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Owen Smith must be running out of options. He is still standing in the Labour Party leadership contest, but more and more members, supporters and commentators are asking why. Where has it all gone wrong for him?
Let’s remind ourselves how we got here.
First came the coup. The leadership contest did not arise because some MPs were shocked at the outcome of the referendum: the referendum was used to launch their plan to oust Jeremy Corbyn. The MPs at the core of the coup had planned to launch an attack on Corbyn after the Oldham by-election on 3rd December last year – assuming Labour would lose. When Labour won the by-election, they had to postpone their attack until the scheduled elections the following May. In the meantime, there was a whispering campaign against Corbyn and his leadership – including the strange and unsubstantiated allegations that Corbyn was soft on anti-semitism (which the rebels said they had just noticed had been rife in the Party for years).
The plot was floated in the Sun on 2nd May – in an article which proved to be remarkably accurate. It said that Margaret Hodge MP was the stalking horse who would announce she had the backing of 50 MPs to stand against Jeremy Corbyn as soon as the elections were over. This would trigger a leadership contest and she would then withdraw to allow a serious challenger to emerge – who could enter the contest without any negative connotations of having been part of the toppling of the former Leader.
The plotters assumed Labour would lose at least 150 council seats in the May elections – enabling them to say that Jeremy Corbyn was a vote loser who could never win a General Election and to appeal to the middle ground of the Labour Party to ditch him for the sake of the Party and its General Election prospects. In the end, Labour didn’t lose that many seats, and the plotters had to call off the coup and save Margaret Hodge for another day.
The referendum result gave the plotters, at last, the chance to go for it – would it be third time lucky? It does have to be pointed out that the referendum result was not Corbyn’s fault. The Tories called the vote and it was they who most failed to deliver for “remain”, with their party the most split. Corbyn delivered pretty much the same percentage of Labour voters for “remain” as Nicola Sturgeon did of SNP voters: he was demonised, she was heralded as a hero. Corbyn also attended significantly more rallies and meetings than, for example, Angela Eagle. Nonetheless, the panic after the Brexit result was sufficient for the rebels to get away with blaming Corbyn for the outcome – irrespective of the actual figures.
As planned, Margaret Hodge kicked the attack off – though not by declaring that she would stand against Jeremy (which would not have been very credible – not least because she is five years older than him). Instead, Hodge put a motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn which MPs were encouraged to sign – while MPs resigned, one by one, from the Shadow Cabinet. It was all intended to put across the picture of Jeremy Corbyn as a beleaguered Leader, support ebbing away and then haemorrhaging. If he had lost the confidence of MPs, how could he fail to resign?
Never in the history of humankind has more pressure been heaped on one elected Leader (probably). Never in the history of humankind has a Leader been more determined to withstand the pressure. Corbyn understood that his mandate came from members and supporters – and he wasn’t letting them down, no matter what 172 MPs said.
The plotters did not lose sleep over the setback and moved on to the next step. Corbyn having failed to listen to MPs, Angela Eagle started gathering nominations and triggered a leadership contest – at that point probably believing she was going to be the candidate. If all the plotters had wanted was a contest, the 172 MPs who voted for the no confidence motion would have nominated Eagle to show what support she had for the challenge. As it was, over half of them held back. Eagle must have realised quite quickly there was another candidate in the background.
It was only at this point that Owen Smith went public. Clearly he had been working behind the scenes for a while. Does anyone really think MPs held back from nominating Angela “just in case another one comes along” and as soon as Smith put himself forward suddenly went “Ooh, not really spoken much to you before, but I am suddenly overcome with the conviction that you would be a better Leader than Jeremy or Angela”? Does anyone really think that was how he managed to get more nominations in a few days than Angela had secured over a few weeks? Apart from anything else, John Mann MP has revealed on Twitter that he was approached last year to support Smith in a leadership bid.
Eagle and Smith spent a few days both chasing MPs’ nominations, having agreed that whoever got more would go forward as the candidate to oppose Jeremy Corbyn. The tactic did rather give the game away: the plot was about “anyone but Corbyn”, not about who was the best Leader. The plot was about putting all the anti-Corbyn eggs in one basket, not an open contest during which Labour could debate its future. The plot was about stressing the supremacy of the MPs – who would decide which single (anti-Corbyn) candidate the party members could vote for.
It was here that the plotters slipped up, tactically. Two anti-Corbyn candidates could have covered twice as much ground as one, putting the anti-Corbyn message across more effectively. Each would have gathered a personal vote. The leadership contest is not a first past the post ballot: the third placed candidate would have been eliminated in the first round of counting, with their second preference votes transferring to the other contender. The media spotlight would have been on two contenders, giving more anti-Corbyn coverage. It was a strange mistake to make.
Any Labour Party member, then, who still believes that the leadership contest came about because MPs acted in response to the disappointing Brexit result are either naïve or deluding themselves – or both. It was a calculated plot to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Leader over the heads of the membership – on the grounds that “nanny” (in this case, some MPs) knows best.
As the leadership contest began, the plotters must have thought they were on course, with a good chance of victory. They had not been able to force Corbyn to resign, but they had forced a leadership contest. They believed that party members had experimented with Corbyn and would now come to their senses.
This terrible miscalculation was their second big mistake – as four factors showed.
•First, Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) began making nominations – and overwhelmingly came out in support of Corbyn. The latest figures are 153 nominations for Jeremy Corbyn and only 25 for Owen Smith, with 27 CLPs deciding to make no nomination – leaving Smith still officially less popular than “no one”.
•Second, Corbyn began drawing huge – unprecedentedly huge – audiences to his rallies, while Smith has struggled to attract respectable numbers at all. Smith’s recent East London rally in Aldgate struggled to pull in 100 – while Tower Hamlets Momentum alone saw 50 people come to a Sunday afternoon picnic the same day.
•Third, Corbyn clearly won the first hustings, which was watched by thousands of party members over various live streamings. Corbyn won over what had started as an evenly matched audience. Smith had little to say and didn’t say it well. Corbyn supporters felt vindicated, and Smith supporters began admitting that it was there man who was coming across as not electable. The bookies shortened Corbyn’s odds for winning the Labour Party leadership – and some began offering odds for him winning the next General Election.
•Fourth is the latest and perhaps most crushing factor: the results of the election for the six constituency representatives on Labour’s National Executive Committee NEC. These posts have been elected by a ballot of the membership for around two decades – with those elected serving for two years. There are usually two slates of candidates: one drawn from the centre and left of the party and openly backed by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA); another one backed by the Blairite organisation of the day, but not necessarily openly. Candidates backed by the CLGA have usually won three or four places out of the six.
When the contest opened this year, it was clear that the Blairites were organising. The candidates they were backing received more nominations than usual. However, when the result was announced (on 9th August), all six of the candidates backed by the CLGA (above) were victorious. The turnout was up – in line with the rise in party membership. In 2014, Ken Livingstone topped the poll, with 39,548 votes. In 2016, Ann Black topped the poll – with 100,999 votes. Christine Shawcroft was second, with 97,510 votes – a particularly interesting result as she is the most consistently left voting member of the NEC, to the extent that even some on the left have sometimes said she scares middle ground voters away. They won’t be saying that now. Even CLGA-backed candidates standing for the first time won with almost equally high votes.
The Blairites were clearly stunned. They had backed sitting NEC members and Eddie Izzard – hoping to cash in on his high name recognition. Party members were having none of it. The candidate with the tacit support of the Blairites who came top was sitting NEC member Ellie Reeves, who received 72,514 votes – over 9,000 less than the lowest scoring candidate backed by the CLGA.
Ellie Reeves gave her reaction to the result on Radio 4’s World at One, shortly after it was announced. She said that she was worried: the National Executive was supposed to hold the leadership to account, and if the six constituency members were all of one mind, how would they do this? Newly elected NEC member Rhea Wolfson, interviewed next, was quite clear that they would be able to do so – between them, the six constituency representatives are a diverse bunch, coming from different parts of the country, with different lengths of party membership, men and women, etc.
It was a telling reaction from Reeves. The National Executive does more than hold the leadership to account – but why would the candidates backed by the CLGA not be able to do this? Did Reeves (or the other Blairite-backed candidates) only hold to account those leaders they disagreed with? Did she (or they) ever say they were thinking of resigning from the NEC because they agreed with the Party Leader, so they would be unable to hold him to account?
The plotters must have been stunned by the NEC result. They have been trying to discredit Jeremy Corbyn’s victory by saying that it is due to registered supporters and new members diluting the votes of proper, longstanding members. They variously say that all these supporters are infiltrators who belong to odd left wing sects – as if there had ever been that many members of odd left wing sects! However, the NEC election was only open to longstanding full members. Registered supporters do not vote in NEC elections.
That is why the NEC result is such bad news for Owen Smith and the plotters. It doesn’t look like they are even going to win in the vote of full members. Their backers on the NEC put the price for Registered Supporters up to £25 and allowed them only 48 hours to register in order to stop Corbyn supporters signing up. In the event, 180,000 people paid their £25 and registered as formal supporters – they are assumed to be mostly Corbyn supporters. The Party has not yet announced how many Affiliated Supporters are eligible to vote (this is members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy): it is assumed that the majority of these will be Corbyn supporters. The High Court has now ruled that, according to the Labour Party’s own rules, those who joined as ordinary members during the year should be allowed a vote too – upsetting the NEC, which had only granted a vote to those who joined before January.
The plotters must feel that this contest is departing from the script. What will they do next? We shall return to this question very soon.
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