The Searchers by Andy Beckett: ‘A vivid profile of left MPs, down but not out’

Andy Beckett’s new book is, he writes in the introduction, “the story of a group of political explorers and of a series of interlocking political journeys which are rarely considered as a whole”. The explorers in question are Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell and Tony Benn.

Beckett’s The Searchers is a group biography-cum-long durée history of Bennism that tracks their political lives through the wilderness and up onto the main stage of British politics with close attention, empathy and verve.

In their time, Beckett’s searchers have been regarded with “fear, contempt or hatred”, but the group – who the author describes as the closest mainstream British politics has to heretics – have also had a complicated, arguably outsize influence on their party and the country’s politics.

Beckett’s subjects came to full political awareness in the same era

Of the five, Benn would seem to be the odd one out; he was first elected to parliament in 1950, long before the others were political, let alone politicians.

Beckett convincingly argues, however, that all of his subjects came to mature political awareness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, influenced by the new left and leftist currents beyond Labour including “anarchism, anti-racism, Marxism, pacifism and identity politics”.

Benn just experienced this awakening at a slightly later stage in his life, while happening to be a cabinet minister. The younger politicians may have been Benn’s “disciples”, but the five’s completely politics-dominated lives shared a common vision.

The drive to fulfil this politics carried Livingstone and McDonnell to innovate at the Greater London Council in the 1980s and on, less fruitfully, into Westminster in the 90s. Abbott started her career at the Home Office before becoming a TV researcher and being elected to parliament in 1987, joining Corbyn, who had become the MP for Islington North in 1983 after some years as a Haringey councillor.

Benn’s later-in-life radicalism led him to contest Labour’s deputy leadership contest in 1981 and lose by a whisper (49.574% to 50.426%). Sitting as an MP until 2010, his long career saw him become, somewhat unwillingly, a national treasure.

Vivid eye for detail meets seemingly effortless narrative pacing

I review a lot of books, and a lot of books about the Labour Party, and the praise one can normally give the prose and writing style of these books is somewhat limited. Beckett’s, in this regard, is a breath of fresh air: a vivid eye for detail meets narrative pacing that seems effortless – but obviously isn’t.

As a character study, and as an evocation of Britain in the last century, it would be worth reading even if you had no particular interest in the subject matter. Beckett takes the reader from the polluted streets of a London quite different to that of today’s to the carpeted quiet of the slightly run-down hotel in Chesterfield where Benn made his constituency home from the mid-80s.

If the latter is channelling Philip Larkin’s Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel, the book as a whole put me in mind of Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau, making sure – as that book does –  in a sparing, unshowy way, that the reader feels all the distance between the recent past and now and understands that the actions described are products of a particular moment.

These were always people convinced another world was possible; what that other world looked like has changed over time. “This is not the world I would have created,” Livingstone said when he was mayor of London in the 2000s, “but it’s the world I have to live in.”

Beckett gives a carefully observed portrait of Corbyn

Beckett is clearly sympathetic to his subjects, but one of the book’s many commendable features is its focus on how their differing characters factored into both success and failure, effective team-work and devastating fall-outs.

Livingstone was nimble, and a very skilled politician, but inconsistent and self-interested; McDonnell principled and organised but prone to alienate with a “curt” manner; Abbott fiercely self-sufficient but subject to “the double-edged prestige of being a pioneer” and stubborn to a fault. They’re prone to acting in ways unhelpful to themselves, from Livingstone’s GLC-era declaration that “everyone is bisexual” to Abbott’s mid-90s small-scale diplomatic spat with Finland. 

Perhaps the book’s most interesting character study is of Corbyn himself, who it details as hard-working, if not particularly brilliant; intensely personable and genuinely interested with his constituents, collegiate and disengaged from gossip in Westminster. “In a country that often values these qualities,” Beckett writes, “he was seen as reliable, dogged, humble, and seemingly not in any way hypocritical.”

It was this modesty and consistency, delivered by a soft-spoken, middle-class man, that ultimately took Corbyn to the very top of Labour politics – but left him, the author argues, perhaps most ill-prepared for the demands of power, inflexible and considered even by some allies prone to “courting martyrdom” rather than coalition-building.

In Beckett’s carefully observed portrait of Corbyn, the reader sees both all the things that made him so potently appealing to his supporters and the failings that made him profoundly unsuited for leadership.  

The Labour left may be down – but it’s foolish to count it out

Beckett maintains an approach of disciplined sympathy for almost all of the book, but things begin to overbalance in the last section, which concerns Corbyn’s time as leader. The author argues, not unconvincingly, that Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott and Livingstone are underrated as electoral politicians, able to marshal broad coalitions within their constituencies and consistently increase majorities.

There’s something in this, I think, but it’s the kind of reasoning that will have you shot on sight by the Labour Party’s more important Irish Morgan – there are few “hero voters” in London, after all – and it has limited wider electoral utility.

Beckett begins to over-egg this kind of argument when discussing Corbyn’s general election campaigns – so what if the campaign-produced ‘Corbyn Run’ game garnered more downloads than there are Tory members?

If the first 400 pages of Beckett’s quite substantial book are a masterclass in teasing out complex stories of simultaneous failure and success, the final chapters are a more standard blow-by-blow strung up between quotes from jostling advisers. Here, he ends up reasoning along the lines of Corbyn’s infamous post-2019 “we won the argument” piece. And argument aside, they very much lost the election.

Beckett is more convincing, however, in his argument that our social politics – how Britain deals with race, or aspires to, how it thinks about gay people, or the role of women – is closer to that presented by Livingstone’s GLC than those professed by the Thatcher government. “We won the argument” is stubbornness and cope rather than actual analysis, but that doesn’t mean that short-term defeat cannot mask longer-term forms of success.

If there is a political lesson from The Searchers, it is that dormancy should not be confused with death, and that the politics Beckett’s protagonists champion may often, as it does now, find itself down, but it is patient over long durations and foolish to ever count totally out.

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett will be published by Allen Lane on May 2nd.

Read our coverage of the 2024 local elections here.

If you have anything to share that we should be looking into or publishing about this or any other topic involving Labour, on record or strictly anonymously, contact us at mail@labourlist.org. 

Sign up to LabourList’s morning email for a briefing everything Labour, every weekday morning. 

If you can help sustain our work too through a monthly donation, become one of our supporters here.

And if you or your organisation might be interested in partnering with us on sponsored events or content, email mail@labourlist.org.