Last Thursday evening, Jeremy Corbyn was addressing a local Labour council meeting concerned with “Action on Housing!” at a community centre just up the road from where he lives in Islington, north London. The former Labour party leader, with eviction concerns of his own, was in his element, drawing on decades of local knowledge of venal landlords, housing trust failures and planning battles, cracking jokes about the attention span of Michael Gove, the housing secretary, nodding and winking to the concerned and the converted in his audience. While he spoke, however, you couldn’t help being struck by one glaring oddity. It concerned his use of pronouns. Asked about national Labour policy on rent controls, or about the housing crisis being a key element of the next party manifesto, he had no hesitation in using the collective “we” to describe the Labour election campaign ahead. The clear implication was that he would be representing the party locally, as he had for the past 40 years. Yet, as everyone in the room knew, the chance of him being the official candidate of a Labour “we” that would fight the seat was zero. Ever since the Labour whip was removed from Corbyn over his unrepentant response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into antisemitism in the Labour party, Keir Starmer has made it clear “that he doesn’t see any circumstances” that would allow his predecessor to be a candidate. That fact will be reinforced in national executive motions at this week’s Labour conference in Liverpool aimed squarely at Islington North. Party membership will be removed, one states, from individuals who provide “financial support or assistance to, or otherwise support an individual who declares an intention to stand in opposition to a Labour party candidate”. The days of councillors and party allies nodding along to Corbyn at public meetings like last Thursday’s are theoretically numbered. As one source close to the national executive committee (NEC) says: “It means the moment he tweets out that he is running as an independent, anyone who retweets or likes that tweet would be removed from the Labour party.”
On the surface, the absence of a queue of candidates jostling to replace Corbyn is curious. Islington North should be the fantasy seat for any ambitious young Labour politician. In 2019, Corbyn secured a 26,188 majority, despite the abject performance of his party nationally. To date, however, Christian Wolmar, the writer and authority on the failures of rail privatisation, is the only local party member to have unequivocally stated his determination to run. The reasons for that are simple. “I’m old,” Wolmar says. “Other people with a political career ahead of them know that they will face huge anger from the left for ever if they win.” Wolmar has been given to understand by the party that the current plan is to do nothing until an election is called and then work fast in selecting – or more likely imposing – a candidate. Corbyn is a wily enough campaigner to know that the months pending that operation give him an opportunity. Last month he sent out a leaflet to all local members celebrating the achievements of his 40 years in office. He has, since the summer, several local activists say, been guest of honour at an unprecedented series of community events – organised by the local party but without much visible Labour branding, assiduously collecting data and email addresses. Among close friends, Corbyn’s message has reportedly been clear: that as long as he retains the support of the local branches he will stand and fight the next election as “a Labour candidate, official or not”. In public, he does not yet need to be drawn precisely on that question. In response to my questions he states, with predictable ambiguity: “Forty years ago, I made a promise to my constituents that I would always stand up for democracy and justice on their behalf. In Islington North, we keep our promises.” Those around him in the constituency party have taken a vow of silence on the issue. Apparently, that omerta was breached in a constituency branch meeting a couple of months ago, when one member broke ranks and blurted: “Can I mention the elephant in the room? We never mention Jeremy out loud, but we are talking about nothing else in private.” The comment prompted an improvised motion, which passed almost unanimously. The motion stated that: “This CLP [constituency Labour party] would like to thank our sitting MP, J Corbyn, for his commitment and service to the people, and want to express that it should be our democratic right to select our MP.” But actions currently speak louder than words. Last week, Corbyn was announced as honorary president of Islington Trades Union Council at the borough town hall. At the ceremony, where he was joined by his Islington North constituency chairwoman, Alison McGarry, one speaker after another urged him not to give up. Lord John Hendy KC, who Corbyn elevated to a peerage in his resignation honours list, hailed him as the “greatest leader Labour ever had”. Alexander Gardiner, a TV producer and local party member, would disagree. Gardiner speaks for a loose group who want to “reclaim Islington” from the left of the party. “Labour is allowing him to run a shadow campaign and doing nothing to establish any alternatives,” Gardiner says. “He’s very active. The constant celebration of his 40 years as an MP is clearly being supported and promoted by the local party, which lays out the carpet for him.” The solidarity among Corbyn loyalists, who control all aspects of local party apparatus, remains fierce. “If you walk into a meeting and you are not one of them,” Gardiner says, “you are immediately a Tory in disguise.” That hostility and intimidation, he suggests, make it hard to gauge the strength of feeling locally, particularly as many party meetings now take place in Zoom calls, where “about half the people sit in silence”. Gardiner believes the anti-Corbyn sentiment among local Labour voters is stronger than some imagine. “Remember the constituency party voted for Starmer as leader [against the clear candidate of the left, Rebecca Long-Bailey].” Does he think Corbyn would win against Labour if he stood as an independent? “The honest answer,” he says, “is I think voters will see through his campaign as the exercise in self-indulgent narcissism that it is.” Other prominent local activists, speaking on condition of anonymity – was there ever a group more wary of heads and parapets than the factions of the north London left? – are not so convinced. One says that events of recent weeks have changed their mind about Corbyn’s chances of going it alone. “The old adage is that if you stand against your own party, you don’t win. But I think Jeremy will be an exception.” They point to the fact that the NEC motion banning support for Corbyn as an independent would be impossible to police – and that while this would be a contest that the Labour leadership would do its best to ignore, every Corbynista member would view it as their last stand. “It would be a big mistake to give the local party no choice. If we are just presented with Starmer’s nephew, say. At least give us the option of his nephew or his cousin.”
Film-maker Ken Loach, an old friend and ally of Corbyn, speaks for many on the left when he says that: “I think that there is a general hope that Jeremy will stand because he remains a very important political figure. The programme and the ideas that he and John [McDonnell] put forward on public ownership and council housing are the alternative to the Starmer-Sunak consensus and have to remain present in public discourse.” McDonnell, who served as shadow chancellor during Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, has urged Starmer to let him back into the party almost on compassionate grounds: “What harm is he going to do?” One answer to that question lies in the easy attack lines he would provide a Tory party in freefall (even at last week’s Tory conference, Rishi Sunak made a couple of lame efforts to continue to identify Starmer with the man he had expelled, while Suella Braverman, the home secretary, bizarrely appropriated Corbyn’s favourite lines from Shelley, “we are many, they are few”, in her unhinged conference address). Beyond those desperate jokes, Starmer well knows that any weakening of his stance would undo the work he has done to bring Jewish voters back to Labour. One local activist says: “I think the calculation is that even if they lose Islington North, you gain three marginal seats with significant Jewish populations. The ruder the leadership is to Jeremy, the more likely that is to happen.” One of the ironies of that equation, as Wolmar says, is that if Labour had not adopted its purgative stance toward its former leader, now 74, he might well have retired at the next general election without prompting. If there is any certainty on Islington North’s 2024 ballot paper, however, the prospect of Corbyn, J “going gentle” is no longer an option. • This article was amended on 8 October 2023. While Alison McGarry spoke at an event at which Jeremy Corbyn was made honorary president of Islington Trades Union Council, she had no role in the decision to award the honour, nor did she “host” the ceremony as a previous version said.