Media Matters Stephen Glover
The ruthless Seamus is a key figure in the Jeremy Corbyn hierarchy. But will he stay or return to his job on the Guardian?
The Corbynista whom Labour moderates most detest is not John Mcdonnell, Diane Abbott or the shambling leader himself. It is Seamus Milne, the party’s executive director of strategy and communications. He is hated partly because he is regarded as clever (something of a distinction among the general run of Corbynistas) and partly because he is seen as unwaveringly hardline. In some minds it may not help that he is a Wykehamist from a rather privileged background who is generally described as a millionaire. His father, Alasdair, was a director-general of the BBC who crossed swords with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Seamus is himself a journalist, and until last October had spent nearly all his working life at the
Guardian, most recently as a columnist. Loathing for him (it should be said that by most accounts he is personally very pleasant) reached boiling point at the Labour Party conference at the end of September. It was reported that he had doctored a speech given by Clive Lewis, the shadow defence secretary. When Lewis, who supports Labour’s official policy of renewing Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent, came to read his autocue, he found that his words had been altered. A passage which appeared to rule out Jeremy Corbyn’s favoured policy of scrapping Trident had been removed. Lewis, a former Territorial Army officer, was said to have retired backstage after his speech and to have punched a wall in frustration.
The story, if true, tells us a good deal about Seamus Milne, product not only of Winchester but also of Balliol College, Oxford. The scope of his power must be considerable if he can censor the speech of a shadow minister on so important a matter. His reputation for ruthlessness would seem to be thoroughly deserved. This was the action of a determined and single-minded operator. It was also undemocratic and slightly sinister.
Labour moderates are therefore overjoyed by rumours that the asceticlooking Milne is about to resign his position as political commissar to Jeremy Corbyn, and return to his old job as a columnist on the Guardian. But can they be true? Would a man give up all the power that he has in return for churning out dependable tirades against the United States, capitalism and the Tories, as well as panegyrics in praise of Vladimir Putin? Such a turn of events seems unlikely. It has been officially denied by the Labour Party. And yet it may happen. I write this in the knowledge that, not for the first time, this column could be overtaken by events.
When Milne left the Guardian a year ago to take up his new job, he was said to be ‘on leave’. Although paid by the Labour Party, he remains an associate editor of the paper, and many of his colleagues there expect him to return (though by no means all of them hope that he will). He is also close to Katharine Viner, the editor of the Guardian since June 2015, who is significantly more Left-wing than her predecessor, Alan Rusbridger. Milne could slot back into his old role very easily. But would he miss the smell of cordite? And is it likely that a doctrinaire zealot who is playing what he sees as a historic role in purifying the Labour Party, and wants to help re-fashion it as a mass movement of the far Left, would swap those lofty ambitions for the musings of the paper’s comment pages?
I suspect that with nearly a year having elapsed since he went on leave, Milne is coming under pressure to choose irrevocably between two paths. And not a moment too soon, I’d say. It can’t be right for a journalist still on the paper’s books to be a leading and controversial figure in Corbyn’s Labour Party. For one thing, according to a columnist on the paper,
Guardian journalists sometimes feel circumscribed when writing about Milne, and this feeling of restraint can even apply when animadverting on his boss, Jeremy Corbyn. They are naturally reluctant to criticise someone who is technically still a colleague, and may soon be sitting alongside them again on the editorial floor.
If Milne does elect to return to the paper where he has worked for more than thirty years, he will inevitably stir up hatred as much as he has done in the Labour Party. For although he was widely regarded as a closet Stalinist during his time on the Guardian, his sojourn on the political stage has made him both a more formidable and a more divisive figure. The same ideological differences between moderates and Corbynistas that have raged inside Labour have caught fire at the paper. It has already edged Leftwards under Katharine Viner’s editorship, and would very probably move further in that direction if Seamus Milne were readmitted to its councils. One way or another, this intense, driven man is going to continue to cause ructions in whichever arena he chooses to pitch his tent.