Aftermath

A Question of Leadership

 

• The contest to find Ed Miliband’s successor is transformed by Jeremy Corbyn’s inclusion.

 

• Underlying divisions – from welfare to weapons – come to the surface.

 

• Shadow Cabinet unity is shattered.

 

• Labour figures denounce colleagues as ‘morons’ and ‘criminally negligent’.

 

• Trying to avoid the mistakes of the last leadership contest leads to new errors.

 

• Former Labour leaders despair – but have they misread the public mood?

 

 

IT WAS THE ELECTION they hadn’t wanted. Some of Ed Miliband’s closest advisers had tried to persuade him to stay on as a caretaker leader. They thought it would be careless for candidates and activists alike to career into a leadership contest in a state of shock.

It soon become clear that the party was trying to correct the mistakes of the previous leadership contest rather than face the future with confidence. When Ed Miliband had won in 2010 he had put his energies in to his campaign, not his victory. He had to give his keynote conference speech just 72 hours after narrowly seeing off his brother for the top job – and didn’t have it prepared.

It was decided to save his successor similar difficulties. There would be a ‘special conference’ on 12 September – ahead of the annual conference later in the month, giving the winner a couple of weeks to get their thoughts, and their new team together before subjecting their main speech to unforgiving and intense scrutiny. Never mind that the media wouldn’t be content with an ‘Oscar winner’ approach on the first occasion, with a new leader simply thanking those who had been involved in the campaign. So in effect the leader’s stall would have to be set out twice in the space of a month.

Other options had been available. NEC member Jonathan Ashworth had argued that the regular annual conference should be transformed into a hustings event for candidates and the election of a new leader should follow. Harriet Harman was initially tempted by a shorter timescale, settling the issue before parliament rose for the summer. She was well aware that the length of the previous contest – stretching from May to the very end of September – had allowed the Conservatives to set the agenda in 2010, and along with their Lib Dem allies successfully accuse Labour of at least contributing to – if not causing – the financial crash. But the compromise of a special conference was agreed by the ruling National Executive on 13 May, less than a week after the crushing election defeat. The majority of those present felt the scale of that defeat precluded the leadership contest from being rushed – but equally, there was a reluctance for it to drag on for most of the rest of the year.

Harriet Harman – now the party’s interim leader – would resign from her post as deputy, and her replacement would also be elected on 12 September. Announcing the timetable, she said:

We want as many people as possible to take part. More than 30,000 new members have joined the party in the last few days and I hope many more members and supporters will take this opportunity to have their voice heard.

She should have been careful what she wished for. Little did she know at the time how painful a process it would be, with accusations of infiltration and mischief-making as the party membership soared by a third, and, under rules introduced by Ed Miliband, more than 112,000 ‘registered supporters’ would sign up at a cut price rate of just £3 to have a say on who should be Labour’s next leader.

* * *

At first it had seemed pretty straightforward. On Sunday 10 May the Shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna, sat alongside Lord Mandelson on Andrew Marr’s BBC sofa – the furniture transported to a temporary pod constructed on college green, the strip of grass where many political reporters hold forth to camera against the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament. Umunna didn’t quite say he’d stand for leader but gave strong hints. Later that morning, the Shadow Care Minister, Liz Kendall, didn’t stand on ceremony and told the BBC’s Andrew Neil she would throw her Blairite hat in the ring. She later told me she simply gave an honest answer to a straight question. It was expected Yvette Cooper would join the race, and I rang Andy Burnham – widely believed to have the best laid plans – to check when he would make an announcement. ‘I’m shattered and in shock, to be honest,’ he said – and indeed took almost a week before making a formal announcement. He could take his time as he already knew he had sufficient support to launch his bid.

Two days later I took the train to Swindon, when Umunna decided he would announce his candidacy in an unconventional way. He posted a ropy video – complete with wind-battered audio – on YouTube, shot on the town’s main shopping street. If he wanted to undermine his slick image and look like an insurgent it wasn’t a bad way to do it, though there is a fine line between trying to innovate and lacking gravitas.

I caught up with him amid low-rise industrial units on the edge of town, where the Labour Party had its local campaign headquarters. He was already acting like a leader in waiting, insisting on doing what’s called a ‘pool clip’ – a couple of answers to a journalist from one broadcaster for dissemination to the others. In this case, the honoured recipient would be Sky’s Joey Jones. But I, along with ITN’s Libby Wiener, persuaded him to take questions from each of us. Libby was definitely ‘bad cop’, reminding him he ‘wasn’t royalty’. He had had – and would have – much tougher encounters than this and three days later he would pull out of the contest, citing media pressure. Sources close to his campaign suggested he had the firm support of fewer than ten of his colleagues and it would be an uphill battle to get on the ballot.

But that day I decided to follow in his footsteps and visit the pedestrianised street where he had shot a video which would have been regarded as a professional embarrassment by most terror groups.

I wanted to assess how difficult the challenge would be for Labour’s hopefuls and on an iPad, showed various voters pictures of the likely leadership contenders. Unlike some, Umunna was recognised by almost everyone, even if his full name was a mouthful for a voter or two. And he was regarded pretty positively. What jolted me like an electric shock was how much the local shoppers were keen to talk about Labour more widely, without the slightest prompting. Sometimes getting an opinion from random people on the street was about as easy as finding a rap song without a profanity.

This time they held forth and had any of Labour’s five million conversations been with these voters, the party might have known Swindon wasn’t swinging their way. And some of their opinions could have been scripted in Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

Whack! ‘I don’t want that Spurgeon in charge!’ said a middle-aged man, just one consonant away from the SNP leader’s real name.

Pow! ‘Well none of these candidates can be as bad as the last leader! He was useless!’

But – ouch! It was how the party was perceived on welfare that really hurt. Despite a slogan which featured working people, Labour was seen on the side of the ‘scrounger’ not the ‘striver’ – this despite the fact that the perceived abuse of the welfare system was going on under a Conservative–Lib Dem government.

This comment from a well-spoken woman in late-middle age was not untypical. ‘It’s the unfairness of it all,’ she began, ambiguously. ‘My father always voted Labour. I am from a Labour family. But it’s so unfair to see people that don’t do a day’s work have everything – sitting at home watching their colour TVs when everyone else goes out to work.’ And it was Labour, not the government that was getting the blame. She wouldn’t vote for them unless Labour faced up to this.

And in a sense face up it did – but by again fighting the last election not the next one, the party almost spectacularly split over the welfare issue during the long and not so hot summer of the leadership campaign.

* * *

That split seemed some way off on a searingly hot Saturday, 16 May, when more than a thousand people crowded in to a harshly lit basement beneath the TUC’s London headquarters, just round the corner from the throngs of shoppers going about their business in nearby Oxford Street. This had been the venue for the first ‘hustings’ of the campaign, hosted by the Blairite Progress group – an odd choice of location given that some trade unionists had denounced the group as a right-wing ‘party within a party’ and had wanted it banned. The warm-up acts ahead of the leadership contenders included the deputy leadership candidate Caroline Flint and newly elected MP Wes Streeting – an east London councillor and former education officer for the LGBT charity Stonewall. Each got the event off to a punchy start, with denunciations of the ‘political, not organisational’ failings of the previous Miliband regime.

Then the main cast. It wasn’t quite the final line-up of the contest as each contender was still seeking the nomination of 35 MPs. Two of those present – Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt and Shadow International Development Secretary Mary Creagh – would subsequently fail to do so. While the remaining candidates – Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall, and Yvette Cooper – tried to emphasise, initially politely, points of difference, it looked at this stage that there was an emerging consensus on some policy areas.

The word that Ed Miliband had been reluctant to utter – ‘aspirational’ – was to become le mot de nos jours in Labour circles. All that emphasis during the election on those on zero hours contracts meant Labour had to broaden its appeal and, in the words of Yvette Cooper, not just move either ‘a bit to the left or a bit to the right’. Andy Burnham felt that the proposed levy on high value properties – the so-called mansions tax – had been seen as anti-aspirational. And all three felt the party hadn’t been pro-business enough. Now the party’s own pollsters have suggested that Labour’s attitude to business wasn’t much of a vote winner or loser – it wasn’t one of the main factors that would drive someone to cast a ballot. But the candidates clearly felt it was the first baby step toward regaining economic credibility, as well as being a straightforward way of distancing themselves from Ed Miliband’s legacy.

It’s not surprising the aspirational message was being delivered by all the candidates thus far. An internal Labour analysis by shadow ministers Jonathan Ashworth and Gloria De Piero suggested that while Labour had done well in cities, the party had generally done less well in smaller or medium sized towns, amongst families with young children and with ‘suburban professionals’ – or what the Mosiac data refers to as ‘New Homemakers’ who live in modern, private housing estates on the edge of urban areas, and who tend to say they want to ‘get on in life’. Around 50 per cent of voters, incidentally, fell into those categories in the seat that Ed Balls lost.

Commentators at the time ruminated on how dull and uninspiring the struggle for the succession was likely to be. The Shadow Justice Minister, Dan Jarvis, gave a speech after the Progress hustings, specifically ruling himself out of the running. Some MPs have been ‘parachuted’ into safe seats with which they have little connection. So unconventional was Jarvis’s background for a Labour politician he had been an actual paratrooper and army officer. So despite Andy Burnham’s denunciation of Westminster elites, the three candidates who would get on the ballot paper would all have previously been political advisers to frontbench Labour politicians – Andy Burnham himself had been a special adviser to Chris Smith at the Department for Culture Media and Sport, Liz Kendall advised both Harriet Harman at the DWP and Patricia Hewitt at the DTI while Yvette Cooper had simply served Harriet in opposition.

Those around Ed Miliband believed the candidates at this stage had made an error by ‘fishing in the same pool’ – leaving another candidate free to trawl for more left-wing votes. Or to mix metaphors, all three candidates – Andy Burnham included – shifted the centre of gravity further to the right of Ed Miliband and crucially – though they didn’t realise it at the time – to the right of many new members. By moving away from some of Miliband’s positions, they enabled someone further to his left to exploit the political space. Or as Miliband’s former aide Stewart Wood described it:

They made a pitch to the centre during a Labour leadership contest. I can understand why Andy Burnham did it – he felt he had to show he wasn’t the prisoner of the unions. Had someone closer to Ed’s politics filled that space, that might have been more of a challenge to the Left. But also there was a feeling that politics had to change, and – I am not saying I agreed with this – but there was a feeling that all those Labour leaders were the same.

All that was indeed about to change. Spectacularly.

* * *

Only three candidates were in the race to be Labour leader at 11.00am on 15 June. Under the new rules introduced by Ed Miliband, in order to get on to the ballot paper, candidates needed to be nominated by 15 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The threshold had risen from 12.5 per cent under the old rules as MPs and MEPs were no longer guaranteed a third of the vote between them in the actual contest.

The former Labour Party General Secretary Ray, now Lord, Collins – who knew the trade union movement inside and out – had had the tricky task of negotiating the demolition of the old electoral college which had also guaranteed the unions – and what are known as ‘socialist societies’ – a third of the vote too. The new rules had been agreed at a special conference in 2014 – but the GMB union would only give up the unions’ share of the electoral college if the MPs surrendered their special privileges at the same time. So now the votes of Westminster politicians would not have any more weight than the vote of ordinary Labour members (and indeed party supporters who could sign up for just £3) or rank and file trade unionists, who were to be known as ‘affiliated supporters’.

The MPs’ role now was to be gatekeepers in the process. Clearly, if a politician didn’t have the backing of even one in seven of his or her colleagues, they might have trouble leading the parliamentary party – so probably best not to put that MP on the ballot paper. But it didn’t quite work like that. The gatekeepers took the gate off its hinges and erected a great big welcome sign instead.

Again, many MPs were really re-fighting the previous contest. In 2010, left-winger Diane Abbot had struggled to meet even the lower threshold to get on the ballot. But confining the contest then to four white males in their 40s would not have been the best publicity for Labour’s avowed inclusivity. So some of those to her right – including her fellow leadership contender, David Miliband – ‘lent’ Abbot their nomination and the result was as expected: she finished last. It was assumed this year’s left wing hopeful Jeremy Corbyn would suffer a similar fate now.

Between 11.00am and the high-noon deadline on 15 June, six MPs who didn’t share Jeremy Corbyn’s politics nominated him to be leader of their party. That got him to 36, exceeding the minimum criteria by one, with moments to spare. A well-organised social media campaign – the official #Jeremy4Leader, and on Facebook JeremyCorbyn4Leader, along with the supportive but unofficial #Jeremy4Labour – had been extolling his parliamentary colleagues to do so. Oxford East MP Andrew Smith was credited with making it possible by getting him over the hurdle of 35 nominations. Tom Watson was prepared to do so in exteremis but in the end his nomination wasn’t required. But another half dozen MPs who didn’t agree with many of Corbyn’s policy positions had signed his nomination papers even earlier. Many stated quite publicly they would not subsequently vote for him.

For example, the Ogmore MP Huw-Irranca Davies:

I think Yvette Cooper is a very strong candidate, but so are others as well. But we are not a cult, we are a broad church – we need to have these broad voices.

And Tottenham MP David Lammy:

While there is enough that Jeremy and I disagree on to mean that I won’t be voting for him, I believe the choice of who becomes Labour’s next leader should be made by Labour members and supporters, not by MPs.

In fact only 20 of the MPs that put Corbyn on the leadership ballot said they would vote for him as leader – fewer than one in ten of Labour’s Parliamentary Party. But the following month, on 21 July, a bombshell dropped. On BBC Newsnight, presenter Kirsty Wark read out the results of a survey of Labour Party members and supporters by internet pollsters YouGov – and it put Corbyn 17 points clear of his nearest rival Andy Burnham. John McTernan – Jim Murphy’s former chief of staff, and who had also been Tony Blair’s political secretary – was on hand to provide an instant reaction. He questioned the intellectual credentials of those who had lent temporary support to the left-winger:

The moronic MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn to ‘have a debate’ need their heads felt. They need their heads felt! They should be ashamed of themselves. They’re morons.

The motivations of the ‘morons’ who had put him on the ballot paper had been manifold. There were those – such as Jon Cruddas – who had indeed wanted to ‘broaden the debate’ after such a setback at the polls, and felt it would be wrong to suppress some views at the very outset. He was also pretty confident Corbyn, and more importantly, his arguments would be defeated fair and square. Frank Field, on the right of the party, wanted to use Corbyn to shake the other candidates out of any complacency and make them confront and criticise Corbyn’s anti-cuts agenda. Writing in the Mirror a month after nominating Corbyn (22 July 2015) he admitted it was not going well:

I nominated Jeremy Corbyn in the belief that what we in Labour most needed was to debate our future. Instead of rising to this challenge, Jeremy’s presence seems to have frightened the other candidates into silence… Jeremy is quite open on the deficit. He doesn’t believe any cuts whatsoever should be made. I do not believe the Labour Party will be elected to govern on such a programme. I was therefore hoping one of the other candidates would challenge this deficit denying. Time is fast running out for them to do so.

Margaret Beckett – Labour’s interim leader following John Smith’s death in 1994 – admitted on Radio 4’s World at One that she had indeed been one of those described as moronic. She said:

We were being urged as MPs to ensure that the party had a field of candidates and that I thought was a perfectly legitimate point of view. If Jeremy had been a long way behind, I don’t think the thought of nominating him would have crossed my mind. But then when it looked as if he might almost be able to stand but then not be able to, I was concerned that people would feel that they had been deprived of the opportunity for their point of view to be aired… But yes, I’m beginning to wish that I hadn’t, to be quite honest about it.

A former Labour Party official who wasn’t keen on Corbyn’s leadership ambitions said that Lenin had had a better term than John McTernan for those who had given what he regarded as an ‘ultra-left’ candidate a platform: ‘useful idiots’. There is some debate over whether Lenin ever uttered the phrase but its contemporary use is a measure of how Corbyn’s candidacy was provoking strong feelings.

One figure at the centre of the Ed Miliband election campaign said the MPs who nominated Corbyn had been ‘criminally negligent’. But hadn’t Ed Miliband taken his eye off the ball when the new leadership rules had been agreed?

* * *

Failure, as they say, is an orphan, and when it comes to the rules for electing Labour’s new leader few even admit to knowing the parents. The final proposal emerged from Ray Collins’ review after seven months of negotiations held in every region of the country behind closed doors, in what are now smoke-free rather than smoke-filled rooms. It was endorsed at a half-day conference called for the purpose in London’s Docklands in March 2014 – at the ExCeL centre. Not many would use superlatives now to describe what happened.

Speak to most senior people in the Labour Party and they will tell you they issued dire warnings at the time. Were the new rules cock-up or conspiracy? Some senior figures believe the former, some the latter but they were very possibly a product of both. One senior Shadow Cabinet member told me:

These rules were absolutely crazy and I regret not having more of an argument about this. We as Shadow Cabinet members hadn’t been consulted. I found out they were taking away MPs’ votes and tried to contact Ed Miliband’s office to complain. I got a text back from him saying ‘It’s too late to raise objections’.

He said that many of those now denouncing the rules had actually been initially supportive. ‘Blairites’ close to David rather than Ed Miliband saw the new rules as a way of diluting union influence:

In 2010 David won the election amongst members but they only had a third of the overall vote. So the argument was take MPs out if need be, just so long as you weaken the unions – and if you strengthen the party members’ role, you shift any future contest to the right. But they sacrificed the stabilising influence of the MPs and didn’t factor in the potential politics of these new registered supporters.

So perhaps a conspiracy that became a cock-up, then… again, some of those involved had been looking to the past, not the future. It had been assumed that the views of the rank and file membership would somehow remain static. But in fact while the overall membership figures looked incredibly stable until Labour’s election defeat and the surge seen in the leadership election, there had in fact been considerable churn. Indeed by 2015, barely one in three members had actually voted in the previous leadership contest. As Ed Miliband had ‘moved on’ from New Labour, it’s possible some New Labour members moved away. So the membership itself couldn’t be relied upon as a stabilising or moderating influence. And while some union leaders played the part scripted for them, warning of a weakening of the trade union link, the general secretary of Unite – the largest affiliate to Labour – Len McCluskey seemed remarkably sanguine. Four days after the special conference to introduce the new rules, his union’s executive council resolved to:

rapidly prepare a plan to ensure that we maximise the number of our political levy paying members who express support for our continuing collective affiliation, and who take advantage of the possibility of becoming associated members of the party.

Under the new rules members had to say explicitly that they wanted the union to pay a £3 ‘affiliation fee’ to Labour on their behalf and that they genuinely wanted to be supporters of the party – so, roughly translated, what Unite’s executive was pledging to do was devote considerable resources to the task of signing up these ‘affiliated supporters’. What McLuskey realised was that union influence need not be confined to one-third of the vote for a new leader in an electoral college – the more of these new ‘affiliated supporters’ his union could sign up, the more influence his members would have.

In a briefing note dating from March 2014, the union makes it clear it can see advantages in the new system:

The new proposals fit in with Unite’s political strategy, which is to encourage as many of our members as possible to join and get active in Labour… That is why Unite will not walk away from this – we will be standing and fighting for what we believe in, which is a Labour party of and for the ordinary, decent people of this country. Labour, remember, is OUR party. We – the trade unions – started it and this is a chance for six million ordinary men and women to really make their voices heard.

And it successfully signed up far more supporters than any other union when the leadership contest got under way – around 112,000. The union had used an outside organisation to set up call centres to ring members and tell them about the new rules, and targeted those members who had voted in previous Labour leadership elections as they would be most likely to sign up. One insider said they had spent about £18 per affiliated supporter to do so. The union’s executive backed Jeremy Corbyn for leader, and recommended a second preference for Andy Burnham.

Under the new rules voting papers were distributed by Electoral Reform Services, who were conducting the ballot, not by the unions. That meant – unlike in 2010 with Ed Miliband – trade unions couldn’t send out leaflets supporting one of the candidates with, or alongside, election material. But Len McCluskey did write to all members urging support for Corbyn, and when members of Andy Burnham’s team pointed out that he had been endorsed by the union leadership too, McCluskey ‘clarified’ that the first choice of his executive was very much Jeremy Corbyn.

In the end, though, supporters who had joined Labour through their trade union didn’t dominate the contest – there were 148,000 of them, compared with just under 290,000 fully-paid party members, and 112,000 ‘registered supporters’. Overall these trade unionists accounted for slightly over a quarter of the total eligible votes – so less than the third of the votes the unions had been guaranteed under the old electoral college system. And in the event, only around half of those entitled to vote did so.

The real innovation – and what turned out to be the biggest headache for Harriet Harman – was the introduction of the new ‘registered supporter’ who could join up directly for just £3 to take part in the contest. Around one in five of those eligible for a vote in the leadership election were in this category. There had been muddled thinking on this from the outset. The Conservatives had selected some candidates – ­including the outspoken and independent-minded GP and now MP Sarah Wollaston – by ‘open primary’ allowing anyone who wanted to take part to do so, not just party members.

Labour could have decided that if their next leader was to have broad appeal, the decision was too important to leave to the activists. Instead they went for a halfway house allowing a wider range of people to participate but only if they ‘support the aims and values of the Labour party’ and are ‘not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it’. Examining what was going on in people’s minds would prove difficult. And that task became trickier with Jeremy Corbyn’s entrance into the race, as this gave at least two groups of people not normally supportive of Labour an incentive to sign up.

First, those on the right. As Corbyn’s campaign appeared to be taking off in mid-July, The Telegraph comment page suggested that a victory for him in the leadership contest would be:

dreadful for Labour, the sort of political disaster the party last suffered in 1983 when Michael Foot’s left-wing views saw the party lose by a landslide to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives.

But it went on:

Not everyone thinks it would be a bad thing if that was to be repeated at the next general election in 2020. Indeed, some people joke about voting for Mr Corbyn, hoping to saddle Labour with a bearded voter-repellent as a leader. Thanks to Labour’s new leadership rules, it doesn’t have to be a joke. Anyone can vote in the Labour leadership election.

It then gave a ‘handy five step guide’ to doing so.

The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, tweeted:

I seem to have a lot of traffic in my timeline saying that for a mere £3, I can change Labour’s future and vote for Jeremy Corbyn. Bargain.

The former Conservative minister Tim Loughton was successfully ‘weeded out’ by Labour officials who were on the lookout for ‘known’ opponents who were trying to get a vote. The former Conservative MP and columnist Matthew Parris tried to sign up his llamas. Andy Burnham reported a Conservative councillor turning up at a public meeting to brag that he had a vote. But concerns grew that some of the weeds were not being spotted for the trees. Labour staff had to – at the very least – ‘verify’ that these new supporters were on the electoral register and were initially overwhelmed by the work involved. Extra staff were hired, and the party’s Newcastle offices went in to a 24-hour working pattern to process the new recruits.

Yet they also had to check if an applicant had stood against Labour at an election, signed an opponent’s nomination papers, or denounced the party on social media. Not every infiltrator was necessarily well-known or vocal so the national party had to rely on local constituencies to flag up potential problems, with two panels drawn from the ruling national executive committee charged with overseeing the process – and sitting as judge and jury on eligibility.

But Labour insiders always thought that once Jeremy Corbyn was on the ballot paper, the bigger danger would be infiltration from the left, not the right. This proved particularly tricky to police.

Certainly the website run by Trotskyists Socialist Action – which features pictures of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez on its home page – was urging a vote for Corbyn within two days of his appearance on the ballot, and provided a link to the Labour Party website to enable supporters to sign up. The website said:

The left, both inside and outside Labour, are encouraging people to register their support for Labour to participate in the elections. Those unwilling to join the Labour Party, because its policies are so right wing, can instead become registered supporters, as long as they agree with Labour’s aims and values and do not support any organisation opposed to Labour. It is hoped that many will register and pay the necessary £3 to vote for Jeremy…

Socialist Action’s view was that Labour had lost ground in the run-up to the election when it tried to sound more fiscally responsible, and as a result had become less distinguishable from the Conservatives. This is an extract from their post-election analysis:

Opinion polls running up to the election overall underestimated Tory support and overestimated Labour’s. If this polling bias operated for the past five years, it still remains the case that Labour established a commanding poll lead over the Tories by May 2012. That lead eroded rapidly when it shifted to an explicitly austerity-lite agenda. Labour anchored its general election campaign firmly on the right; with vague pledges, emphasising a commitment to spending cuts, an anti-immigrant message and joining in the right-wing attacks on the SNP… When the Tories shifted their own campaign tactics to making public services spending promises, including an extra £8 billion on the NHS, Labour attacked the Tories from the right, for making ‘unfunded’ commitments. In effect Labour did snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Socialist Action has its roots in the International Marxist Group, which infiltrated Labour in the early 1980s… though since then there have probably been as many splits as there were amongst the anti-Roman liberation groups in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: ‘So whatever happened to the Popular Front for Judea? – He’s over there!’

Socialist Action supporters participate in much bigger umbrella organisations such as the People’s Assembly and were active in the Stop the War Coalition which Corbyn chaired. But they probably have only around 500 adherents so even if all of them had been successfully signed up to Labour (if they hadn’t done so already, without being too explicit about their views) and hadn’t been sifted out by officials, their votes would hardly have been proven decisive for Corbyn. More influential would have been their encouragement to people not party-politically aligned but involved in campaigns to join Labour, at least temporarily – but it’s perfectly possible many people didn’t need that encouragement.

But there were some signs that the degree of ‘infiltration’ – organised or spontaneous – was much higher than assumed. Ben Bradshaw, the former culture secretary who was a ‘Blairite’ candidate for the party’s deputy leadership, said data from his Exeter constituency suggested that many of those who had applied for a vote in the Labour leadership contest hadn’t been historically supportive of his party. From his local activists’ contribution to Ed Miliband’s five million conversations on voters’ ­doorsteps, they had built up extensive records of which party people had supported in 2015 – and how some of them had cast their ballots in ­previous years, too. He told me:

We have cross referenced all the new registered supporters against our canvassing records which are amongst the best in the country and we have found consistently around ten per cent of people have been extremely hostile to Labour and have always voted for other parties.

The issue also arose at what is called Labour’s procedure committee – made up of representatives from the party’s ruling national executive. On 19 August, The Guardian published leaked notes of a meeting where the interim leader, Harriet Harman and the party’s General Secretary, Iain McNicol, had supported a proposal to check potential supporters’ voting records against canvass returns nationally, in a similar process to the work carried out in Exeter. While someone’s stated intention not to vote Labour would not be enough on its own to debar them, Harman favoured emailing or writing to them again to ask if they really did share her party’s values. If they didn’t respond within 72 hours or provide an adequate explanation for their previous voting intention, they would be struck off. One of her aides admitted to me ‘there’s not much we can do if people lie’, but it was felt that this additional layer of verification would at least contribute to the case that the party was trying to do everything in its power to enforce its own rules. It was believed that this would also make it less vulnerable to a legal challenge by one of the candidates if they were to lose by a small margin. But the vote on the issue was deadlocked on the committee. One member was on a summer cruise and had their lifeboat drill interrupted to be asked their view. The phone signal was dodgy but enough of the conversation made clear that this member did not come to Harriet’s rescue. It was felt that those who had perhaps voted tactically could have been denied a say. The committee chair, Jim Kennedy was an official of the Unite union – which was backing Jeremy Corbyn. One member of the committee said to me that ‘he is just doing Corbyn’s bidding. Or at least Len McCluskey’s.’ In any case Harman – at this stage – didn’t get her way.

The left had been trying to move the debate away from infiltration on to talk of a ‘purge’ – the hashtag #labourpurge began trending on Twitter to emphasise it wasn’t just those in the centre or right of the party that could question the contest’s legitimacy. The arguments against conducting the extra checks weren’t entirely partisan or spurious. Some of Kennedy’s supporters on the committee weren’t against local parties using their data – as Ben Bradshaw had done – to flag up problems but didn’t want the party nationally to take on the burden. But the argument was also put forward that the information collected from the election could be out of date. Minds can change.

Now, it’s not that difficult for Labour officials to refuse a ballot paper to well-known people that it regards as being on the far left – they did so when Mark Serwotka, leader of the non-affliliated PCS union, tried to become a registered supporter. But many who hold views to the left of Labour might never have stood against the party at an election, or have a record of activity which suggested that they didn’t – admittedly, as perhaps the least worst option – want to see a Labour government.

If they said they had been disillusioned with Labour over, say, Iraq, or nuclear weapons and had considered voting Green, that in itself couldn’t disqualify them. After all, Labour hadn’t expelled Jeremy Corbyn for his anti-nuclear, pro-nationalisation views, so if voters were now being attracted back to Labour’s banner and away from other parties on the left because he was on the ballot, how could they be denied a vote?

Matters came to a head in a most bizarre way on 25 August.

* * *

‘Follow that car!’ That’s not a phrase you expect to hear very often, if at all, in political journalism. But BBC producer Sally Heptonstall uttered it to a cab driver as she saw Andy Burnham being bundled in to the back of a Vauxhall Corsa.

So sensitive had Labour become to charges that their leadership contest was descending into farce, they somehow decided not just to descend further, but to plunge headlong off the mountain of ridicule. Some of the leadership teams – spearheaded by Burnham’s – had asked for a meeting with Jim Kennedy and Labour officials to discuss fears over infiltration, and to seek reassurances that the party had robust systems in place. A meeting had been granted then cancelled. Harriet Harman had decided that she – rather than just the officials and the NEC’s Jim Kennedy – would meet the candidates herself.

That day they were all due to be in Stevenage, the marginal Hertfordshire seat where a good campaign hadn’t resulted in victory. Harman had chosen the town as the first stop on her ‘pink bus’ tour of Britain before the election. But its significance today was that BBC Radio 5 Live was hosting a hustings there – at which Jeremy Corbyn brushed aside concerns about infiltration:

There’s been a lot of nonsense in the papers. Large numbers of people got involved in politics for the first time. A few Tory MPs tried to join, got rejected, end of story.

Harman hadn’t wanted to hold her sensitive meeting in the full glare of publicity. So party officials hadn’t told the candidates where the meeting would be held. Instead, they would be picked up after the hustings – from the Stevenage Arts and Leisure Centre – and be conveyed to a secret venue elsewhere in the new town. But Burnham had been tailed, though his car tried to shake off pursuers at one of the town’s many roundabouts. Having failed to carry out the more elaborate car-chase manoeuvres – such as shooting across a level crossing just before the barriers come down, or zooming across a swing bridge just before it opens – it soon became impossible to conceal the venue and the infrastructure of the mass media pulled up outside the Business Technology Centre.

Harriet Harman then made herself available, and offered reassurances about the process. But within 48 hours further checks on those wanting to become registered supporters had been given the green light.

Labour officials ended up rejecting 57,000 applications – largely because many of these applicants hadn’t even been on the electoral register. Some people, though, had joined via their trade union and then had also tried to sign up as registered supporters or members. The new system – unlike the old – is far more effective at identifying and stopping ‘multiple voting’. Before, if you straddled all three classes of membership in the electoral college – for example if you were an MP and a trade unionist as well as – naturally enough – a party member, it would not have been impossible to have been issued with three ballot papers. This time it really was supposed to be ‘one member, one vote’.

But on the day of the not-so-secret Stevenage meeting it was revealed that only 3,138 applicants had been struck off for political reasons – 1,900 because they had been candidates for, or prominent supporters of, the Greens – and 400 because they apparently had indeed been Conservative ‘infiltrators’, Though a definitive official figure wasn’t provided, at least 110 refuseniks had been involved in parties or groups to Labour’s left, such as the misnamed Left Unity (though arguably they were now trying to unite with mainstream Labour) and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition. In the end more than 4,000 were denied a vote because of their politics.

The leadership teams stressed they now wanted to be seen to be talking about policies not process, but privately all but the Corbyn team felt the party had probably underestimated the extent of infiltration on the left and right. That said, under the old system when ballot papers were issued to any trade unionist whose union was affiliated to Labour, 2.7 million voting papers had gone out. Polling by Unite suggested only around half their members supported the party, so some ballot papers for the last leadership contest had undoubtedly gone to Conservative, Lib Dem, Green and no doubt SNP voters, too – and without very much fuss.

* * *

The question is why Labour left itself open to the risk of infiltration at all in a brand new system. Clearly Ed Miliband had wanted a swift ‘off the shelf’ solution to the mid-term Falkirk fiasco – proposals that would appear to be watering down union influence. Some around him saw it as a means of taking up community campaigner Arnie Graf’s ideas and reconnecting Labour with those who had lost trust in politics, or didn’t take well to the existing bureaucratic structures of political parties but wanted to signal their support.

But even those broadly backing the reforms had warned of potential problems and had been ignored. The general secretary of the GMB union, Paul Kenny, had raised concerns about the low price attached to Labour support – and said a £3 fee risked ‘entryism’ – in other words those who didn’t share Labours values might be tempted to take part in the leadership contest.

So the GMB had pushed for a higher fee of £15–20 but union sources say Labour’s leadership rejected this. The Vice-Chair of the election campaign, and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Ed Miliband, Lucy Powell called for a higher threshold for MPs to enter the race – support from 20 per cent not 15 per cent of the parliamentary party, with the aim of having a ‘run-off’, as the Conservatives do, between just two candidates. This would almost certainly have killed the Corbyn campaign stone dead. But according to those close to Ed Miliband it had been those on the Blairite wing of the party which had been most vociferous in calling for a lower threshold in case they themselves would struggle to get the support of one in five colleagues to mount a leadership bid in future.

The idea of ‘registered supporters’ had been proposed first in 2011 by the former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain as part of his Refounding Labour project on how to modernise the party’s organisational structures. It had concluded:

In order to safeguard the membership offer, there should be no formal rights for Registered Supporters, only local members and affiliates are to be involved in selections’ [of Labour candidates].

And while supporters would potentially get a vote on a new leader, this would only happen if they exceeded 50,000 in number and – under the old ‘electoral college’ system – their influence would also be limited. Under the new rules, their vote is on a par with MPs and fully paid-up members.

Views are split on whether Ed Miliband hadn’t thought through the potential consequences of the new rules, and was pleased just get out of the Falkirk fix, or whether he was thinking more strategically.

Lord Mandelson warned of the dangers of infiltration at the time. But he got the impression that far from being horrified, Ed Miliband embraced the prospect of more rank and file trade unionists and left-wing supporters signing up for membership as a means of moving the party further away from New Labour. Miliband’s inner circle would say this was nonsense. The biggest supporters of the changes were Blairites – if not Mandelson himself, certainly those who admired him as they saw the reforms as a way of watering down union influence.

Miliband had appointed Simon Fletcher as his trade union liaison officer early in 2013. Fletcher – a pivotal figure in the Corbyn leadership campaign as well as the former chief of staff to Ken Livingstone when he was London Mayor – was involved in drawing up the new rules. But so too was the solidly mainstream Roy Kennedy and strategist Tom Baldwin, friend of Alastair Campbell and admirer of Tony Blair. Those who worked with Fletcher at the time didn’t find him factional and didn’t believe he was trying to devise a system that would one day propel a more left wing candidate into the top job. Instead he was there to reassure the unions that Miliband would ‘mend, not end’ the union link. He was also, some suspected, there to try to help Miliband see off any leadership challenge he might face either before the election, or if he had wanted to stay on afterwards having failed to gain an overall majority. He would in all probability have required union support to do so. But had Miliband been in the unions’ pockets, it’s unlikely the Falkirk fracas would have been allowed to escalate in the first place, with party officials willing to involve the Scottish police in an internal row over the selection of a union-backed candidate. The consensus at the time was that the new rules would be a challenge not a sop to the unions, and Fletcher’s role was to help keep the support and funding flowing.

A bad worker is said to blame his tools and some think the same was true of Labour’s modernisers when it came to the leadership election. Miliband’s former strategist, Tom Baldwin, said Labour politicians shouldn’t blame the new rules for the apparent rise of the Left. MPs opposed to Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t have nominated him – and if people signed up to support him, well his opponents should have been inspiring others to join the party to oppose him. Writing in The Guardian (28 August 2015) he said:

Those in despair about this process must learn how to galvanise more of those millions of voters who desperately need Labour to be a party of government again, just as much as Corbyn has inspired those who fancy another five years of protest. Any fightback to reclaim Labour must begin by reaching people outside the party and bringing them in – just as Tony Blair did 20 years ago – rather than looking for someone else to blame.

* * *

The event was chaired by a comedian but the message was deadly serious. Stand-up comic and radio host Matt Forde chaired an audience with Tony Blair organised by the modernising Progress group. He joked with the former leader if he had voted for Jeremy Corbyn, and in a withering response, Blair emphasised ‘No, I was a Labour leader’. It was the Conservatives who would want to see Corbyn succeed.

He went on to say:

After the 1979 election the Labour party persuaded itself of something absolutely extraordinary. Jim Callaghan had been Prime Minister and the Labour party was put out of power by Margaret Thatcher, and the Labour party persuaded itself that the reason why the country had voted for Margaret Thatcher was because they wanted a really leftwing Labour party.

And he offered this analysis of Labour’s defeat, suggesting a further move to the left would be ‘other-wordly’:

We lost in 2010 because we stepped somewhat from our modernising platform. We lost in 2015 with an election out of the playbook from the 1980s, from the period of Star Trek, when we stepped even further away from it and lost even worse. I don’t understand the logic of stepping entirely away from it.

Perhaps his most controversial advice was that those voting with their hearts not their heads in the leadership contest should ‘get a transplant’. This was later denounced as ‘stupid’ by his former deputy, John Prescott. Indeed, in not endorsing any of the candidates opposed to Corbyn in the contest, Blair recognised his intervention might prove counter-productive. He said he doubted his endorsement would help.

If people were signing up for a different type of politics, if they had – like Corbyn – been involved in the Stop the War coalition, then the views of the ‘Start the War’ prime minister wouldn’t necessarily be shared.

Senior figures in the party then had a better idea. Rather than a series of ‘drip, drip’ warnings of a lurch to the left, wouldn’t one big intervention by all the extant former leaders be preferable? It proved impossible to reunite the band, but both Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock did conduct their own solo projects.

On 16 August, Blair’s successor at Number 10 was the star attraction at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Clearly visible through the bank of windows behind Gordon Brown was the former home of the GLC – now a luxury hotel – once inhabited by Ken Livingstone and other supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the ’80s. And right outside it was a merry-go-round. Just as it looked like Labour’s left wing had been moving further from power, they were now heading back.

Brown had discussed his contribution to the debate over lunch with close friends in Fife two days earlier. The party nationally and the press had little advance warning of his remarks. As he delivered them from memory, he paced up and down with the urgency and stress of a caged beast longing to be free. Indeed, cameras would need a wide-angle lens to capture him. Some of the speech was highly personal, suggesting he hadn’t quite got over his own ejection from Downing Street five years earlier when he talked about being ‘heartbroken’ and sympathising with activists who were ‘grieving’ after the latest serious setback. He said ‘I know what it’s like to feel rejection and defeat’. But in many ways the speech was classic Brown – praying in aid the great Labour and progressive figures of the past, including Aneurin Bevan, Keir Hardie, John Smith – and Nelson Mandela – to make the case that Labour needed to remain mainstream –‘desirable, popular, electable’ – and relevant. He made a point of not denouncing Corbyn by name but appeared to characterise his foreign policy thus:

Don’t tell me that we can do much for the poor of the world if the alliances we favour most are with Hezbollah, Hamas, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela and Putin’s totalitarian Russia.

Earlier in the month, on 2 August, the leader who knew most about Opposition – Neil Kinnock – had warned:

In the leadership election, we are not choosing the chair of a discussion group who can preside over two years or more of fascinating debate while the Tories play hell with cuts.

And he criticised what he called the ‘malign purposes’ of the ‘Trotskiyte Left and the Telegraph Right.’

In a subsequent intervention on 29 August – two weeks before the new leader would be announced – in the pages of The Observer, Blair conjured up an image of what a joint appeal against a Corbyn leadership might have looked like – though he seemed sceptical of its chances of success:

Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown and I have collectively around 150 years of Labour party membership. We’re very different. We disagree on certain things. But on this we’re agreed. Anyone listening? Nope. In fact, the opposite. It actually makes them more likely to support him. It is like a driver coming to a roadblock on a road they’ve never travelled before and three grizzled veterans say: ‘Don’t go any further, we have been up and down this road many times and we’re warning you there are falling rocks, mudslides, dangerous hairpin bends and then a sheer drop.’ And the driver says: ‘Screw you, stop patronising me. I know what I’m doing.’

Ed Miliband, meanwhile, had gone ‘down under’ and largely disappeared from view – but for a snap of him sporting Corbynesque facial hair. He was on a family holiday to the Great Barrier reef, in another country where a Labour party had failed to win a recent election, while Corbynmania raged at home. Perhaps he couldn’t be expected to fly back from Australia to issue warnings about the future of the party he so recently led. But his reluctance wasn’t just based on logistics. And it wasn’t simply whether to deliver a joint message – but any message. He said he was ‘unlikely’ to get involved. Partly that could be out of humility as he had just delivered a worse result than expected for Labour. While he would make it clear after the leadership election that he had no intention of returning to the front bench, he also had no intention of lecturing the people who had signed up under new rules to the Labour Party about how they should vote. He regarded getting more than half a million people involved in an internal party election, and opening the door to new supporters, as positive. Friends say, like his strategist Tom Baldwin, he believed that all leadership candidates should have made these rules work for them and if they lacked support, they should have been campaigning to increase it.

After all, for all the talk of ‘entrysim’ and ‘inflitration’ into Labour’s ranks, the radical Left in some European countries weren’t trying to sneak into parties in order to change them – they were out and proud and in some cases making an impact, while the more traditional social democratic movements had been struggling.

* * *

In national elections in 2009 under the ‘Syriza’ banner, a coalition of parties to the left of Greece’s ‘Labour Party’ – the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party, PASOK – polled less than five per cent of the vote. Following years of post-crash austerity, in 2012 most of the disparate group of ecologists, feminists, communists and ultra-left Trotskyists in the volatile coalition decided to solidify into a political party – ‘Syriza, United Social Front’ was formed. In January 2015, it scored 36.3 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections, becoming the largest party in parliament, while PASOK – a party of government as recently as 2012 – was reduced to a rump of 13 MPs and with a derisory vote share similar to Syriza’s in 2009.

Had Ed Miliband polled as well, he would have been in Downing Street. Of course in Britain austerity was nowhere near as severe.

But in Spain, too, the mainstream party of the left – the Socialist Workers Party – has been polling less well than Podemos, the radical movement to its left whose bearded leader Pablo Iglesias wants to extend public ownership and leave NATO. Sound familiar?

The ‘movement’ has gone from being a small collection of economists, Trotskyists, and Trotskyist economists with a prominent social media presence in 2014 into a fully-fledged membership organisation, with 350,000 people signing up within a year – becoming the second largest party in Spain, behind the right-of-centre People’s Party.

It’s not just on the continent that anti-austerity parties are flourishing. The SNP are no Syriza – but at the general election they had a different, slower trajectory for deficit reduction and stood on an anti-austerity platform. Just as Germany was blamed for the scale of the cuts in Greece, Westminster was whacked for allegedly imposing a financial straitjacket on Scotland.

The message from Athens to Andalusia to Aberdeen was that old established parties of the left were not standing up for ‘their’ people.

So Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn to ‘broaden the debate’ certainly succeeded on that front – those who wanted to test his ideas to destruction were less successful. It soon became clear that rather than facing an external threat, Labour was in the process perhaps of having its own Podemos created from within. Indeed the Spanish party’s leader Pablo Iglesias said he ‘saluted and supported’ Corbyn.

That’s not to say what became known in the media as ‘Corbynmania’ was manufactured by the far Left to capture Labour. But in an era of disillusionment with conventional politics – the Conservatives gained an overall majority on a bit less than 37 per cent of the vote – a simple, distinctive message can cut through the background noise.

I attended one of the first hustings of the candidates that included Jeremy Corbyn. It was a lively affair. Bizarrely it was held in Dublin. That’s because it was hosted by the GMB union which has members in the Irish Republic – and which had also got a very good deal by holding their conference at the massive Citywest hotel and conference complex which had been built without full planning permission, and had been taken in to receivership after the financial crash.

The hustings was chaired by the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire and he decided he wanted to obtain straight ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers to some questions. Each candidate was asked if they backed the Conservatives’ benefit cap. Liz Kendall said ‘Yes’, and Jeremy Corbyn gave an equally straight answer – ‘No’. There were jeers from the audience when both Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper attempted to give more nuanced responses.

This was no love-in for Corbyn – the GMB, unlike other big unions such as Unite and UNISON, didn’t endorse his candidacy. One senior official denounced him as ‘a bit of a hippie’ and that many of the union’s members who were working hard in a supermarket and needing tax credits wouldn’t take kindly to his support for those who didn’t do a ‘a hand’s turn’. But there is little doubt that the clarity of message won some of the audience over. As one of them said to me: ‘He may be unrealistic, but at least he is clear on what he stands for.’

Unconstrained by Shadow Cabinet collective responsibility, he could say what he liked. And he was doing just that. The seeds of the ‘Corbyn effect’ had been sown. But Harriet Harman was about to pour some Baby Bio all over them.

* * *

So determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous leadership contest, with the best will in the world Labour’s interim leader Harriet Harman made some new ones.

Travelling around the country in her pink bus, she had heard what I had heard in Swindon – people were worried about Labour overspending, but some were less concerned about the totality of public expenditure and more about how it was being disbursed. In short, they feared that too much would be spent by Labour on those who ‘deserved’ it least and who weren’t willing to work. So she was not prepared to let the Conservative narrative on welfare take hold – just as it had on the economy in 2010 – because Labour was too pre-occupied with a leadership contest.

But every silver lining is ensconced in cloud.

George Osborne delivered the first Conservative-only budget in 18 years on 8 July. It was, of course, as much a political as a fiscal event. Labour jaws dropped as he announced a National Living Wage for the over 25s. His critics say it was really an enhanced minimum wage – nonetheless he had stolen Labour’s clothes. He had wanted to do this since 2013, but his Lib Dem coalition partners had vetoed it because they wouldn’t sign up to the other part of the package – a reduction in spending on tax credits. And it would be this which would cause a problem for Labour leadership candidates in the midst of a contest. The Chancellor was proposing to speed up the withdrawal of tax credits as incomes rose – making three million families an average of £1,000 a year worse off, according to the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies. But, in a welfare bill – separate from his budget – he was also proposing to limit child tax credit to the first two children.

On 12 July, in an interview for BBC’s Sunday Politics, Harriet Harman declared:

We can’t simply say to the public you were wrong… we’re not going to do blanket opposition because we’ve heard all around the country that whilst people have got concerns, particularly about the standard of living for low income families in work, they don’t want just... blanket opposition to what the government are proposing on welfare… for example, what they’ve brought forward in regards to restricting benefits and tax credits for people with three or more children. What we’ve got to do is listen to what people around the country said to us and recognise that we didn’t get elected – again.

And she commented on the qualities voters should look for in her replacement:

I do say to all those people who are going to be voting in the leadership election, think not who you like and who makes you feel comfortable – think who actually will be able to reach out to the public and actually listen to the public and give them confidence, so that we can have a better result next time than we did last time. The point is not to have somebody who we can feel comfortable with, the point is to have somebody who can command the confidence of the country and that’s what they should have in their mind. There’s no point doing choice in a disappointed rage, we’ve got to be doing choice for the future.

But disappointed rage is precisely what some supporters of Andy Burnham felt when they heard this. And Yvette Cooper’s camp were very nervous. While it might have been right, had the leadership election been settled, to then ‘reach out’ to those who hadn’t voted Labour, both Cooper and Burnham’s supporters knew that those who had backed the party wouldn’t be impressed with apparently failing to oppose Conservative cuts. And they knew Jeremy Corbyn would not only rebel against this position but enhance his standing with members who already liked his plain-speaking, anti-austerity message.

Harman said she had consulted the Shadow Chancellor, Chris Leslie – who was backing Yvette Cooper – and Rachel Reeves, who was widely expected to be Shadow Chancellor if Andy Burnham were to win. But the leadership candidates themselves insist they had no advance warning. And they felt if there had been a better way to grow Corbyn’s support nobody had yet discovered it.

The following evening, I took up position in the gaudily carpeted committee corridor of the House of Commons, along with a small but hardy band of newspaper and broadcast journalists. Harriet Harman was to address a meeting of her parliamentary party behind closed doors, with no media access, in Committee Room 14.

So we took turns to listen at the door. Thankfully Harriet has a crisp, clear voice which carries quite some distance, so we weren’t entirely reliant on second-hand accounts of the meeting. Turning up a little late, she had walked past the waiting hacks, telling us ‘It won’t be very interesting.’ It was.

Inside, she argued strongly for the party to abstain on the welfare bill when it came before the House in just over a week’s time. She said she didn’t want to tie the next leader’s hands on the detail of welfare reform so abstention was the best option.

She also floated the idea of backing the benefits cap – but with a review after a year – which was something of a concession on her part, as she reminded her fellow MPs that the party had backed a cap in principle in the manifesto. She argued: ‘We can’t campaign against the public – we want to campaign with the public against the government’, adding that blanket opposition makes it difficult to be heard on the things you do oppose.

Her wider argument was not to fall into a Conservative trap on welfare. No vote was taken at the end of what proved to be a stormy meeting. Neither Burnham nor Cooper attended but one shadow minister told me ‘Harriet suffered a backlash in there – we were quite split.’

She had gained support for setting out opposition to some of the budget measures on Employment Support Allowance and maintenance grants but when it came to abstaining on tax credits, she faced the one thing colleagues felt she wasn’t giving the government – fierce opposition. While her supporters were pleased that five MPs had spoken up in her defence, a clear majority had been critical – with one comparing the cap on child tax credits as ‘a form of eugenics’.

The debate was resumed at the next meeting of the Shadow Cabinet the following morning. Both Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper had argued for what in parliamentary terms is called a ‘reasoned amendment’. Though doomed to fail because the Conservatives have an overall majority, it is a device for setting out the Opposition’s differences with the government. But that wasn’t the full scale of the top-table split. Instead, there was more of a splintering. Andy Burnham explained it to me like this:

I argued twice in Shadow Cabinet that we should oppose the welfare bill. In the second discussion Harriet asked for everyone’s views. There were a range – abstain; a reasoned amendment then abstain; and a reasoned amendment then oppose. I supported that. But too late in the day it looked like we were just going to abstain.

What helped concentrate minds was an amendment put down by Helen Goodman, a former shadow minister, which would be a rallying point for Labour rebels. So on 16 July – four days after her TV appearance, and two days after the acrimonious Shadow Cabinet meeting, Harriet Harman met ten of her senior colleagues – and conceded that there would indeed be an amendment to the government’s proposals. But in the words of one shadow minister, ‘It was tabled with just 20 minutes to spare. It was a dog’s breakfast’.

This is what it said:

That this House, whilst affirming its belief that there should be controls on and reforms to the overall costs of social security, that reporting obligations on full employment, apprenticeships and troubled families are welcome, and that a benefits cap and loans for mortgage interest support are necessary changes to the welfare system, declines to give a Second Reading to the Welfare Reform and Work Bill because the Bill will prevent the Government from continuing to pursue an ambition to reduce child poverty in both absolute and relative terms, it effectively repeals the Child Poverty Act 2010 which provides important measures and accountability of government policy in relation to child poverty, and it includes a proposal for the work-related activity component of employment and support allowance which is an unfair approach to people who are sick and disabled.

It avoided mentioning entirely the controversial ‘two-child’ tax credit policy. And Harriet Harman was still insisting that once the amendment had inevitably been rejected, her MPs should abstain on the welfare bill, and not vote against. Andy Burnham told me he had made progress, but not as much as he would have liked:

Under the pressure I applied, the party moved to the position of a reasoned amendment. In effect this was opposition. Having forced the change I then had a decision. Did I resign from the Shadow Cabinet and walk my supporters through the opposite lobby from the rest of the Shadow Cabinet – or abide by a collective decision that was a compromise. It’s different for Jeremy – he is not in the Shadow Cabinet and isn’t bound by collective responsibility. It’s frustrating.

Liz Kendall had praised Harman’s courage in trying to teach the party some hard lessons but even she wouldn’t explicitly back the limiting of child tax credit to the first two offspring. She told me she took a more sophisticated approach:

If we are going to oppose something we have to show how we would pay for an alternative. So on tax credits, I say to govern is to choose – we spend £100billon on tax reliefs, many of which are good, but I have asked Margaret Hodge (the former chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee) to do a big review of those reliefs to come up with the money we need.

But for Cooper and Burnham, they were forced to abstain on measures that they opposed. They knew that when politicians were mistrusted they had just been given a difficult task in arguing that they were really, really against Tory welfare changes – they just weren’t prepared to vote against them. Corbyn’s campaign – which had already by now taken off – had just been given rocket boosters. Burnham puts it like this:

It was a turning point in the campaign, definitely. It was a no win situation for me – but had I resigned over the welfare and possibly won the leadership at that moment, it wouldn’t have been me.

Yvette Cooper didn’t quite put it like that but that the welfare row had hindered, not helped:

To be honest it was a complete mess. I always felt we should oppose the bill. It included the abolition of child poverty targets that I had worked hard to establish in the first place. It also included what I call ‘the children’s tax’ – if you have three children and are in work, then – with withdrawal of tax credits – you can be worse off. But we ended up with this messy compromise. We ended with people being confused about what we stood for.

At least some of those divisions have already been reported. But not the full scale of them. It wasn’t just leadership candidates who were worried about the approach. Mainstream members of the Shadow Cabinet who weren’t competing for the top job felt that Harriet Harman hadn’t fully appreciated that Labour could oppose some of the welfare reforms and still be on the side of the ‘strivers’. One of them said ‘Are we really telling someone working all hours at their local Aldi that they can’t have a third kid?’

And while the welfare row broke through on to the front pages of the papers, other tensions remained beneath the surface. So keen was Harman to avoid knee-jerk opposition, even some Blairite frontbenchers were concerned that she might be over-correcting. A majority at the Shadow Cabinet had to nip in the bud the idea that Labour might sign up to George Osborne’s flagship measure of raising inheritance tax thresholds. Harman didn’t want to alienate aspirational voters in the south-east of England, where property prices were high. But the prevailing view was that the government was being anti-meritocratic, and if Labour wanted to show it too was serious about getting the deficit down, a measure costing almost £1 billion a year by 2020 was not the best way to do so. Plus Jeremy Corbyn – who would almost certainly rebel – might as well install himself in the leader of the Opposition’s office there and then.

But Harman was trying to douse any Corbyn effect in her own way. She was concerned his presence would encourage a ‘leftwards drift’ amongst more mainstream candidates – who had already rejected her, and Shadow Chancellor, Chris Leslie’s overtures not to oppose automatically a one per cent cap on public sector pay. Ultimately though she didn’t have to stand in another internal election and the leadership candidates were in a tougher battle than they had anticipated which meant now perhaps wasn’t the best time to sound too right-wing.

There is little doubt there was ‘a Corbyn effect’ which frustrated those close to Liz Kendall, who felt she had to do the heavy lifting of opposing his agenda without too much backing from her mainstream colleagues. A little late in the day for some, Yvette Cooper chose to oppose rather than appease the left-winger, denouncing his policy of quantitative easing – effectively a device to fund infrastructure – as risking runaway inflation, and his plan for rail renationalisation as a waste of money which could be better spent on improving child care. She also suggested unnamed others – with Burnham in mind – were ‘pandering’ or ‘copying’ Corbyn. But she still staunchly defended Labour’s spending record while in government.

At a rally in Manchester, Andy Burnham spoke of Corbyn’s energy, and with a month to go in the campaign, extended an olive branch to Corbyn’s supporters. A week later at another well-attended rally – this time at a church near London’s St Pancras station – Burnham ran through a list of crowd-pleasing policies from ending charitable status for fee-paying schools to opposing the right to buy for housing association tenants. And with just ten days to go until the leadership poll closed, he made ‘five promises’ to Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters if he became leader – which included his opposition to the welfare bill.

But, as we know, party members chose Corbyn to, arguably, what they might have seen as Corbyn-lite. I asked Andy Burnham if he had fallen victim to the Corbyn effect or indeed, had been pandering to the man who had by then become the front runner. He responded:

I don’t see it that way, for obvious reasons. The party hierarchy have been misreading the mood amongst members – they want a different kind of politics to the insipid stuff Labour has been serving up in recent times. We can’t lecture people. It’s not a case of me veering completely to the left, or whatever. The substance of what Labour was saying has been too shallow. I’d already felt that. Jeremy has come in, of course, and really spoken to that.

But was the nature of the leadership contest moving Labour further away from the voters that the party needed to win back?

* * *

If a week is a long time in politics, then Labour’s four month leadership contest felt like an absolute aeon. That cosy consensus amongst candidates and potential contestants at the Progress hustings had – on the surface – been shattered.

But Labour’s pollster James Morris isn’t entirely convinced that voters concerns can’t be addressed from the Left. For him the main lesson from Labour’s campaign and Ed Miliband’s leadership is this:

The most important thing is to have strong, clear decision making. It’s better to be strongly in the wrong place than to be weakly wobbling from side to side.

With the chopping and changing of Labour’s message over the preceding five years: ‘Voters seldom had any idea of what the party was saying. Jeremy Corbyn had at least been clear – and used language voters would understand.’

Beyond a lack of clarity, voters were worried about Labour’s spending and needed to know they would do something to grow the economy, rather than just move resources around. Corbyn certainly espoused policies for economic growth and his approach – if not his leadership ambitions – gained the endorsement of 41 economists. The list including a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, David ‘Danny’ Blanchflower. In a letter to The Observer on 23 August, they said:

The accusation is widely made that Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have moved to the extreme left on economic policy. But this is not supported by the candidate’s statements or policies. His opposition to austerity is actually mainstream economics, even backed by the conservative IMF. He aims to boost growth and prosperity.

Corbyn has, however, railed against austerity and championed borrowing for investment. Morris believes he could argue for his radical agenda in a way which appears to address voters’ concerns – for example, portraying his opposition to nuclear weapons as also opposition to ‘wasteful’ spending, and identifying his very different list of savings from the Conservatives – lowering the inheritance tax threshold, and spending less on defence – to get the deficit down.

But for all the apparent energy of a leadership campaign that was initially being seen as dull, this period of well-publicised Labour introspection could prove there is such a thing as bad publicity. A poll towards the end of the contest by ComRes for the Daily Mail suggested the Conservatives had broken through the 40 per cent barrier for the first time since the election – 14 points ahead of Labour – who were languishing in the 20s. This was more than double the six and a half point gap between the parties at the general election.

The poll also suggested that the installation of any of the leading leadership candidates was likely to make matters a little bit worse, not better:

Jeremy Corbyn 22 per cent, Andy Burnham 22 per cent and Yvette Cooper 21 per cent – all had similarly low proportions of respondents saying that they would vote for Labour if they were leader.

The challenges for Jeremy Corbyn are immense. Party management and discipline will be difficult, especially as he himself has been a serial rebel.

But there is one lesson for any leader to learn from Ed Miliband’s time in office. To be more inclusive. During Labour’s election campaign, the most senior and prominent pair of Labour politicians, the two Eds, hardly met. Ed Balls wasn’t prevented from doing what he wanted to do by ­Miliband, but his allies say he was rarely involved in campaign strategy. The party’s general secretary – the most senior official – had difficulty in getting access to the party’s own polling regularly. Despite health being one policy area where Labour had a lead over the Conservatives, the Shadow Spokesman, Andy Burnham often felt shut out of his leader’s plans. One insider – who was genuinely ‘in’ – put it like this:

You need better decision-making processes. Keeping decision-making in a tiny little circle and basically shutting out most of the Shadow Cabinet from doing almost anything is certainly one way of running a campaign but not one I would recommend. The political management operation was fantastic in the past five years – that is, keeping Ed in place – there were ructions, but they managed to hold the whole thing together. But at the cost of overall direction. You need slightly weaker political management – and to do more to bring people in, to share information and create a leadership team. Although people think of Blair as almost presidential, in opposition prior to 1997 you had that approach.

If the first task of the new leader is to unite a party that was polarised over a long contest, they may have little choice but to embrace opponents. If not, one shadow minister warned:

There is a very real danger of splits – the parallels with the mid to late ’80 are very, very strong right now. Labour must have one eye on its history all through this.

The pages of that history tell the story of the SDP split on the right, and the expulsion of Militant on the left.

Labour’s victory song in 1997 was ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. A more appropriate phrase – often used in adverts from that era – might now be ‘The value of your of investment can go down.’

* * *

So what are the lessons for Labour?

Those closest to Ed Miliband will point out he had a difficult task in trying to create enough distance between his party and the financial crisis for which Labour was seen to be responsible. He had, they argue, little choice but to steer between the two dangerous rocks of difference and credibility. If he went too far left and emphasised his distinctiveness from the government by abandoning austerity then any attempt to restore post-crash economic credibility would be holed below the waterline. But veering right, and signing up to the government’s deficit reduction strategy, albeit with different policy priorities, would sink any hope of motivating many traditional supporters who were looking for clear blue water between Cameron and Labour.

But Miliband’s strategists would concede that in avoiding some risks on the left and right, too few voters were clear about what forward course he was charting.

Overall, though his hand on the tiller did move the party further left from the centre.The Conservatives gave those thinking about backing them a reason to do so when they successfully argued that the SNP would stick a small outboard motor to the Labour vessel and propel it even faster in that direction, and the economy into stormier waters. But Ed Miliband’s main strategists would argue those who sought but failed to succeed him perhaps sought to jerk the tiller back slightly – or more dramatically – while in a state of shock, without a hard headed assessment of the conditions.

Miliband was not relaxed about what he saw as increasing inequality and was proud to have raised the issue of whose interests a growing economy should serve. But his advisers have consistently denied there was a ‘35 per cent strategy’ – a focus on winning just enough votes to get into government, with the help of disillusioned Lib Dems, and those disillusioned with politics more generally.

In fact, nothing riles them more than this charge. They targeted Conservative-held seats and wanted to win back people who had backed David Cameron in 2010. Those around him would, however, concede that they didn’t have a compelling enough answer to the question of how to improve living standards for those who had higher incomes in some parts of the country – but who, with little reliance on the state, often felt they were struggling with high costs. Labour performed particularly badly in the south of England, outside London.

The man put in charge of Labour’s election campaign Spencer, now Lord, Livermore – felt himself that the focus had been too narrow. As I saw day-by-day on the campaign trail, while Labour had plans to tax those at the top and improve employment rights for those at the bottom, it didn’t even emphasise policies it already had – from reducing childcare costs to help to get on the housing ladder – for those in the middle nearly as much. As Labour in the end failed to get anywhere near 35 per cent of the vote then it is obvious, to say the least, that they must broaden their appeal.

While Labour lost seats, however, Ed Miliband’s allies don’t believe they lost all of the arguments. The Conservatives’ adoption of the Living Wage – for over 25s – is a measure Ed Miliband would call ‘pre-distribution’ – and didn’t feel quite bold enough to offer himself. Those vying for the US Democratic nomination for president, including Hillary Clinton, are all following their own version of ‘the country succeeds when working people succeed.’

But Ed Miliband has departed front-line politics. And just as Tony Blair was the future once, the new recruits – encouraged in by new rules – can shape the future now. In many ways, it is a very different party to the one which was in government for 13 years. Little more than a third of its 2010 membership are still active.

So it’s now for the 550,000 or so members and supporters to draw lessons from the election, not former leaders – and certainly not me.

* * *

Covering both the election campaign and the leadership contest which followed, there do, however, seem to be some very clear pointers to what issues need to be addressed – though many of the lessons drawn from this tumultuous year in the party’s history will depend on the political prism through which they are viewed.

To necessarily broaden its appeal, the party will have to decide whether they will put serious political effort and organisational resources into trying to ‘re-engage’ non-voters for whom Russell Brand proved to be no magic wand, or to spend more time winning back people who consistently vote but have drifted leftwards to the Greens, and rightwards to UKIP as well as to the Conservatives. Labour will also need to examine closely why, with a small overall swing to the party despite the loss of seats, older voters seem to be moving in the other direction. But the policies designed to appeal to a wider electorate will depend on the politics of those who develop them.

During the leadership campaign, Liz Kendall argued that reassurance, especially on public spending, was necessary to win back voters in English marginals in particular – Nuneaton, Reading, Stevenage – who hadn’t forgiven Labour for being in power during the financial crash. But as the pollster James Morris points out, it isn’t impossible to broaden Labour’s appeal from the left, too – with caveats: that the party is seen to address key concerns about the economy and about immigration rather than ignore them. A battle would have to be won to make a distinction between borrowing to invest while eliminating the day-to-day deficit. But on the latter it’s not, the pollsters would argue, as unpopular as some may think to raise taxes on business to help do this, so long as there are other policies that would convince voters the economy would grow, and not go into reverse under Labour.

But the bigger lesson, the pollsters suggest, is that clarity of message is almost more important than the message itself. ‘One Nation Labour’, ‘Rebuilding Britain’, ‘The Promise of Britain’, ‘Squeezed Middle’ – the list goes on. A cabinet minister under Blair and Brown said to me: ‘Those around Ed Miliband never convinced him that he didn’t need five strategies when one strategy would do.’ Rather than Labour being regarded as too left- or too right-wing by most voters, they were never really sure what it stood for at all. The other striking aspect of the election campaign is how little of it was spent attacking the Conservatives head-on. Conventional London press conferences – usually the vehicle for denouncing opponents, complete with dossiers suggesting all sorts of horrors await if you vote the ‘wrong way’ – had been ditched. As Ed Miliband toured the country he would set out his vision for change – he was, as a senior aide put it, his own strategist. But the team around Ed Balls felt the party leader hadn’t conveyed the risks of a majority Conservative government to voters, so Labour’s plans were subjected to far more demanding scrutiny from the media.

The difficulty for Labour over the summer was not whether but how to oppose. Harriet Harman’s decision to abstain on the welfare bill boosted Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign as he could distance himself from the Conservatives and the Labour establishment. That issue is now resolved, but the underlying dilemma isn’t. If you are in opposition, will you be regarded as a credible party of government if you simply come out against just about everything the present administration does – including apparently popular measures? Labour’s membership shot up in the wake of the defeat – but the party leadership can’t just speak to their half a million and more members and supporters but to the ten or 11 million voters Labour will need to win.

Labour is very nearly 100 seats behind the Conservatives – it will need, on paper at least, to take constituencies it has consistently failed to win in the past if it is to have a majority in 2020. That’s not impossible but given the scale of the task, it’s also likely that the new leadership will face the same questions as the old. It is now clear that Labour would have attempted to form a government from a very poor second place. So they are almost certainly going to be asked again about legitimacy. But fundamentally they will be interrogated on this point: Would they do a deal with the SNP to get into Downing Street? And they will need a convincing and consistent answer.

And as for Scotland, Labour’s private polling suggested the party never neutralised the impression it would put Westminster first. A senior Labour strategist told me that he was frustrated that too many of his colleagues hadn’t accepted that Scotland was lost to them sooner. Just before the formal campaign got under way, at a tense meeting in London, Jim Murphy was refused extra resources for his already well-funded campaign and told to better prioritise what seats he actually thought he could hold. That strategist’s advice is that Labour needs now to accept it will be ‘a long road back’ in Scotland and the party must address the ‘the English question’.

Scottish Labour has a new leader – 34-year-old Kezia Dugdale. She said on the day of her election in August that she was of a new generation, unburdened by the baggage of the past and that voters should ‘take another look’ at her party. Under her leadership, ‘Nobody will be in any doubt about what the Labour Party stands for and who we stand with.’

Former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish believes the lesson Labour should learn from the election is that the only way to convince voters it won’t put Westminster before Scotland, and to be free of the need to go cap in hand to Labour in London for cash, is through independence. No, not for the nation, but for the party. Scottish Labour would become a sister party of what is now the UK party – like the relationship between Germany’s Christian Democrats and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union. He argues:

An independent Labour Party could say it’s the voice of Scotland. But with rights, would come responsibilities. We would have to raise our own funds but the benefits would be substantial. It would be clear we were sending MPs to Westminster to represent Scotland. We need to display deep patriotism, not cheap patriotism – and not narrow nationalism.

It will be an interesting debate.

Apart from facing political challenges, Labour will also need to look at organisational changes. Several senior people have stressed that a field campaign, or ‘ground war’ – knocking on doors, delivering leaflets – is designed to ‘get the party over the line’. It’s no substitute for lacklustre leadership or a political offer people don’t want to purchase. Nonetheless, there is evidence that Labour didn’t target voters as effectively as the Conservatives or the SNP, didn’t put resources into vulnerable seats they needed to defend, were blindsided by the scale of the Lib Dem collapse, and their five million – or more – conversations gleaned little information of use in identifying why some voters were reluctant to support them.

If Labour gets itself into a competitive position again, it will need to carry out reforms. There is every chance it will be less well-resourced in 2020 following reforms to trade union funding, so it may have to be more radical. Its new leader may have no less a task than transforming the Labour Party into a community-based campaigning organisation that puts its new members to good use and continues to grow. That will require a lot of perspiration – but also perhaps more inspiration than was evident during the past five years.