W Stephen Gilbert Meet the Author

only be their third win in the Premier League so far.

and we'll have much more in Sportsday at half-six.

W Stephen Gilbert is a writer and journalist.

He used to be a television producers of drama and documentaries,

a job he alternated with writing about television, and he wrote an

admired biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter.

Now he has written a book about Jeremy Corbyn.

More of a political pamphlet really, it is subtitled Accidental Hero,

and it's a brief introduction to the man who came from relative

obscurity to become the most controversial leader of the Labour

Stephen Gilbert, why do we need a book like this about Jeremy Corbyn?

I mean, many people don't understand where he can have come from, to be

A lot people, perhaps most people, would not have heard of him

before June, and now he is the leader of Her

Majesty's Opposition, and is on the front page of the papers every day.

He's the most interesting figure that's

come up the pike in British politics for generations, I would have said.

He's also, of course, one of the most controversial.

He has been, since before his election, the cause

of an enormous amount of, you might say vilification, in many cases.

What is it that makes him quite so controversial?

He represents a wing of the Labour Party that has been out of much

He has policies that, although many people in the country support, and

indeed have come back to the Labour Party because he espouses them.

The anti-austerity position that he takes on the economy, taking the

railways and the public utilities back in to public ownership.

These are very popular in in the country actually,

but they haven't been pushed by the Labour Party for a long time.

The Labour Party has moved, a lot of us think, rather to the right.

He does seem as if he is playing politics by rules that many of the

commentators in the press and the media aren't really familiar with.

They don't quite know how to deal with somebody who is from,

Well, I think this is where I have an advantage in writing this book.

The people who are in the Westminster village,

which is deafeningly noisy, don't actually get much perspective,

I think, whereas being outside it one can take a more detached view.

I think people who inhabit the Westminster village,

and that is the columnists, the political reporters, the editors,

MPs and peers and their supporters, they are a bit like wild animals.

I mean, they all hunt in a pack, and they know the smell

of everything, but they don't remember what was said yesterday,

They live in the moment, like animals do, and the moment is

I don't think they hear what is being thought out in the country.

Part of the problem seems to be when he advances arguments

on this or anything else, they get drowned out in the noise,

the cacophony of criticism, and quite a lot of that seems to be

not just about his politics, his positions, but his competence.

The argument is he has come from nowhere, he has no experience - a

point you yourself make in the book - he has no experience of managing

an organisation of diplomacy, he has always been an oppositionist and

he's simply not therefore up to the job, complex job of leading

a political party, let alone potentially being Prime Minister.

The word "incompetent" is very, very loaded.

I don't think that Corbyn is incompetent.

He may not have obvious managerial skills, but those will come with

He will perhaps get more practised at handling people, but he is

appealing beyond the Parliamentary party, to the country at large, and

I think his authenticity reads much more powerfully for huge numbers

of people than any sense of him being incompetent.

You make the point in the book that political

Nobody saw Corbyn as a potential winner when he was

Nobody predicted the SNP landslide in Scotland, but I

am going to ask you nonetheless to do a bit of predicting.

People say the Labour Party might split,

People say Corbyn might be ousted by his fellow MPs, people say all

Well, I don't profess to be able to predict the future,

unlike almost all of the columnists and correspondents.

There are lots of things one can muse about, and I will muse,

if you like, I think there is a strong chance that the Parliamentary

Labour Party is so detached from reality they will actually somehow

Now, if that happens, then my prediction would be that at least

a quarter of a million people would immediately leave the party, which

is a very good basis, it seems to me, for a new party - what shall we

say - the Democratic Socialists, which I hope then Corbyn and

McDonnell and perhaps 25 more MPs would immediately resign, and stand

for re-election at a by-election, under these new colours.

I have had a look at these MPs who might do that, and it's interesting

that the great majority of them have very healthy majorities.

So the chance they might come back under these new

Perhaps there would be a rump of 20 people in the Commons who

represent the Democratic Socialists, let us call them that, which is

two-and-a-half times as big as the Liberal Democrats in the House.

That would be a very good basis, then, for fighting the general

election of 2020, as a new party, right across the country.

So when people say, do you think Jeremy Corbyn will be

My answer is yes, I do, but not necessarily as leader

W Stephen Gilbert, thank you very much indeed.