Remembering Harry Fletcher 2

In addition to probation, there were many other fascinating sides to the well-connected Harry Fletcher, something poignantly illustrated I understand by the range of those attending and speaking at yesterday's funeral. This from the Jewish Chronicle tells us a bit more about one of those sides:-  

Remembering Harry Fletcher, the Socialist who tried to steer Labour away from hate

Martin Bright reflects on the campaigner and old-fashioned trade unionist who died earlier this month aged 72

I first came across Harry Fletcher nearly 20 years ago when I took over as Home Affairs Editor of the Observer. Harry, who died on January 8 aged 72, was an extraordinary mixture of dynamic PR man, impassioned campaigner and old-fashioned trade unionist.

His nominal job at the time was Assistant General Secretary of Napo, the probation officers’ union. But he was always much more than that. He knew his way around the Home Affairs world better than any journalist or politician and constructed elaborate campaigns around the issues he cared about: tagging, anti-social behaviour orders or the privatisation of his beloved probation service.

He was a thorn in the side of ministers and those who ran the country’s major penal institutions throughout his career. But it is a sign of the respect in which he was held that among the first people to pay tribute to him following his untimely death were two of his greatest adversaries: Ed Owen, former special adviser to Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, and Martin Narey the former head of the Prison Service.

In recent years he committed himself to the cause of victims of domestic violence and stalking in his work with the Victims Rights Campaign. Harry’s lasting legacy will be changes to the law on coercive control and stalking, which he pushed for alongside colleagues at his final employer, Plaid Cyrmu.

Harry was a socialist who found himself working for the Welsh Nationalists because he could no longer stomach the antisemitism he had watched slowly poison the Labour Party. He had always worked closely with John McDonnell on campaigns and was happy to work on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid. There is no doubt Harry’s involvement in the early days of Corbyn’s leadership gave it a credibility it lacked elsewhere. Indeed, if he had been placed in overall charge of communications it is possible to argue that Labour would be in a very different place today.

From the moment Corbyn was elected in September 2015, Harry urged the Labour leader to rebuild trust with the Jewish community. He knew his record as a backbencher would prove a problem, but with his characteristic optimism Harry believed he could help heal wounds. Driven by an increasing awareness of his own roots (his paternal grandfather was Jewish), he built a network of relationships with key figures in the community.

We talked often during this period and I watched as Harry became increasingly frustrated with Corbyn’s refusal to deal with the issue. His suggestions, including plans to engage with the Jewish media and the community with a series of interviews and set-piece speeches, fell on deaf ears. He had long urged Corbyn and McDonnell to setup an inquiry into antisemitism in the party, but when Shami Chakrabarti’s report failed to address the issue and instead resulted in a life peerage for the lawyer, he was horrified.

The Labour Party should be ashamed of making an enemy of the man who spent his life fighting injustice and the last three years of his life campaigning to expose antisemitism. In Harry Fletcher, the Jewish community has lost a proud champion and comrade.

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Here are the tributes from Twitter referred to, plus a couple of others:- 

Martin Narey "God, he could be a pain. But he was a formidable opponent and was always, always, willing to have a pint once the argument was over. Very sad news."

Ed Owen "That’s sad news. Yes he was quite a figure. He knew how to use the media to get policy issues on the agenda. I won’t repeat some of the expletives used when I was in the Home Office when one of his leaks appeared in the Guardian or the Times. But I say that as a tribute."

Jane Furniss "Harry used to ring each of his network & 'say X tells me Y is going to happen. Have you heard anything about it?' Then he'd ring Z & say ' Jane confirms ... what do you know' & repeat.. complete pain in the neck... in a good way. RIP Harry"

Martin Bright "He was one of the best. A better hack than most journalists and a better campaigner than most politicians."

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Finally, this article by Harry in the Sunday Times of 23rd April 2017 fills in some gaps but will make uncomfortable reading for some:-

Life inside the chaotic and ‘anti‑semitic’ Team Corbyn

At the first event of Labour’s election campaign last week, even Jeremy Corbyn’s enemies said he’d had a pretty good day. He was fluent. He was unscripted. He was saying things that need to be said about politics, and he believed them. He reminded me what it felt like at the start of his incredible rise, the summer before last, when his leadership campaign team consisted of four people — Jeremy, his son Seb, John McDonnell and me.

As one of his advisers, I was with Jeremy from the very start, and I stayed part of his inner team until the middle of last year. I still think that if he fights like he did in 2015, if he can recapture the excitement that brought hundreds of thousands of people into Labour, this election just might not be a foregone conclusion.

But for now, Jeremy’s 2015 win remains the high point of his leadership. And for me, the 10 months that followed that victory, working for John and Jeremy at the heart of the leader’s operation, were months of growing concern. Concern that they can’t cope with the demands of running a top-level office; concern that they don’t learn from their mistakes; and concern, above all, about their relationship with the Jewish community.

The chaos started early on. The day after the leadership election, I got a call from The Sun. It was running a story the next morning that Jeremy wanted to abolish the British Army. It was a stretching of something he’d said in the past. The Sun tried all his staff, and nobody was picking up. It turned out that his press officer had a contract that expired at midnight, nobody had thought to renew it, and she was on a train back to Liverpool. So 3m readers got told that Jeremy wanted to abolish the army because there was no one to answer the phones. And that never really changed. MPs found it impossible to get meetings.

Jeremy and his team wanted to support every good cause going, and not let anybody down, but he ended up with 100 hours a week of commitments, and not enough time to go round. The amount of work coming in totally exceeded the capacity of the staff. They were — they still are — almost terrified of having power. The team just comes across as frightened to make decisions.

The atmosphere was very, very fraught, and tense, and unhappy. People were working ridiculous hours. There was a glaring need for proper line management, and it just wasn’t happening. There was no diary, no schedule, few or no regular team meetings. Nobody knew what their job was. We discovered in passing one day that there were tens of thousands of unopened emails to Jeremy that no one had ever read.

People would suggest campaigning ideas, ideas that could have had traction and repaired some of the damage. I wanted to do something on a lifelong commitment to service veterans. But they just never went anywhere, never saw the light of day. Jeremy would promise people, let’s meet and discuss this, and it never happened. They found it extremely difficult to cope.

What angered me most was their inability to understand why they’re perceived as anti-semitic. Jeremy believes he is completely non-discriminatory. He would never be hostile to someone in the street. But he is, if you like, anti-semitic along the institutionalised lines of the Metropolitan police in the 1990s, when they messed up the Stephen Lawrence investigation.

I identified it as a problem from the very early days. I sat down with Jeremy right at the beginning and I said we needed to go through everything, because if you start to do well, three or four newspapers are going to go for you. And I said the main thing they’ll use is Hamas and Hezbollah, and the things you’ve done with them.

I told him we had to be totally honest on it, that he had to have answers to everything, and he had to say again and again that he supported the Jewish community and would never discriminate in any way. And he just couldn’t see it at all.

I’d liaise regularly with Jewish Labour groups. They wanted to work with Jeremy. I’d suggest to him about how he might build bridges with the Jewish community, and none of it ever happened. It was very, very frustrating, and it just got worse. Every attempt to improve relationships did well for a day or two, and then something or somebody would sabotage it. Every time, what was required was a swift response, but it just never happened.

The very first thing I tried was to negotiate with The Jewish Chronicle for an interview. Jeremy got very uneasy about it and said he couldn’t do it. So I went back and it was happy to give him an op-ed, which he would have complete control over. It promised not to change a word. There would be a complete partnership. Nothing happened.

What angered me most was their inability to understand why they’re perceived as anti-semitic Jeremy and the team just didn’t understand the collective impact of incident after incident after incident. He dealt with every episode as if it were isolated. I think he just saw those offended as complainers. But the Jewish community was, quite understandably, seeing it as a theme, seeing Jeremy digging himself deeper all the time.

Some people said the reason he was criticised was for his views on Israel, not towards Jews as a whole. But it wasn’t. It was about discrimination. Jeremy did have an antipathy towards Israel. But the criticism he received was because of a pattern of behaviour that was perceived by the Jewish community as anti-semitic.

I was one of the people who recommended that Shami Chakrabarti do her report into anti-semitism in the party. I got credit for that from Jewish organisations — and then total dismay when she joined the Labour Party a few weeks later, and utter dismay when she became a peer. It clearly had an impact on the fact that her conclusions were seen by many as a whitewash, but Jeremy and his team just couldn’t see it. He wasn’t prepared for personal attacks, and he got very angry.

Labour is split at the moment between those who want to run a robust campaign and those who want to leave Jeremy to it. I am in the first camp. He is the leader of the Labour Party, and I want Labour to do well. The country needs competitive politics. Both the organisational failings and the exasperation of the Jewish community are resolvable — if the will is there.

For all Jeremy’s failings, I was reminded again last week that he is at his best and his most inspiring in campaign mode — and that Theresa May clearly isn’t comfortable with anything spontaneous, uncontrolled or challenging. If Labour can recapture the spirit of that first leadership bid, and argue for a Brexit that benefits the finances of ordinary working people, this could still be a contest.

Harry Fletcher was a media and strategy adviser to Jeremy Corbyn from 2015-16