So who was behind Corbyn’s suicide note?

Labour’s leaked manifesto bears all the hallmarks of a political fixer who was schooled in the dark arts

From the start of the general election campaign, Labour’s leadership came under fire for its caution. Putting VAT on private school fees seemed to represent the limit of Jeremy Corbyn’s radical instincts. That, and an unenthusiastic reheat of Ed Miliband’s platform of two years ago. But that was not what 250,000 new Corbynista members of the party signed up to support. Where was nuclear disarmament, they asked? What about nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy? When do we get to soak the rich?

Now we know. Labour’s leaked manifesto offers far more red meat to Corbyn’s followers than recent policy proposals suggested it would. Nationalisation of bus services has been added to previous commitments to buy back the railways and Royal Mail. But a ban on trains with driver-operated doors? Now that’s new, and will, naturally, be welcomed by the rail unions, especially the RMT.

It is the significant increase in the trade unions’ influence that will give most comfort to Left-wing voters, and leave everyone else anxiously watching old film reels of the Winter of Discontent.

Central to Labour’s industrial strategy is the re-establishment of a Ministry for Labour, last seen in Whitehall in 1968. This new department will deliver a number of promises to the unions, the most eye-catching of which are public inquiries into the “Battle of Orgreave” during the 1984/85 miners’ strike, and another public inquiry into the practice of blacklisting. The most recent Trades Union Act will be repealed, and union reps will have legally enforceable access to any workplace in order to proselytise. Public sector contracts will only be awarded to companies that recognise trade unions, presumably even if they are more costly to the taxpayer.

So what on earth has happened in the past few days? It’s as if merely the repeated mention of Karl Marx over the weekend has suddenly injected a heavy dose of Viagra into the Left. At last we’re seeing glimpses of the red-blooded socialism Corbyn has been preaching for three decades.

Who is responsible for this sequel to Michael Foot’s “longest suicide note in history”, as the late Gerald Kaufman christened the party’s 1983 manifesto? The fingerprints on the cover, I strongly suspect, belong to none other than Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson.

Watson is a protégé of the Trotbasher John Spellar, MP for Warley, who was himself the protégé of John Golding, the former general secretary of the engineering union of which Spellar was the political officer in the early Eighties. It was Golding who, as a Labour MP with the proud nickname “Hammer of the Trots”, manipulated the hapless and naive Bennites on the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) into including in the party’s 1983 manifesto every bonkers and barmy proposal the party had come up with in the previous three years.

Mistakenly assuming this to be an olive branch from the normally combative Golding, the Left eagerly grasped the offer with both hands, unaware that Golding’s motive was simply to ensure that when the Thatcherite tsunami obliterated Labour at the polls, everyone would know exactly whose defeat it was.

Watson enjoys his reputation as a trade union fixer in the Golding mould, a remnant of the machine politics that used to play a much bigger part in the party than it does today. He seems to have taken a leaf out of Golding’s book and encouraged his leader, and his leader’s supporters, to throw caution to the wind and embrace their inner Marxist. Because when Labour goes down to a horribly inevitable and predictable defeat on June 8, it will aid the recovery effort if there is no doubt about whose door the blame must be laid.

That door is in Islington. Today the reported authors of the manifesto – Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications, and Andrew Fisher, who supported an anarchist candidate at the last election – may be warmly congratulating themselves on putting together a truly “radical” platform. On June 9, however, they may find themselves blaming each other.

Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. But the parentage of the Labour Party General Election Manifesto 2017 will not be a matter of doubt.