It’s been a long, long trek from aspiration to hope. Count the TV debates, the endless string of Newsnight interviews, the animated discussion programmes. Clip out the newspaper lead stories, the columns, the shock polls. Follow the odds as Jezza surges and Unison joins Unite. Two months gone; almost two more to go. Plus four-and-a-half-years until an election that most pundits currently predict Labour won’t win anyway. Where’s the beef? Where’s the heady mix of impending power and flamboyant personality that makes page one a natural choice day after day?
Of course there’s malign meddling in the mix. Stir in Telegraph entryists anxious to foist Jeremy Corbyn on Labour, and Socialist Worker readers of similar intent. But there’s also something more straightforward here: a feeling of editors and correspondents more than usually absorbed by a story. They’re involved in what’s happening. They are also making choices for themselves.
You can see that most easily when columnists take sides: Jonathan Freedland, Rafael Behr and Martin Kettle versus Owen Jones, Zoe Williams and Seumas Milne in the Guardian galaxy, John Rentoul versus Mark Steel on Indy planet. Philip Collins waxing incandescent in the Times. Blairites and Bennites replay their ancestral star wars. Derek Hatton returns from the dead to bemuse any BBC viewer under the age of 30. Even the Telegraph discovers that Jeremy, this “radical leftwinger, is a beacon of modernity in tune with young readers” (ie not Telegraph readers). But for me, at least, there’s a feeling of deja vu all over again.
If you were editing the Guardian in the early 80s, when the Gang of Four left Michael Foot’s Labour (and three of your leader-writing team subsequently decamped to fight a general election for the SDP) then you knew that politics wasn’t some game played on a distant stage. You knew it could rattle the cages around you (and that you’d better write the last editorial before the big vote yourself, because that was what the job entailed).
Is Corbyn a Foot, or a Roy Jenkins in reverse? The challenge, in many ways, remains constant. Journalists, AA Gill observed in the Sunday Times the other day, are innately leftwing. “They believe where we are could be improved in the future by new things and ideas. People who own culture and trade things are innately rightwing.” And that rule of thumb, please note, applies to newsrooms right across the political spectrum. It’s a huge mistake to think that, because people work for the Mail or Express, they all sing in Dacre or Desmond choirs after work. Final choices, final arguments, matter everywhere.
John Harris, assiduous tender of Labour grassroots, moved the ratchet up again in the Guardian last week. He’d been to a Storming Corbyn rally in Luton: “It felt like Scotland a year ago.” He’d found 400 people packed in a hall. “The cacophony of pro-Corbyn noise on Twitter and those packed meetings symbolise something beautifully simple: people refusing to do what they’re told.” Bolt on “the tumult that has broken out all over Europe” as you go.
It’s a powerful song to sing at news conferences. It takes an initially low-key story – the trudge of a defeated party trying to pick itself up – and applies the spirit of the age. But its particular allure is that it also reflects the debate at a watercooler near you: not just another story, but an involved experience; not just national politics, but office politics too. And that heady blend, perhaps, is always the one that’s most difficult to see straight and clear.
“Burnham to attack headline-grabbing gimmicks” boomed a Times tale last week, stretched right across a full page. This is becoming the compulsive, self-sustaining contest for all seasons (including, as it happens, the silly season).
