Mail SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE
Corbyn faces a leadership challenge from Owen Smith, with the result to be announced at the start of the Labour conference in Liverpool next month.
By contrast, Theresa May was given the keys to No10 just three weeks after the Brexit referendum. Mullin said: “The Tories have always been much more serious about power than Labour. They were in trouble too in the immediate aftermath but they got their act together very quickly.
“Indeed, they got a new leader while Labour were still arguing about which names should go on the ballot paper.”
Mullin, who publishes his memoir Hinterland next month, first met Corbyn in 1981 when they campaigned to get Benn elected as Labour deputy leader.
But Mullin, who went on to serve as a minister in Tony Blair’s government, never believed that Corbyn would become leader of the party one day.
He said: “I’ve always got on well with him, I’ve always respected him, but I never thought of him as leadership material.”
Mullin says Corbyn’s opposition to invading Iraq may have helped him get elected.
He said: “Jeremy was a leading member of the Stop the War campaign and I think that is what propelled him, however unexpectedly, to the Labour leadership.”
Mullin will be speaking at the Festival of Politics at the Scottish Parliament on August 19 and at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 29.
This time last year, during the Labour leadership campaign, the historian told us that Corbyn was no Michael Foot.
Okay, so Morgan doesn’t much like Corbyn but he both overstates Hardie’s virtues and misrepresents his politics.
In his contrast with Corbyn, he claims “Hardie was not a class warrior” but any reader of Hardie’s life and work would see that there was no harsher critic of capitalism and he believed it was the working class that would win socialism.
Hardie was first and foremost an agitator. He served in Parliament but was never at ease there. Like Corbyn, he was more comfortable talking directly to people in struggle than being sucked into the gentlemen’s club of the Houses of Parliament. Hardie described the House of Commons “as a place which I remember with a haunting horror”.
He was not always popular with his colleagues. Far from always receiving “the love of his colleagues”, he was often at odds with them. Many preferred the easier life of making friends with, rather than challenging, Tories and Liberals.
His final and most bitter split with many of his colleagues was his opposition to war. Even in his own Welsh constituency, he was met by a howling mob. He explained that living with that level of hostility was “the price of the ticket” for sticking to his principles.
Corbyn was famously chair of Stop the War and has been vilified for his principled stand against the Iraq war, bombing in Syria and the renewal of Trident.
Corbyn has, without foundation, been accused of encouraging anti-Semitism while, it is claimed, Hardie was a champion of Jewish refugees.
But Hardie was not immune from the casual racism that was common in his day, including in his maiden speech to the House of Commons when Hardie complained that fine British workers were emigrating and being replaced by Jews.
Both Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith contributed chapters to “What Would Keir Hardie Say?”
Smith talks about Hardie’s enthusiasm for grassroots activism and Corbyn of his quest for a united peace movement.
They share their respect for Keir Hardie and for each other. It is possible to do both.