unpaid, especially after Christmas. On the contrary, Jack MacGougan, the union’s general secretary, who recruited Corbyn, proudly announced in his annual report for 1972 that the union had won a trailblazing four weeks’ paid holidays for its members, and had established a forty-hour week. Smith is certain that Corbyn ‘never had any contact with our members. He just sat in at meetings passing me information.’ Further, added Smith, ‘He was OK, but he didn’t have the chance to shine.’ Smith also recalled: ‘The clothing industry is a tough business. If an employer went broke it was because of trading conditions – not to fiddle their employees.’ Corbyn, not for the first time reshaping the truth to improve his self-image, conjured a tale of a brave personal fight against exploitative Jewish employers of sweatshop labour. Parochialism and fantasy fed the original source of his anti-Semitism – namely, as he saw it, the malign collective power of Jews.
Corbyn was immersed in an unfamiliar world. The union was dealing with struggling, overworked, self-employed Jews. Tailoring was a fragmented, insecure industry, and bad luck could turn an employer into an employee overnight. In that alien culture, Corbyn had no time for those seeking self-improvement – to fulfil the dream of moving from East End slums to north London’s suburbs. Thirty years later he boasted that at the end of one Wages Council meeting, a Jewish tailor had offered to make him a suit if he provided the cloth. Corbyn had spurned the offer. ‘Imagine trying to bribe a union official,’ he laughed about the generous gesture.
Since he disdained materialism, culture and anything spiritual, Corbyn was an empty vessel, uneasy with a race complicated by its history of survival over two thousand years of persecution. While Jamaica was black against white, and South America’s indigenous Indians fought against the Spanish, Jews in London were the victims of discrimination by all classes of Europeans, including the working class. That truth did not quite fit the Marxist theory of history that Corbyn had imbibed in Jamaica and Skegness: workers exploited by employers, who needed his protection as the first stage before eventually seizing power to govern the country.
Those nuances eluded him even as he found his metier. Here was a cause that secured him both an office and status, so that his sense of inferiority was partially alleviated. With a regular income, he could afford a better home: he left Islington and rented a flat in neighbouring Hornsey. There he joined the local Labour Party, a moribund group split between the extreme left – communists, Marxists and Trotskyites – and conventional social democrats. At meetings held in a dilapidated headquarters on Middle Lane in Crouch End, Corbyn deftly gave the appearance of not belonging to any faction. But Barbara Simon, the branch’s long-serving secretary, was not fooled. ‘He was a natural Marxist,’ she noted, seeing him as a sly, diligent agitator seeking political advantage at every turn to secure control of his small domain.
Corbyn was transformed, and politics became his life. Soon he was appointed chairman of the branch’s Young Socialists, and he would regularly cycle around the constituency, chatting to potential voters in every public venue and council estate, and offering application forms to join the party. His energy transformed Labour’s status in Hornsey. Through jumble sales and collections, he also helped to raise enough money to repair the local party headquarters. Toby Harris, a member of the branch from the age of sixteen, was struck when in the summer of 1972 he returned from Cambridge University and saw the newcomer tirelessly undertaking the thankless chores hated by everyone else.
The one odd note was Corbyn’s parsimony. Ever since he had witnessed the treatment of farm animals in Shropshire, he had been a vegetarian. In addition, he rarely drank, and did not smoke, go to the cinema, watch any sport or enjoy any social activity, so he had little in common with most members. His one concession to frivolity was to sing Irish protest songs in an Irish pub. Commitment to the reunification of Ireland was not wholly outlandish at the time. In March 1971 Harold Wilson had flown to Dublin to speak to the IRA’s leaders about peace and a planned transition to a united Ireland, and he later welcomed them to his home in Buckinghamshire. The former prime minister, however, received no credit for that initiative from Corbyn, who shared his fellow members’ anger at what he saw as Wilson’s betrayal of socialism during his last government. Unlike Corbyn, Wilson was not dedicated to hastening the imminent collapse of capitalism. Rather, as ‘the principal apostle of cynicism’, he was blamed for ‘too great a number of tawdry compromises [which] pollutes the atmosphere of politics’.
Like others on the left, Corbyn was not taken in by Wilson’s compact with the trade unions, and in 1973 he joined the new Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, an organisation that reflected his own commitment to establish a communist society. Thereafter his ideals never changed. To secure victory in the class war, he embraced the mantra of Tony Benn, at that time the rising star of Labour’s parliamentary radicals, to encourage direct action by workers on the streets and in workplaces to establish what the left called ‘industrial democracy’. Benn had just read The Communist Manifesto, and had become passionate about the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a Utopian, classless society, a mystical world. In this vision, the economy would be nationalised without compensation. That would include all the major industries, banks and property corporations. To turn Labour into the agent of that revolution, Corbyn adopted Benn’s rallying cry: ‘There are no enemies on the left.’ Their only adversaries were capitalists.
Douglas Eden, a polytechnic lecturer and a member of the Hornsey Labour Party, watched as Corbyn manoeuvred patiently to secure control over the branch. ‘In his carefully self-controlled way,’ said Eden with bitter admiration, ‘he presented himself to the lower orders of society, the vulnerable and inadequate people who felt indebted to him, as working-class. Once he got power, he dominated the branch and got their votes.’ One of the early casualties was the branch’s moderate chairman Andrew McIntosh, who Corbyn eased out. ‘Andrew didn’t learn his lesson,’ recalled Eden, who openly described Corbyn to the Labour Party’s headquarters as ‘a patrician from a wealthy background’. In revenge, Corbyn marked Eden for similar treatment – an official complaint to force his expulsion.
By late 1973, Corbyn felt emboldened. The tailors’ union moved its headquarters out of London, so he resigned and moved on to become a researcher for Tony Banks (later MP for Newham North-West) at the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AUEW), one of Britain’s most powerful associations, with nearly 1.5 million members. Banks apparently assumed that the well-spoken ex-grammar schoolboy could produce the required research. Corbyn’s self-esteem and confidence rose, as did his salary. He would later boast that he even organised a picket of striking AUEW workers outside their own headquarters against the union’s moderate leadership.
In September 1973 Salvador Allende was killed by the Chilean military, supported by the CIA. Washington’s involvement aroused worldwide outrage. Naturally, Corbyn demonstrated against the CIA’s conspiracies. His antagonism would be justified after Senator Frank Church delivered volumes of evidence to Congress in Washington in 1976 about the CIA’s undercover operations. That, combined with the earlier revelations in what became known as the Pentagon Papers of the lies told by President Johnson and others about American involvement in Vietnam, and the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency after Watergate, strengthened Corbyn’s loathing of American influence. And then British intelligence, frustrated by a ferocious IRA bombing campaign, was exposed for torturing the innocent as well as the guilty in its attempts to identify murderers in Ulster. The eventual consequences of those sensational disclosures were unpredictable.
On 6 October, while Israelis were observing Yom Kippur, the three neighbouring Arab states, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, launched a surprise invasion intended to drive the Jews into the sea. After a fierce nineteen-day war, the intruders were routed. Any chance for a peace settlement between Israel and the Arabs was lost. Days later, Opec, the cartel representing the world’s dominant oil producers, quadrupled its prices. Global mayhem followed. Emboldened by the financial squeeze on Britain, the country’s miners sensed another opportunity to overthrow Heath. The government’s latest 16.5 per cent pay offer was rejected, and an overtime ban imposed. As ‘flying pickets’ dispatched by Scargill prevented coal deliveries to the power stations, Britain’s economy suffered, and by year’s end the miners were out on strike. With electricity supplies cut, Heath ordered industry to work a three-day week. Just as in wartime, streets were dark, offices were unheated and unlit, and ration books were needed