Tom Bower specialises in men with something to hide. He made his name as a biographer by doggedly digging up dirt on the sort of rich, powerful figures who excel at keeping it buried, such as Robert Maxwell. But in Dangerous Hero, he is attempting something slightly different. For all the author’s dark inferences that Jeremy Corbyn is hiding things that voters deserve to know, the striking thing about the Labour leader is what is out there in plain sight.
Once again this week Corbyn’s record and character have come under a harsh spotlight. He stands accused by a group of now former Labour MPs of leading an institutionally antisemitic party, fiddling while Brexit burns and jeopardising national security in his eagerness to accommodate almost any enemy of America.
Readers may disagree with the breakaway MPs’ conclusions, but can hardly be surprised by the charge sheet. We all know by now about the meetings with Holocaust deniers and perpetrators of blood libel, the somersaults turned to avoid blaming the Kremlin for the Salisbury poisonings, the long history of antipathy to the EU. (Corbyn’s former constituency agent Keith Veness tells Bower that he suspects the Labour leader secretly voted to leave, judging by his apparent pleasure at the referendum result, although this has been repeatedly denied.) It’s not that he really made a secret of any of this, but that for decades he was such an insignificant a figure in British politics that it hardly seemed to matter. And now he is so very significant that his supporters can’t afford to let it matter, if they want their one shot at a true socialist government.
The book opens with a vignette that in some ways illustrates what Bower is up against in trying, as he evidently is, to convince readers that the Labour leader is unfit for office. The author writes that as a backbench MP Corbyn got so deep in personal debt, following an ill-advised promise to personally underwrite the costs of opening an office in his constituency, that his then wife Claudia was struggling to feed and clothe their three sons. After an awkward meeting with the veteran leftwinger Reg Race, summoned by his wife as a neutral observer, Corbyn agreed to sell the family home. But his friendship with Race, the bearer of bad news, did not survive and neither ultimately did the marriage. (Although officially he and Claudia divorced because she wanted to send their son to a grammar school and Corbyn didn’t approve, Bower argues this was merely a cover story and his first two wives both felt emotionally and practically neglected.)
The anecdote is clearly intended to be telling on multiple levels; here is a man aspiring to run the nation’s finances who seemingly can’t even manage his own, sulks when confronted with mistakes and fosters myths about his private life that make him look noble. Yet readers sympathetic to Corbyn could clearly interpret it as evidence of a man so principled that he would rather sacrifice his home and marriage than break an election promise. As for the hair-shirt tendencies Bower also describes, so what if he eats baked beans cold from a tin or isn’t much fun on holiday? Can’t a man have his mind on higher things?
Other charges, however, are harder to dismiss. Perhaps the most telling criticism is that Corbyn is simply not very bright, or certainly not as bright as leaders are traditionally expected to be. A teacher’s son, educated at a fee-paying grammar, he nonetheless scraped only two Es at A-level before dropping out of a course in trade union studies at North London Polytechnic because the academic work (at least in Bower’s telling) was beyond him.
“He came to loathe high achievers, especially undergraduates with ambition to get to the top … most of all he hated the rich and successful and identified with losers,” Bower writes. His first wife, Jane Chapman, says Corbyn never read a book in four years of marriage and there are repeated accounts of him reading from scripts in meetings in the manner of someone who simply can’t think on his feet. His backbench career was long on expressing passionate solidarity with causes but short on concrete achievements, and he comes across as prone to ducking arguments that he lacks the skill to win.
Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, left one critical meeting on antisemitism concluding that the Labour leader was either emotionally or intellectually incapable of even grasping the complaint: “He did not engage, either to agree or disagree. He looked as if he was shrinking into a shell from which he did not want to come out.” Bower even ascribes the antisemitism scandal now tearing Labour apart in part to an inability to understand that not everything is about class struggle.
The other wounding charge here for someone who prides himself on authenticity is the suggestion that Corbyn romanticises his own history. It’s mostly pretty minor stuff, like claiming as a young man to come from “Telford new town” rather than posh rural Shropshire. More seriously, however, Bower questions whether his parents were ever at Cable Street, the infamous 1936 clash between fascists and East End socialists, as Corbyn has repeatedly claimed whenever he wants to argue that his anti-racist credentials run deep. (Presumably the author’s lawyers have been over all over this allegation like a rash, but it would have helped the reader to have some hard evidence on this point.)
More than once, Corbyn or his office are caught suggesting that he doesn’t know or can’t remember people with whom it later emerges he shared platforms. Is that simply an understandable failure to recall every name from the thousands of people he must have met over a long parliamentary career, or something worse? Bower isn’t inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
And that’s perhaps the biggest flaw in an otherwise damning book. Bower’s colours seem nailed to the mast, for all that he was once a student Marxist himself, and particularly towards the end there are times when his criticisms feel like something of a stretch. Even if it is true that his handling of last year’s failed vote of confidence in Theresa May left John McDonnell “fuming, wondering whether Corbyn wanted to be prime minister at all”, it seems unrealistic to think Corbyn could have persuaded Tory MPs to trigger an election they might lose simply by sounding more emollient. Nor does Bower spend enough time analysing the popularity of his economic beliefs, or why he succeeded where bigger characters on the hard left failed in taking over the party and almost winning an election.
His description of Corbyn’s early years as an activist and councillor in Haringey, where he came across in public as quiet and unconfrontational while (in the words of one fellow councillor) turning “every meeting of the Labour group into a terrible argument” rings depressingly true today. But there remains an unresolved tension in the book between talk of “ruthless plots for power” and the portrayal of Corbyn as an accidental leader, who seriously considered retiring to rural Wiltshire to keep bees only two years before stumbling somehow to the top.
This is the most compelling in-depth study so far of a man whose head is unusually difficult to get inside, given his suspicion of anyone who isn’t a fellow traveller. Just don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind.
• Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power is published by William Collins (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
