A firebrand leftwing Labour leader whose radical political prospectus terrifies the establishment; a smear campaign alleging ill health fostered by unaccountable figures seeking to oust him from power. This is the plot of A Very British Coup, a 1982 work of fiction by former Labour minister Chris Mullin that centres on the rise to power of plain-speaking Harry Perkins. Election euphoria has given way to turmoil and crisis. With Perkins deemed irretrievably unpopular, the media demands he stands aside for a more “moderate” colleague. At this moment, agents of the British state – supposedly impartial servants of the elected government – take the opportunity to strike.
A far-fetched scenario, surely? It seems not. Last week the Times ran a front-page story headlined “Jeremy Corbyn too frail to be PM, fears civil service”. Officials were quoted as saying there were worries Corbyn was not up to the job “physically or mentally”. One asked: “When does someone say [he] is too ill to carry on as leader of the Labour party let alone prime minister?”
Now, there is not a single person in Corbyn’s circle who fears for his health; he has a more vigorous fitness regime than most 20-year-olds. If Corbyn was “frail”, as briefed, his performance in the bearpit of prime minister’s questions would reveal it. Strikingly, the concerns about Corbyn’s health seem to merge with political objections to his agenda. “He needs to have a grasp of the domestic agenda in the 21st century, rather than living in the past,” one civil servant is quoted as saying.
Park what you think about Corbyn for a moment. Britain is supposed to be a democracy. In a democracy, the civil service has to be studiously neutral. In the code they are supposed to follow, officials are told: “Ensure you have ministerial authorisation for any contact with the media”, and “act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of ministers, while at the same time ensuring that you will be able to establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future government”. Briefing a newspaper about the unsuitability of the leader of the opposition is a flagrant violation of this code.
Corbyn has written to the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, to ask for an independent investigation. Some commentators have asked why Labour is helping to keep a news story centring on Corbyn’s ill health running. But again: park your political sympathies. This threat must not be met with silence.
Some critics of the contemporary left believe that it is conspiratorial. It is certainly true that there exists within it a strand of what could be called “conspiracism”, which holds that power is wielded by shadowy individuals, rather than understanding capitalism as a system of competing power relations. This conspiracism is usually misplaced, and has its roots in the fact that socialism disappeared for a generation, re-emerging suddenly, without deep-rooted ideological or institutional underpinnings. It’s certainly not the case that establishment manoeuvrings are Labour’s sole block on power: for example, the party’s failure to clarify its Brexit stance risks severe self-harm.
Yet sometimes conspiracies do exist, driven by self-preservation on the part of the powerful. Who would deny the Hillsborough cover-up was a conspiracy? What of collusion between the police, security services and loyalists in the murder of Catholics in Northern Ireland? Senior civil servants, clearly hostile to the left, breaking the civil service code to brief the Murdoch press ahead of a possible election is just as surely a conspiracy.
Hostility from the senior civil service is hardly surprising. Of the permanent secretaries, 59% were privately educated: fearing a government that would challenge privilege is entirely rational. Former Labour minister Angela Eagle – who can hardly be described as a Corbynista – once told me that, when posted to the Treasury, she encountered civil servants “wedded to free market fundamentalism”, who “were very confidently espousing all sorts of neoclassical nonsense about markets”. Former cabinet minister Peter Hain, too, once told me that “since Thatcher’s time, the Treasury has got a very neoliberal economic model, so it’s in its element with this current government’s approach of cutting, cutting, cutting”. Even before Thatcher, the Treasury infamously inflated the level of Britain’s deficit in the 1970s, leading the then Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, to go cap in hand to the IMF, much to his later regret.
There are two further reasons for the hostility towards Corbynism. The first is that the Labour leadership has an extra-parliamentary theory of change: it believes winning an election is insufficient, that mobilising people – through protests, direct action, strikes – plays an important role, too. The second is what can be described as the “anti-imperialist” tradition of key Labour figures, who believe western foreign policy is frequently dictated by economic self-interest. Both of these positions scare very powerful people. But again, perhaps you object to them, too; perhaps you object to hiking taxes on the rich, or increased public investment, or the expansion of public ownership. It is irrelevant. The civil service is there to execute the policies of the elected government. If it reveals itself to be politically motivated, then this critical pillar of democracy must be questioned by us all.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
