If this is disloyalty, we need more of it, not less

It had to happen, I suppose. Eventually a different narrative had to emerge. And, since the original one wasn’t particularly believable, the alternative was likely to be a lot more plausible.

Corbyn: cheated of victory by disloyal critics?
Or saved as long as possible from himself by those critics?

His supporters’ account of what happened in the two elections for which Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, runs something like this.

In 2017, he came tantalisingly close to winning the election, gaining the biggest single increase in popular vote of any Labour leader since the war. He was cheated of victory by the deliberate and treacherous behaviour of a number of Labour Party staff and members, led in particular by thoroughly disloyal Members of Parliament.

Just another 2500 votes would have given Labour the victory.

Then, in 2019, those same disloyal staff, MPs and members, conspired to undermine him further, willing to lose the election to Boris Johnson, as the price for driving Corbyn from the leadership.

It was a never particularly convincing story.

That’s first of all for a question of principle. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that occupying the leadership isn’t simply a matter of honour or even authority, it’s also a matter of responsibility. The first responsibility for a defeat is the leader’s. Any attempt to attribute blame to someone else is scapegoating to avoid personal accountability.

Secondly, the Corbynist explanation also fits the facts badly.

While Labour surged in the popular vote, that was less to do with Corbyn’s success, and much more to do with the continuing collapse of the Liberal Democrats as a rival party of the centre-Left.

Surge or not, Labour was still nearly 2.5 points behind the Tories in the popular vote, and ended up with 55 fewer Parliamentary seats. To set Labour’s achievement in 2017 in context, it lost then with 40.0% of the popular vote. Back in 1970, it also lost, but with 43.1%. In a first-past-the-post, constituency-based system, winning the popular vote only wins an election if it’s spread geographically the right way.

That’s where the tale of the 2500 for victory votes fails. The votes would have had to be in exactly the right constituencies, and that’s not something any campaign can engineer. Indeed, a smaller switch to the Tories, of exactly the right votes in the right places, would have given them a Parliamentary majority. The reasoning is meaningless.

As for the effect of the disloyal staff and members in 2019, with an extra two and a half years in charge, the Corbynists had greatly reinforced their control of the party machine. Internal opposition to Corbyn was far less powerful in 2019 than in 2017, and yet the defeat was far greater.

Patrick Heneghan.
Disloyal or working to stop Corbyn making things worse?

Which is what makes the new narrative more plausible. It comes from Patrick Heneghan, previously Labour’s executive director for elections and campaigns. He’s one of the former Labour staff accused of disloyalty by Corbyn supporters. By his own admission in the Huffington Post, he did indeed engage in action in direct opposition to the leader’s instructions.

He was part of a group that defied Corbynist instructions to defund a number of constituency campaigns in 2017. And which campaigns were listed for defunding? Why, they were all constituencies held by Labour MPs who had been critical of Corbyn.

In other words, the leader was deliberately jeopardising attempts to beat the Tories, because that mattered less to him than eliminating internal opposition to his rule.

Now, it’s true that some of those MPs were sitting on large majorities. But, since many of those seats were indeed lost in 2019, it’s clear they were by no means as safe as they might have appeared. Besides, the leader was trying to redirect the funds into campaigns for seats occupied by his loyalists, with majorities just as large.

So Heneghan and his group surreptitiously set up a separate fund, away from the leadership’s control, to funnel finance to the MPs Corbyn wanted defunded. And indeed the seats were held.

This is quite a statement, because it suggests that Corbyn’s relative success of 2017 – losing less badly than expected – was at least in part down to ‘disloyal’ staff disobeying his instructions and properly funding certain campaigns against his wishes.

With this in mind, it’s pretty obvious what happened in 2019. People like Heneghan could no longer influence events. A lot of the MPs opposed to Corbyn had been muzzled or had left. Indeed, the Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, had decided to leave Parliament altogether. So suddenly the bridle that had prevented him doing far more damage in 2017 was gone. And, unsurprisingly, the damage was far greater.

Why, we even lost Tom Watson’s former seat.

In this account, it wasn’t the supposed disloyalty of the staff that caused the disaster of 2019. It was because that supposedly disloyal group could no longer prevent it. It was they, and not Corbyn, who had limited the defeat of 2017; with their influence weakened in 2019, the defeat became a rout.

While the ‘disloyal’ group was able to influence things, losses were contained. When its influence waned, losses soared.

I don’t know about you, but that suggests to me that ‘disloyalty’ of this kind, to the Corbyn faction, was all that saved Labour in 2017. The disaster of 2019 was because ‘disloyalty’ of that kind was no longer in a position to save the party from Corbyn.

Or, putting it more positively, maybe loyalty to the party as a whole required disloyalty to Corbyn while he was leader. 

Corbynists won’t agree, but I can’t help finding that explanation of the facts far more convincing than theirs.