SPOT THE PYGMY!
Two of these three men made the world a better place. The third is a bully-boy champagne socialist set on defying both democracy and the law. Can you guess who’s who?
SELF-RIGHTEOUS trade union firebrand Len McCluskey this week compared himself to those giants of freedom, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. Was he justified in drawing parallels with men who singlehandedly changed the course of their nations’ histories? Read LEO McKINSTRY’s analysis of their lives and achievements, and decide for yourself ...
CHILDHOOD
MANDELA: Born in 1918 in the village of Mvezo in South Africa’s Cape Province, the son of the village chief and counsellor to the tribal king. His childhood home was a beehive-shaped mud hut with a floor made of crushed anthills. Much of his time as a boy was spent working as a cattleherd. Both his parents were illiterate but when he was seven his mother, a devout Christian, sent him to a Methodist mission school based in a single room. His secondary education was also in a Methodist school.
GANDHI: Born in 1869 in the British-ruled state of Porbandar, where his father was the chief minister.
Like Mandela, Gandhi had a devout mother who prayed and fasted regularly. When he was five, the family moved to the smaller state of Rajkot, his father again serving as a senior administrator. Mahatma entered the local school when he was nine, though he was only an average student and was plagued by shyness.
McCLUSKEY: Born in Liverpool in 1950, the son of a painter and decorator, also called Len, who had worked in the docks.
Living in a two-up, two- down redbrick terrace house, he had modest but contented upbringing, though he inherited some of his mother Peggy’s intense political partisanship. ‘She would rather bite off her own arm than vote Tory,’ it was said of her.
Len went to the Cardinal Godfrey state high school in Anfield.
EARLY POLITICS
MANDELA: Throughout his youth, Mandela’s experiences of the ever-tightening apartheid regime fuelled his involvement in the African National Congress, which was campaigning against colonial rule.
He formally joined the movement in 1943 while studying law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was the only black student. During the Fifties, when he working as a lawyer, his involvement with radical activism deepened, leading to frequent harassment by the state. In 1956 he was even arrested for treason, though the charges were dropped. GANDHI: Like Mandela, Gandhi became a law student after leaving school. In a bold move for someone so shy, he left India in 1888 to qualify at the London Bar. He then moved to South Africa in 1893, where his legal work was matched by his high-profile involvement with the early civil rights movement, inspired by his anger at racial discrimination.
On his return to India during World War I, his mounting fame put him at the forefront of the Congress Party, campaigning for Indian self-rule. McCLUSKEY: He began work in the Liverpool docks on leaving school, but as a clerical worker rather than a docker. Becoming a shop steward in 1968 in the Transport and General Workers’ Union — the forerunner of Unite — he was soon displaying his militancy. ‘I was very much a child of the Sixties. Revolution was in the air,’ he once said. His fondness for confrontation drove him up the union hierarchy, making him a Merseyside regional officer of the TGWU in 1979, a post which he used to flirt with the notoriously extreme Militant Tendency.
THEIR STRUGGLE
MANDELA: Through the African National Congress ( ANC), he fought against a system built entirely on bigotry, fuelled by vicious human rights abuses and totalitarian repression.
At first Mandela tried to cling to the Gandhi doctrine of nonviolence, but from the late Fifties he decided this approach could not succeed because of the racist intransigence of the South African government, as epitomised by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when 69 anti-apartheid demonstrators were killed by police.
The return of violence, he felt, was the only answer — and indeed he set up the ANC’s military wing, which carried out bomb attacks in South Africa against government installations. GANDHI: British rule in India was nothing like the monstrous autocracy of South Africa. But still, it was undemocratic, unrepresentative and unsustainable. Gandhi’s ultimately successful campaign against the empire was based not on terrorist insurgency but on defiance, reflected in his campaign for a boycott of British goods and his refusal to pay a tax on salt levied by the Government, which had a monopoly in its manufacture. McCLUSKEY: The self-styled warrior against oppression has nothing like the genuine abuses of imperialism and racism to fight against. In fact, he is really the defender of privilege. His battles have largely consisted of lobbying for already well-rewarded workers, including British Airways cabin crew and public employees who already enjoy higher pay, shorter hours, longer holidays and better pensions than most workers in the private sector.
PRICE THEY PAID
MANDELA: Bravery in the face of adversity defined Mandela. When he was put on trial on terrorism charges involving sabotage in 1964, he declared that he was ‘prepared to die’ for the ‘ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony’. He was sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment on Robben Island, where he was confined to a small
cell with the floor as his bed and a bucket as his lavatory. radios and books were banned, and he was allowed one visitor a year. At the start of his imprisonment he had to undertake hard labour, hammering stones into gravel. GANDHI: During his civil disobedience campaigns in South Africa and India, he was imprisoned by the authorities 13 times. Solitary confinement and hard labour often featured in his punishment, but he made the acceptance of suffering part of his political creed. During World War II he was detained for two years by the British. For part of that time, he went on hunger strike. McCLUSKEY: He might pose as a crusader against injustice, but he has never experienced a moment of harassment by the authorities. Even his incendiary remarks this week about defying the law on strikes have met with no response.
If anything, he is the authoritarian. When a journalist on the Spectator magazine wrote a mildly disobliging article in 2015 about his leftist influence on Labour, he used an expensive legal firm to threaten libel action.
In the same vein, Gerard Coyne, the Unite union’s West Midlands regional organiser, found himself forced out of his job on ‘preposterous and trumped- up charges’ after he dared to challenge McCluskey this year in the union’s leadership contest. ‘ Political dissent is not tolerated inside Unite,’ said Coyne after his dismissal. McCluskey’s winning vote amounted to just 5.6 per cent of the total Unite membership, making a mockery of his pretensions to be the voice of working people.
LIFESTYLES
MANDELA: Even though he was arguably the most famous person in the world — and certainly the most celebrated — on his release from prison in 1990, he never showed much interest in personal wealth, always living modestly. On becoming President in 1994, he cut his salary by a third and handed part of the rest to a children’s charity.His homes in Johannesburg and his ancestral village of Qunu were large but lacking in ostentation. When he died, he left an estate of £2.5 million. GANDHI: He made a simple life of sel f - discipline the central principle of his politics, once he became the spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement. Shunning all wealth, he lived an almost monastic existence dressed in his simple shawl, loincloth and spectacles. His homes in India were a series of modest bungalows in residential communities. His diet was strictly vegetarian because he loathed the concept of animal slaughter. McCLUSKEY: A classic champagne socialist, he does not allow his politics to interfere with his pleasures. Only last year he was seen partying at the luxurious Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where junior suites cost £1,200 a night. Fond of the Gay Hussar restaurant in the West End, he caused a storm of controversy this year when it emerged that Unite had contributed £417,000 towards the purchase of a £700,000 flat for him in Central London ( the union said the arrangement was an investment, and had the full authority of its executive committee).
ROMANCE
MANDELA: ‘I was hardly Don Juan,’ he once said, but he did have a colourful private life. His first marriage, to nurse Evelyn Mase, the cousin of an ANC leader, ended in 1958 amid accusations of his adultery. She remained embittered for the rest of his life.
‘The whole world worships Nelson too much. He is only a man,’ she said in 1994.
He subsequently married Winnie, an uncompromising ANC activist whose reputation was destroyed by her involvement in sectarian violence within the black community — and then, more happily, Graca Machel, the widow of the Mozambique president. Altogether, he fathered six children. GANDHI: When he was just 13, he had an arranged marriage to 14year- old Kasturbai Kapadia, a union that produced four sons. She remained devoted to him but, from 1905, Gandhi appeared to develop an aversion to the act of intercourse. He turned this repulsion into another principle of selfrestraint, advocating chastity for ‘thoughtful’ Indians.
At times, he tested his own discipline by sleeping and bathing with naked young women, some of them his own relatives. McCLUSKEY: His fondness for disorder spills over into his personal life. Married to Ann for 25 years, he had a child in 1991 by his mistress, Jennie Formby. But when he divorced Ann, he moved in with another partner, Paula Lace.
He remains close to Jennie, who has recently served as both the political director and a regional secretary of Unite. McCluskey was also embroiled in a bitter controversy in 2013 over the vacant Labour seat of Falkirk, when he was said to have pushed for the selection of another of his female friends, Karie Murphy.
ACHIEVEMENTS
MANDELA: A heroic campaigner against racial injustice, he brought down the infamous apartheid regime in South Africa through the sheer force of his moral leadership. The first democratically elected President of his country, he remains a global symbol of humanity.
On his death in 2013, Barack Obama described him as ‘one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that anyone will ever share time with on this earth’. GANDHI: Armed only with his ascetic integrity and pioneering philosophy of non-violent resistance, he overthrew the might of the British Empire in India, bringing democratic independence to his homeland. His example inspired the movement for colonial freedom throughout the world.
Einstein said of him: ‘We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlighted contemporary, a role model for generations to come.’ McCLUSKEY: The most prominent trade union leader in modern Britain, he has used his muscle to drag Labour radically to the Left under Jeremy Corbyn, and accelerate his movement’s decline into becoming merely a mouthpiece of narrow, well-paid vested interests.
Often described as a dinosaur and a relic of the Seventies, he yearns for a return to that era of turmoil. ‘It was a time of great advances for working people,’ he says. By which he means mayhem and misery.