Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are self-evidently not twin brothers separated at birth. Telling them apart would not be a problem for even the most myopic of moles. Yet they have more in common than either would ever recognise, never mind acknowledge. Both owe their positions to the anger and alienation felt towards the political establishment by different and significant minority segments of the electorate. Both are Marmite politicians: you love them or you hate them.
Objects of near-worship to those they enthuse, subjects of fear and loathing among those they repel, indifference is not the emotion aroused by either man. Both reject the conventional electoral wisdom that power is awarded to those who are most successful at capturing the swing voters on the centre ground. The calling card of both is an alleged superiority in authenticity and principle over mainstream politicians that makes both men vehicles for revolt against more traditional notions of how a leader ought to act, look and think.
The two men also have some problems in common. Both lead parties that are still traumatised by what happened to them at the general election. Labour lost a contest most of its members had convinced themselves they were set to win. Ukip had a different sort of disappointment. The party racked up more than four million votes, its best ever performance at a general election, but its reward for that haul was just a single member of parliament.
Both parties are now cash strapped and split. Both leaders are swirled by internal conflicts. The great majority of Labour MPs are hostile to Mr Corbyn – and he knows it. So do his supporters among the Labour membership, the more zealous of whom are directing reciprocated animosity towards Labour parliamentarians. When the shadow cabinet met last week, Mr Corbyn gave them a little talk about discipline and speaking with one voice, a lecture in loyalty that caused some dark hilarity among those who recall his previous incarnation as a backbencher with a record-breaking history of rebelling against all his predecessors as Labour leader. He also demanded that members of the shadow cabinet should in future clear all interviews and statements through his office, an injunction that some Labour frontbenchers will simply disobey. The lecture on loyalty was particularly aimed at Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary, who took the side of the chief of the defence staff when Sir Nicholas Houghton trampled on the constitutional proprieties by quarrelling with Mr Corbyn’s opposition to the nuclear deterrent. But it could have been directed at almost every member of the shadow cabinet: there are few of them who have not openly contradicted Mr Corbyn over one thing or another, and usually on several, since he became leader.
Both camps are organising. Momentum, the activist organisation set up by the Corbynistas as a counterweight to the dissident parliamentarians, is seen as a menacing party within a party by many Labour MPs. They voted to create a “shadow shadow cabinet” by giving many of the chairs of the party’s parliamentary committees to some of the Labour leader’s most prominent internal critics. Both sides are paranoid about each other – and both sides are right to be so. This week, Labour’s national executive committee will be asked to “clarify” the rules governing the party’s leadership elections. Mr Corbyn’s supporters say that the current wording is ambiguous about whether a leader dethroned by a no-confidence vote could stand again in the subsequent contest if he couldn’t muster enough nominations from MPs. They are correct: the wording of the rule book is unclear. But they would not be bothering to seek this change, a move that in itself draws attention to the insecurity of Mr Corbyn’s position with his parliamentary party, if they did not think he needed protection from a future attempt to topple him.
Nigel Farage has a similar set of difficulties. Since the election, Ukip has been shedding staff and members, and its cash flow has been drying up as big donors divert their money to the campaign to leave the European Union. The Ukip leader is at war with the entirety of his parliamentary party. The differences between him and Ukip’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell, are now so pronounced that they’ve stopped bothering to pretend about it.
And now, the destinies of Mr Corbyn and Mr Farage are going to entangle in a Pennine town. The two insurgent forces will clash with each other at the Oldham West and Royton byelection. No other party will matter in this contest. There can be only one of two results when the folk of Oldham go to the polls in early December: Labour holds the seat or Ukip takes it. It is significant for Labour because this is the party’s first electoral test under its new management. The party ought to be heading for a great victory if Mr Corbyn and his supporters are correct about what the voters want. The seat has been Labour since 1945, bar one brief blip at a 1968 byelection when the party lost because the then Labour government was very unpopular. Michael Meacher, whose death triggered this contest, secured a substantial majority at the general election and electorates don’t normally decide to change their minds about their preferred flavour of representative in such a short space of time.
By most accounts, Mr Meacher was an assiduous servant of his constituents. He was also once known as “Tony Benn’s vicar on Earth” back in the days when Mr Corbyn was a junior preacher for Bennery. So you could say that the voters of Oldham have had some preconditioning for Corbynism. If the Labour leader’s theories about how politics works are correct, his party should do better than well here. It should romp home with a much bigger majority. One of those theories is that the way to win elections is not to bother trying to win converts from other parties. The way to win is by reaching out to non-voters who have rejected Labour in the past because the party has never previously offered them “real socialism”. Oldham is a perfect place for an early test of that thesis. At the general election, turn out was just over 60%. If the Corbynista theory about non-voters is correct, there ought to be thousands more now ready to flock to Labour.
The test is a bit complicated by the fact that the Labour candidate in the byelection is not actually a disciple of the Labour leader. Offered three leftwing contenders to be their standard bearer, the local party rejected all of them. It instead picked Jim McMahon, the highly regarded leader of the local council. No Corbynista he. In his mid-30s, he impresses Labour MPs who know him and clearly belongs to the centre-left tradition of his party. I’ve even occasionally heard him tagged “the next Tony Blair”. So whether the outcome is good or bad for Labour, there will be a battle of interpretation over what it means. If Labour does badly, the Corbynistas will blame Mr McMahon and Labour MPs will blame Mr Corbyn. If Labour does well, the Corbynistas will claim vindication and Labour MPs will say Mr McMahon won despite Mr Corbyn.
One way or another, what happens in Oldham will be taken as a reflection on Corbyn Labour. The party’s leadership is clearly nervous about what the verdict will be: they rushed the writ for this byelection before Mr Meacher had been laid to rest. That was to try to prevent Nigel Farage from getting a bandwagon rolling in Oldham. He needs to win here. A byelection sensation – and that would be a fair description if Ukip takes the seat – would do a lot to soothe his party’s disappointment with its general election result and boost its flagging morale and momentum. The party fancies its chances because this is one of the many northern seats where it leapt into second place at the general election. Profiting from the weakness of the Tories in northern towns like this and the evaporation of the Lib Dems, and feeding on alienation from Labour among many of the “left behind”, Ukip’s vote share surged from a negligible 3% to 21%.
This is Ukip’s first electoral test since May of its strategy of targeting Labour voters in northern England. It is encouraged because it came only 617 votes behind snatching a neighbouring seat at a byelection in the last parliament. John Bickley, its candidate in that Heywood and Middleton contest, is again flying the plum and custard colours in Oldham. The byelection will also test Mr Farage’s theory that Mr Corbyn and his views are so repellent to many traditionally Labour folk that they are ripe for the plucking by him. Ukip’s early propaganda material, which paints the Labour leader as an unpatriotic friend of immigration who would leave Britain defenceless, seeks to turn the byelection into a referendum on his leadership.
So, to some extent at least, it is bound to be. If Labour does well here, Jeremy Corbyn will be a little safer from his mutinous parliamentarians. If the party does badly, Labour MPs will be redoubled in their fears about where he is taking them and their determination to prevent him from leading them into the next general election.
