Political leadership is impossible in the age of social media - as Jeremy Corbyn has found

The tweet reporting Corbyn’s intentions was accurate – but then became inaccurate because frontbenchers went apoplectic when they read it

Jeremy Corbyn (AFP/Getty)

The way we communicate now threatens the existence of the old political parties. On the one hand, there are the two vast UK governing parties, each supposedly bound together by common values and policies. On the other there is Twitter.

If there is a word out of place from a leader, or a leader’s critics, the Twitterati leap. The pace of politics has speeded up beyond recognition. An internal spat can become a noisy, uncontrollable civil war within seconds. The last two highly charged shadow cabinet meetings relating to the thorny issue of Syria were not only reported on Twitter and the rolling news TV channels before they had even ended, but, in a surreal manner, their outcomes were also determined by reports of what was happening.

At one frontbench gathering a week before the Commons vote on whether to bomb Syria, Jeremy Corbyn had told his frontbenchers that they should consult with party members before deciding on their position the following week. As shadow cabinet members left the meeting they discovered on Twitter that Corbyn was to email party members declaring his opposition to military action. Some of them were furious at such a pre-emptive strike. But Corbyn’s advisers only acted speedily because they had seen Hilary Benn on Sky News supporting military action. They wanted to get their side of the argument out there too. Before rolling news and social media, there were no platforms for such open, vivid and immediate internal conflict.

As the next follow-up shadow cabinet meeting began on the eve of the Syria debate, a senior political journalist tweeted that Corbyn would offer a free vote but also insist party policy was to oppose the air strikes. The journalist had been briefed by Corbyn’s office. During the meeting the shadow cabinet members read the journalist’s tweet on their phones and became furious again. Corbyn had to give way and agree that opposition to air strikes was not party policy. The tweet reporting Corbyn’s intentions was accurate, but then became inaccurate because frontbenchers were apoplectic having read the tweet during the meeting.

The dissenters were active too. Tweets from informed journalists and the rolling news channels were reporting the twists and turns of the shadow cabinet meetings before they had finished. Within minutes of the meetings ending, detailed blogs were published with vivid accounts of what had happened – who had his head in his hands, who had protested most angrily.

In response to the blogs, Corbyn’s office briefed accounts that were also tweeted and blogged. All hell was breaking loose at an uncontrollable speed. Again none of it could have happened at such mind-boggling, nerve-shredding, panic-inducing speed without texts, Twitter and blogging.

In the summer of 1994 I wrote a paper for Reuters and the BBC looking at the internal crises fracturing John Major’s government compared with Harold Wilson’s vulnerability in the late 1960s. I showed that the dance between the newspapers and the growing number of broadcasting outlets in the mid-Nineties made it much harder for Major to govern or lead his party.

In 1968 Wilson was fragile, but the media storms were nowhere near as intense for him as they were for Major. Sometimes the plots against Wilson at the top of the Labour Party made the inside pages of the broadsheets but were rarely on the front. There were only a tiny number of broadcasting outlets inviting dissenters to appear, so the critics were not on public view. In contrast, by 1994 there were lots of programmes seeking Major’s critics to speak out. Major’s supporters felt compelled to respond on other outlets, the newspapers reported the clash between the two sides, and the broadcasters followed up the front pages the next day with more interviews.

I followed in detail one sequence that began when the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, innocently noted during an interview that there was a case for a referendum on the euro. Howard made his comments on the Saturday Today programme. I know for certain he had not intended to provoke another round of the civil war but, by the following Wednesday, Newsnight opened with a shot of No 10 and Jeremy Paxman asking “Will John Major still be in Downing Street by the end of the week?”

He was in Downing Street for another three years, but they were years of hell as broadcasters and newspapers fuelled a crisis, rather than merely reporting it.

The mid-Nineties seems like an innocent age now. Indeed, the New Labour era is distant history too – the age of control freakery and message discipline. The dance between the BBC and newspapers back then was all about Labour “spin”. In their confused way, both the BBC and the newspapers were opposed to Labour’s controlling tendencies, demanding more candour and openness. Now they have the wild openness of Corbyn’s Labour Party and a looming Tory split over Europe and yet insist that only united, disciplined parties win elections.

But the unity of New Labour would be impossible now. Often with good cause, Alastair Campbell was driven demented at times by non-stories running out of control, forced to work sleeplessly in an attempt to rebut them. But it was relatively straightforward then. Crucially there were gaps between media eruptions; pauses for leaders and others to reflect calmly on what to do next. Now there are no pauses. Politics in the Twitter era would not work in a Harold Pinter drama where the pause plays such a pivotal part.

Perhaps it would be healthy for the warring sides in an internal political battle to ignore social media. But they cannot do so. Social media has become a powerful weapon in the battles. If one side tweets, the other tweets back. Journalists re-tweet the tweets and two, big political parties formed in another age become impossible to lead.