Take me out? No, Jeremy liked a night of cold beans ...with cat Harold Wilson
JEREMY CORBYN has been labelled everything from a political disaster to a breath of fresh air and an unlikely sex symbol in recent weeks.
But his burgeoning legion of female fans will be disappointed to discover he’s not a great one for romance – in five years of marriage to his first wife, he never once took her on a dinner date.
She eventually left him to have some youthful fun because Corbyn preferred spending his evenings photocopying documents for the Labour Party – or eating cold baked beans for supper – rather than visiting nightclubs.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Professor Jane Chapman told how the pair married after a ‘whirlwind romance’ while working on Labour’s 1974 Election campaign.
But after celebrating their wedding at her Tory-supporting father’s bowling club in Westonsuper-Mare, Prof Chapman said it was straight ‘back to business’ – and that was politics.
Just 24 at the time, she says rather than taking her on candlelit dinners, her husband, then 25, spent most of his time at political meetings in the North London borough where they lived, or doing clerical work.
She recalls: ‘We both got elected to Haringey Council in 1974. Politics became our life. He was out most evenings because when we weren’t at meetings he would go to the Labour headquarters, and do photocopying – in those days you couldn’t print because there were no computers.’
Prof Chapman also revealed that strict vegetarian Corbyn had little interest in ‘decent food’.
‘He would eat anything as long as it wasn’t meat,’ she said.
‘He had quite a good appetite, but he didn’t mind what the food was because he couldn’t be bothered to give it the time. So he would just grab a can of beans and eat it straight from the can.’ One hobby the couple did enjoy was riding on Corbyn’s prized Czech CZ motorbike. Prof Chapman recalled: ‘He had a little motorbike and he liked to go camping, so we went on the back of the bike with a two-person tent. ‘We travelled through France into
Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and from there into Czechoslovakia and to what is now Slovakia.’ Another shared love was animals – the couple had a tabby cat named Harold Wilson and a black mongrel dog called Mango.
Prof Chapman said she married Corbyn for his ‘honesty’ and ‘principles’, but his intense dedication to Left-wing politics eventually became too much.
In 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher was elected, Prof Chapman called time on their marriage. ‘I missed the other things,’ she said. ‘We didn’t do things that I liked such as going to the cinema or to clubs. I wanted a different work-life balance.’
Prof Chapman, who specialises in communications at Lincoln University, said the pair remained friends and Corbyn has her vote for the Labour leadership. She added: ‘He’s really shaken politics in this country. He’s pulling in bigger crowds than Tony Blair.’