LEFT OUT THE INSIDE STORY OF LABOUR UNDER CORBYN
GABRIEL POGRUND AND PATRICK MAGUIRE Bodley Head, 384pp, £18.99
Jeremy Corbyn blindsided the establishment, twice: emerging from the backbenches to seize the leadership in 2015, and then delivering a shock electoral success two years later, resulting in a Tory minority government. The ‘mainstream media’ has struggled to penetrate the internal dynamics in his insurgency. Left Out, the work of two young journalists at the Times and Sunday Times, focuses on the last two years of the Corbyn project, ‘from Glastonbury to catastrophe’ last December. It reveals how Karie Murphy finally wrested control of the party machine from recalcitrant Blairites, how John Mcdonnell and Corbyn fell out over the Skripal poisonings and the antisemitism crisis, and how the Brexit compromise unravelled – almost, it seems, by accident.
After the model of Tim Shipman’s All Out War, this is very much an SW1 account, and a first draft of history. Phillip Collins, in the Times, was tart about the genre: recording what cakes were served in which committee room for each crucial meeting, the authors risk ‘confusing what mattered with what merely happened’. Collins went on to credit Pogrund and Maguire with telling a coherent story, the ‘rumbling of a political idiot’, which vindicates those who always saw Corbynism as a ‘leftist indulgence’. But Jim Pickard in the Financial Times argued that Left Out offered a ‘generous insight’ into Corbyn’s movement; demonised figures like Karie Murphy are allowed to defend themselves – and quite effectively. Stephen Bush, in the New
Statesman, questioned the authors’ political nerdiness: ‘the problem with Corbynism was about morality’ not just ‘organisation and strategy’. However, as Pickard pointed out, there is no shortage of such commentary elsewhere: this is a story that bears retelling.