Jeremy Corbyn didn’t really want to lead the Labour Party. After securing the nominations to get on the ballot paper in the party’s 2015 leadership contest, Corbyn told his director of operations, Jon Lansman, “You’d better make sure I don’t win.” But Corbyn did win – a landslide victory – taking 59.5 per cent of the vote.
A little more than a decade later, and Corbyn’s approach to the leadership of Your Party – the new left-wing group he has been involved in founding – has been very different. After initially resisting the idea of leading a new party after being bounced into setting one up by his co-founder, Zarah Sultana, Corbyn and his allies fought the party’s eventual leadership as though the life of the British left depended on it. As a source close to Corbyn put it to me in January, his slate (“The Many”) “must win” control of Your Party’s Central Executive Committee “for the party to survive”.
After six months of factional in-fighting, they’ve done it. On 26 February, The Many beat Grassroots Left (Sultana’s grouping), taking 14 of the 24 contested seats. Sultana-backed candidates took seven seats, and three independent candidates were also elected. Though Corbyn’s victory has been secured, the future of Your Party remains uncertain. Can Corbyn inspire this new organisation with the impetus and optimism that his leadership of the Labour Party did? If possible, could Your Party provide a new vessel for Corbynism? Or is the party doomed to marginality and irrelevance, smothered by the success of the Greens?
I met Corbyn shortly after his victory in his parliamentary office in the eaves of Portcullis House. Close to Corbyn’s desk is a large window that overlooks Big Ben. During our conversation, the room became gradually shrouded in golden evening light, which illuminated the the wood-panelled walls and the cupboards of books and memorabilia from Corbyn’s 40-odd years as an MP. A shelf behind his desk carries a collection of books from the Left Book Club, given to Corbyn by his mother, alongside a picture of his recently deceased cat, El Gato.
Alongside Corbyn was Jennifer Forbes, the newly elected chair of Your Party’s Central Executive Committee and a former Labour candidate in Cornwall in 2019. She had travelled up from Truro after being elected to the CEC to attend its first meeting. And they are part of a new bureaucracy at the top of Your Party that is finally beginning to take shape. At the party’s conference in November last year, members opted for a collective leadership structure over the election of a single leader, a system back by Corbyn.
Your Party’s structure is therefore collective and byzantine. The CEC serves as the leadership of the party and includes 20 lay-members, alongside four “public office holders” (which include both Corbyn and Sultana). Forbes was elected chair at the committee’s first meeting, which was held on 8 March. The former Labour MP Laura Smith was elected vice-chair and Louise Regan, an officer at the National Education Union, was elected political officer (Forbes, Smith and Reagan are all part of The Many). Corbyn’s former chief of staff when he was leader of the opposition, Karie Murphy, also remains involved behind the scenes.
But atop this administration, Corbyn is now the indisputable spokesman. Both The Many and Grassroots Left proposed appointing a Parliamentary Leader or Parliamentary Spokesperson to serve alongside the CEC: at this first meeting, committee members voted on whether to fulfil that promise. Sultana voted against the creation of a Parliamentary Leader and abstained in the vote that saw Corbyn elected. (The NS approached Sultana’s office for comment on this article, but received no response.)
After a turbulent few months – during which it sometimes looked as though the viability of the party was at stake – Forbes and Corbyn seem restless to get on with it. “We know we’ve got a united team behind Jeremy as our leader in parliament,” Forbes said. When I described the founding of the party as “torturous” and asked both Forbes and Corbyn if they have any concerns about those problems continuing, Corbyn responded: “That’s the kindest way it’s ever been described.”
Forbes added: “It’s been resolved democratically now. There were clearly different ideas for how the party might go… There’s been an opportunity for people to evaluate those ideas and they’ve chosen the direction we’re offering.” Corbyn agreed. He put the differences between the two camps down to divergent methods. “You’ve got people [within Your Party] who are super-politically active and want to see a new party and that’s good. They’re putting effort into that,” he said. “There are others who just want to see a different political voice who are not very politically experienced.”
Tensions over strategy and ideology remain though. A recent flashpoint was the party’s decision not to stand a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. After it was announced, Grassroots Left put out a statement criticising the decision, arguing that Your Party should have put a “principled, socialist candidate on the ballot” and refusing to give unconditional support to the Greens, who the statement described as “a pro-capitalist, pro-Nato party”.
When I suggested that Your Party had “broadly supported” the Green Party instead, Corbyn corrected me. “More than broadly,” he said. “This was during our own CEC election, we had no organisation that could make the decision at that stage.” When the by-election was called, Corbyn held an online meeting with Your Party members in the constituency to ask for their thoughts. “There were one or two who thought we should contest the election,” he said. “The most important thing was to defeat Reform and the far right.” Corbyn later put out a statement endorsing the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer (as did Sultana), and appeared alongside the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, at a recent march against the far right in Manchester. During our conversation, Corbyn described Spencer’s victory speech as one that could have been “made by a Labour candidate seven or eight years ago”.
How Your Party might work with the Greens is a crucial question given both now occupy a similar space on the left. When Your Party was first announced in July 2025, it initially attracted 800,000 people who signed up to express their interest. But due to the chaos of the party’s initial first months, many potential members have been put off, migrating to Zack Polanski’s Green Party instead. The Greens now have over 200,000 members in England and Wales; Your Party has just 55,000. When I asked whether they think the in-fighting put potential members off Your Party, Corbyn was clear: “Absolutely.” (A statement on The Many’s website describes the unauthorised launch as having done “immense damage to Your Party”.)
But Forbes and Corbyn remain confident there is still a place for Your Party to work with and alongside the Greens. “We’re here to provide an alternative voice to the failing Labour government,” Forbes said, “and to oppose the Tories and Reform. We don’t see the Greens in that way, they aren’t our enemies.” Corbyn agreed: “There were some people who believe there should be no room for compromise with anybody. That’s not the line I would take.”
The biggest test of this attitude will be the upcoming local elections taking place in England, and parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. Your Party does not plan to prioritise recruiting and standing its own official candidates (it will only do so in seats where the CEC deems there is a realistic chance of a Your Party candidate succeeding). Instead, a source tells me that “supporting community independents will be a priority”. There are existing groups in areas including Liverpool, Bradford, the West Midlands, Oxford and Lancashire, many of which Corbyn has already worked with and supported. Labour is already bracing itself for heavy losses, particularly in London where recent reports have suggested Starmer risks losing 600 seats.
One such group is the Newham Independents, in north-east London, a pro-Palestinian organisation that has been making small gains in recent by-elections to the borough council. Corbyn was the guest of honour at their local election campaign launch. “It was a very grand affair,” he said. “They had good food afterwards. It was like an Iftar supper.”
Organisations like this are Corbyn’s people. The community alliances formed, and now mapped onto by Your Party mirror the alliance he has formed in parliament with four other pro-Gaza MPs: Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Iqbal Mohamed and Adnan Hussain. Adam and Khan are also involved in Your Party, though they do not sit on the CEC: Corbyn has yet to formally change his party on the parliament website to Your Party. “Regarding Your Party status for MPs, necessary CEC and parliamentary procedures need to be followed”, his spokesperson said. It is understood he is conversations with Adam and Khan regarding these parliamentary procedures.
Despite the upset and the struggle of the past few months, Corbyn, when I spoke with him, appeared buoyant. Now he has won control of Your Party, he might be able to get on with shaping it in his image: a party of local, community independents with policies shaped by members. Corbyn plans to launch a series of policy commissions involving Your Party members in the next few months. The first one will develop the party’s approach to welfare.
When Your Party was founded, there were several competing visions for what it should be: could it be a singular national, socialist party, aiming to replace Labour? Or, could it be a federation of existing community independent groups huddled under the umbrella of a new left-wing party? The latter seems to be the model favoured by Corbyn. This approach suits Corbyn and his style of leadership – he is an often unwilling figurehead, who disdains the limelight and would rather share it with someone else (as he did with Forbes during this interview).
That sense of principle, of listening to others and putting their views and priorities first, is what endears so many who follow and work with him to Corbyn. But it is also what ultimately made his leadership of the Labour Party so challenging. It wasn’t in his nature to adopt the ruthlessness needed to lead a political party. The irony remains: when he was about to become the leader of a national political party, Corbyn was anxious and unwilling; now that he is fighting local battles, he is eager and energised. Some would say this reflects both his ambitions and his capacity.
Both Corbyn and Forbes admit that the first chapters of Your Party history have been difficult. “The last few months have been complex,” Corbyn said, “but they are the last few months, not the next few months.” With his de facto leadership of Your Party secured, Corbyn has the opportunity to shape those months to come in his image.
[Further reading: Abandon all hope at the Your Party hustings]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentIt is the Left Book Club – most famously published Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, alongside a lot of pro-Soviet dross (before splitting with CP) – not the Left Wing Book Club