Mould events. Or watch them pass you by.

With hindsight, William Yale, the main US intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War 1, would criticise the reaction of his President, Woodrow Wilson, to major events. The winner isn’t:

…he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realise this simple truism.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read those words, in Scott Anderson’s excellent book Lawrence in Arabia, since they struck such a bell. Last week, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had to pull a vote in the House of Commons on the Brexit deal she’d spent two years negotiating with the European Union, because it was obvious she was going to lose and lose massively. She wasn’t so much in retreat as in precipitous flight.

Theresa May in the House of Commons
Admitting defeat, in her very attempt to dodge it,
by pulling the Brexit deal vote

Such a government rout would normally present an Opposition with a golden opportunity, to make a bid for office itself. Many of us were, therefore, surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, who as leader of the Labour Party also leads the official opposition, declined to take the obvious next step and propose a vote of no confidence in the government. He said he wanted to wait for the ‘appropriate moment’ to do so.

That seems to mean waiting until the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten MPs, turned its back on Theresa May and committed to vote with the no confidence motion. In other words, he wanted to wait until he could be sure of winning.

Let’s step back over forty years, to 5 April 1976, when Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

With the promised support of the then-Liberal Party (today the Liberal Democrats), Callaghan enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. He was fairly secure against a no-confidence motion. Besides, a new Prime Minister – you might think he deserved a bit of a honeymoon.

Thatcher gave him just two months.

On 9 June 1976, she brought a no confidence motion against his government.

With his majority, Callaghan could, of course, see it off. She lost by 290 votes against 309. Close, but still a defeat. Many might have dismissed her, feeling that she’d overreached and failed, proving poor judgement.

But that wasn’t the lesson she learned from the experience. Instead, a little over nine months later, on 23 March 1977 she tried again, and was beaten again. Indeed, this time, the margin was even bigger: 298 to 322.

What was she playing at? Let’s be clear: I found Thatcher a bigoted, ruthless, often cruel Prime Minister. But she was an effective politician. Those two failed attacks issued a clear statement of intent: she was going to harry Callaghan and keep on harrying him until she beat him. She was saying, not just to MPs but to the electorate as a whole, that she was serious about taking the top office herself. That displayed qualities much admired by voters: toughness, guts and tenacity.

Finally, in 1978 the Liberals withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government. That’s the equivalent of what Corbyn’s waiting for from the DUP: the withdrawal of support by a small but crucial partner. So Thatcher came back to the attack again. She brought her third no-confidence motion on 28 March 1979. And this time she pulled off the trick, beating him in what became a famous photo finish: 311 votes to 310. Just one vote. And it was enough to bring down his government.

A general election was held in May, which the Conservatives comprehensively won, and Thatcher was in office for eleven years. The Tories, indeed, through her and her successor John Major, were in power for eighteen.

The only no confidence motion she won was in 1979. And even then, there was no guarantee of victory. After all, she scraped through by just one vote. By the Corbyn definition, that made it only barely an ‘appropriate moment’. But she pressed ahead anyway, as she had twice before in the previous three years, though the moments then were so inappropriate that she lost.

The defeats didn’t stop her. Because she moulded events rather than waiting for them to turn favourable to her. Like her or dislike her – and I don’t like her at all – she was undeniably one of those who, in William Yale’s words, ‘consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events’. The reward was eighteen years of rule by her party.

Corbyn’s waiting for events to come to his rescue.

Where Thatcher got stuck in, as a player in the game, and flourished, he’s sitting on the sidelines. Inviting history to sideline him.