The Labour leader’s team feel sacrifices from both sides of the party divide will be needed after the ballot results are announced

On the fourth floor of an unassuming trade union office opposite London’s Euston station is the centre of the campaign that looks set to sweep Jeremy Corbyn to success for a second time.

Is this the heart of the leftwing activist group, Momentum? “It’s the loving heart of the Jeremy for Labour campaign,” jokes a press officer, opening the door. “We’ve taken down the MP dartboard,” he adds, with a smile.



In a bright room with blue carpets, about a dozen staff are seated at computers or around a large table, scouring the day’s newspapers.

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As Labour’s bruising leadership battle draws to a close, the mood in Camp Corbyn is one of impending victory over Owen Smith when the ballot results are announced on Saturday. The team are told that they will have passes for the Labour conference (some have never been before) and there will be two thank-you drinks, one before the result and another in two weeks’ time.

Sam Tarry, the campaign director, is in a reflective mood. He admits that the next step must be some form of “negotiated peace settlement” with compromises and sacrifice from the leadership team and MPs.

However, he says he is irritated by the some of the language from the other side, who he feels are prepared to “destroy the Labour party just to stop Jeremy”. James Mills, head of communications, cuts in, calling it a “scorched earth policy”.

Nodding, Tarry adds: “I think there has been a concerted effort between Owen Smith, the more hard right MPs [and] ... relics like Neil Kinnock to say that the Labour party will never win a general election. It sounds as if they are gearing up for round three.”

He argues that MPs need to learn the lesson of their probable failure in attempting to topple Corbyn. “The timing was wrong,” he says. “It is the establishment against half a million people. They think they have a God-given right to have control of anything.”

The massive rise in membership should not be seen as “apocalypse now but opportunity now”, he says.

How would he view a Smith victory? “I will be the first person to go and work for his campaign: I’ll help him to win a general election,” he says, although they are easy words given that no one here thinks that is a likely outcome.

Tarry says the campaign for Corbyn has been on a scale “unprecedented in British politics”. He talks about volunteering to help secure City Hall for Sadiq Khan and says their techniques were “rudimentary” in comparison.

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Staff in the social media team are updating colleagues ona computer app that has allowed supporters to each call hundreds of people, with one woman reaching 1,600.

“Our biggest app users are older, retired people, who often feel marginalised with political activity,” says the campaign coordinator Emma Rees. The technology has helped parents take part in front room phone banks after their children go to bed, she adds.

Overall, the system has been used to make 110,000 calls; another 300,000 have been made through more traditional means. The reach through Facebook peaked at 6m a week, while there were 82m Twitter impressions throughout August and September.

Corbyn is not the obvious front man for such a digital strategy, but he has a great deal of support from young, technologically savvy supporters. Rees says there is a Coders for Corbyn group, which has brought together about 40 computer programmers to support the campaign.

It is not just social media that has been used to try to jazz up Corbyn. In a corner, Jason Harris, who runs a design company, sits at a computer. In front of him, laid out across the table are posters of a moody-looking Corbyn that do not necessarily fit with his image as an allotment enthusiast.

Harris and others argue that they have not changed Corbyn’s image with these Athena-style posters, but simply taken shots of him during his normal work as leader of the party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the campaign posters for Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Handout

Generally, the staff are all keen to emphasise that their campaign has been positive and caring and has unlocked the talents of their members. “We want to continue building on these relationships as that will help us build a movement to get Labour back to power with Jeremy as prime minister,” says Mills. “All the MPs I know are good people who will respect the outcome of the result.”

It is a markedly softer tone than when Mills’ boss, the shadow chancellor and campaign manager John McDonnell, accused Labour’s ruling body of carrying out a “rigged purge” of party members to block Corbyn supporters.

Those comments came at the height of a tense stand-off between the two sides over allegations that Momentum was encouraging entryism into Labour from hard left groups that had been proscribed in the 1980s.

At Corbyn’s campaign headquarters, the very word “Momentum” is deliberately missing, as workers stress repeatedly that this is the “Jeremy for Labour campaign”.

Tarry and his co-director of the campaign, Jon Lansman, are, however, the driving forces behind Momentum and James Schneider, a key figure in the press team, is on loan from the group.



So what is Momentum’s role? Tarry is keen to stress that the campaign is funded separately, having raised more than £300,000 in donations from about 19,000 people giving an average of £16 each.

But it is clear that Momentum’s base (including a database of 100,000 people) was used to kick off the campaign with force – and at a rate that those close to Smith say he could not match without a similar infrastructure.

The debate inside Labour is whether the scale and the success of the Corbyn campaign can genuinely be translated into something that could beat a popular Conservative government under Theresa May.

Critics of Corbyn say he is unelectable and believe that his more extreme policies around Trident, Nato and public ownership will never attract enough support to make Labour a party of government.

Some MPs point out that Michael Foot, Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, drew crowds of 20,000 before experiencing a crushing defeat by the Tories in 1983. When faced with demands to cooperate, they highlight the fact that Corbyn was a serial rebel on the backbenches when Labour was led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and he tried to overthrow Neil Kinnock before that.

Tarry hits back. “We can demonstrate that we can run the type of campaign that the Labour party has not been capable of doing – with a far greater reach,” he says, talking of taking inspiration from the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US.

He says he wants to hand over the knowledge they have built up during a “holistic approach to community based campaigning” to the Labour party after the race is over. “We aren’t precious; we want the Labour party to win the next election,” he says, insisting that he will be ready to help, whoever becomes the leader.