Kitabı oku: «Dangerous Hero»

Islington, Late 1996

‘I’ve got all these debts,’ Jeremy Corbyn told his long-time friend Reg Race. ‘Can you work out why?’

‘I don’t need to be a genius to tell him what’s wrong,’ Race thought. ‘He’s in danger of bankruptcy.’ But at first he said nothing. Sitting in the Spartan living room of Corbyn’s semi-detached house in north London, Race picked up a single sheet of paper and read out the politician’s financial death warrant. Across from him sat his host and Claudia Bracchitta, Corbyn’s formidable Chilean wife. They had positioned themselves unnaturally far apart from each other.

Claudia had summoned Race as a mutual friend to solve their differences. Blending his expertise in both Marx and Mammon had won him the trust of the Corbyns. As Corbyn’s close political ally on the far left for many years, Race, a former MP, had transformed himself in recent times from a political agitator into a successful financial consultant in Britain’s health business.

The papers in front of him showed that the Corbyns owed their bank £30,000, the equivalent today of twice that figure. Several personal loans had been guaranteed by Corbyn’s income as an MP. He was also burdened by high mortgage repayments. As a last resort, the bank could threaten to recover its money by seizing his home. ‘You’ve run out of loans,’ said Race. Unchecked, within five years the debts would amount to £100,000. Corbyn’s annual salary was £43,000.

Claudia interrupted. This was entirely the result of her husband’s folly, she said. She and their three sons had little money even to buy food and clothes. ‘We can’t afford a decent life.’

The principal cause of the debts was the Red Rose Community Centre on the Seven Sisters Road in Holloway, north London. Situated in the heart of Corbyn’s constituency, the Red Rose was a bar and dance area on the ground floor of the building that fulfilled his commitment to open his party office in the constituency. Corbyn was paying its rent and some of its staff’s salaries out of his own pocket. Simultaneously, he owed a large sum to the Inland Revenue for his employees’ unpaid National Insurance and pension contributions. The financial chaos was matched by his style of management. His employees complained about being both undervalued and underpaid. Among the casualties was Liz Phillipson, his battle-scarred assistant, who had resigned rather than continue to tolerate Corbyn’s fecklessness.

‘You haven’t got enough money for what you’re doing,’ Race said bluntly. ‘You should close your office in Holloway and move to the Commons. That would cut your costs by 80 per cent.’

‘I won’t,’ replied Corbyn.

‘Oh, come on, Jeremy, you know he’s right,’ Claudia said, her voice rising. ‘Why don’t you believe him?’

Corbyn mumbled, then fell silent. His body language showed that he felt no inclination to follow Race’s recommendations. Claudia was becoming noticeably agitated. ‘It was clear a breakdown was coming,’ thought Race.

He was not surprised by the tension. Corbyn had first met his ‘utterly lovely’ wife (she had an athletic figure and a characterful face) in 1987, and soon after they decided to marry. An intellectual with a deep understanding of South America, Claudia had bonded with him at a protest meeting against Chile’s military dictatorship, addressed by Ken Livingstone. ‘She wanted to get off with me,’ Livingstone would recall, ‘but I had to go off to meet Kate, my partner, so she went for Jeremy.’ In the flush of romance and clearly infatuated, Claudia had not grasped that while her future husband’s enthusiasm for making jam or turning wood on a lathe was appealing, his lack of interest in material things meant that he ignored her need for comfort. At one stage she had planned for them and their young sons to move from Islington to leafy Kingston-upon-Thames, but was quickly disabused of the idea. ‘He has to live in his constituency,’ Keith Veness, another close political friend, informed her. ‘No one told me,’ she sighed.

Long before the onset of their financial problems, life with Corbyn had proved difficult. Tony Banks, the Labour MP for Newham North-West, witnessed just how difficult as one day he walked into Westminster’s central lobby and spotted Claudia standing by the wall, tearfully holding her children. Jeremy, she explained, had promised to meet her two hours earlier. He had not turned up. Banks took the four Corbyns to the Commons family room and went off in search. Eventually he found Corbyn in a committee room. ‘You’d better come out and look after your children,’ he suggested. Corbyn did not seem fazed for a moment. Banks was not surprised. ‘When pushed to have a day off,’ he recalled, ‘Jeremy’s idea was to take his partner to Highgate Cemetery and study the grave of Karl Marx.’

Reg Race had experienced something similar when he had invited the Corbyn family for a week’s holiday at his country home in Derbyshire. On the day, Claudia arrived with the children.

‘Where’s Jeremy?’ asked Mandy, Reg’s wife.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Claudia with sadness. ‘He just told me “I’ve got to go to a meeting,” and I haven’t seen him since.’

Over the following thirty-six hours, Claudia called several numbers searching for her husband. Two days later he turned up, explaining his absence as a necessary sacrifice for ‘the movement’. At the time, Race decided that Corbyn was absent-minded rather than neglectful. But a huge question about his attitude towards his responsibilities remained unanswered.

Shortly after, Keith Veness and his wife Val confronted the same thoughtlessness. Claudia, who had come from a middle-class family used to a certain degree of comfort, was always complaining about the shortage of money.

‘I’ve told Jeremy that he should stop being an MP and get a well-paid job,’ she confided.

‘What can Jeremy do to earn more money?’ Veness asked.

Val added, ‘The miners get much less than Jeremy.’ But Claudia, she realised, did not appreciate her husband’s hair-shirt lifestyle. She had even wanted a cleaner, but Corbyn had vetoed that. Did Claudia have bourgeois tendencies, Val wondered.

None of Corbyn’s constituents could have imagined the tension when he arrived at meetings with his family to speak about Ireland, a subject of no interest to Claudia. By contrast, he had a self-proclaimed (if questionable) passion for Arsenal Football Club. Claudia was worried about hooliganism at the team’s home matches at Highbury, while Corbyn, according to Keith Veness, regarded the game as ‘crude and awful’, and much preferred not to go. So Veness took Corbyn’s sons to matches, while their father went to political meetings.

‘Jeremy wasn’t interested in football,’ recalled Veness, contradicting Corbyn’s boast of passionate support for Arsenal. ‘Except, that was, on Cup final day.’

By late 1996 the marriage was all but over, and with nothing left in common, the two had drifted apart. To Corbyn, Claudia’s list of complaints was familiar. Ever since 1967, when he had met Andrea Davies, his first girlfriend, at the Telford Young Socialists, a succession of women had made the same observations: he never changed his ways, and he rarely thought about them. Throughout the years he wore the same shabby clothes, ate the same bland food and stuck to the same political convictions he had begun to absorb in Jamaica, where he had spent fifteen months as a teenager in the 1960s. Admirers hailed his inflexibility as proof of his uncompromising principles, and to some the purity of his other-worldliness was endearing. Detractors blamed his limited intelligence and lack of education for his failure to appreciate others. On his own account, amid a constant round of demonstrations, speeches and political manoeuvres, he claimed to avoid causing any personal insult. Further, to avoid criticising any of his partners, he would insist that politics was about ideas, not personalities.

Reg Race had helped him realise his first political dreams in the early 1970s. Ever since, Corbyn had trusted his advice, especially once his friend became the financial supremo at the Greater London Council (GLC) during Ken Livingstone’s turbulent reign in the 1980s. But as they forged a bond on the left of the Labour Party, Race had discovered Corbyn’s ignorance about the bureaucratic requirements of government, and his simple-mindedness about finances. While the committed revolutionary strove to challenge powerbrokers across the world on behalf of the oppressed, he seethed about any personal criticism in his own home. With so much to hide, he condemned any revelations about himself as abhorrent.

However, on the day in 1996 on which Race described Corbyn’s financial crisis, the focus was entirely on him. Even if a rich benefactor had volunteered to pay off all the debts (and that was improbable), he would soon have fallen behind again. He had little choice, Race told him, but to sell the family home. Claudia agreed. Reluctantly, so did Corbyn – and thereafter broke off his relations with Race. The messenger was to blame. After this experience, Race questioned Corbyn’s character and his propriety to influence the direction of the Labour movement.

In early 1999 the Corbyns’ home was sold for £365,000 (£730,000 today), and they downsized to a house in Mercers Road, a shabby street in Tufnell Park, off the Holloway Road. On the day of the move, Corbyn was told by Claudia to empty the fridge. He forgot. He also forgot to clear the garage. Late in the afternoon, while their former home’s new owner, dressed in a camelhair coat, fumed on the pavement, the garage door was opened to reveal rubbish crammed to the ceiling. Corbyn had regularly picked wood from neighbourhood skips, and also collected railway junk as he criss-crossed the country on trains. Boxes of safety lamps, metal signs, track signals and other paraphernalia had been stuffed in any old how. Late in the day, everything was finally shuttled across to the basement of Mercers Road, creating a new world of clutter.

The move brought one advantage. The building had been converted into bedsits, making the estrangement between Claudia and Corbyn easier. She and their three sons took the top floors, where she lived with a young South American dubbed ‘the toy boy’, while Corbyn, in the basement, had relationships with a series of younger women.

The couple’s estrangement was kept secret for almost two years. Late in 1999, while Corbyn was at a peace conference in The Hague, a journalist contacted Claudia and asked whether the two had separated. Instead of telling the complete truth, she explained that their twelve-year marriage had ended in 1997. She said that she had wanted their eleven-year-old son Ben to go to Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Barnet, but that Corbyn had stipulated that he should go instead to Holloway School, a local comprehensive notorious for achieving, for three successive years, the worst GCSE results in the country, and listed as ‘failing’ by Ofsted, the office for standards in education.

From The Hague, Corbyn confirmed Claudia’s account. Defending his ideological purity against selective schools, he implied, was more important than his son’s education – or his marriage. To avoid being branded a hypocrite, he said he preferred his son to be badly educated than to be given an unfair advantage. Labour’s Islington council, he knew, despite receiving additional government funds, had failed to improve Holloway. The school was plagued with discipline problems and classes in which up to twenty languages were spoken, the white pupils being especially disadvantaged.

In a series of interviews, Claudia reinforced the same message. ‘My children’s education is my absolute priority, and this situation left me with no alternative but to accept a place at Queen Elizabeth Boys’ School. I had to make the decision as a mother and a parent … It isn’t a story about making a choice, but about having no choice. I couldn’t send Ben to a school where I knew he wouldn’t be happy.’ To the public Corbyn appeared to have acquiesced in his wife’s wishes, but, like so many communists, he had put his political principles first, and ended the marriage: he could not live with a woman who did not accept his beliefs. The only dent to that image of ideological purity was Claudia’s revelation that Corbyn had agreed for another of their sons to spend two years at the local Montessori nursery, at £600 per term.

If that had been the last word on the subject, the notion that the marriage had broken up over Corbyn’s principles might have been plausible. He favoured, he said, France’s strict laws on the privacy of public figures’ family lives – laws which have been exploited to conceal rampant corruption among French politicians, including former presidents. But Claudia, possibly with Corbyn’s encouragement, went further. ‘He is first the politician and second the parent,’ she said. ‘He definitely felt it would have compromised his career if he had made the same choice that I did. It’s very difficult when your ideals get in the way of family life … It has been a horrendous decision.’