The strange art of political plotting
As it’s revealed Jeremy Corbyn held a secret meeting at his allotment, Harry Mount says he’s not the first...
When Winston Churchill met Joseph Stalin and Franklin D Roosevelt during the war, they chose dramatic venues such as Tehran and Yalta. Jeremy Corbyn settled on his allotment in East Finchley. Earlier this summer, the Labour leader reportedly met Diane Abbott and John Mcdonnell at his north London plot on a top-secret mission – to turn Labour into a Remain party.
According to a Dispatches investigation, broadcast on Channel 4 last night, Corbyn wanted to avoid the inevitable gossip that would develop if they had met in Westminster. But the “allotment plot” was overthrown by Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s director of strategy and communications, a hard-left Brexiteer.
Political plots often take place in strange venues. Here, then, are some of the strangest...
The Independent Group launches at Nando’s, 2019
When the pro-remain Independent Group of MPS was founded in February this year, its 11 members – who had all jumped ship from other parties – held their first round-table dinner in a London branch of Nando’s. Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry and Luciana Berger et al looked rather uncomfortable as they tucked into the restaurant’s signature spicy chicken dish. However, the bid to look like men and women of the people backfired somewhat when they ordered salad, bottled water (didn’t advisers tell them there are free refills at the machines?) and plain chips. Nine months later, after two name changes and more than half its MPS left, the parliamentary group is a spent political force. Should’ve ordered peri-peri.
The Conservative ‘Pizza Plotters’, 2018
In October 2018, Andrea Leadsom, then Leader of the Commons, invited a select group of colleagues to meet in her Parliamentary office over pizza to torpedo Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Eight senior ministers – Dominic Raab, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Penny Mordaunt, Chris Grayling, Liz Truss and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox – got stuck into thin-crust fiorentinas to discuss how to scupper the planned “soft” exit. Several Cabinet members, including Liam Fox and Esther Mcvey, sent their apologies. Perhaps they prefer a deep crust.
The Tate Britain Brexiteers, 2011-2016
It was beneath Rex Whistler’s The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats that Britain’s exit from the EU was planned by a tiny cadre of Eurosceptics – Daniel Hannan, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless. “We guessed that we’d never meet any MPS or hacks there, and we never did,” says Hannan.
Labour’s Curry House Plot, 2006
That summer, Tom Watson met fellow Labour MP Siôn Simon and a group of party malcontents to dream up ways to topple Tony Blair. It started with lunch in a Birmingham restaurant, followed by drinks in a Dudley pub before dinner in a Wolverhampton balti house. Tony Blair left office the following year.
The Loch Fyne Oyster Plot, 2004
On the long drive back to Glasgow airport after a memorial service on the Inner Hebridean island of Iona to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Labour leader John Smith, John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, and Gordon Brown, then chancellor, dropped off at the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Argyll. The rumour was that the two men discussed a “peaceful succession” from Blair to Brown. Health secretary John Reid and minister Douglas Alexander were also present – yet a spokesman denied the existence of any “Loch Fyne accord”.
The Granita Deal, 1994
The most famous of all recent plots allegedly took place in May 1994, in the now defunct restaurant Granita in Islington, and led to the formation of New Labour. Tony Blair, then shadow home secretary, and Gordon Brown, then shadow chancellor, met 19 days after the death of Labour leader John Smith. Brown reportedly agreed not to stand in the leadership contest in order to give Blair a free run. In return, Brown would take the role of chancellor and accede to No10 after Blair had served two terms.
For years, they denied it ever happened. In her memoirs, Cherie Blair said the meeting, in fact, took place in a neighbour’s Islington home, not in the restaurant.