Will accidental leader Jeremy Corbyn fire up Your Party?

Anna Chen – 9 September 2025, Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn was always the accidental leader. Never the scrapper or ruthless careerist backstabbing his way up the greasy pole of politics, he would have been played by an amiable Ian Carmichael had his story been made into a movie. More Ealing comedy than West Wing, it’s an extreme cosmic irony that he was landed with the role of saviour of the downtrodden masses not dissimilar to that other JC. And look what happened to him. Life of Brian meets Being There.

He’d been a Labour backbencher for 20 years before I established the press for a moribund Stop The War in September 2001 when we feared the US would attack Iraq after 9/11.

John McDonnell had been the Left’s Chosen One, but had recently taken a break, saying it was “Buggins’s turn”. And here we were with his second; a gentler, much-liked constituency MP who was happier turning up to anti-apartheid protests and speaking at meetings than leading a national movement. The timing was a complete fluke. And, given McDonnell’s renewed friendship with Alastair “dodgy dossier” Campbell, a lucky break.

In focusing the press campaign and our releases on Corbyn, it often felt like I was strapping El Cid’s corpse to his horse and sending it to the battlefront. It was what he came to mean to the unrepresented British working classes by way of this vital “tributary” that was important. He was our figurehead and pole of attraction. 

So what went wrong? Asa Winstanley’s recent article — Will Jeremy Corbyn allow Zionists to sabotage him again? — expands on valid criticism by Zarah Sultana, the purged Labour MP and cofounder of Your Party currently rocking the establishment. Sultana is quoted as saying: “It shouldn’t have happened this way, there should have been robust challenge when the political establishment, the media establishment … attacked the Corbyn project, there should have been a more robust challenge to that. We have to learn those lessons. We have to fight back and not give these fuckers an inch.”

The new party, launched in July, represents the left’s most significant challenge to Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Your Party’s founding declaration explicitly condemns a “rigged system” that funds “billions for war” while denying basic welfare, and it demands a “free and independent Palestine”. Over 800,000 Britons, effectively disenfranchised by a virulently right-wing government intent on waging the elite’s wars at the public’s expense, signed up to the Your Party email list. It is now potentially the biggest party in the UK, delivering the same shock to the state as the last time Corbyn led anything. Elected to Labour Party leadership in September 2015, the half a million-plus members he attracted made it the biggest political party in Western Europe.

But you can add “reluctant” to “accidental”. Sultana had to persuade him to step up. It’s a tall order after everything that’s been thrown at him. Is Jeremy up to the challenge as he pushes 80?

Having been thrust into the spotlight during the anti-Iraq war campaign after the 9/11 attacks in the US, he soldiered on bravely but chose his advisers unwisely. A middle-class lad from a manor in deepest Shropshire himself, his closest lieutenants both had daddies who’d owned castles and never ditched the class hierarchy despite being renegade posh. Their assumption of boss status was alarming. (The only time I heard from Seumas Milne was when he phoned me, not to thank me for my breakthrough work or discuss press matters, but to shout at me, in a startling outburst of displaced resentment, for something investigative reporter Greg Palast had said. It had taken a working-class Chinese Brit woman to do, unpaid, the job they’d failed to do in their long association with MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.)

The 2017 general election was heading to be a shoo-in before their disastrous misjudgement over Brexit snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The public had sobered up since the non-legally binding referendum, and were now suffering buyer’s remorse, as experienced by Labour activists on the doorstep. Seventy percent of Labour voters had chosen Remain in the referendum. But every time Corbyn soared in the polls, someone would leak that he was still pushing for leaving the EU. To others he was insisting he had decided on Remain and Reform from within. Labour eventually lost by fewer than 3K votes and we ended up nailed to the USS Titanic. Europe was fatally wounded and degenerated into the band of raging Berserkers we see today.

Along with a handful of others, I wrote about this harmful triangulation at the time, and I’m relieved to see that Sultana gets it. You’d have expected Jeremy’s strategists to have thought strategically, whatever Lexit views they actually held, gone with the flow of public demand and thrashed out their differences afterwards.

Meanwhile, BRICS is the biggest trading bloc on the planet, with China and the global south struggling to get out from under a declining America’s hegemony. Yet no-one from Your Party could issue a message of solidarity to China on its recent 80th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II.

Your Party is a challenge — up to a point. If Your Party can shift the UK on the Gaza genocide, I’m all for it. And Corbyn has acknowledged that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was “not unprovoked”.

However, Asa’s article points out a grim reality about Team Corbyn’s self-sabotaging capitulation to Zionist attacks on him. What is also alarming is all the signs indicating they align with the Washington position on China. No debate, no evidence. Just a knee-jerk sinophobia which, as I’ve found out the hard way, also permeates the Left.

Any war on China, successfully picking itself up off its knees in the 21st century, is an existential threat to all of us and something that responsible politicians should be guarding against.

Posh white lads led the working-class into a mine-field and now they threaten to lead it over a cliff. Will a spirited Zarah Sultana manage to break away? Or is the price that when the West’s military pivot to 1.4 billion Chinese takes place she’ll be on board?

Watch this space.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum betrays the 70% of Labour voters who voted Remain: 26 November 2016 Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum group repackages betrayal as a nationwide campaign to ‘Take Back Control’ of Brexit and push it through despite only 37 per cent of the electorate voting Leave.

Questions for Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne and Alan Johnson on the Brexit victory: 27 June 2016 Cometh the hour, cometh the man. But it wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn. Or even Labour’s Remain front man, Alan Johnson.

Eggheads Against Jeremy Corbyn: right-wing academics phone it in to the FT: 4 September 2015

BRICS now the biggest trade bloc on the planet 24 October 2024 The UK could have been part of this, as promised when we were mis-sold Brexit. 

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”: The leader of the opposition was Britain’s last defence against Brexit yet he pressed the Article 50 button.

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