Jeremy Corbyn, the man who knows a thing or two about being the target of a Labour Party coup, has admitted he feels sorry for Keir Starmer. "On a personal level it must be devastating," Corbyn said, pausing only briefly before delivering the kind of empathy that probably isn't much comfort. "You suddenly realise that this person doesn't trust you at all and really doesn't wish you well at all."
Corbyn's own coup experience began on the evening of 25 June 2016, when The Observer reported that his shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, was plotting a mass walk-out. After a night of failed phone calls, Corbyn finally reached Benn at 1am. Benn confirmed the plot, Corbyn fired him, and then spent Sunday taking resignation letters from 21 colleagues. "I was sort of ticking them off," Corbyn recalled with a dry laugh. "I went to the allotment. I got a few resignations in the allotment. I wrote them down and made notes at home: so I could call them the potato rebel, the beetroot rebel."
The parliamentary Labour party meeting that followed was, in Corbyn's words, "very rough, horrendous really. Basically, an hour of abuse thrown at me." A motion of no confidence passed 172 to 40. Corbyn folded the result, put it in a drawer, and refused to budge. His wife, Laura Alvarez, was a vital steadying influence. "She is from Mexico and she thinks Britain is more corrupt than Mexico - in Mexico it is just more obvious," Corbyn said. His ex-wife, from Chile, simply said: "It's a coup, stop them. We have seen coups before."
Corbyn later beat challenger Owen Smith by 61.8% to 38.2% of the membership. Now, as Starmer faces his own crisis, Corbyn offers a bit of advice: don't go into the bunker. "Sometimes you have to do things instinctively rather than necessarily calculating to the end. If you've got instinct to do something, do it. You might get in trouble later on but at least you have been true to yourself."
As for the possible leadership contenders - Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner - Corbyn is unimpressed. "I wouldn't vote for any of them," he said. But on reflection, he would vote, applying tests on the economy, opposition to racism, peace and war, and the environment. "To stop the retreat on environment politics, stop the retreat away from public ownership, and stop the retreat away from the politics of peace globally; we can do better than funding war and subsidising the arms industry."
"But yes," he added, "you can't ever totally divorce the personal from the political, even though many of us would like to."