Extended and amended version of article in The Mail On Sunday October 4, 2015

As the late baseball legend Yogi Berra once said: it was like déja vu all over again.

I had become infamous for the second time by writing some words which produced a response from the leader of the Labour party. I discovered this in the strange setting of a Karachi traffic jam. Stranger still, it was a positive response from a leader I had fought for most of my political life.

The first brush with notoriety was in far-off 1987. Shortly before that year’s General Election I wrote an attack on Labour’s then policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The party leader, Neil Kinnock, understandably took exception to this. I lost my job with Labour’s then Shadow Home Secretary, Gerald Kaufman. These events led me to a new life writing for this newspaper.

Infamy-2 arose because I offered a speaking passage to Jeremy Corbyn. It had a simple theme: Labour says, you never have to take what you’re given.  I added a fine sample of anaphora (as we call it in the speechwriting game). “You may be born poor but you don’t have to stay poor. You don’t have to live without power and without hope. You don’t have to set limits on your talent and your ambition – or those of your children. You don’t have to accept prejudice and discrimination, or sickness or poverty, or destruction and war. You don’t have to be grateful to survive in a world made by others. No, you set the terms for the people in power over you, and you dismiss them when they fail you.”

I wrote the first version of this years ago. I loved it, but it seemed no one else did. I offered it first to Neil Kinnock (no hard feelings) and to each of his successors. Each ignored it: none replied. I tinkered with it and sent it out again. After all, J K Rowling collected twelve rejections for Harry Potter.

I sent it by letter to Jeremy Corbyn, when he took over. Habits are hard to break. I added a few left-over gags, jibes and zingers against David Cameron. Shortly after I pinged a copy to his new chief of staff, Neale Coleman. No response. Back to the day job: I took off for Karachi to write a book on Pakistan cricket.

Tuesday last I had a series of meetings. My mobile phone kept interrupting. A mystery English number, a mystery English voice. But communications occasionally misfire in Pakistan. It was unintelligible. The mystery voice tried yet again when I was stuck in one of Karachi’s celebrated traffic jams. By luck, there was a strong signal. Over the blaring horns, I could make out the caller as Neale Coleman. He told me that Jeremy had liked my words and that I would shortly hear some of them in his Party Conference speech.  This was gratifying but I had no opportunity to listen as the traffic jam eventually released me to another meeting.

On the return journey I hit another jam in almost the same place. My phone rang non-stop. Dozens more mystery English callers. They told me that Jeremy Corbyn had used most of my words (without the additional gags) and been well-received – but that I had been “outed” as their author.  Was I furious that he had stolen them?

This mix-up was all my fault. I had completely forgotten that four years ago I had posted them on my blog after their previous rejection by Ed Miliband. My blog is extremely forgettable, even to me. But a former cricketing colleague, Alex Massie of The Spectator, had found them there, and concluded understandably but wrongly that Corbyn had swiped them without permission.

I tried to correct this from Karachi, but then Corbyn was attacked for using second-hand material. So what? No one attacked Winston Churchill for “blood, toil, tears and sweat” even though Garibaldi had used them long ago.

Some people with long memories were amazed that I had offered words to Jeremy Corbyn. We were on opposite sides in Labour’s savage civil war in the early 1980s. I  worked for Denis Healey in the defining Deputy Leadership battle of 1981, he was one of Tony Benn’s followers. At the time I called them Labour’s Space Invaders, after a very early popular video game where weird aliens took over the screen unless you zapped them in time. (I compared Benn himself to a tube of Signal toothpaste: “anyone can pick him up and squeeze him and out comes soft soap with a hard red stripe.”)

Later I got to know Corbyn as a neighbour and (first-rate) constituency MP. He is much more likeable than Benn, and I am sorry that he will never use any of my anti-Cameron barbs. “His economic policy – pain without purpose, misery without mission, austerity without ambition, hurt without hope… His methods: government by gimmick, policy by panic… a timeshare salesman for a system whose time has run out… If his government joined a circus, dozens of fleas would be thrown out of work…”

Well, maybe he was wise to omit them, but from Karachi I noticed that Corbyn’s deputy Tom Watson had clearly rejected his call for civilized politics, with a barrage of insults for Labour’s opponents. They were not as funny as mine but Watson was right: politics needs its moments of pantomime to give the audience a chance to cheer the hero and hiss the villain.

Corbyn seemed to be Mr Nice Guy, but most of his political record gave me the heebie-jeebies. He wanted to leave NATO, a repeat of Tony Benn’s policy: desert all our allies and then preach them a sermon. Like Benn, he seemed blind to the nature of the Russian regime.  I saw Corbyn as another follower of the old fallacy of “No enemies on the Left”, giving moral support to dismal regimes like Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela.  I do not believe for a moment that he supports or condones terrorist groups – but he never seemed to recognize the need to resist them before talking to them. I did not think he realized that ISIS means the extinction of modern, civilized life in every place it is allowed to occupy.

On defence I have moved closer to him: once opposed to scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent, I can now see no value in renewing it. But I was depressed from Karachi when he fell into an ancient trap, and plunged his party into turmoil, by declaring that he would never press the nuclear button. No leader ever has to answer hypothetical questions about nuclear war. If British nuclear weapons have any point, it is to create uncertainty among our enemies about the risks of threatening us. On conventional defence, I could not see a Corbyn-led government making the commitments our country needs, or sending our forces into conflict when it is right to do so.

His domestic programme suggested a lot of money being spent to reacquire assets which had performed badly in public ownership. I saw big gains for bureaucrats and trade unions and no new power for consumers and public service users to keep them in check. I wondered whether Corbyn would ever act against a stupid, destructive strike, or even condemn it.

But I still offered him my golden words. I did so because he was chosen by an overwhelming majority to lead my party in a fair election. He was open about his programme. He won my party’s support for it and now he deserves a fair chance to present it to the whole country. I ask him only to listen to his doubters – something New Labour never did.

For all the things I disagree with, I believe that Jeremy is committed to the basic values of our party, which I tried to express, and to defend the people at home and abroad who need to see those values in action. And even when he is wrong, I welcome his determination to seek something better than conventional wisdom. Regardless of party label we have had over two decades of conventional wisdom in government and terribly little to show for it.

Although it houses some world-class companies and a large stock of talented and innovative people, our economy has persistent, deep-seated weaknesses. More and more workers in other countries can produce more than we do at less cost. We pay our way in the world by turning ourselves into a car park for other people’s money. It is usually a short-term car park, and sometimes we even re-spray the money and give it new licence plates. Our financial institutions still bet billions of pounds on assets they cannot value or even understand. We live each day on the edge of another crash.

We have been through the slowest economic recovery in history, which has missed millions of our people. We have more chance of seeing Elvis riding Shergar than an end to the deficit. Our tax and benefit system remains shambolic and unfair, and continues to punish poor people who want to better themselves. Our NHS is in deep crisis, and scores of hospitals are close to meltdown. Every day more of our people give up hope of finding decent affordable housing.

In spite of huge commitments to defence and security, there is no country in the world where it has become safer for Britons to live or work or travel – including Britain.

Above all, we have persistent inequality. There are deep pockets of privilege in almost every sector of our economy and every public service. Our society has become a giant casino in which millions of people are forced to play with a stacked deck.

On all these problems and many more this government has no real answers. Neither did the Coalition, neither did New Labour, all of them in thrall to conventional wisdom. Again, Corbyn deserves the chance to discover something better.

He has now become the trustee of the hopes of millions of people for a better life and of all those who believe in the values he expressed. More immediately, he is the trustee of all the Labour candidates who want to win office and make a difference for their communities. If he fails, then the waiting conspirators in his party will have to decapitate him. (Memo to conspirators: try to exclude Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. They each make thousands of people feel better about Jeremy Corbyn.)

In a sweltering Karachi, I am still delighted that Jeremy Corbyn liked the words I offered him. But if he lets down my party I have plenty more available to use against him.