When Corbyn was Labour leader, I found it very difficult to get any real idea of how good or bad he was doing, because the reporting of him was so blatantly polarised. He was vilified in the mainstream press, and hailed as a messianic figure on social media. The mainstream reporting was so brazenly hyperbolic that it was easy to disregard it all as a smear campaign; when anyone criticised Corbyn, they could be dismissed as part of the Establishment campaign against him. Two hyperpolarised mythologies developed around the Labour leader: Corbyn the Messiah, who would champion the downtrodden and lead Britain to a golden age; Corbyn the Destroyer, who hated Britain and sympathised with terrorists.
Tom Bower's book is all of the Corbyn the Destroyer mythology condensed into one handy volume, published in 2019 (it was also serialised in the Daily Mail). It is not a good book, sometimes it is comically bad, and it is riddled with errors and inaccuracies.
Sources are not provided for most of the information - 'for legal reasons... unusually the book has no references'. When a source is named, such as the notoriously untruthful George Galloway, it becomes clear that Bower has largely been in contact with people who disliked Corbyn or had vendettas against him: he has no interest in getting a proper understanding of Corbyn as an actual person, only in presenting him as an incompetent Marxist cartoon villain.
The sources of quotations from books, magazines, and newspapers are also frequently not given: we are just meant to trust that the magazine or newspaper did say it, but are not given the date or issue number for us to find the quote ourselves. We also have to take it on trust that Bower has not deliberately omitted positive comments from his various sources. The few times that a source does say something positive about Corbyn, Bower immediately tries to defuse it:
'"People thought he was a nice bloke," conceded Allcock. "He made them feel comfortable. He even charmed his adversaries." In his constituency dealings at least, Corbyn had perfected a genial mask, despite not yet proving himself as an effective MP.'
Bower pretends to understand Corbyn's inner thoughts and motivations, which are invariably sinister and malicious: he acts not out of concern for the unfortunate, but out of hatred for the upper and middle classes. For example, before he was an MP, councillor Corbyn pushed to for houses to be built on some parkland; if we are to believe Bower, Corbyn's main goal here was to annoy the middle classes who would lose their park, not to help people without homes.
'Annoying Haringey's middle classes game 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.'
Racist dog whistles are common throughout. The reader is meant to be suspicious of Corbyn's anti-imperialist beliefs and championing of refugees and immigrants; we are meant to see him as anti-White, anti-British, a self-hating white British man who sides with foreigners against his own people: 'He would black up if he could,' one Labour MP said of Corbyn, according to George Galloway.
This characterisation is appalling, and I think it tells you a lot about the author. Indeed, throughout Bower comes across as an intensely repulsive man; this is not helped by the two author photos, in which his body language and facial expression make him look like an absolute prick.
Furthermore, in the introduction and author bio, Bower says he used to be a Marxist himself back at university, and was known as 'Tommy the Red', and yet he seems completely incapable of understanding Corbyn & co's ideology and motivations. Leftist descriptors such as 'Marxist' are used almost as synonyms for 'evil' or 'villainous'. Corbyn is variously described as 'ideologically inconsistent', 'obsessed with ideological purity', 'Marxist', 'Trotsykist', 'committed to Stalinism', and 'anarchist'. These words have incompatible meanings which you would expect a supposed former leftist to understand; Bower's 'ex-Marxist' backstory reminded me of the unconvincing 'ex-atheist' backstories encountered in works of Christian apologetics. If he genuinely was Tommy the Red, my assumption is that he was motivated by teenage rebellion and a temporary dislike of middle class Britain, and he is projecting those remembered feelings onto Corbyn & co.
The book's subtitle is 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power'. As a result, Corbyn's lack of both ruthlessness and ambition for power throughout are hilarious recurring themes. Bower repeatedly tells us that Corbyn is ruthless without backing this up; often he clunkily adds implied ruthlessness when it manifestly isn't there.
'Lenin would have expected him to act ruthlessly, but... <proceeds to describe a lack of ruthlessness>'
It is clear throughout that Corbyn is not power-hungry. He was quite happy as a backbench MP focused on his constituency and protesting global injustices; he had never aspired for ministerial positions or put in the work to develop policies. In 2012, he was considering retiring to Wiltshire to focus on beekeeping and growing vegetables. On page 311 out of 348, describing the 2017 election campaign, Bower says:
'The campaign had transformed Corbyn himself. The veteran protester understood that politics was no longer just a series of battles within the Labour Party, but actually about winning real power. His new ambition was to become prime minister.'
It is on page 311 out of 348 of a book supposedly about 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power' that Corbyn is first described as wanting power.
The book ends with what is meant to be a mic-drop by Bower, but it is such a failure of a mic drop that it perfectly illustrates how lazy and perfidious the book is. Bower does not believe that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is Corbyn's favourite poem, as he has claimed in interviews.
'His enthusiasm for it was dubious, not least because Wilde himself was no believer in socialism.'
Bower then closes the book with a part of the poem which ends with,
The implication is that Wilde was somehow warning of a socialist hellscape like the USSR, but the poem is about someone being executed by hanging at Reading Gaol, the British prison, and the 'red Hell' refers to - you know, well - the afterlife hell to which 'his sightless soul may stray', not to socialism.
That's not the worst of it. After reading this I had to look around for a bit thinking I was going mad or had fallen into a parallel universe. Hadn't Wilde wrote an essay advocating socialism? The Soul of Man Under Socialism? Wasn't this essay a socialist classic?
'Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.'
Either Bower didn't bother to check Wilde's views on socialism (even just by Googling 'Wilde socialism'), or he doesn't care, because it doesn't matter if the book is truthful or accurate: its only purpose is to damage Corbyn's reputation.
There are of course grains of truth in the book, as there was in other Corbyn coverage, (I think it is quite clear that Corbyn's administration would have been disappointing, that the bond market would have savaged him, that he was out of his depth as leader, that he had some weird views, and that there was a serious anti-Semitism crisis*) but they are so thoroughly buried in falsehood and hyperbole that it becomes easy to dismiss it all as smears and nonsense. Those hoping for an accurate insight into Corbyn and his leadership would best look elsewhere.
*When Corbyn was leader, I had absorbed, from friends and social media, the narrative that the anti-Semitism crisis was largely an Establishment smear against Labour and Corbyn. I wasn't following politics or the story very assiduously, and I wasn't on social media that often. However, by the time Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, I was on social media more often, and on the day of her sacking I saw a huge explosion of anti-Semitic comments and posts from leftwing sources. This was a moment of Great Disillusionment for me, the scales fell from my eyes.
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