A 'Lynch Mob Without a Rope': We Talked to John McDonnell About the Labour Coup

In the past week, some 21 members of the shadow cabinet – and a further 31 shadow ministers – have resigned citing Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. 172 Labour MPs, over 81 percent of those who voted, have passed a vote of no confidence in their leader.

It looked like the game was up, the experiment over: "Jez we can" was to become "Jez: you can't".

It's Wednesday night and I'm stood, still grappling with a Glastonbury come down, on the steps of a London university, waiting with a crowd of over a thousand people, for the Labour leadership to come and give a speech.

The organisers tell me this is no resignation, but that Corbyn is coming to make one thing clear: he's not going anywhere. A survey of Constituency Labour Parties suggest he still commands their support, alongside that of the trade unions. A majority of members who joined after 2015 are in favour of deselecting MPs who consistently criticise the leader – although at the moment, that would be a vast majority of them. That split between the membership and the party is exactly the problem.

"Jeremy has the largest mandate of any political leader in our party history", a fired up Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, yells down the microphone at the gathered crowd. "There were a group of MPs who could not accept that mandate, and we've been expecting a coup anytime since."

Since the current leadership took control of Labour, the shadow cabinet has been brimming with Labour politicians who were never Corbyn's biggest fans. There's a sort of irony to Corbyn losing the confidence of MPs who never liked him in the first place. This isn't lost on McDonnell, who refers to the rebels as a "lynch-mob without the rope."

"We were expecting it after the Oldham by-election, as people said we would lose, but we won it with a huge majority," McDonnell suggests to me, as we sit down to talk in a dull lobby in SOAS.

"We were then warned [it] would happen after local and mayoral elections, as they would prove Labour couldn't win. We won every mayoral seat, we matched the highest level of support for Ed Miliband, and in every parliamentary by-election we have increased our majority under Jeremy."

But then came Brexit. 63 percent of Labour voters backed Remain, which is less than the 75 percent that the campaign were banking on. Corbyn has been criticised for failing to get the Labour vote out.

I ask John if Jeremy should stand down, allowing for another left-wing candidate, one who might be electable to take control.

"These are people who have tried to undermine [Jeremy] from the very minute he was elected, yet they'll try to argue this isn't about the specific issues he's been campaigning on", he replies.

"This is deeply political: whether it's Jeremy or anyone else, if we allow them to remove the Labour leader then they'll have a veto over whoever is elected by the rank and file, and that's unacceptable."

An hour or so later Jeremy finally shows up, mobbed by the crowd as he jumps onto the microphone. While comrade John had used his speech to bash his parliamentary party, Jez chose not to really mention them at all. Instead he decided to earnestly address the crowd of supporters about housing, public services, climate change and the war in Iraq.

When Jeremy won the election, leftwing supporters in the party came together, a plan was hatched that by 2020 Jeremy would have changed the party and it would be time for him to be replaced.

Jeremy would be a catalyst, dragging the younger, slicker and more charismatic talent up through the ranks. Years of building a socialist political project would allow time for British politics to be pulled to the left.

Whether or not this plan was ever a go-er, Brexit went and fucked it. The years until the next general election could have turned into months. There is no time to prune a younger leader to take over the reigns.

Angela Eagle is being touted as Corbyn's replacement – but there's no reason to believe in either Labour's leadership or a general election she could find success either.

The centrist politics that won elections under Blair seemed to buckle under Miliband and Brown. If Jeremy were to be kicked out of the leadership the left of the party would almost definitely split. If he stays, the Parliamentary party will be broken. The Labour Party now needs a leader who can sweep to victory, but this leader doesn't exist. There are a lot of rumours that Corbyn's going to quit but on Wednesday night and this morning his team insisted he's going nowhere.

@MikeSegalov / @CBethell_photo

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