Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
BROTHERS Picking up my brother’s body from Papua New Guinea was the most horrific thing I have ever done
nteering he never even spoke to his ily back home. He explains: “It was a y formative experience of my life. nd I made one phone call home in years, but you know what? They e out when I called.” e stresses that it was not down to a but rather the technology of the day. fact, the family was so close, one her was responsible for naming him.
He says: “I was supposed to be called something else. Mum and Dad agreed what I was going to be called, and he took the ers to go off and register the birth. then he changed the name.” is mum would never reveal what it uld actually have been. he Islington North MP, who lost both ents before he won the Labour leadip, says one of his earliest memories a family day out to Stonehenge. e says: “My mum and dad didn’t like anybody being at home, they didn’t like anybody not doing something, so they dragged us all off to Stonehenge that day. They’d given me, even though I was probably about four then, quite a long lecture about the history of Stonehenge.”
Asked whether they would be proud now, he says: “They both were still alive when I was first elected to Parliament, so they were very pleased about that. “So I hope so.”
Jeremy now has a close relationship with his own three sons.
One, Seb, has entered politics, and works for the Labour Party, but he has never pushed any of them. In fact Ben, the eldest, works in football, another of Jeremy’s passions.
Ben works for Watford FC, even though his dad is a diehard Arsenal follower and fan of manager Arsene Wenger. Jeremy lives close enough to the Arsenal stadium to hear the crowd roar when they score. He says: “There was that nil-nil draw the other week and I opened all the windows and there was nothing. I thought the match had been cancelled.” While his sons may have different interests, they have all grown up immersed in politics.
Jeremy says: “The eldest one has been to every count, every election, since 1987, just after he was born. The first one he came to he was 10 days old. That’s cruel, isn’t it, really?”
For such a family man, a life in politics must have been hard to juggle at times. But Jeremy has never backed away from contentious issues, whether it is getting rid of apartheid, scrapping nuclear weapons or attacking Tony Blair’s decision to enter the Iraq War, an issue that angers him especially. He says: “I think Tony Blair should be prepared to answer for the stuff that’s been put against him.”
Has it all been worth it? He says, simply: “I do what I do because I believe in it. I am proud to work for the community I represent, proud to do stuff to try to change politics, get a bit of justice, a bit of peace, a bit of equality.”
If he becomes PM, he would stand up to Donald Trump. He says: “There’s a number of things I’d like to discuss with President Trump, and I will. Climate change for a start. I’d put my case to him. He, no doubt, would have a great deal to say to me.”
With his incredible, and unlikely, rise to the top, perhaps it is time a film was made about the unassuming chap who ended up being cheered by thousands on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury?
Given how he met his third wife, Laura Alvarez, originally from Mexico, it should be a rom-com, perhaps?
He explains: “Her niece had gone missing, disappeared, and I met her sister who was looking for her, and I then asked to help, and, of course, I did.”
So Hugh Grant to play Jeremy, the knight in shining armour, then?
He laughs and says: “Me and Hugh Grant are a bit different. I haven’t even got the hair for a start.”
John Bishop: In Conversation With Jeremy Corbyn, tonight at 9pm on W.