Jeremy Corbyn read the entirety of Lawrence Freedman’s 528-page book Kennedy’s Wars while voting on the Rwanda Bill in 2023. The veteran independent MP – and former Labour Party leader – knows the twists and turns of the Parliamentary Estate so well that he has worked out a precise formula for voting in order to allow himself at least 20 minutes of reading time in the House of Commons Library per vote. He is currently working his way through the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to the UK during the Second World War, in between trips to the division lobby. He explained this to me when we met on a recent freezing cold afternoon at his constituency offices in Finsbury Park. “Is this at all of use to you?” he asked.
It was. You have to build up experience to work out such a meticulous approach for spare minutes in the Commons. Corbyn knows parliament: its tatty green corridors, the clang of the division bells. The rhythms of speaking and voting have been a permanent daily fixture for more than half his life. His constituency office is littered with mementos of his 42-year career as the MP for Islington North. Corbyn, 76, ought to be planning a retirement spent reading even more books and growing marrows in his allotment. Instead he has been engaged in an all-out struggle with Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana to set up a new political party of the left. Your Party – its name for now – has been wracked by infighting over finances, membership data and organisation since it was launched in July.
While I waited for Corbyn to arrive, a member of staff served tea in a selection of Corbyn-themed mugs. Some marked his 25th anniversary garden party; others were emblazoned with Labour’s 2017 general election campaign. Several of those are valuable enough to have been pinched by visitors. “We’ll count them before you leave,” the staffer joked. When Corbyn bustled into his Durham Road offices to meet me, it became clear he had popped into an adjoining room for a chat with his constituency colleagues; our interview began ever so slightly late. He emerged, having taken off a grey, functional raincoat and beige baseball cap, confident and excitable, asking if I’d heard about his upcoming performance as the Wizard of Ozlington in a pantomime at Islington’s Pleasance Theatre (I had). “It’s my biggest role to date,” he smiled.
A decade ago, Corbyn, the ultimate backwoods parliamentary eccentric, was unexpectedly elected leader of the Labour Party. His ascension catapulted him to a level of fame he, his allies and his family never expected, let alone coveted. Corbyn’s leadership of Labour was harrowing. It was brought to a sullen end in 2020 owing to criticism of his handling of the party’s anti-Semitism crisis and a humiliating election defeat in 2019. A year later he was suspended by Keir Starmer for his response to an Equality and Human Rights Commission report of his handling of anti-Semitism within the party and banned from standing as a Labour candidate.
He was expelled from the party, again by Starmer, after announcing he would stand as an independent against Labour in the general election, bringing his 60 years of party membership to an end. He was re-elected in Islington North last July, beating his Labour opponent, Praful Nargund, by more than 7,000 votes. Talking today at the party he helmed for half a decade and joined as a 16-year-old, Corbyn sounded jaded. “I really struggle to wonder what it is for,” he said of the Labour government, “I think if you walked out of this room and went down Stroud Green Road now, stopped ten people and said – what do you think the government’s mission or purpose is? They’d go, ‘I don’t know.’”
Corbyn maintains friendships within Labour; he remains close to John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor. But he looks at the party – and his old colleagues within it – with a resigned gloominess. “I think the sense of political community around Labour has gone,” he said, “it’s there in the unions, it’s there in the Palestine campaign. It’s there in the People’s Assembly. But it’s not there in the Labour Party.”
Does he think this sense of political community within Labour will ever come back? “No,” he said, bluntly, “I think the Labour Party has turned a fundamental corner, and I don’t see it coming back”. He pointed to the party’s current poll ratings: Labour are consistently polling at less than 20 per cent, a historic low. “It’s very hard to see a way back from that”.
If there is any lingering animosity on Corbyn’s part to the Prime Minister, it is well hidden. “I try not to do personal in politics,” he said when I asked him if he felt betrayed by Starmer. “His knowledge of the details of the [Brexit] legislation and all that was amazing. Did we always agree? No”. Still, Corbyn can be cutting about the man who replaced him. “I was really surprised when he announced I was one of his best friends,” Corbyn said, referring to Starmer’s assertion of the pair’s closeness during the 2020 leadership campaign, “I’d never seen that coming. I think he dropped that after a while. I haven’t really had anything to do with him for four years.”
This is not the first time that Corbyn has felt bleak about Labour’s future. During Tony Blair’s premiership (“in the depths of New Labour”), Corbyn can remember having a conversation with Tony Benn about the next steps for socialism in Britain. “Tony and I were discussing what would happen in the future,” Corbyn said, “and Tony said, do you think the Labour Party will survive?” “Probably not,” Corbyn said he told Benn, pointing to what he saw as Labour’s “predilection” for warmongering. “But what is the alternative?” Benn asked, “because if we formed a new party, it wouldn’t be easy.”
Their conversation was prophetic. More than 20 years later, Corbyn is now in the process of founding Your Party, whose inaugural conference will take place on 29 November at the ACC in Liverpool. Members will vote on the party’s official name in the coming months.
Rumours of a new force on the British left were circulating around Westminster even before Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour Party. Dismayed by Starmer’s treatment of the remaining socialists within Labour and his policy towards Israel after 7 October, informal discussions between a handful of the key figures from Corbyn’s leadership began to take place shortly after the 2024 general election.
They included old hands such as Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s stakhanovite former chief of staff, and Pamela Fitzpatrick, his co-director at the Peace and Justice Project; both women have been staunchly loyal to him during the party’s tricky opening months of existence.
The creation of a new party on the left became more serious – and more likely – after the suspension of seven left-wing MPs, all with close ties to Corbyn, from the Labour Party for voting to remove the two-child benefit cap in July 2024. Among them was Sultana, whose social media following and socialist principles led some involved in early conversations to describe her as Corbyn’s “heir”.
But Tony Benn was right: setting up a new party is complicated. On 3 July, just 10 minutes after an informal Zoom meeting, Corbyn found out via X that he would be co-founding a new left-wing party alongside Sultana. Having urged his comrades to delay less than half an hour earlier, Corbyn was stunned.
The slow birth of Your Party has been characterised by twists and turns like this. The Sultana-Corbyn relationship has not run smoothly. In September tensions between the pair reached a boiling point; Corbyn and the Independent Alliance reported Your Party to the Independent Commissioner’s Office following Sultana’s unauthorised launch of the party’s membership portal. Sultana consulted defamation lawyers, claiming to be the victim of a “sexist boys club”. I understand that the pair are back on speaking terms now.
Corbyn agreed with my assessment that this process has been “difficult”, adding that “there is no handbook on how to set up a political party. When this is over, I might write one,” he winks. “You’re starting with a completely blank sheet of paper,” Corbyn said, “and you’ve got to populate that paper with something that will come out with a coherent party, at the same time being democratic, inclusive and accountable.” This is the most important element of Your Party for Corbyn: it has to be representative on a grassroots level. This assessment aligns him far more with the likes of Jamie Driscoll and Andrew Feinstein (who are closer to Sultana) than with his loyal allies, Murphy and Fitzpatrick, who would rather take a more top-down approach. “I think what’s needed is empowerment of our communities,” he said, explaining his hope that the founding of Your Party will be ultra-democratic.
Hence the use of sortition at the party’s founding conference, a process under which individuals are selected to create a random yet representative sample of the population (as championed by the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam). “For conference, I was worried that if we just said to a group, ‘look, you form yourselves into an informal group and elect delegates to conference’, what’s going to happen is those that know each other are going to elect each other, and those that don’t know anybody will be left out,” he said.
Corbyn won’t be drawn into discussing the minutiae of these controversies. Instead, he outlines his dreams for Your Party: “It will be a voice that unites people. A voice for the left”. Under Corbyn’s vision, Your Party will echo the political platform he ran on in 2017, but was never able to enact in government: “It is a voice for economic justice, for public ownership of utilities. It is not going to measure every government’s achievement by what the markets think and what the borrowing ratio is and what the gilts yield is, but instead measure itself against elimination of child poverty, measure itself against equality, measure itself against environmental sustainability,” he said, “which is a lot of the stuff John McDonnell was trying to do”.
Corbyn’s stubborn unwillingness to publicly explain why Your Party has faltered can appear like indecision. There is broad disappointment across the British left about Your Party’s failure to launch. “The apparent implosion of Your Party is a mortifying moment for the left in Britain”, wrote Corbyn’s former adviser, Andrew Murray, in a September edition of the Morning Star. Experienced socialists saw this moment as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a new left movement. The factional drama engulfing Your Party may have squandered their chance.
I asked Corbyn what he would say to those people. “I’m sorry if you are at all disappointed,” he said. “We are all socialists. It’s never going to be an easy road. And for any misdemeanours on my part, of course, I apologise. But I want to make things work.”
Corbyn is clearly not going anywhere: “I never thought I would, and I still don’t, give up being politically active”. But the idea that he would throw himself back into such a turbulent process is a surprise. Corbyn may not need this project, but many of those involved in this nascent left-wing party need him. He is unique on the British left; to his admirers he is a galvanising national figure in an otherwise thin pool of talent. To some on the left it’s Jez – and only Jez – who is capable of resurrecting British socialism. Like Benn before him, Corbyn was, as his former adviser James Schneider put it in July, the “political embodiment” of socialist hopes around the country.
Currently, Corbyn’s only equivalent on the left is Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader. While Your Party has floundered, Polanski’s brand of “eco-populism” has captured the imaginations of the voters who supported Corbyn in 2017 and 2019. Polling shows the Greens capturing the youth vote. Polanski’s unapologetic socialist policies – nationalisation, wealth taxes, anti-poverty measures – and fiery rhetoric (he seems to be accusing his enemies of “fascism”) have echoes of Corbyn’s Labour.
Sultana has made clear that Your Party opposes the Greens, criticising them on their policies on NATO and diplomatic ties with Israel, but Corbyn speaks warmly of Polanski. “I know Zack, of course,” he said, “we had a very pleasant breakfast together in a very nice cafe in Stoke Newington, as you do.” While he is clear Your Party and the Greens are not “the same party” and serve different purposes, he adds: “We can work together with them on Palestine, we can work together with them on environmental issues… if we’re providing a space, and a voice and an opportunity for a united left to put forward that position, that’s got to be a good thing.”
As things stand, if the party’s founding documents are passed by the membership this weekend without considerable changes, then next year members will be asked to elect a single leader of Your Party. Sultana’s desire to co-lead Your Party alongside Corbyn despite his evident reluctance has been an indirect source of trouble throughout the founding process. Sultana has been clear that if the position ends up being a sole leader, she will throw her “hat into the ring”. Will Corbyn do the same? “I want us to get a leadership team through the election of a committee,” he said, “and if people want me to be the leader, then that’s a democratic choice that will be made.” He adds: “I’m very prepared to do that job.” When I pushed him, he gave a typically Corbyn answer: “I’m around,” he said, “I’m here.”
[Further reading: Inside the battle for Unison’s soul]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand