offering as an alternative a siege economy that limited imports and confiscated even more money from the wealthy. The government was split. Many middle-class Britons feared that proletarian hordes, led by a Bennite commissar, would be incited to seize their property. In Haringey, Corbyn and his brother Piers, himself by now a Trotskyite candidate in a local election, led squatters into unoccupied houses across London. Piers’s group even picketed the home of Hornsey Labour Party member and GLC councillor Douglas Eden near Muswell Hill to protest against the GLC seeking to have unauthorised occupiers expelled from empty properties. Alarmed, Eden telephoned Corbyn to ask him to intervene. It did no good. ‘Corbyn waffled because he supported the squatters,’ said Eden, who realised too late that Corbyn equated his own ambitions in Haringey to those of Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in Chile.
In that febrile atmosphere, Corbyn and Chapman set off on his 250cc Czech motorbike in the summer of 1976 for a camping holiday across Europe. ‘Jeremy always chose to go on holiday in August,’ explained Chapman, ‘because there were no political meetings.’ To her distress, her husband showed no interest in her political duty to nurse her constituency in Dover in preparation for the next general election, nor in her academic work. She also feared that the holiday would be as uncomfortable as the previous year’s in France, Spain and Portugal. The ordeal was not just riding pillion on Corbyn’s bumpy bike, but his passion for abstinence. While Chapman wanted to sleep in a proper bed at night and eat in interesting restaurants, Corbyn insisted on a small tent and cooking tins of beans on a single-ring Calor gas stove. The nearest Chapman got to comfort was after a rainstorm flooded their tent outside Prague. Begrudgingly, Corbyn agreed to spend the night under cover – not in a hotel, but in a student hostel. He became furious when his motorbike broke down in Czechoslovakia, assuming that because it had been manufactured there it would be easy to have it repaired. Instead, he was introduced to the realities of a communist economy. The bike had been made exclusively for export, and no Czech garage mechanic knew how to fix it, or where to obtain spare parts. For two days he fumed until it was finally repaired.
During their journey, Chapman discovered that her husband was not interested in equality within marriage, or in sharing any domestic chores: ‘Women living out their sex lives as a personal statement was ignored by him,’ she recalled. ‘He never spoke about sex, music, fashion or books. He put class first.’ Equally distressing was his indifference to Europe’s most beautiful cities. In Vienna, he refused to enter the palace of Schönbrunn, the Kaiser’s summer retreat, because it was ‘royal’. ‘You go in,’ he told her. ‘I’ll stay outside.’ European culture offended him. Oblivious of his surroundings, he stood in Vienna’s beautiful Ringstrasse and pronounced it ‘capitalist’. He walked past all the museums and art galleries, and found no pleasure in medieval towns. In villages, he was interested to watch the peasants going about their lives. In Prague, soaking wet from torrential rain, he did not lament a missed visit to Hradčany castle, and turned down a walk through the old town. Nor did he comment on the dilapidation of the city’s old buildings, all neglected by its communist overlords. ‘Preservation of architecture and heritage,’ recalled Chapman, ‘didn’t appear to be on his agenda.’ For similar reasons he had always refused to accompany her to Paris, where she did occasional research, or to Los Angeles to visit her aunt. He spoke only about elections, campaigns and demonstrations, although his knowledge even of these was incomplete. Strangely, considering his claims forty years later of his profound sympathy for South America’s indigenous people, he never mentioned that supposed fascination to her. By contrast, he expressed a deep interest in Britain’s manhole covers, especially their dates of manufacture: ‘My mother always said there’s history in drain covers. So most people think I’m completely mad if they see me taking a picture of a drain cover, but there we are.’
Most travellers who crossed into Czechoslovakia from Austria during the Cold War were shocked by the experience. Running just behind the customs buildings were two rows of electrified barbed wire. Between them was a wide, sandy strip of ground concealing a minefield. Looking out over the eerie silence were armed soldiers in guard towers, with orders to shoot on sight anyone approaching from the Czech side. Those caught within five miles of the border without police permission could expect imprisonment. Any Western visitor riding a motorbike through those fortifications would be left in no doubt that Eastern Europe was a prison. Czechs were badly dressed, had limited food, and lived in decaying buildings. Czechoslovakia, a rich democracy before 1939, was a police state. But Corbyn uttered not a single word of criticism, and expressed no sympathy for the country’s 1968 attempt at liberation from the Soviet Union. He simply dismissed what he was seeing as a delusion, just as he dismissed the victims’ accounts of the horrors of Soviet Russia. He wilfully ignored the despair suffered in the name of ‘social justice’ not only by Czechs, but by hundreds of millions of people in Russia, China and the other countries in ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe. He said nothing about the thousands of skilled and scholarly Czechs forced to take menial employment as street cleaners or worse, as punishment for opposing the Soviet occupation. ‘He was a Tankie,’ said Keith Veness, meaning that Corbyn had supported the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956 and the Prague uprising twelve years later. When in conversation Veness mentioned Stalin’s cruelties, ‘Jeremy walked away. He couldn’t do political arguments. He was a communist fellow-traveller. The bastard never apologised for the Moscow trials.’ In that Cold War era, Corbyn’s sympathies were stark. ‘NATO’s object’, he said, and that of ‘the war machine of the United States is to maintain a world order dominated by the banks and multi-national companies of Europe and North America’. Only the South Americans deserved to be liberated – from American imperialism. Both during that European holiday and throughout their relationship, Corbyn never mentioned to Chapman his time in Jamaica, nor his interest in Guyana or Cuba. Considering the profound influence those places supposedly exerted on his world view, his silence was remarkable.
The Corbyns returned to London with Jeremy unaware that their marriage was cracking up. ‘Jeremy never thought there was anything wrong,’ recalled Chapman. ‘He assumed that, because our politics were compatible, that amounted to a proper relationship.’ ‘She tried to make it work,’ said Keith Veness, ‘but he was uninterested. He never came home, and the relationship just slowly broke up.’ Chapman’s requests for more than just a political life – cinemas, restaurants, clubs, children – were ignored. ‘He didn’t acknowledge my emotional side,’ said Chapman. ‘He doesn’t recognise a woman’s feelings.’
Despite their disagreements, early on 20 August 1976 the two set off to Willesden in north London to join the picket line outside Grunwick, a film-processing plant where female Asian workers were on strike and unsuccessfully trying to prevent strike-breakers taking their places. During that long but forlorn struggle, Corbyn became a familiar face as a footsoldier against employers. ‘Jeremy was a Trotskyist,’ recalled Chapman. ‘No doubt about it.’
A hammer blow to the left fell in September 1976. The pound’s value sank still further, and the markets were in turmoil. Britain once again became the ‘the sick man of Europe’. While some spoke of humiliation, Tony Benn and Corbyn saw an opportunity to introduce draconian controls to create a socialist economy. Jim Callaghan took the opposite view. The government appealed to the International Monetary Fund for a loan – the biggest in the IMF’s history – and agreed to reduce inflation by cutting public expenditure and imposing pay limits. The left was outraged. If taxpayers’ money and huge loans were not spent by the government, they believed, unemployment would soar. Labour was irreconcilably split. In the ideological battle chancellor Denis Healey was on one side, Benn and Corbyn on the other, shouting slogans on marches in support of Benn’s ‘alternative economic strategy’. It was a dialogue of the deaf.
On his own patch, Corbyn worked towards a breakthrough. In the 1978 council elections, contrary to predictions that Labour would do badly because of the huge rates increases, his vigorous organisation produced a high turnout, and Corbyn turned the tide by using his links with the immigrant community, who agreed to come out to vote. The count was held in the cavernous Alexandra Palace, an exhibition hall built in the nineteenth century overlooking London and fittingly called ‘The People’s Palace’. Seeing
