‘Corbyn must change to become PM’
TOM Watson has told Jeremy Corbyn he must change if he wants to be Prime Minister.
In an extraordinary intervention, the Labour Deputy Leader openly acknowledged he was working to “give a platform” to MPs who come from a different tradition to Mr Corbyn.
“Jeremy needs to understand that if we are going to be in No 10 we need to change,” he said.
“There’s a crisis for the soul of the Labour Party.”
Postie turned celebrated man of letters Alan Johnson yearns for another Labour government but not his old comrade Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.
The slum boy orphaned at 13 who rose to fill top Cabinet positions in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments, and then wrote a series of bestselling memoirs, admits that’s politically tricky.
“I’m not sure that I do want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister,” Johnson tells me. “I want Labour to be in power so there’s a paradox if you like.
“I worry because I just don’t think he, Jeremy, is up to the job and I think what we’re seeing now is lack of leadership over where the country goes. We should be wiping the floor with the Tories in the polls and we’re not and Jeremy must take some responsibility for that.”
The obvious question is who does the 68-year-old ex-Hull MP who stood down in 2017 think could do a better job?
He rattles off MPs’ names: Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper, Angela Rayner, Stella Creasy, Diana Johnson and Keir Starmer.
Heading Labour’s Remain campaign in the 2016 referendum, Johnson clashed with Corbyn and thought it a success the Eurosceptic Labour leader said anything positive about staying in, but Johnson now thinks Brexit must go ahead and another poll would be divisive.
Yet the frustration is clear in the ex-minister, who travelled from youthful Marxist to the trade union Right, that his party isn’t doing better under a hard Left leader.
Not that this veteran of many past battles, who believes in the values of solidarity and loyalty, is about to jump ship to support the splitters who’ve set up their breakaway group in Parliament.
“I’ve been in the Labour Party for 45 years and intend to stay but,” adds Johnson in sympathy with a Jewish MP horribly abused, “I haven’t had to endure the disgraceful abuse aimed at former colleagues like Luciana Berger.”
He’s a good-natured toughie, behind the easy chat and stylish suit, a smart man who fought every step of the way.
I’ve known him for more than 25 years since he was an engaging general secretary of a posties’ union now called the Communication Workers Union.
Johnson was a militant moderate behind the firebrand speeches, pushing hard then preferring a deal to no-deal and strikes. If some lucky people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, Johnson’s was empty of cutlery.
Home was a few squalid rooms, dad Stephen vanished and after cleaner mum Lily died when Johnson was just 13, he was brought up by teenage sister Linda in a council flat.
Yet there isn’t a trace of Little Orphan Alan self- pity when the former Home Secretary talks about how harsh life was then.
Instead when we sit in a pub on London’s Carnaby Street, a haunt in the swinging 1960s of the mod whose dream was to be a pop star, he’s relieved he no longer wakes at 4am every day to go to work.
“I had the most elaborate Heath Robinson arrangement for getting up at
I was the beneficiary of two strong women, my mother and my sister ALAN JOHNSON ON GROWING UP POOR AND ORPHANED AT 13
the Post Office,” he recalls, referring to the cartoonist known for his drawings of elaborate machines. “There was one alarm next to me in the bedroom. I put it over the other side of the room so I’d have to get up to turn it off.
Then I’d go downstairs and lay on the settee in my uniform with a greatcoat over me and another alarm to get me a little bit closer to when I had to leave.
“All the time I was thinking I can’t wait until I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. It was tough.”
These days the bright London boy who passed his 11-plus and left school without any exams is touring the country with a talk show.
In the likes of Southampton, Workington, Peterborough and Coventry he’ll focus on the social significance of his life’s soundtracks from Elvis Presley, Lonnie Donegan, Beatles and the rest. “Music is my passion, politics always an interest,” smiles Johnson. That interest is fuelling an anger burning fiercer than ever in this graduate of the school of hard knocks at fresh insecurities suffered by working-class families.
“The University of Life is a bit of a cliche but it was for me, starting at the Post Office aged 18 and with three kids by the age of 20,” he admits.
“I keep saying to people when they say I’ve had a hard life: I didn’t have a hard life. My mother had a hard life. I was the beneficiary of two strong women, my mother and my sister.
“My mother died on the council waiting list – her one dream was having her own front door instead of sharing with five other families – then me, when we were 19, getting a council house on the Britwell estate in Slough.
“I had a job and if you could get up at four in the morning, a job for life and a pension with a strong union to defend my interests. These are three things – council house, job for life and pension and a strong union – all diminished.
“The unions are still doing their bit but they are not as strong as they were. I was bloody lucky. Now if you can get a council house, you’re a loser or a stigma is attached.
“There’s not the opportunities to get those houses. I get sick and tired of hearing there’s no longer any such thing as a job for life. Why not?
“Yes, the mines are gone. The steelworks are gone. The fishing industry’s gone. But there are still jobs you can do for life. Watch the newsreaders on the telly. They’re there all the time. They don’t stop being a newsreader.”
Friends of the Queens Park Rangers fan were surprised when he quit London to live in East Yorkshire where he’s penning a novel. He pops back to the Big Smoke to make TV and radio shows, including a Radio 4 series on schools.
Johnson is viewed as another of Labour’s lost leaders, pipped for the deputy’s role in 2007 by Harriet Harman but never auditioning for the main gig despite regular pressure. Did he want to be Prime Minister? “I wouldn’t want to do the bloody job. It’s a terrible job,” he almost shouts. “You’ve got to want to be leader to do it and that’s part of Jeremy’s problem. Nobody leaves 10 Downing Street a saner, rational person than they went in.
“I often feel I have to apologise for refusing to stand. I was always being urged to stand against the leader who had the merit of being elected.
“People were urging me to stab Gordon Brown in the back when he was handling the global financial crisis and step over his prostrate body.
“Then I was urged to stab in the back Ed Miliband. I didn’t want any of that.”
Perhaps not, but when too many politicians enjoyed a red carpet ride in life we could do with someone born without privilege who first did a proper job.
■ Alan Johnson’s tour dates can be found at https://alanjohnsonbooks.co.uk/official-tour-dates/
People were urging me to stab Gordon Brown in the back then Ed Miliband ALAN JOHNSON ON PRESSURE TO STAND AGAINST LEADERS