It was all going so well for Sir Keir Starmer. He won the Labour leadership handsomely, appointed a fresh shadow cabinet, and was riding a wave of blessed non-scrutiny thanks to Covid-19. He had begun to make amends to the Jewish community for his party’s racist vendetta against them and there was a solid chance that political correspondents would learn how to spell his name.
Then, it leaked. An 860-page dossier prepared in the final months of Corbyn’s tenure which, going by the reports of those who have seen it, essentially exculpates the party of mishandling anti-Semitism charges. It says these complaints were not treated differently, a central allegation made by whistleblowers who spoke to Panorama. More ominously, the document is said to allege ‘abundant evidence of a hyper-factional atmosphere prevailing in party HQ in this period, which appears to have affected the expeditious and resolute handling of disciplinary complaints’.
According to the Guardian, the compilation charges that senior disciplinary staff ‘were bitterly opposed to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘seem to have taken a view that the worse things got for Labour the happier they would be, since this might expedite Jeremy Corbyn’s departure from office’. M. Stanton Evans once quipped: ‘I was never for Nixon until Watergate’. I never knew how much I loved the people working for Jeremy Corbyn until I found out they were working against him.
Betrayal is the most powerful emotion in the Labour psyche
These eleventh-hour averments fall into two categories. The first is politically-driven negligence: they hated Corbyn so much, they allowed it to get in the way of promptly resolving complaints. The second is malice: they hated Corbyn so much, they either allowed factional animus to undermine Labour’s electoral fortunes or actively willed that end.
This is incendiary stuff. For the avoidance of doubt, if any Labour official worked to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister, that was an act of supreme loyalty to the Labour party and the country. Preventing a Corbyn premiership was a moral imperative but it was also in the long-term interests of the party that would have forever borne the shame of such a government. However, the insinuation that moderate staffers caused anti-Semitism to go unaddressed because of their loathing of the man at the top is what will dominate the political and legal fallout from this leak.
Sir Keir has ordered an investigation into the leaking of the document and the ‘background and circumstances in which the report was commissioned and the process involved’. Holding a review into complaints about a review of how it reviews complaints is Inception-level Labour, but it is also wise. In addition to the claims about Labour staffers’ conduct, it is alleged that the dossier contains personal details of whistleblowers. Sunday Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund says that two Labour employees and a number of whistleblowers have instructed the solicitor Mark Lewis to pursue for libel and data protection breaches. If personal data has been improperly released, Labour will want to limit its exposure to further legal action by taking good faith steps to establish what happened and put measures in place to prevent a repeat.
Why the dossier was commissioned, who wrote it and what remit, methodologies and evidentiary standards it drew on will be central questions for the review. For Corbynistas, it is a stodgy slab of ideological comfort food, sating their appetite for vindication of Corbyn and proof of a grand conspiracy ranged against him. Moderates view it as a poisoned broth intended to shift blame for two consecutive election defeats and to spike the ball for the post-Corbyn leadership. Such behaviour is standard operating procedure for the far-left: demand the wheel, grab the wheel, crash the car into a dynamite factory, then claim Tony Blair had the wheel the whole time.
Sir Keir cannot triangulate this away. Four of his far-left frontbench colleagues have signed an open letter demanding the leaked report be published ‘in full’. One of them, shadow environment minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle, posted a link to the unredacted report on a social media group. He has since admitted that was ‘wrong’ and now says Labour should publish the report with complainers’ details redacted. Russell-Moyle was a terrible appointment that reeked of pandering and Sir Keir is reaping the rewards of accommodating the far-left instead of drumming them out.
Betrayal is the most powerful emotion in the Labour psyche. It is what explains away every election defeat, policy reversal and internal ruction. Sir Keir finds himself wedged between moderates, who have invested their hopes in him, and Corbynistas, who are deeply suspicious of him, both of whom feel betrayed by the party, its institutions and its practices. As a member of Labour’s sentimental soft-left, he will want to keep both factions on board but practically he will have to choose if he is to move the party past the Corbyn era and make it electorally viable again.
The legal problems this leak has caused Labour will take their course but it is in Sir Keir Starmer’s power to take control of the political fallout right now. Hasten the rapprochement with the Jewish community, return to the centre-left, drive out the Corbynistas and try to give the country back the respectable Labour party snatched away almost five years ago.
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