Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn by Gabriel Pogrund & Patrick Maguire

Author:Gabriel Pogrund & Patrick Maguire [Pogrund, Gabriel & Maguire, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473582835
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

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In the wake of the first meaningful vote, the prime minister, thanks to procedural chicanery from the donnish backbencher and former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, had been required to set out her Plan B. When MPs voted to amend it on 29 January, two months to the day before Brexit was still scheduled to happen, the Conservatives and DUP united around a proposal to send May back to Brussels to negotiate a replacement for the backstop. The only other proposal to muster a majority was an amendment from Labour’s Jack Dromey and the former Tory Cabinet minister Caroline Spelman, calling on the prime minister to rule out no-deal. The vote gave Corbyn sufficient cover to meet May and relay the demand in person.

Their meeting, subsequently described as ‘serious’, was the first of many between the oddest of couples. While May knew what her party did not like – the backstop – she lacked the means to do anything about it. The only thing that united her MPs was a solution that, in the eyes of Brussels and Dublin, did not exist. Yet nothing else appeared capable of commanding a parliamentary majority. So it fell to the leaders of the largest parties to chart a way forward and begin the tentative first steps of Murray’s plan.

Those accorded the dubious privilege of accompanying Corbyn to his sporadic one-on-ones with May over Brexit spoke of them as Tinder dates from hell. Neither had the hinterland to sustain a conversation beyond the dry matter at hand, which Corbyn had little interest in anyway. Instead, they would make pained small talk about their constituencies and May’s churchgoing. On his way out, Corbyn, as if suggesting a nightcap, asked May: ‘What are you up to now?’

‘I don’t know, I do whatever my people tell me to do,’ the prime minister replied.

Karie Murphy shot back: ‘I wish you were a bit more like that, Jeremy!’ On her return to LOTO, she even told colleagues that May was surprisingly ‘nice’ and ‘really genuine’.

But May’s post-date verdict was withering. In response to Corbyn’s central and indeed only demand she tweeted: ‘The only way to avoid No Deal is to vote for a deal.’ As a statement of fact, the logic was self-evident, but it had only a tenuous relationship to political reality. Her deal not only fell short of what Labour had demanded, it was so loathed by Conservative MPs as to have no chance of passing anyway.

Corbyn was not a politician built for the Brexit age. It demanded that he exercise executive power with a regularity and force that seemed beyond him. The interminable cycle of votes and amendments kept him chained to Westminster. Gone was the spirit of 2017, its heady insurgency and the clarity of message. Aides say Corbyn still believed in delivering Brexit, but how Labour might get there – and precisely what kind of Brexit it might deliver – seemed to be beyond him. His instinctive response, according to those present, was to withdraw. At his best he was Delphic, at his worst he was gnomic.

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