So, farewell then, Seumas Milne: where are the Corbynistas?
Seumas Milne with Corbyn poster (Shutterstock)
Remember Seumas Milne? Karie Murphy, anyone? Right-wing journalists used to fill dumb days at the office by re-reading Milne’s archived Guardian articles in praise of the USSR. It seems these central figures in the ill-fated regime of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are destined merely for the footnotes of the first history books. In 2019, Channel 4 named Milne as one of the two “Men Who Really Run Britain”. The other was Dominic Cummings, who continues to sear himself on the British political imagination. Milne and his coterie seem to have abandoned the scene they also stalked without as much as a “by your leave”. Should we be surprised?
They did resurface briefly in April 2023, when Mr Justice Chamberlain at the Royal Courts of Justice handed down a judgement as part of a wider case involving Milne and Murphie against the then General Secretary of the Labour Party, David (now Lord) Evans. The case here was about the privacy of those involved in a notorious report on anti-Semitism within the Party under Corbyn’s leadership. The Party, freshly invigorated to remove the Corbynite stain under Keir Starmer, had spent over £1 million so far on its legal case against Milne and Murphy, accusing them of leaking the report in order to disrupt media coverage and undermine the new leadership after the disastrous electoral defeat in December 2019. The judge ruled that two anonymous participants in the case, listed as “EZE” and “EHL” were entitled to remain unknown to the public.
The case against Milne, Murphy and others was a powerful one. The Party accused them of leaking a report about anti-Semitism in the party. Why might Milne want to be involved in such an act, given his complicity in the anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s party? The 760-page report had alleged that anti-Corbyn staffers had tried to delay cases of anti-Semitism being brought forward; it also alleged that some of these staffers had diverted funds away from important seats at the 2017 election. With the ascension of Starmer to the Labour leadership in 2020, Milne and Murphy would have been very happy to see the report released and to undermine the new moderate leadership. Other anti-Zionists trolls started leaking some of the names involved in the report on social media.
In 2024, Labour dropped their case against Milne and Murphy. The party had lost “eye-watering” sums of money in their legal case against the pair, with over £2 million of the party coffers spent on the ultimately futile case. First seen as a brave attempt to wipe out the centre of the Corbynite party, the three-year legal case became a convoluted and mutually damaging affair. The Labour Party’s Forde Report established no conclusive evidence about the source of the leak: a failure, on the part of the party’s new leadership, to issue constructive and telling evidence of what had gone wrong under Corbyn’s leadership.
Since the end of the Corbyn leadership, Seumas Milne and Karie Murphy have virtually disappeared from public view, aside from their involvement in the case. They have made no public statements – Milne, a lifelong journalist and political activist, has apparently retreated into anonymity. There were rumours that he was trying to write a book, or collate a diary for publication, but none has yet materialised. Perhaps this is not surprising, but given the large public profile Milne possessed during his time behind the throne 2015-19, maybe his disappearance tells us something interesting – about the man and the party he left behind.
It’s pretty clear what to make of the latter. Keir Starmer made no bones about his desire to eradicate every trace of the Corbynite regime, and the enigmatic identity of Milne was the first victim. Starmer gave Alex Barros-Curtis the job of Executive Director of Legal Affairs, precisely to oversee the case against the five former staff members, and solidify his reputation as a clean-sweeper on anti-Semitism.
Milne’s reasons for his virtual silence are perhaps more interesting. His only public intervention has been a substantial interview with Tribune magazine last year to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication in 1994 of his seminal book on the Miners’ Strike, The Enemy Within. An expert if sententious piece of research, the book remains the core achievement of Milne’s career – emblematic of the trade union activism and the role of the labour correspondent which have virtually disappeared from public life. Does the interview tell us anything new?
The answer is no – though that is perhaps what is so interesting. Milne refers again and again in the interview to the “classic smear campaign against the miners”. MI5 is still hauled in as emblematic of the Establishment’s campaign against working people. We may as well still be in 1984 – since “solidarity and collective action speak to our times”. The establishment and the intelligence service, he tells us, “always change the rules of the game”, and they’re still at it. Milne is not writing op-eds about the injustice of the cuts to winter-fuel payments, as a former Conservative strategist or an Alastair Campbell would be apt to do. He’s gone back to the archives.
Beside Milne, the other man who was hailed in 2019 to wield the power behind the scenes in 2019 was Dominic Cummings. Everyone knows what happened to him – and Cummings, with a substantial following on Substack, shows little sign of hiding his views any time soon. Milne has been very different: he has not spoken out against the moderation of the current government, nor has he played any part in the disputes over Jeremy Corbyn’s membership of the Labour Party. He has merely kept playing his weary cards on the legacy of the Miners’ Strike and the legacy of Thatcherite subterfuge. It’s almost quaint – and it tells us much about the complete transformation of the Labour Party over the last five years. No one will be happier with this eclipse of Seumas Milne, the former avatar of Labour’s hard Left, than Sir Keir Starmer.
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