Just minutes before the event was due to begin, rumours started to spread that Andrea Leadsom was about to announce she was pulling out of the Tory leadership race, at a press conference just down the road. Eagle’s aides heard the news and managed to get her speech started a few minutes early to catch some limited coverage on rolling news channels, but broadcasters barely covered the event. The only story in town was that Theresa May was set to be anointed as the country’s new prime minister. Eagle was left in the excruciating position of being stranded on stage calling for questions from journalists who had run out of the door to the real story just before she began speaking.



According to those watching in Corbyn’s office, there was a sense of schadenfreude that for once it wasn’t their media operation that was coming under pressure.

The following day came the one moment of real concern for team Corbyn: an epic six hour meeting of Labour's national executive committee, which would decide whether the leader was on the ballot which went to members by default or would have to collect supporting signatures from Labour MPs – an uphill task. Early on in the meeting Corbyn narrowly and unexpectedly lost a vote on whether he could remain in the room for part of the discussion. His team became worried they "had got the numbers wrong" and briefly panicked. But by the end he won the automatic right to appear on the ballot by 18 to 14 votes.

A secondary decision by the committee – to block tens of thousands of new members who had joined in recent months from voting and to raise the fee for being a registered supporter from £3 to £25 – was designed to limit Corbyn's support base. Instead, some individuals involved in the anti-Corbyn coup feel the decision only heightened the sense that the party machine was working against the incumbent leader, who then benefitted from the resulting sense of injustice.

As far as the disparate organisers of the coup were concerned, there was no point in having an anti-Corbyn candidate on the Labour leadership ballot if there weren’t enough registered Labour voters who would be willing to vote against Corbyn. With every extra day that Eagle and Smith argued over who got to be the candidate, Momentum was signing up thousands of new Labour members to back the leader. With this in mind anti-Corbyn Labour activists launched a new organisation, Saving Labour, which had some links to Progress, the Blairite think tank. Unlike Momentum, it had limited data and no established social media presence.

Still, the new group tried to fight back, even though it initially lacked a single candidate or manifesto to coalesce campaigning around. Street stalls were set up across the UK with limited success. The group had to improvise its messaging and struggled to target potential voters: Progress members were phoned and asked to convince all their family to sign up to the party.

According to one person involved, in the early days the campaign made the most of friendly MPs and councillors who were willing to share the contact details of local party members who could be potential anti-Corbyn supporters. This was stopped swiftly after Labour general secretary Iain McNicol – no ally of Corbyn – issued a stern warning about this legal grey area. Saving Labour has always strongly insisted it kept within the law in terms of data handling and claims it signed up 120,000 backers for this leadership election.

Attempts to recruit additional supporters had its perils. One of the group’s key aims was to persuade people who had recently left Labour to rejoin and vote against Corbyn. Unfortunately it was discovered that one of the relatively common reasons people had stopped paying their Labour subscription was that they had recently died. This resulted in occasions where keen Saving Labour volunteers found themselves calling numbers to ask whether recently deceased individuals would be willing to rejoin the party to block Corbyn. The pitches did not necessarily go down well with their grieving relatives.

The Labour coup’s delays in getting their act together were beginning to show. Smith waited until 12 July – a fortnight after the coup began – to start hiring a proper campaign team. Meanwhile, attempts to unite the Eagle and Smith campaign structures did not work. At the end of that week, according to sources close to Eagle, the former shadow business secretary went to see Smith. She had a proposal: They should run on a joint ticket with him as shadow chancellor in order to present a united front before the two-day window for people to pay £25 for a vote as a registered supporter opened on the Monday. Her pitch was rejected, according to individuals close to her.



Another attempt was made to unify the two campaigns when Eagle went to see Smith in his office at 7:45pm on the following Monday night after the parliamentary Labour party held its hustings. According to an email seen by BuzzFeed News, Eagle suggested to Smith they should merge their campaigns and “take all key strategic decisions together on a dual-key basis” while running “on a joint ticket without the other candidate as shadow chancellor”. This didn’t happen.

In part this was because Smith was in the ascendancy. After Labour MPs submitted their nominations on Tuesday it became clear to the Eagle-supporting Labour MP Peter Kyle that his preferred candidate would require an enormous swing of support to make the ballot. He informed Eagle and rather than stretch out the process, Eagle conceded defeat to Smith. She immediately phoned Iain McNicol and asking him not to release the list of MPs who had nominated each candidate, ensuring that her backers could unite behind Smith without being asked if he was their second choice.

As Smith gave his celebratory TV interviews in the ornate lobby of the Houses of Parliament, David Cameron – now on the back benches – strolled past and smiled, taking an interest in what was going on. One man had just been freed from the brutality of being in the losing side in a winner-takes-all election. The other was about to experience it.

Smith’s team had hoped he would be a fresh face who they could carefully introduce to the 500,000 people who received a vote in the Labour leadership election. They planned to build up his public personas with set-piece interviews in the media and appearances at televised hustings with Corbyn. He would tour the country meeting members. It was a tried and tested approach – but perhaps one that could have worked in 2010, in a pre-smartphone era.

What soon became apparent was that in the time it took to formally start the leadership campaign, the blank canvas had already been filled by their opponents, especially on the internet. While Smith had been battling Eagle for the right to be the anti-Corbyn Labour candidate, his reputation among many Labour voters was already being destroyed in highly viral posts about his time working for the private drug company Pfizer. Old comments from 2006 circulated as evidence he was a Blairite who would have backed the Iraq war if he’d been in parliament. He was tarred as a supporter of NHS privatisation. No matter how much he protested there was little he could do to shake it.

And while Smith built an effective team to handle traditional media, they found themselves completely outgunned on Facebook by both official and unofficial pro-Corbyn sources – leaving them struggling to even get their message in front of the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of highly engaged Labour activists they needed to reach.

“Immediately before we even appointed anyone to do social media they had tens of thousands of people sharing bullshit from The Canary or some other half-true source,” moaned one Smith aide. One particularly viral theory that Portland Communications, a PR firm with ties to Tony Blair, was involved in organising the Labour coup “absolutely damaged” the Smith campaign, they added.

“It got shared and shared and shared. But how do you fight bullshit? If you respond it becomes a story.”

Similar issues kept arising. One Sunday afternoon the campaign team found themselves in the situation of arguing about a tweet from a member of the public at an Owen Smith event in Hull, in which their candidate had allegedly made a joke about the size of his penis. The campaign insisted his reference to “29 inches” really related to the inside leg measurement of his suit trousers.

“One staff member suggested we just issue a Venn diagram with a segment labelled ‘things that are obviously untrue’ and ‘thing that are so ludicrous it’s embarrassing to respond to’ with that story in the middle. I don’t think the tweet was ever sent.”

