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The British election result is historic for a number of reasons, not least of which because it served as a test case against the long-offered argument that turning left is electoral suicide for a major political party. But what made it particularly significant is that no major party candidate in the Western world in recent history has faced the kind of consistent, widespread, stubborn, and (in Corbyn’s case) often dishonest opposition from both the media and the political class — and come out on top regardless. It was always a given that the Right would do its best to discredit Corbyn, particularly the famously vicious right-wing British press, which has never met a Labour leader it didn’t attempt to portray as a buffoon. But what makes Corbyn’s sudden ascent so unexpected is that the attempts to undermine and delegitimize him came from not just the Right, but from across the political spectrum. Over the last two years, it’s often been the very same Labour MPs sitting across from Corbyn in shadow cabinet meetings who have been most dedicated to undermining his leadership and ensuring the party remained in a permanent state of chaos. At every step of the way throughout Corbyn’s leadership, he has faced an implacable and hostile wall of opposition from his own party. This was coupled with the never-ending stream of negative coverage from both the right- and left-wing media. Looking back on this nearly two-year long history of attacks, plots, and smears shows just how extraordinary of an achievement Corbyn’s victory is.

All Roads Lead to a Coup The new year didn’t bring many changes. Blair continued to badmouth Corbyn. MPs continued to call on him to resign. The press (with the help of anonymous Labour MPs) portrayed him as a hypocrite for being paid to do his job as an MP. Labour MPs continued to plot against Corbyn. “We need to have more courage,” one told the BBC. “Lots of people are talking about a battle of ideas. But that can wait. There is nothing more important than ditching Jeremy Corbyn.” Another said that “if Jeremy Corbyn leads us into the 2020 election, it’s all over for the party. We are screwed.” The May 2016 election results provided the next opportunity for MPs to declare Corbyn’s leadership a failure. In reality, the May elections were a mixed bag for Labour, with the party losing big in Scotland and Wales (where it had been hemorrhaging votes for years), but more or less breaking even in England, as well as decisively winning the London mayoralty. Perhaps given the preceding eight months of infighting largely instigated by anti-Corbyn MPs, it was to be expected. But Labour MPs immediately called for Corbyn to resign in the wake of the election, citing his leadership. As the Guardian’s Gary Younge put it, “When it comes to assessing Labour’s electoral fortunes, Corbyn is treated with all the due process of a seventeenth-century woman accused of witchcraft and dunked in a river. If she drowns she’s innocent; if she floats she’s guilty and condemned as a witch.” Anti-Corbyn MPs faced a difficult dilemma, however. Their efforts to recruit a hundred thousand centrists failed, and it was clear Corbyn would easily win any leadership challenge. So Labour MPs who wanted to oust Corbyn were in the awkward position of constantly badgering him to leave without being able to do anything about it. The Brexit result provided the long sought-after pretext for Labour MPs to launch a coup. As one Labour MP told the Telegraph about the plot to remove Corbyn ten days before the referendum vote: “It is not going to be a date in the calendar, it will be on the back of a media firestorm. It could happen within 24 hours.” Another explained how it would go down: “Things go wrong, people have had enough, you start to see resignations, and it spirals from there.” Corbyn’s half-hearted campaign against Brexit, while not the defining factor in the referendum result, nonetheless proved the spark that set off a leadership challenge. The process closely followed what MPs had described to the Telegraph. After the Observer reported Benn was planning on launching a coup against him, Corbyn sacked him, leading to the resignation of his shadow health secretary, which in turn triggered the resignations of eleven more of his shadow cabinet. By the next day, forty-seven cabinet members had resigned, leading to chaos. MPs wrote scathing resignation letters, with one accusing Corbyn of trying “to poison the well of our national political discourse.” His own MPs yelled “Resign” at him in the middle of a parliamentary debate. They passed a no-confidence motion against him by 172 to forty, and nearly sixty former Labour parliamentary candidates called for his resignation. To anyone not paying attention, this would have seem particularly damning. And to be sure, even five hundred young Labour members, youth councillors, and activists signed a letter — organized by a formerly pro-Corbyn activist — calling for his resignation, citing his lackluster Brexit referendum campaign. But the efforts were also entirely in line with what anti-Corbyn MPs had been saying for months was their plan: to find an appropriate moment during which they could force his ouster. Labour MPs’ efforts to defeat Corbyn failed a second time, however, with Corbyn beating his sole challenger, Owen Smith, by an even larger margin than in his first victory. Yet even this had involved bypassing several obstacles. At first, it wasn’t clear if Corbyn could stand in the leadership contest without the support of MPs. When the NEC — the entity that decides how the party is run — decided he could, there was a legal challenge launched against the decision. Corbyn’s deputy leader charged that “Trotskyists” had infiltrated the party. London Mayor Sadiq Khan came out in support of his challenger. But the victory was a decisive one, largely due to party members who had joined up after 2015. This was after the NEC banned members who joined less than six months before from voting, and raising the membership fee from £3 to £25.