Rosa Prince, the online political editor for the Telegraph, was an interesting choice for Jeremy Corbyn’s biographer, and when I say “interesting”, of course I mean “perverse”. It is a bit like asking Owen Jones to write a biography of David Cameron: no one would doubt his gusto, but there would be the wrong circle, wrong age, wrong hinterland, no friends of friends of aunts of friends and, crucially, Cameron’s associates would be immensely suspicious of Jones, as Corbyn’s are of Prince. It would avert the danger of a hagiography, but at the cost of any close-quartered insights. All the reminiscence is hacked from articles that have already been published, mostly in the Daily Mail. Prince pores over an incident when Diane Abbott, then Corbyn’s girlfriend, was sighted by friends in his bed, wrapped in a sheet. It’s not a new story though it appears to be a new account, its prurient inclusion justified on the Laura Kuenssberg defence (“I’m a journalist, and I found out a thing”).
It’s frustrating; because the thing about socialism, as the saying goes, is that it takes a lot of evenings, and nobody spent more evenings on it than Corbyn. There are hundreds of people: ex-flatmates, friends on the board of the Jackson’s Lane Community Centre, comrades at Tony Benn’s soirees, who don’t just remember him intimately, but have funny stories. Meetings of gnarly Greens and assorted progressives, just after Corbyn’s election as leader, were like a cheerful wake after a good innings (“Do you remember the time he made you drive that terrorist to Dungeness?” “That wasn’t a terrorist! That was a vegetarian”).
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