Left Out – Corbyn election campaign chaos was even worse than it seemed at the time

“People in the north just won’t vote Tory,” responded Ian Lavery when he saw a poll showing that Labour would win just 138 seats in a general election, the party’s worst performance since 1918. The data, revealed at a meeting of Labour’s top brass in Brighton during the party’s annual conference last autumn, is just one of the many fascinating details in a new book about the inner workings of Jeremy Corbyn’s office – Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.

In its chaos, the Brighton conference came to characterise the nature of the general election campaign which would follow. Corbyn was, as suspected at the time, central to a bid by activists to take out then-Deputy Leader Tom Watson by effectively abolishing his position. Although their motion was withdrawn after a severe backlash, Watson did ultimately resign, telling Corbyn that “what went on at conference has been weighing on my mind”. His resignation came during the first meeting between the pair in months, as Corbyn had been avoiding his deputy.

Watson later told Peter Mandelson: “You don’t know what it’s like. I have to turn up to these meetings, I have to go on these NEC officers’ calls. I see the brutality. I see the vindictiveness. I see not just what they’re doing to the Labour Party – destroying it – but the sheer brutality with which they’re doing it and I can’t bear it. I just feel contaminated.” It is striking just how similar this account is to the claims of the whistleblowers who spoke out about the party’s mishandling of antisemitism.

The book suggests the toxic culture came from the top, with severe acrimony within Corbyn’s core team. It was split on everything from economic policy, the core theme of the Corbyn Project, to Brexit, the most important question of the day. John McDonnell, the then shadow chancellor, campaigned for Remain-oriented approach to the general election, fearing that a Liberal Democrat surge would allow the Tories to come through the middle in metropolitan seats, while Corbyn’s chief adviser, Seamus Milne cautioned that such a position would lead the working class to desert Labour en masse in the heartlands.

They ultimately landed on a fudge: “Labour will get Brexit sorted by giving people the final say in six months.” This attempt to please everybody failed dramatically; Leavers scoffed, while Remainers demanded a stronger stance.

The internal disagreements eventually descended into utter acrimony, with people on the pro-Brexit axis of Corbyn’s team refusing to speak to those on the second-referendum axis. It had a paralysing effect on the operation. “Nine-tenths of my bloody day was spent communicating on behalf of people who wouldn’t communicate directly with each other,” one aide told the book’s authors.

Morale was low throughout the campaign, with a sense of depression originating from the top. Corbyn appeared broken by the combination of the antisemitism crisis and Brexit, and approached the election with a profound paranoia about his own team’s activities. He would question their trustworthiness regularly. “I need to see the whole grid not just parts of it. Can you send now?”, Corbyn demanded in one email.

The authors of Left Out conclude bluntly: “The man on whose shoulders the hopes of the left rested had been reduced to spending vital hours of the campaign bickering over his right to see his own schedule.”

In one particularly petulant incident, the Labour leader refused to make a campaign stop at flood-hit South Yorkshire, “citing his diary and the fact he had not been kept in the loop,” according to the book. Labour had an opportunity in that instance to upstage the Prime Minister, who had been heckled by locals several days before. They could also have highlighted the fact that the Conservatives had under-invested in flood defences, but Corbyn instead wished to make a point about internal processes.

Such extraordinary behaviour led some aides to conclude that Corbyn was sabotaging his own campaign. One senior noted in an email the Labour leader’s attempts to disrupt the campaign schedule: “JC was deliberately adding extra things and talking to people to delay and then spoke for 30 mins plus at the campaign stop once they had arrived 40 mins late.”

A fortnight before the election, a team of senior Labour officials, including John McDonnell but excluding Corbyn, convened to assess the state of their campaign. The group “was in unanimous agreement on one thing: Labour’s campaign was not working. Even the basics, such as the slogan, were agreed to have been a disaster,” says the book. Still, these senior figures remained divided over whether to switch their focus to retaining seats in Leave areas or to increase their determination to win over Remainers.  An alternative slogan, “We’re on your side”, was proposed but ultimately rejected.

The following two weeks were thus much like the preceding weeks – they were dominated by anger and leaks. And, as we now know, the consequences for the party were dire. Labour suffered its worst election result since 1935 and saw its vote share fall by eight points. Boris Johnson returned to Downing Street with a majority of 80, the Conservatives’ biggest election win for 30 years, paving the way for a hard Brexit. Labour’s heartland seats, from Blyth Valley to Bolsover, switched sides for the first time in living memory.

This wasn’t just the end of a campaign, but of a political project that was mired in chaos from the very beginning. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s book captures the inner workings of an amateur yet powerful group, which ran the Labour Party for four years, in excruciating detail. They have had access to emails and texts, as well as verbal accounts from powerful players. Combined, their accounts make Left Out the definitive story of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Not everyone is happy with it, though. Laura Alvarez, Corbyn’s wife, tweeted in response: “The mainstream press obsession with its distorted account of previous Labour leadership goes on and on. Watch this space for a book that tells the actual truth will come and how we can develop our socialist policies for the Many. Keep your money for a worthwhile book!”