Twenty minutes later than planned, the lights dimmed and a short film was screened showing Labour triumphs since the second world war. Backstage, Jeremy Corbyn crossed himself as the film reached the Tony Blair era. Needs must. Now was a time for unity, not division. Let the Blairites have their little moment. Anything to keep them quiet for a bit. They would be forgotten soon enough.
As the film flickered to a close, Corbyn appeared, hands aloft, to greet his people. His people rose to cheer. And cheer. And cheer. Last year’s Corbyn would have looked a little bemused by the love-bombing, but Corbyn 2.0 has more of a swagger. The leadership election may have been a chastening experience for the Labour party, but not for Corbyn. He’s thrived on it and now can’t get enough of the attention. On and on they cheered and Corbyn did nothing to stop it. This was his moment. His time.
“It’s great to see a packed hall,” he began. It was packed, but only just. Before he had come on, stewards had been asking people if they wanted to move forward to fill up some empty seats at the front. A few Labour MPs and a couple of hundred moderates had chosen to catch an early train home. To beat the rush. Nothing more. Some Corbynistas were rounded up to plug the gaps and all the Labour leader could see was a tide of love. “It’s not about me,” he insisted. But it was. He knew it and so did everyone in the hall. Corbyn has made the personal, political. By appearing so ordinary, he has become a tabula rasa on to which others can imprint their own desires and aspirations.
For a while Corbyn was happy to witter on about not very much. He didn’t like the Tories, he didn’t like the House of Lords – though he didn’t elaborate on why he had given Shami Chakrabarti a peerage and he didn’t like Sir Philip Green. None of which was that surprising or what people had really come to hear. A few eyes began to close. This might have been his best conference speech, but he had set the bar quite low. Corbyn 2.0 is still not the most gifted of public speakers and there were moments when he was locked in a losing battle with the Autocue.
After about half an hour, Corbyn finally got to some substance – the 10 pledges he had made in his leadership campaign. “These aren’t the 10 commandments,” he joked, getting in a quick dig about the Ed Stone. But as far as the people in the hall were concerned they definitely were the 10 commandments. Everyone knew that even Moses had had to squeeze “Thou shalt not have no other gods before me” through the national policy forum.
The pledges were certainly an article of faith, as Corbyn declined to go into too much detail about their implementation. That would be for another day. All that mattered for now was that a new national investment bank with £500bn in its back pocket would be incredibly cheap as interest rates were so low and that British people could learn to appreciate immigrants by campaigning for a national living wage of £10 in Poland. Brexit was dealt with in just five short sentences. Believe and it will happen.
Not all did believe. Some walked out over the Iraq war and diehard New Labour pockets of resistance defiantly hummed Things Can Only Get Better. But they were very much in the minority. As Corbyn neared the end of his hour-long epic, he picked up the pace. “Ours is a 21st century socialism. We are not backward-looking,” he said, unwittingly planting the possibility in everyone’s subconscious that they might be just that.
“I’m convinced we can beat the Tories in a general election next year,” he concluded. Up till then, Corbyn had taken the hall with him. This was asking a bit too much. Not even the most loyal supporter believes that. Faith has its limits. The final ovation felt less spontaneous and more dutiful than the one that had greeted him an hour earlier. The Red Flag was sung at barely above a murmur. Perhaps many of the new Labour supporters have yet to learn the words and the old ones have forgotten them. The Jerusalem that followed was also less than full-throated. There again, ”Till we have built Jerusalem as a place where Palestinians can coexist happily with the Israelis” is a bit of a mouthful.
