Cooper vs Team Ken! Seconds out for Round 2 of the leadership fight
WHAT exactly is Corbynism? A tribute band for 1980s ideology, symptom of modern dissatisfactions, or fighting force, organised by machine politicians drawn from unions and grizzled veterans of town hall politics?
One reason Labour’s moderates are so fazed by the rise of an unflashy, old-fashioned socialist is that they can’t agree on what Corbyn represents.
That’s changing though – and the clue is in Corbyn’s appointments. His front bench is sorely depleted by the refusal of many strong performers to serve on it.
But after what I understand was heavy arm-twisting from deputy leader – Gordon Brown’s hardy fixer – Tom Watson, Corbyn has put together a quite fizzy front bench. Even Tory Ministers are musing that, as one puts it: ‘It makes up for in energy what it lacks in common sense.’ Faint praise is better than none.
So Lisa Nandy and Kerry McCarthy, both of whom outperformed dreary Labour legions in the Commons under Ed Miliband, get mid-ranking roles with good media visibility (energy and rural affairs – an interesting option for McCarthy, a vegan).
Forthright Luciana Berger, dispatched in a panic by Labour HQ to Scotland to shore up the ‘No’ campaign to Scottish independence a year ago also gets a berth as mental health spokesman.
Berger has the unenviable job of being a pro-Israel MP in a Corbyn camp full of Hamas-worshippers. ‘ That will become a problem,’ says one Jewish backbencher. ‘There’s a strong feeling that she should not align herself with a lot of outright Israel-haters around Corbyn.’
BUT to discover where real power lies, you need to look beyond the window-dressing of the front bench. As revealed in this column before his triumph last Saturday, the new leader has benefited from practical support and strategic nous from Ken Livingstone’s old inner circle.
Crucially, Simon Fletcher is the Labour leader’s new chief of staff and has what my mole describes as ‘growing control over access to Jeremy and Corbyn’s message’. Fletcher masterminded Ken’s victory when he first won the London mayoralty as an independent candidate and was Livingstone’s most influential aide.
It was Fletcher who persuaded eurosceptic Corbyn to support staying in the EU, thereby preventing a Labour civil war over the referendum.
Now I gather, the latest addition to team Corbyn, as deputy chief of staff, is Anneliese Midgley, a former events organiser when Ken was mayor, who has close union ties. She joins yet another key Ken loyalist Neale Coleman – the ‘director of policy and rebuttal’ rated, no less, by Boris Johnson as a ruthless organiser (and one of the few of Ken’s placemen Boris kept on).
Anti-Corbynites, beginning to regroup around the compromise candidate of Yvette Cooper, are fretful about this consolidation of Livingstone’s arms-length power. A former senior union official warns that the ‘Ken Again’ collective have ‘never lost the appetite to purge opponents’.
Anxious at that prospect, unlikely alliances are forming across the old Brown-Blair divide. Particularly significant is the newly-minted mateyness between Cooper and Dame Tessa Jowell. Dame Tessa may have just lost the mayoral candidacy to Sadiq Khan, but she still has a brainy policy team in reserve – and in her brother-in law, the entrepreneur John Mills, a mighty Labour donor. Past relations between Cooper and Jowell were, as one witness confirms, ‘Arctic’. Now Jowell tells friends she ‘thoroughly approves’ of Cooper’s campaign for more generosity towards refugees.
Some think Cooper is boxing clever by opposing Corbynomics, while preaching the need to embrace the needy. ‘She’s wrapping her arms around a bruised party, like Mother Courage,’ remarks one veteran Minister.
Might Cooper pull off the elusive trick of reuniting the Sensible Tendency with the firebrands? Even erstwhile Blairites now think that may be the best way forward. And Yvette’s supporters note that she’ll have to see off the Ken Again revival first. Let battle commence.
Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist