at making my views clear when people are being silly.”

“I know you have,” I’d say, shaking my head, partly out of some painful memories, but partly also out of doubt. “Trouble is, this lot seem terribly hard of hearing when you’re trying to tell them something true they’d rather not know.”

“Well, it’s up to them. If they’d rather stick with what makes them comfortable and lose, they’re even sillier than I thought. But you can only get things done when you’re on the winning side. Attlee knew that. He told me himself. Bevin knew. Why, even Bevan knew, before he brought the whole house crashing down.”

“Sadly, his heirs seem intent on bringing the house down before it’s even built.”

“Seems a hopeless case. You can’t save people who don’t want to save themselves.” She’d shake her head in turn. And then, as if making up her mind, she’d add, “Let’s have a glass of that red I brought you.”

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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