A passionate and uncompromising firebrand married to the cause

TO MISQUOTE the Bible: greater love than this hath no man, who would lay down his marriage for the cause.

Yet that is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn did when he divorced his wife for offending his Socialist principles by sending their oldest son to grammar school rather than the local comprehensive. In the more than 30 years since his first election to Parliament, the 66-year-old has remained uncompromising in his beliefs.

Born in Chippenham, Wilts, and brought up in Shropshire, his father, David, was an electrical engineer and his mother, Naomi, taught maths at a girls’ grammar school.

Ironically, Mr Corbyn himself received a grammar school education, at the prestigious Adams School.

His parents took a keen interest in current affairs. Jeremy received a copy of essays by George Orwell for his 16th birthday and he and his younger brother, Piers, were encouraged to debate with the adults. Piers would go on to become a weather forecaster.

Both brothers joined the Labour Party, and Mr Corybn stepped up his activism while taking Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic, before he dropped out after rowing with his tutor about the syllabus.

Mr Corbyn married for the first time in 1974. Like him, his wife, Jane Chapman, was a Labour councillor. Now a leading academic, she described him as her “political soulmate,” but eventually tired of the relentless nature of his political activism, saying that as he devoted “100 per cent” there wasn’t much left for her. They split in 1979.

Mr Corbyn was elected an MP in the safe Labour seat of Islington North in 1983. Once in Parliament, it seemed there was not a Left-wing cause he did not support, from Irish unity to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

He came close to being jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax and was arrested in 1984 during an anti-apartheid picket of the South African embassy. An anti-monarchist, he once petitioned Tony Blair to move the entire Royal family out of Buckingham Palace and into a “more modest” dwelling.

Weeks after the Brighton bomb, Mr Corbyn caused fury by inviting members of Sinn Fein to the Commons. His decision to hire as a researcher Ronan Bennett, a novelist whose conviction for murder and terrorist offences had recently been overturned, led to the Speaker banning the writer from Parliament.

Mr Corbyn’s involvement with Amnesty International, and particularly its campaign against the dictator Augusto Pinochet, led him to meet his second wife, Claudia Bracchitta, a Chilean exile. The couple had three children, all boys, now aged 28, 24 and 22. However, in 1998, they separated over her insistence that she would not send the oldest, Benjamin, to the failing Islington comprehensive he had been allocated by the local council.

The MP said: “In lots of cases where people separate it is not for one reason alone. But the only one of legitimate public interest is our disagreement over the choice of school for Ben.”

Mr Corbyn settled into a life he described as “parsimonious,” saying: “I don’t spend a lot of money, I lead a very normal life, I ride a bicycle and I don’t have a car.” Two years ago, he married Laura Alvarez, 46, who has a business importing fairtrade coffee.