for a brief honeymoon in southern Ireland.
They returned to a tiny ground-floor studio room in Etherley Road in Haringey, which they had bought with a mortgage from the Greater London Council. One year later, they moved to a bigger ground-floor flat in Lausanne Road, near Turnpike Lane. Several chickens, a cat christened Harold Wilson and a dog named Mango ran around the garden. Married life became a succession of meetings, demonstrations and campaigns. At 5.30 on some mornings they would head for a picket line to support strikers, then meet up again at the end of the day. Their social life was confined to meetings of the Labour Party, functions to support Troops Out and Cuba Solidarity, council meetings and demonstrations, while Chapman intermittently researched her doctorate in Paris and Corbyn ostensibly worked for the AUEW.
To Corbyn’s delight, as a councillor he represented mostly immigrants: Greek Cypriots, Asians and Afro-Caribbeans. He genuinely enjoyed mixing and socialising with the rainbow of communities in Haringey, assiduously attending their main social events and promising to look after their needs. However, that did not include the inhabitants of Chapman’s ward adjoining Stamford Hill, in the south of the borough, where the Orthodox Jews were the backbone of local Labour. To Chapman’s regret, while she showed interest in her husband’s constituents, he was indifferent to those in her ward, including her fellow councillor Aaron Weischelbaum, who was Jewish. ‘Jeremy,’ she explained, ‘was conflicted because he supported Palestine and the abolition of Israel so that Palestinians could recover their homes.’ Corbyn spoke of Israel as the worst example of American imperialism. Occupying land, in his opinion, was an obvious form of colonialism. This made Zionists racist, and therefore he opposed Israel’s existence. He condemned the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s promise in 1917 of a homeland for the Jews, and dismissed the effect of the Holocaust as explaining the Jewish people’s longing for their own country after 1945 to avoid future persecution. In Corbyn’s hierarchy of oppression, the descendants of slaves were the most victimised, while Holocaust survivors were at the bottom of the list. He did not distinguish between Jews in London and Zionists in Tel Aviv. To him, they were all guilty.
Among the surprises for Chapman was the absence of books in her husband’s life. Throughout the four years of their marriage, he never read a single book. He did not think deeply about ideology or political philosophy. Her initial judgement that he was ‘bright’ was mistaken. As an agitator, he relied on his wife for political friendship. ‘He didn’t get depressed. He was driven by his motivation to change society,’ she recalled. His handicap, he was acutely aware, was his lack of a working-class pedigree. By then his parents had moved to a new home in Wiltshire – chosen to enable them to pursue their burgeoning interest in archaeology. During Corbyn and Chapman’s visits for Sunday lunch, politics were politely discussed, but Corbyn’s parents never mentioned that they had been present at the Battle of Cable Street, or that David had ever considered going to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Their son’s introduction of those key events into the biographies of his parents would come much later. Both smacked of fiction.
To compensate for the limitations of his background and education, Corbyn played on his status as a councillor, trade union official and energetic activist. He became expert at working out how to win new votes, and would spend hours calculating where and how Labour could maximise its strength in Hornsey. Although he never read Trotsky’s writings, he adopted his ideas of process, and mastered the political skills to produce what Trotsky had called ‘a permanent state of unrest’ for eventual victory.
With both Corbyns’ support, Haringey’s ruling Labour group increased the rates by 23 per cent, making them the highest in the country. Shortly after, the borough’s housing workers went on strike for more pay. Consistent with socialist policy against any dismissals, Corbyn successfully urged his fellow councillors to award the hefty increase. In recognition of his commitment he was made a vice chair of the subcommittee on development, and would boast that the 42 per cent increase in the council’s overall budget, financed by local ratepayers, had allowed Labour to double the number of its staff. Annoying Haringey’s middle classes gave him particular delight. Faced with a huge housing problem after the arrival of thousands of Cypriot refugees in London, Corbyn proposed building homes on green parkland. Local residents were outraged. The rich, he scoffed, clearly disliked living alongside immigrants – but they would have no choice.
In October 1974, Harold Wilson called another election. With Irving Kuczynski standing once again as Labour’s candidate, Corbyn’s energetic campaigning, supported by the prime minister visiting the constituency, reduced Hugh Rossi’s Tory majority to 782 votes, both a success and a disappointment for Corbyn. Wilson returned to office with a narrow parliamentary majority of three.
Although electioneering was over, Corbyn remained in perpetual motion. Leaving home early in the morning, he would bounce between council meetings, Labour Party gatherings, demonstrations, leafleting and occasional trips to the AUEW’s office to justify his salary. His pride and joy was Hornsey Labour Party. Nominally only the ‘assistant/minutes secretary’, he had swelled the local party’s membership, making it, he asserted, the second largest in the country. The huge influx was divided between moderates and committed hard leftists, who attracted the attention of MI5, the domestic security agency. The branch’s agenda reflected Corbyn’s priorities. Shortly after the general election, three resolutions were passed: to condemn the exploitation of tea-pickers by British companies; to deplore the imprisonment of twenty-one Iranian students after a sit-in at the Iranian embassy in London; and to support the boycott by the Labour leader of Hornsey of a visit by Prince Philip to open a new housing development. ‘I believe you’ve got to stand by your principles,’ Corbyn told the local newspaper. He also put forward motions in Haringey council meetings to impose import controls, restrict individuals spending money abroad, and to oppose Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market. There were no motions to deplore Haringey’s poverty, low rates of income, or the council’s failure to build more homes.
The inspiration for many of Corbyn’s ideas was Tony Benn, the new industry minister. Born in 1925 to an aristocratic family, Benn had been elected an MP in 1950, and was a social democrat as a minister during Wilson’s first term. By 1974, he was moving far to the left. One of a number of Labour Members disillusioned with Wilson’s excessive caution in promoting a socialist agenda, he became popular among Marxists, regularly visiting militant shop stewards at shipyards and factories to encourage class consciousness. At those meetings he railed against Britain’s membership of the European Common Market as a threat to parliamentary sovereignty. European socialists were condemned as revisionists, while East European communists were praised. To build socialism, in 1975 Benn created the National Enterprise Board (NEB) to take over Britain’s biggest twenty-five corporations and nationalise the City’s financial institutions. NEB officials, Benn believed, could manage industry in the public interest. To demonstrate the success of socialism, he diverted taxpayers’ money to support unprofitable corporations.
Among the beneficiaries was British Leyland in Birmingham, one of Britain’s biggest car producers. Neither Benn nor Corbyn understood Leyland’s plight. The company had been managed for years by Donald Stokes, a corrupt salesman, while its managers had ignored their foreign competitors’ technical improvements. Their attention was too often focused on surviving the anarchy on the production lines. Leyland’s Longbridge plant was blighted not only by ruinous restrictive practices imposed by competing trade unions, but also by daily strikes. These were organised by Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson, a towering Marxist shop steward who apparently delighted in furthering the ruin of Britain’s motor industry. Neither Corbyn nor Benn ever criticised Robinson. In their world, trade unions were sacred. To that end, on the AUEW’s behalf Corbyn presented Benn with a blueprint to reconstruct the motor industry by increasing shop stewards’ powers. Benn was delighted with Corbyn’s work, an accurate reflection of its limitations. Neither considered the consequence of the constant strikes: defective products. For the first time since 1945, Germany and France produced more cars than Britain, and the country’s vehicle imports rose from 14 to 57 per cent of the market. Neither Benn nor Corbyn was alarmed. ‘He immatured with age,’ was one of Wilson’s less
