Politician of the year – Jeremy Corbyn
2017 was the year when everyone lost. The Tories lost their majority, Labour lost the election, the SNP lost a third of their Westminster seats and the Lib Dems, well, 60% of Lib Dem general election candidates lost their deposit.
Yet despite this litany of defeat, one politician had a very good 2017: Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour might have fallen short in June, but it was nothing like the wipeout predicted by the polls, pundits (not least at Uncut) and Labour’s own candidates.
At the 2017 general election Jeremy Corbyn was able to tap into seams of Labour support among the young and non-voters that have been beyond the reach of the party for over a decade, if not longer.
Expectations, however, are a tricky taskmaster.
Having wildly exceeded the bar for success in 2017 – let’s not forget, even Len McCluskey was talking about 200 seats as a decent performance – the political world now expects much, much more of Labour’s leader.
Jeremy Corbyn has done his bit to help fuel these expectations, predicting he’d be prime minister by Christmas when at Glastonbury in June, and more recently, in his Grazia interview, forecasting that he’ll “probably” be prime minister next year.
When expectations rise like this, either there needs to be demonstrable progress – for example, establishing a commanding poll lead over the Tories – or the media narrative will turn to why Labour is under-performing.
The local elections in May, which are being fought in metropolitan areas, will likely give Labour a boost but at some point Labour is going to have to win big votes in the House of Commons and bring the government down.
If not, those expectations, which contributed so much to Jeremy Corbyn’s happy 2017, will be a lot less benign in 2018.
Early-bird shameless leadership bid – Emily Thornberry
Emily Thornberry wins for realising that the anti-Semitism currently infecting parts of the party membership was poisonous to opinion-formers, as well as many party members. Visiting Israel and the West Bank, she staked out her position as clearly differentiated from that of Corbyn himself, who refuses to visit Israel, despite numerous invitations.
Ah, if only it were the result of a deeply-held belief, rather than political expedience. We need only go back a few years to 2007 to find the now Shadow Foreign Secretary speaking at an anti-Israel rally with all the bigots of the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) crowd.
No, she’s polished up her act a great deal since those days; not to mention cultivating the party’s most important single backer, one Len McCluskey of Unite. A journey indeed from tweeting herself out of a job in 2014, by way of a patronising photo of a White Van Man’s house.
Question is, can she keep a lid on her flexible principles, and that contempt, if she ever makes it to leader?
Pragmatist of the year – Angela Rayner
Angela Rayner gets on with things: whether it is pregnancy at 16, taking on a shadow cabinet job when many were walking away from them, refusing to be pigeonholed as being of the left or the right.
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