In a fortnight’s time, if opinion polls and most other available evidence are to be believed, Jeremy Corbyn will be elected leader of the Labour party, placing the most unexpected pressure on the political management skills of a man who has previously run only the planning committee of Haringey council in north London.

Within days of his election on 12 September, he will meet his MPs, only 20 of whom ever truly backed him. Two days later, he will face prime minister’s questions, an event he has watched from the backbenches for the past 32 years. A fortnight later, he faces four days of scrutiny at a traumatised Labour annual conference.

At some point in this melee, he must appoint a new frontbench that may have lost some of its best talent. He will need to appoint a chief whip who is likely to be told by many Labour MPs that Corbyn is entitled to receive the levels of loyalty he gave previous Labour leaders – none.

The Conservative party has prepared a parliamentary welcome in which Corbyn will need to decide how to vote on a series of touchstone issues covering public spending, welfare and defence. It will all be designed to show that Corbyn’s support is a million miles from the heartbeat of the country.

Corbyn hardly has an infrastructure in place to deal with these challenges. He did not intend to stand for the job and only did so when Lisa Nandy, John McDonnell and Jon Trickett all declined to do so for various reasons. The fourth choice of the left, Corbyn hoped to get on to the ballot paper but never expected to win. If ever there was a case of greatness being thrust upon someone, it is this. He is almost the accidental leader of the opposition.

In the Labour party over the past two decades, the leader has become paramount, directing not just his own staff, but Labour headquarters. Corbyn has had next to no experience of making difficult political decisions, preferring instead the safety of leftwing protest politics.

In Simon Fletcher, his campaign chief of staff, Corbyn has a focused, level headed and talented adviser who worked for Ken Livingstone for many years, including Livingstone’s failed attempt to beat Boris Johnson in Labour London in 2012.

Many of Corbyn’s initial staff will come from the group that have worked for Livingstone in the past. Trickett, the former parliamentary aide to Miliband, will be influential, as will Tom Watson on the assumption he is elected deputy.

Beyond that, however, Corbyn faces a huge organisational challenge when he has to assemble a coherent leadership team that can harness the unstructured popular movement that has formed around him, outside Westminster. He does not yet have a plan how to relate to the new left infrastructure – Red Labour, Grassroots Alliance, the People’s Assembly and the various leftist parties drawn to the return of a lost radicalism.

There is little sign that Labour headquarters would be enthusiastic cooperators in this cause. Many Labour organisers have spent a lifetime fighting the front organisations of the hard left, as well as the Greens. Similarly, many of the special advisers who worked for Miliband shadow cabinet are appalled.



For many Labour MPs, Corbyn’s election represents a dilemma, encapsulated in the penultimate sentences of Tony Blair’s recent Observer article. Attacking the left’s hermetically sealed belief that they have created a mass movement, Blair argues: “The question is: what to do? Do we go full frontal and take it on or do we try to build a bridge between the two realities? I don’t know. But the answer will preoccupy the Labour party for years to come, provided that the space to examine it is permitted.”

The issue of how the one-time Labour mainstream responds to a Corbyn victory, either full frontal confrontation or cooperation, is now the central question among Labour MPs. It depends on three factors – the scale of Corbyn’s victory, Corbyn’s own willingness to try to bind the party together and the response of the ultimate boss – the electorate – to his leadership in the electoral tests of 2016. But few Corbyn opponents think it will be simple or quick to dislodge him.

Much will first depend on Corbyn’s mandate. If he has won in all three parts of the new Labour electorate – the 292,973 members, the 148,182 affiliated supporters and 112,799 registered supporters – he will have the strongest mandate any Labour leader has had. The electoral system, for all its glaring faults, is more democratic than many of its predecessors.

Corbyn himself claims the whole dynamic of the Labour party will have changed if he is elected and the party outside Westminster will be entitled to wield more influence.

But if he is not the victor among the full members, he will be walking but wounded and a legal challenge is more likely. If a legal challenge is mounted due to maladministration of the election, and the courts will be reluctant to intervene, Corbyn will find the legitimacy of his mandate put under forensic scrutiny in a court room and that may not be a pretty sight.

The inability of the party to make the belated checks they promised on new recruits is self-evident, largely due to the cut-off date for applying to become a registered supporter was so close to the ballot itself. The party’s own procedure committee, a national executive sub-committee, rejected legal advice to make additional checks.

But if Corbyn has won with a healthy majority, he says he will try to appoint a shadow cabinet reflecting all ideological wings of the party. In this case, do figures such as Tristram Hunt, Chuka Umunna and even Yvette Cooper say they will not serve under Corbyn ? If they refuse, they will invite the charge of being splitters, engineering a coup, taking themselves from the field of battle and being anti-democratic – charges already levelled in vitriolic language by Lord Prescott, a supporter of Andy Burnham, against Hunt.

Yet if they serve, they face the shackles of collective shadow cabinet responsibility and losing self respect. They will be asked if they want Corbyn to be prime minister and, for some, it will be difficult to answer truthfully.

As a result, there are plans afoot to try to enforce a restoration of shadow cabinet elections, something that is in the gift of the parliamentary party and difficult for Corbyn the democrat to oppose.

It is argued that a majority of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) oppose Corbyn’s politics and an election would see success for candidates on a mainstream slate who are opposed to him. This would limit Corbyn’s freedom of manoeuvre and allow shadow cabinet members to say they work to a mandate provided by the PLP. By contrast, if Corbyn tries to block a return to shadow cabinet elections, the centre right may refuse to serve.

Corbyn’s own willingness to compromise with the rest of the party is as yet unknown. Although no one questions Corbyn’s personal decency, he does not have a track record of working with other Labour MPs, so much so that many openly admit they have rarely spoken to him in decades at Westminster. Even his relations with key union leaders are in their infancy.

John Harris charts the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his effect on politics. Link to video

At times, he has sounded belligerent, insisting his election will change the balance of power inside the party and mean the currently sidelined annual party conference – an institution effectively dominated by a small group of big mainly public sector-based trade unions – will have its powers restored. An early test will be whether he forces through a vote at conference to ditch support for replacement to the Trident nuclear submarine as many grassroots constituency parties are already proposing.

There are forces that have rallied round him that are spoiling for a fight. Take the Alliance for Workers Liberty, once known as Socialist Organiser, and its newspaper to which Corbyn recently gave an interview. Its leading theorist Sean Matgamna wrote last month: “If Jeremy Corbyn wins, it won’t be the end but the beginning of the fight. A leader of the French Revolution once observed that ‘those who make half a revolution, only dig their own graves’. A Corbyn victory will at best be only half a revolution. It will energise the PLP and its backers in the press for a serious fight back. If we don’t respond blow for blow, with determination to win, then the rightwing counter-revolution will win. There will be a severe repression of the left. The chance of a new beginning for working-class politics will be squandered.

“If Corbyn wins, then the left should immediately go on the offensive. Irreconcilable MPs should be de-selected. A real political life can be restored in a Labour party that has received an alluvial flood of new members. Labour party democracy needs to be restored. The Labour party conference must again become the democratic labour movement forum it once was.”

There is a strand of Corbyn’s support that seeks to delegitimise its opponents rather than engage with them. But that is not the tone adopted by some of those closest to Corbyn. Owen Jones, his chief media ally, has written an impressively honest piece setting out how hard the challenge facing Corbyn will become. He urges Corbynites to deploy “message discipline”, reach out to the middle income people, the moderates in the Labour party, those opposed to immigration and more broadly to avoid internal confrontations “so that if he is attacked by those determined to undermine his democratically decided leadership they are exposed as the aggressors”. Corbyn should pick his fights with his fellow MPs.

There are already signs that Corbyn is willing to compromise on two touchstone issues. Despite his campaign slogan of being straight talking, Corbyn’s views on the UK relations with two of the most important institutions of which it is a member, Nato and the European Union, are best described as fluid.

At the Daily Mirror hustings last week, he subtly changed his position on pulling out of Nato. “It’s a cold war organisation that should have been wound up in 1990,” he said. But he now says he would “restrict” the role of the military alliance but there was not an appetite on the whole to leave.

Similarly on the EU, his position is a study in ambivalence, refusing to say if he would support continued UK membership if David Cameron fails to negotiate a more social Europe.

Corbyn knows that for some of the famously careerist Labour MPs, the UK’s membership of Nato and the EU define their western values and they will not tolerate a party that is neutral between east and west.

The right of the shadow cabinet are insistent they are not looking to create an SDP Mark 2. One despairing MP admits: “I am not sure we even have the capacity to do it. Who really is our Roy Jenkins figure? Who is our organiser? I fear instead we face a long rebuilding job”.

Another New Labour missionary admits: “We are the victims of our own mistakes and we lost the mainstream of the party over a decade ago, much of it due to Iraq. The Blairites have become the lost tribe. We let the discrediting of New Labour happen first under Gordon Brown and then it became Ed Miliband’s raison d’etre. Nothing constructive was put in its place, everything was hollowed out and it has caused this huge vacuum.



“As a result, the party has been taken over. It’s going to take two years of electoral defeats and a lot of hard thinking and organisation before this can start to be reversed.”

• This article was amended on 2 September 2015 to add some words missing from a quote from an article by Sean Matgamna. The following sentence was wrongly attributed to Matgamna in an earlier version: “There is a strand of Corbyn’s support that seeks to delegitimise its opponents rather than engage with them.”