Jeremy Corbyn was chosen to contest the safe Labour seat of Islington North in the 1983 election. He won, and has been its MP for the past 32 years.
The fledgling MP caused a stir in parliament by supporting another ‘firebrand’ Labour politician, Ken Livingstone, who had invited Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams to Westminster. Adams saw the visit as an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the British people and break down a ‘wall of disinformation’ around Northern Ireland.
A year later, Corbyn was again in the news. This time the backbench MP, who backed the anti-apartheid movement, was arrested outside the South African embassy in London.
In 1984, Corbyn told the Observer that he believed in transforming Labour into a ‘force outside of parliament mobilising political activity’.
Corbyn’s controversial decision to employ Ronan Bennett as his researcher led the House of Commons security to take away Bennett’s pass. The Guardian, although questioning Corbyn’s ‘romantic attachment to the IRA’, said in an editorial that Bennett, whose conviction for killing an RUC officer was overturned in 1975, should have his pass returned. A Commons vote in 1987 upheld the decision against Bennett.
The MP’s leftwing political beliefs also had an impact on his personal life. In 1999, his wife’s decision to send their son to a grammar school instead of a comprehensive led the couple to split.
Having already witnessed Labour’s shift towards the centre ground under Tony Blair, Corbyn, once dubbed the ‘patron saint of lost Left causes’, found himself increasingly at odds with his party. He was particularly vocal about Blair’s stance on the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
