The State of Labour
Luciana Berger's interview in The Times is a damning indictment of what the Labour Party has become under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership - a home for cranks, zealots and political ideologues.
I've been having a 'ding dong' with Corbynistas on social media who refuse to accept that Luciana Berger was bullied and intimidated into leaving the Labour Party - or that the Liverpool MP needed a police escort to attend last year's Labour Party conference.
Jeremy Corbyn said nothing at the time which sums up the terrible state of the Labour Party today:
Luciana Berger interview: Corbyn and Labour’s antisemitism crisis
Last week Luciana Berger, the 37-year-old MP for Liverpool Wavertree, quit the Labour Party. She tells Rachel Sylvester about the toxic culture in the party under Jeremy Corbyn – and the horrific antisemitism that she has endured
Luciana Berger - Dan Kennedy
Rachel Sylvester - The Times
Luciana Berger is just two weeks away from giving birth when we meet and she is still receiving death threats almost every day as well as a torrent of antisemitic abuse on social media. “I’ve even had a threat to my unborn child,” the MP says. “It came from a former Labour Party member.” On the advice of the police, her security has been stepped up – there are more locks than there used to be on her doors, and she is careful never to reveal her travel plans in advance. “I can’t run as quickly at the moment,” she says, stroking her bump. “I’ve got every measure that I can possibly have to make sure my home and office are safe.”
That cannot stop the virulent attacks she receives on Twitter, many of them from Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters on the hard left. She scrolls through her email inbox, which is full of vile messages from anonymous correspondents calling her an “arrogant y** whore” and telling her to “go and live in Israel you f***ing piece of shit”. One says, “We f***ed and killed your ilk out of here almost 100 years ago.” I’m shocked, but she says she gets emails like that all the time. “They have to stay in the inbox until the police have seen them,” she explains. “People say, ‘You’re so brave,’ but the only reason anyone thinks that is because so few other people speak out. I’m just standing up for what I believe in.”
Last week, Berger was one of seven Labour MPs who announced that they were leaving Jeremy Corbyn’s party to form a new Independent Group in the Commons. Within days they had been joined by another Labour colleague and three Tories. Amid all the talk of political realignment, there was something particularly disturbing about watching a heavily pregnant young woman announce that she was quitting the party she had joined as a student because she was “embarrassed and ashamed” to belong to an organisation that was “institutionally antisemitic”.
Berger and her security detail at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, September 2018GETTY IMAGES
She was clearly emotional and, in a poignant moment, stumbled over her opening line as she announced herself, instinctively, as the “Labour” MP for Liverpool Wavertree before correcting it and confirming that she had resigned from the party. It must have been exhausting for someone in the final stages of pregnancy. “Physically, it’s demanding, but you just find a stamina,” she says. “I feel like a weight has been lifted. I would be miserable if I was still in the Labour Party. There’s never a perfect time but I’m relieved that I will be with my newborn and recovering and not feel that I’m bound to what I have left behind and the toxicity of that culture.”
We arrange to meet “after drop-off”, as Berger puts it, so she can take her daughter, who is nearly two, to nursery. With her long dark hair, big eyes and neat navy blue maternity dress, she looks demure and slightly vulnerable, but as soon as she starts speaking it is clear that there is a strength and steeliness underneath the serenity.
In the weeks before she quit, Berger had been threatened with deselection by hard-left members of her constituency party – an attempt to sack a pregnant woman that would be illegal in any other profession. Instead of confronting the bullies, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, suggested that she should profess her commitment to the Labour leader if she wanted the abuse to stop. “That was pretty extraordinary,” she says. “I’m the one who has to pledge loyalty before I can expect not to become a victim. But I don’t want to be seen as a victim. I don’t feel like one. That’s very important. I will not be cowed and intimidated by these people. I made the decision that I did to leave the party because enough is enough.”
As a high-profile young Jewish woman who also opposes Brexit, Berger has been a magnet for attacks from both the far right and hard left for almost a decade. It infuriates her that she has been defined by her faith. “I’m very proud of my heritage and my Jewish identity, but I didn’t put myself forward to be involved in politics to be on the ticker of a television news outlet as ‘the Jewish MP’,” she says.
Elected to Parliament in 2010 at the age of 28, she was shadow minister for energy and climate change under Ed Miliband and has campaigned on mental health issues. But now she has to spend much of her time confronting antisemitism. Six people have already been convicted of hate crimes against her – four of them were sent to prison and two received non-custodial sentences. “One person posted some extreme antisemitic blogs that were also pornographic and violent with my image. Another superimposed a Star of David on my forehead and said, ‘Hitler was right.’ That prompted an international far-right response using the hashtag FilthyJewBitch, which the police said over a couple of days was circulated 2,500 times.” For a woman who had more than 100 members of her family, aged between 4 and 84, killed in the Holocaust, the image of the yellow star had a “particularly chilling and devastating” impact and she says she could not talk about it publicly for months.
People say, ‘You’re so brave,’ but the only reason anyone thinks that is because so few other people speak out
There have also been horrific personal threats. “In the wake of the murder of Jo Cox, someone sent a picture of a massive machete and said I was going to get it like Jo Cox got it. A guy was arrested for making death threats and when they seized his phones and so on, it transpired he’d downloaded terrorist material.” A letter was hand-delivered to her office. “It said I was going to have acid thrown on me and be stabbed. That was signed off by people who said that they were supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, but who knows? Sadly, the police didn’t find them.”
Although she has not been physically harmed, on one occasion a man pursued her at a music event in Liverpool screaming antisemitic abuse in her face. “It was lots of different things at different moments during the evening saying, ‘I f***ing hate Jewish people.’ I believe he was a Labour Party member at the time.” One particularly horrible tweet shortly before she resigned, from a former Labour member said, “Let’s all pray the same fate awaits @Lucianaberger’s baby that she wishes for all Palestinian babies.” “It was so bad that for the first time the Labour Party emailed me to ask me to report it to the police.”
Often there is also an element of misogyny, from both the right-wing traditionalists and the laddish “brocialists” of the left. “Apparently, feminism is a Jewish construct,” Berger says. “Many of my male colleagues say that we as women get it far worse than they do. They can’t believe what I get … It’s men abusing women in the simplest of terms. I don’t understand it, so I can’t explain, but I’m at the receiving end of it.”
It’s appalling to listen to her set out in detail the abuse she has suffered. An old friend, Oli Winton, has come to the interview for moral support and is clearly horrified by what he is hearing. “I feel sick and I’m sitting here now trying to be professional,” he says at one point. Berger is composed but I would not use the word calm. Occasionally her voice cracks just a little and she is clearly angry, as well as sad, that such prejudice should exist, particularly in a party that is supposed to champion equality and human rights. Dame Margaret Hodge, the veteran Labour MP (who last year accused Corbyn to his face of being antisemitic), says she “has been extraordinary – she’s really emotional about it, but also very tough”.
She was clearly emotional and, in a poignant moment, stumbled over her opening line as she announced herself, instinctively, as the “Labour” MP for Liverpool Wavertree before correcting it and confirming that she had resigned from the party. It must have been exhausting for someone in the final stages of pregnancy. “Physically, it’s demanding, but you just find a stamina,” she says. “I feel like a weight has been lifted. I would be miserable if I was still in the Labour Party. There’s never a perfect time but I’m relieved that I will be with my newborn and recovering and not feel that I’m bound to what I have left behind and the toxicity of that culture.”
We arrange to meet “after drop-off”, as Berger puts it, so she can take her daughter, who is nearly two, to nursery. With her long dark hair, big eyes and neat navy blue maternity dress, she looks demure and slightly vulnerable, but as soon as she starts speaking it is clear that there is a strength and steeliness underneath the serenity.
In the weeks before she quit, Berger had been threatened with deselection by hard-left members of her constituency party – an attempt to sack a pregnant woman that would be illegal in any other profession. Instead of confronting the bullies, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, suggested that she should profess her commitment to the Labour leader if she wanted the abuse to stop. “That was pretty extraordinary,” she says. “I’m the one who has to pledge loyalty before I can expect not to become a victim. But I don’t want to be seen as a victim. I don’t feel like one. That’s very important. I will not be cowed and intimidated by these people. I made the decision that I did to leave the party because enough is enough.”
As a high-profile young Jewish woman who also opposes Brexit, Berger has been a magnet for attacks from both the far right and hard left for almost a decade. It infuriates her that she has been defined by her faith. “I’m very proud of my heritage and my Jewish identity, but I didn’t put myself forward to be involved in politics to be on the ticker of a television news outlet as ‘the Jewish MP’,” she says.
Elected to Parliament in 2010 at the age of 28, she was shadow minister for energy and climate change under Ed Miliband and has campaigned on mental health issues. But now she has to spend much of her time confronting antisemitism. Six people have already been convicted of hate crimes against her – four of them were sent to prison and two received non-custodial sentences. “One person posted some extreme antisemitic blogs that were also pornographic and violent with my image. Another superimposed a Star of David on my forehead and said, ‘Hitler was right.’ That prompted an international far-right response using the hashtag FilthyJewBitch, which the police said over a couple of days was circulated 2,500 times.” For a woman who had more than 100 members of her family, aged between 4 and 84, killed in the Holocaust, the image of the yellow star had a “particularly chilling and devastating” impact and she says she could not talk about it publicly for months.
People say, ‘You’re so brave,’ but the only reason anyone thinks that is because so few other people speak out
There have also been horrific personal threats. “In the wake of the murder of Jo Cox, someone sent a picture of a massive machete and said I was going to get it like Jo Cox got it. A guy was arrested for making death threats and when they seized his phones and so on, it transpired he’d downloaded terrorist material.” A letter was hand-delivered to her office. “It said I was going to have acid thrown on me and be stabbed. That was signed off by people who said that they were supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, but who knows? Sadly, the police didn’t find them.”
Although she has not been physically harmed, on one occasion a man pursued her at a music event in Liverpool screaming antisemitic abuse in her face. “It was lots of different things at different moments during the evening saying, ‘I f***ing hate Jewish people.’ I believe he was a Labour Party member at the time.” One particularly horrible tweet shortly before she resigned, from a former Labour member said, “Let’s all pray the same fate awaits @Lucianaberger’s baby that she wishes for all Palestinian babies.” “It was so bad that for the first time the Labour Party emailed me to ask me to report it to the police.”
Often there is also an element of misogyny, from both the right-wing traditionalists and the laddish “brocialists” of the left. “Apparently, feminism is a Jewish construct,” Berger says. “Many of my male colleagues say that we as women get it far worse than they do. They can’t believe what I get … It’s men abusing women in the simplest of terms. I don’t understand it, so I can’t explain, but I’m at the receiving end of it.”
It’s appalling to listen to her set out in detail the abuse she has suffered. An old friend, Oli Winton, has come to the interview for moral support and is clearly horrified by what he is hearing. “I feel sick and I’m sitting here now trying to be professional,” he says at one point. Berger is composed but I would not use the word calm. Occasionally her voice cracks just a little and she is clearly angry, as well as sad, that such prejudice should exist, particularly in a party that is supposed to champion equality and human rights. Dame Margaret Hodge, the veteran Labour MP (who last year accused Corbyn to his face of being antisemitic), says she “has been extraordinary – she’s really emotional about it, but also very tough”.
Canvassing ahead of the 2010 general election - BETHANY CLARKE/THE TIMES
Berger describes herself as “pretty resilient”, but through her work on mental health she understands the “fragility” of human psychology. That was brought home to her vividly in 2017 when – seven months pregnant with her first child – she had to give evidence at the Old Bailey in one of the antisemitism cases. “At the end, I heard the statements of other people who were not able to give evidence because of the impact of this abuse on their relationships, their family, their ability to go to work, their health. Let’s not be under any illusion about how serious this stuff is. I happen to be able to contend with it at this moment in time, but who knows in future?”
Her way of coping is to use her public platform to speak out about abuse. But those around her worry for her safety. Her husband, Alistair Goldsmith, a Liverpool music manager, is “very protective”, she says. “He knows what it’s like – we met after I’d already been elected. But this wasn’t a choice for my family.”
There was nothing like this level of antisemitism when Berger was a child. Now 37, she grew up in what she describes as “a close-knit Jewish family” in Wembley, north London. Her father runs a home furnishings shop – he once made curtains for Tony Benn – and her mother is an interior designer who wrote a hit song that made the French charts in the Sixties. She has one brother who is a singer. “We always did Friday night dinners and went to synagogue most weeks; I had a bat mitzvah and did Jewish studies GCSE. It was a very multicultural area and school. I went to summer camp at my synagogue and I was involved in the Jewish youth movement.”
She married Alistair at the Princes Road Synagogue, Liverpool, in 2015 and “we do Shabbat almost every Friday, usually in Liverpool. I want my children to feel Jewish – it’s part and parcel of who I am.” There has always been a link in her mind between her faith and the Labour Party. “One of the key values in Judaism that stuck with me from a very early age is the Hebrew term tikkun olam. It means ‘repairing the world’. That’s very much a Labour value, that we have a responsibility to help the communities we live in.”
Someone sent a picture of a massive machete and said I was going to get it like Jo Cox got it
Her great-uncle was Manny Shinwell, who was part of the militant Red Clydeside movement in Glasgow and a minister under Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. A Polish Jew, he was the last parliamentarian to throw a punch in the Commons chamber after a Tory MP told him to “get back to Poland”, so standing up to racism runs in the family.
It wasn’t until Berger got to the University of Birmingham that she first experienced antisemitism. “I received something in the post calling me a ‘dirty Zionist pig’. It was completely alien to me, but also a shock.” At her first National Union of Students conference she was spat at for being Jewish and, as she began to realise the scale of the problem on the left, she resigned from the student body’s national executive council in 2005, accusing it of being a “bystander to Jew-hatred”.
“They call antisemitism a light sleeper,” she says now. “You hear about it in the context of the Holocaust and how that started in Germany in the Thirties and obviously before that in different generations. On my mother’s side, the family was part of the Jewish community that was expelled from Spain and then made their way to Holland. It’s happened over generations. It evolves and – particularly on the left – there’s very little understanding of what 21st-century antisemitism looks like.”
In France, Emmanuel Macron has announced new measures to tackle antisemitism following a spate of attacks, including the desecration of Jewish graves. The levels of prejudice against Jews have grown in this country, too, and not just at Westminster. The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism, logged 1,652 incidents last year, the highest on record and 16 per cent up on 2017. “It’s absolutely got worse,” Berger says. “It’s become most toxic since June of last year. I have a Jewish friend whose child has just started at secondary school and she was beside herself because he was getting taunts in the playground – systematic antisemitic bullying including jokes about concentration camps.”
Sharing a conference platform with Jeremy Corbyn, 2015 - REUTERS
Berger describes herself as “pretty resilient”, but through her work on mental health she understands the “fragility” of human psychology. That was brought home to her vividly in 2017 when – seven months pregnant with her first child – she had to give evidence at the Old Bailey in one of the antisemitism cases. “At the end, I heard the statements of other people who were not able to give evidence because of the impact of this abuse on their relationships, their family, their ability to go to work, their health. Let’s not be under any illusion about how serious this stuff is. I happen to be able to contend with it at this moment in time, but who knows in future?”
Her way of coping is to use her public platform to speak out about abuse. But those around her worry for her safety. Her husband, Alistair Goldsmith, a Liverpool music manager, is “very protective”, she says. “He knows what it’s like – we met after I’d already been elected. But this wasn’t a choice for my family.”
There was nothing like this level of antisemitism when Berger was a child. Now 37, she grew up in what she describes as “a close-knit Jewish family” in Wembley, north London. Her father runs a home furnishings shop – he once made curtains for Tony Benn – and her mother is an interior designer who wrote a hit song that made the French charts in the Sixties. She has one brother who is a singer. “We always did Friday night dinners and went to synagogue most weeks; I had a bat mitzvah and did Jewish studies GCSE. It was a very multicultural area and school. I went to summer camp at my synagogue and I was involved in the Jewish youth movement.”
She married Alistair at the Princes Road Synagogue, Liverpool, in 2015 and “we do Shabbat almost every Friday, usually in Liverpool. I want my children to feel Jewish – it’s part and parcel of who I am.” There has always been a link in her mind between her faith and the Labour Party. “One of the key values in Judaism that stuck with me from a very early age is the Hebrew term tikkun olam. It means ‘repairing the world’. That’s very much a Labour value, that we have a responsibility to help the communities we live in.”
Someone sent a picture of a massive machete and said I was going to get it like Jo Cox got it
Her great-uncle was Manny Shinwell, who was part of the militant Red Clydeside movement in Glasgow and a minister under Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. A Polish Jew, he was the last parliamentarian to throw a punch in the Commons chamber after a Tory MP told him to “get back to Poland”, so standing up to racism runs in the family.
It wasn’t until Berger got to the University of Birmingham that she first experienced antisemitism. “I received something in the post calling me a ‘dirty Zionist pig’. It was completely alien to me, but also a shock.” At her first National Union of Students conference she was spat at for being Jewish and, as she began to realise the scale of the problem on the left, she resigned from the student body’s national executive council in 2005, accusing it of being a “bystander to Jew-hatred”.
“They call antisemitism a light sleeper,” she says now. “You hear about it in the context of the Holocaust and how that started in Germany in the Thirties and obviously before that in different generations. On my mother’s side, the family was part of the Jewish community that was expelled from Spain and then made their way to Holland. It’s happened over generations. It evolves and – particularly on the left – there’s very little understanding of what 21st-century antisemitism looks like.”
In France, Emmanuel Macron has announced new measures to tackle antisemitism following a spate of attacks, including the desecration of Jewish graves. The levels of prejudice against Jews have grown in this country, too, and not just at Westminster. The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism, logged 1,652 incidents last year, the highest on record and 16 per cent up on 2017. “It’s absolutely got worse,” Berger says. “It’s become most toxic since June of last year. I have a Jewish friend whose child has just started at secondary school and she was beside herself because he was getting taunts in the playground – systematic antisemitic bullying including jokes about concentration camps.”
Sharing a conference platform with Jeremy Corbyn, 2015 - REUTERS
She warns that prejudice is being legitimised by mainstream politicians. “People in a position of leadership have a responsibility to contend with it wherever it happens and appreciate that, if they don’t, there can be consequences, because then it’s seen to be OK … Antisemitism is the canary in the mine. If we don’t condemn this issue there are wider ramifications for all of society. It can be different groups at different times in different places – in America at the moment Donald Trump’s targeting the Mexicans; in other countries it’s Muslims with the rise of Islamophobia ... [But] we should always stand together.”
Although some around Corbyn suggest the threat is greater from the far right than the hard left, Berger insists, “It’s not a competition. There’s a suggestion that, if there’s less from the left, it somehow absolves the left – and it doesn’t at all. Particularly on the left where we are supposed to hold these core values of equality for all and antiracism as our central pillars – even one racist among our ranks is one too many. You have to root this out wherever it raises its ugly head.”
In any case, she argues, the two extremes feed off each other – last year a Labour Party member (who has now been suspended) posted on Facebook an image from a far-right website that showed the Statue of Liberty being blinded and smothered by an alien creature with the Star of David on its back.
The Labour Party is, in Berger’s view, guilty of appalling double standards. “It is institutionally racist. I don’t make that claim lightly but I arrive at that conclusion having done my very best over the course of almost a year.” She was the first MP to demand an explanation from Corbyn of his decision to defend a 2012 mural depicting Jewish bankers balancing a Monopoly board on the backs of the poor. “It was horrific so I sought a response from the leader’s office. They said he’s too busy with constituency commitments. I thought this is not acceptable in any way, shape or form.”
Many people are struggling with the culture of bigotry and intimidation and fear
When hundreds of people protested against antisemitism in Parliament Square last March, she addressed the crowd. “The British Jewish community took to Parliament Square to demonstrate not against a far-right party or a fringe group, but against Her Majesty’s Opposition. In the wake of that extraordinary event, it was incumbent on the Labour Party to do everything possible to turn that situation around.” Instead, it was months before Corbyn accepted an international definition of antisemitism. “There was a summer of antisemitism, when there almost wasn’t a day that went by without an article that exposed Jeremy’s own involvement and actions.” What caused most offence, she says, “was the video of him saying that British Jews ‘don’t understand English irony’, that we were seen as the ‘other’. That really struck to the core.”
The last formal meeting she had with Corbyn was over a year ago. She warned him about members of Labour Facebook groups posting antisemitic comments. “Jeremy doesn’t accept that people do this in his name, but categorically that is the case,” she says. “Everything for the hard left is through the prism of the oppressor versus the oppressed.” And Jewish people, she suggests, have been lumped in with wealthy capitalists and imperialists. “They say, ‘You just talk about antisemitism to suppress the Palestinians.’ But this has got nothing to do with the Middle East; it’s about what happens here. People say, ‘Its a smear. It’s being used to bash the leadership.’ Yet every single step of the way the list just goes on.”
Although Berger had very personal reasons for leaving Labour, her concerns about Corbyn go way beyond antisemitism. On the day she resigned, the party readmitted Derek Hatton, the former deputy leader of Liverpool City Council who was expelled by Neil Kinnock along with the rest of the Militant Tendency. He has since been suspended over a tweet about Jewish people and Israel, but she cannot believe he was allowed back in the first place. “So many of my constituents remember like it was yesterday what happened on his watch. Everyone knows someone that received one of those redundancy notices in a cab. This just takes the country back. There’s a nostalgia for a previous era.”
The Independent Group: front row from left, Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry, Joan Ryan; second row, Angela Smith, Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey; back row, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Chuka Umunna, Mike GapesJACK HILL/THE TIMES
She also worries about the Labour leader’s instincts on national security. One of the most devastating moments for her was sitting in the chamber listening to his response to the Salisbury attack, in which he refused to blame Russia. “I could not believe what I was hearing. We have a responsibility when it comes to our nation’s defence and that response publicly from the dispatch box was not fit for a party that seeks to govern.” In the end, she concluded that she had to leave. “There’s only so much you can do to challenge things from within. In order to stay and fight, there has to be something worth fighting for, and there have to be people joining you in that fight.”
Berger hopes more MPs will join the Independent Group. “There is a warm invitation open to anyone who wants to leave their own party if they agree with the values we’ve set out,” she says.
From her conversations at Westminster, she thinks others will follow her out of the Labour Party. “There are many people who are struggling. We said publicly what so many people at all levels of the Labour Party consistently say privately. But people feel unable to speak out because of the culture of bigotry and intimidation and fear.” There is a strange symmetry between Labour and the Conservatives, with the moderates feeling marginalised by the hard left and the Ukip tendency. “The cultures within these parties reflect the politics of the 20th century that haven’t moved on,” Berger says. “They have gravitated towards their fringes, which doesn’t actually reflect the wishes of the majority of the British people who feel unrepresented and don’t have a political home.”
When Berger led out the group of seven MPs to make their announcement, some wondered whether she could eventually end up leading the new centrist party that is likely to emerge from the Independent Group. Lord Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, was impressed: “She has a depth and reach that people have not seen before,” he says. “There’s a moral seriousness as well as an authenticity.” Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, has shown it is possible to be a leader with a new baby.
“We don’t have a leader,” Berger says. “This is not about cooking up in Westminster what happens down the line.” But she is not making any big plans for her maternity leave. “Last time I had a plan and then the prime minister announced a general election when my baby was four weeks old, so I deliberately have not put anything in place because that was quite a shock. I’m going to see how it all goes. I want to play a part in everything that might happen.”
She also worries about the Labour leader’s instincts on national security. One of the most devastating moments for her was sitting in the chamber listening to his response to the Salisbury attack, in which he refused to blame Russia. “I could not believe what I was hearing. We have a responsibility when it comes to our nation’s defence and that response publicly from the dispatch box was not fit for a party that seeks to govern.” In the end, she concluded that she had to leave. “There’s only so much you can do to challenge things from within. In order to stay and fight, there has to be something worth fighting for, and there have to be people joining you in that fight.”
Berger hopes more MPs will join the Independent Group. “There is a warm invitation open to anyone who wants to leave their own party if they agree with the values we’ve set out,” she says.
From her conversations at Westminster, she thinks others will follow her out of the Labour Party. “There are many people who are struggling. We said publicly what so many people at all levels of the Labour Party consistently say privately. But people feel unable to speak out because of the culture of bigotry and intimidation and fear.” There is a strange symmetry between Labour and the Conservatives, with the moderates feeling marginalised by the hard left and the Ukip tendency. “The cultures within these parties reflect the politics of the 20th century that haven’t moved on,” Berger says. “They have gravitated towards their fringes, which doesn’t actually reflect the wishes of the majority of the British people who feel unrepresented and don’t have a political home.”
When Berger led out the group of seven MPs to make their announcement, some wondered whether she could eventually end up leading the new centrist party that is likely to emerge from the Independent Group. Lord Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, was impressed: “She has a depth and reach that people have not seen before,” he says. “There’s a moral seriousness as well as an authenticity.” Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, has shown it is possible to be a leader with a new baby.
“We don’t have a leader,” Berger says. “This is not about cooking up in Westminster what happens down the line.” But she is not making any big plans for her maternity leave. “Last time I had a plan and then the prime minister announced a general election when my baby was four weeks old, so I deliberately have not put anything in place because that was quite a shock. I’m going to see how it all goes. I want to play a part in everything that might happen.”
