15 June 2017

Basking in a Surprise Success,

Corbyns Team is Planning for Victory
Next Time
"Hes shown he can win, and thats enough for me."
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By Stephen Bush

The day after parliament returned on 12 June, I was sitting with

Andrew Fisher, Jeremy Corbyns director of policy and the
author of Labours manifesto, in Portcullis House, where many
MPs have their offices. We were interrupted by Karl Turner, the
MP for Hull East. He bounded over to Fisher and shook his
hand. Well done! he cried. Well done! A lot of us are eating
humble pie!

The scene was particularly remarkable, as Turner had quit his

role as shadow attorney general in 2016 in the mass shadow
cabinet walkout over Corbyns leadership. But it wasnt the only
time this had happened to Fisher that day.

For the first time in at least five years, there is a feel-good factor
among the professional ranks of the Labour Party. There is a
particular glee to unexpected success, and the party went into
the election expecting to be not only beaten but smashed.
Instead, it has advanced. After the 2015 election, Labour
needed to gain 94 seats to end up with a majority of one
better than any of its election performances other than the
landslides of 1997 and 1945.

To take power, it needed to work out how to win either

Kirkcaldy, which the SNP held with a majority of 9,974, or
Kensington in west London, whose incumbent, Victoria
Borwick, had a majority of more than 7,000.

In the event, Labour won both Kirkcaldy and Kensington. A

Parliamentary Labour Party expecting to be shrunk has dozens
of extra members. This is the first election in which Labour has
gained seats since 1997. The picture is less 1997, more 1992 a
surprise result that leaves Labour tantalisingly close to power,
needing just a 3.5 per cent swing to win a majority. But this
time, Labour has the benefit that the surprise has injected
optimism into the party, not plunged it into despair and
recrimination.

No one working for Labour expected the exit poll that showed
the party not only holding on but making advances. For the
leaders aides watching the results at Southside, Labours
London headquarters, it was only when the result from North
Swindon came in at midnight that they began to believe
something remarkable was happening. The immediate result
has been to unify the PLP behind Corbyn. One of the partys
most influential operators in the parallel whipping operation
that Corbynsceptics have been running summed up the mood:
Im a utilitarian. Hes shown he can win, and thats enough for
me.

Although a few outspoken ultras both Chris Leslie, the MP for

Nottingham East, and John Spellar, the MP for Warley,
criticised the result will remain outside the tent, the Labour
leader will enter this new period with a party united behind
him.

Having expected to be in a fight for survival, Corbyn has a more

congenial but even more difficult task: finishing the job and
taking power at the next election, whenever it may be. That
requires changes to how the campaign is run. What is the
point, one senior trade union official texted me on the morning
after polling day, of spending our members time and money
on a system that tells us were losing by 5,000 [in a seat] when
were winning by 10,000?

The leaders office hopes that this failure will lead to greater
support for the organisational review that is being conducted by
Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service and cross-
bench peer, into how Labour operates and organises.

He already reorganised the leaders office last year. That

reorganisation and the appointment of Karie Murphy as
Corbyns chief of staff have been credited with sharpening the
effectiveness of the operation. One friend says that Murphy
would pick a fight with her own reflection, and another senior
staffer describes her admiringly as a battering ram.

Part of Labours success this time came from expanding the

electorate: more than 1.5 million people voted in the 2017
election who did not vote in 2015. Corbyns team hopes to build
on this by running voter registration drives, particularly in
areas where students might not be on the rolls.

The astonishing gain in Canterbury a student-heavy seat that

has been Conservative for longer than the Labour Party has
been in existence has already inspired former Corbynsceptics.
Look at Camborne, big campus there, one New Labour
grandee gushed. Look at Loughborough, big campus there. We
can do there what we did in Canterbury.

Corbyn will also continue to maintain a permanent office at the

partys headquarters, a convention that was abandoned by Ed
Miliband. By working alongside party staff, he has eased
suspicions on both sides. There are still structural problems,
one aide to the leader observes. But I think what needs to
change is how HQ operates, not who works there, for the most
part.

While Jeremy Hunt remains in place as Secretary of State for

Health, the leaders office believes that the NHS will stay a
major election issue. It thinks that hospital cuts can be as
effective a cudgel as school spending cuts were in this
campaign. And it believes that the health issue will help Labour
hold on to and extend the small gains that it made with older
voters, though the assumption has to be that the Conservative
Party will not fight such a helpfully maladroit campaign again.

Whoever leads the Conservatives into the next election and

the leaders office assumes it will not be Theresa May Lab-
ours settled view is that it will be Jeremy Corbyn, not a
successor sharing his politics, who will face the next Tory prime
minister. Its not just Corbyns staffers who believe in his
unique appeal now. One newly elected Blairite MP summed up
the mood: This wouldnt have happened with another
candidate. It was him. What a difference an election makes.