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Inquiry into Nazi camps on Alderney to examine if there was British cover-up


Government investigation into wartime atrocities on Channel Island will ask why Nazi perpetrators never stood trial in Britain


Martin Bright and Antony Barnett

The Observer

Sat 4 May 2024 

The government inquiry into Nazi wartime atrocities on the Channel Island of Alderney has been extended to investigate why none of the Nazi perpetrators responsible for the crimes was put on trial in Britain, the Observer can reveal.

Originally set up to review the number of victims in camps on the island, the inquiry will release a report later this month revealing the full scale of the “unspeakable and unimaginable brutality and sadism” that occurred on British soil.


New evidence seen by the inquiry, which began in July last year, includes historic documents from the United Nations War Crimes Commission that describe the atrocities on Alderney as “systematic terrorism” involving “murder and massacre” and the “torture of civilians”.

In 1981 it was disclosed in this newspaper by author Solomon Steckoll that the senior Nazi officers responsible for the mass atrocities on Alderney were living freely in Germany.

The inquiry has been examining whether there was a government cover-up at the time to ensure the full extent of the horrors was kept from the British public.

A panel of more than a dozen experts brought together by the UK’s Holocaust envoy, Lord Pickles, will conclude that many hundreds of prisoners were killed in Nazi camps on the island but will accept that it is impossible to come to an exact figure due to problems with documentation. The corpses of victims were often dumped in the sea and many more sick slave labourers died after being transported to extermination camps on the mainland after they had been worked to exhaustion.

Most of the victims were slave labourers from Russia brought to the island to build Adolf Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall concrete defence network, but other victims were from 20 countries including France, Spain, Germany and Poland.

The inquiry will disclose details of the hundreds of Jews rounded up by the Nazis and transported to Alderney, many of whom were French. While many survived, they were subjected to horrific treatment in the camp including starvation and punishment beatings. While there was no mass extermination camp on Alderney, one concentration camp was run by the notorious Death’s Head Unit of the SS responsible for administering the Final Solution.

After an Observer report last July, Pickles invited Prof Anthony Glees, an expert in security and intelligence, to investigate why no war crime trials of those responsible for the deaths on Alderney took place.

A postwar British military investigation carried out on Alderney into the atrocities provided an extensive list of Alderney war criminals alongside evidence of their crimes. These criminals included the island’s commandant, Major Carl Hoffman, who was in British custody. But in July 1945 the British government took the decision not to prosecute.

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The Sylt concentration camp on Alderney was destroyed by the fleeing Nazis in 1945. Photograph: Northcliffe Collection/ANL/Shutterstock

Prof Glees, who was adviser to Margaret Thatcher’s Nazi war crimes investigation in the 1980s, has been conducting a full review of historic government records to understand why the British state did not prosecute the war criminals identified by military intelligence.

At the time, the Moscow Declaration signed by Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made it clear that those responsible for Nazi atrocities should be tried in the country where the crimes were committed, but this international agreement appears to have been ignored when it came to Alderney.

Glees said: “What is truly shocking and needs to be emphasised is that, beyond the numbers, it is absolutely true that the Nazis brought their exterminatory mindset to Alderney and were involved in the most unspeakable and unimaginable brutality and sadism on the island that led to many deaths. Lord Pickles asked me to find out why those responsible were not brought to justice.”

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A memorial with plaques in different languages commemorates the victims of Nazi forced labour on Alderney. 

Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

The issue is particularly sensitive as the UK took over as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) this year. The full scale of atrocities under the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands will also have to be addressed in the Holocaust memorial and education centre planned for Victoria Tower Gardens in Westminster.

Pickles explained to the Observer why he had extended the remit of the Alderney inquiry: “This is important not just because these events happened on British soil, but because the barbarity and inhumanity were felt with full force here. From the very beginning, the big question was why there were no war crimes trials for the atrocities committed there.”

As part of the inquiry’s review, the international war crimes expert Prof Dan Plesch has also provided evidence that further opportunities to bring those responsible to justice were missed by the British government. After the war, both the Czech and French authorities were keen to launch prosecutions concerning war crimes on Alderney.

Plesch’s dossier of evidence from the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which operated from 1943-48, includes a document describing the atrocities on Alderney as “systematic terrorism” including “murder and massacre” and the “torture of civilians”.

One document from the British war crimes branch reveals a charge sheet against 25 alleged war criminals on Alderney and includes testimony from Czech prisoner Robert Prokop that described how lethal injections were administered to prisoners.

Prokop said: “All the accused were responsible for and participated in the atrocities committed to the prisoners. The prisoners were brutally beaten and inhumanly ill treated. Many of them were murdered. Ill prisoners were killed by injections.”


Himmler ordered mass execution of prisoners in only Nazi camp on British soil, documents reveal

Plesch said: “Nazi crimes on Alderney, including extermination and casual shootings, were indicted by an international legal authority in the 1940s that Britain led. The accused should have been tried in a British court for crimes committed on British soil under British war crimes law.”

Dr Gilly Carr, from Cambridge University, who is coordinating the panel of experts, said: “It is important to have a review of the number of victims and whole labourer population in Alderney because this was becoming a subject of increasing – and increasingly wild – speculation in recent years. For the sake of the victims and all of those who endured conditions on the island, it has been vital to bring together a specialised team of experts to scrutinise all available information from across Europe and beyond.”

Marcus Roberts, a Jewish historian who has been campaigning for full disclosure of the scale of horrors on Alderney, said: “I hope the review will deliver a totally candid report to finally end the UK cover-up of German war crimes on Alderney and give real closure to the affected communities after 80 years.”

The inquiry will make its findings public towards the end of the month. The precise date and location of the inquiry are being kept confidential for security reasons given the sensitivity of the subject.

UK surgeon who described Gaza ‘massacre’ denied entry to France


Ghassan Abu-Sitta, who was due to speak in French senate, is told Germany has enforced Schengen-wide entry ban

Geneva Abdul and Kim Willsher in Paris

Sat 4 May 2024 

THE GUARDIAN


A London surgeon who has provided testimony over the current war in Gaza after operating during the conflict has been denied entry to France, where he was due to speak in the French senate later on Saturday.

After arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris on Saturday morning on a flight from London, Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, was informed by French authorities that Germany had enforced a Schengen-wide ban on his entry to Europe.


French police said the German authorities, who had previously refused Abu-Sitta entry to Germany in April, had put a visa ban on him for a year, meaning he was banned from entering any Schengen country. It is not clear whether Abu-Sitta was aware of this before flying to Paris.

“They are preventing me from entering France. I am supposed to speak at the French senate today,” said Abu-Sitta, who had been invited by Green party parliamentarians to take part in a conference at the Sénat, the upper house, to speak about Gaza. The theme of the conference was: France and its responsibility in the application of international law in Gaza.


“In an act of utter vindictiveness the French authorities are denying me access to an earlier flight and insisting on sending me on the last flight back late night to London,” Abu-Sitta wrote on X.

The Elysée said it was not aware of Abu-Sitta’s being refused entry to France but a spokesperson told Le Monde: “When it’s a question of a Schengen refuse, the border police can’t do much about it.”

During the months of October and November 2023 at the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza that has since killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, Abu-Sitta operated from Gaza’s al-Shifa and al-Ahli Baptist hospitals. During his 43 days, he described witnessing a “massacre unfold” in Gaza and the use of white phosphorus munitions, which Israel has denied. He has also provided evidence to Scotland Yard.

Raymonde Poncet Monge, the Europe Écologie-Les Verts senator who organised the conference, said she condemned the police action and said they had contacted the office of the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, in an attempt to allow Abu-Sitta entry without success.

“How can Germany issue territorial bans throughout the Schengen area? It’s mind-boggling! This is a new step in the repression of everything to do with Palestine,” said Poncet Monge, who later posted a photograph of Abu-Sitta attending the conference via video.


“We are outraged that he cannot be present among us,” she said.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), an independent organisation of lawyers, politicians and academics who support the rights of Palestinians, called his detention an “unacceptable harassment of a globally respected medical professional”.

In January, the ICJP handed evidence to Scotland Yard in relation to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza under applicable UK legislation, including evidence from Abu-Sitta.

A statement by the organisation said: “By design, the Germans are silencing a key witness to Israel’s war crimes. This follows their action taken on 12 April to bar Dr Abu-Sitta’s entry to Berlin to participate in the Palestine Congress – an event which German police later disbanded.”

Israel denies it has committed war crimes in Gaza and says it is acting in self-defence after Hamas’s 7 October attack.

The ICJP director, Tayab Ali, called the incident “outrageous” and “unacceptable” as Abu-Sitta had his phone taken from him by airport authorities while they were on the phone.

“We have instructed lawyers in Germany to bring this to the attention of the German courts,” he said.

Ali, who is also a partner at Bindmans law firm, said lawyers were with Abu-Sitta and the French had delayed his departure until 10pm.

The UK Foreign Office has been approached for comment.

‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites


Inadvertent poisoning of scavengers across Indian subcontinent is forcing some communities to give up ancient custom


Sonia Gulzeb
Sat 4 May 2024 

THE GUARDIAN


Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are becoming increasingly impossible to perform because of the precipitous decline of vultures in India, Iran and Pakistan.

For millennia, Parsi communities have traditionally disposed of their dead in structures called dakhma, or “towers of silence”. These circular, elevated edifices are designed to prevent the soil, and the sacred elements of earth, fire and water, from being contaminated by corpses.


Bodies are placed on top of the towers, where they decompose, while vultures and other scavengers eat the flesh on the bones. After being bleached by the sun and wind for up to a year, the bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the centre of the tower. Lime hastens their gradual disintegration, and the remaining material, along with rainwater runoff, filters through coal and sand before it is washed out to sea.

“We are no longer able to fulfil our traditions,” Hoshang Kapadia, a Karachi resident in his 80s, said. “We’ve lost a way of life, our culture.”

Kapadia explained that the purpose behind the Parsi burial customs was to “take less and give more” to the world. “The whole idea is not to pollute the earth,” he said

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Vultures gather on a Parsi ‘tower of silence’, circa 1880. Offering one’s deceased body to the birds is regarded as the devout Zoroastrian’s ultimate act of charity.

 Photograph: Sean Sexton/Getty Images

Karachi, which is built upon a river ecosystem on the western bank of the Indus River delta, is home to only 800 Parsis out of a population of 20 million people. The city has just two remaining towers of silence, both barely functional.

Another Karachi Parsi, Shirin, said: “The vulture’s mystical eye is believed to aid the soul’s cosmic transition, and offering one’s deceased body to the birds is regarded as the devout Zoroastrian’s ultimate act of charity.”

“The massive urbanisation and environmental changes in Karachi have led us to revisit our burial rites, as dakhmas were usually built on top of hills in locations distant from urban areas.


“Our tradition is dying. Our culture is dying in a time of increasing environmental change.”

Unlike many scavengers, vultures are classified as “obligate”. This means they do not opportunistically switch between predation and scavenging, as their mammalian counterparts do, but rely solely on locating and feeding on animal carcasses.

In recent decades, vultures have been dying in large numbers across the Indian subcontinent, primarily due to inadvertent poisoning with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is extensively administered to cattle in India and Pakistan.

When these cattle die, vultures feed on their carcasses and ingest the drug, which causes painful swelling, inflammation, and ultimately kidney failure and death in vultures. Research in 2007 estimated that about 97% of the three main vulture species in India and the surrounding region had disappeared.

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Bombay, the Parsee Repository for their Dead, an illustration from 1722. 

Photograph: CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy

The Parsi community in India is exploring captive vulture breeding and the use of “solar concentrators" to expedite the decomposition of bodies. As the solar concentrators only work in clear weather, some have been forced to opt for burial instead.

Kapadia said: “Parsis in Karachi [are forced to] opt for alternative methods of disposal, such as cremation or burial in designated Parsi cemeteries, as the two towers of silence in Karachi are barely functional”. He added that when vulture numbers declined at the towers of silence, some community members suggested creating a small captive group of vultures in an aviary to continue the traditional practice.

To prevent the extinction of vulture species, scientists have recommended banning the use of diclofenac in livestock, a move so far taken by India, Pakistan and Nepal. Captive-bred vultures have also been released into the wild in India in a bid to boost the threatened populations.

Margaret Atwood

Interview

‘I can say things other people are afraid to’: Margaret Atwood on censorship, literary feuds and Trump

At 84, The Handmaid’s Tale author is as outspoken as ever. She talks about aging, culture wars - and why “the orange guy” can’t be allowed back into the White House


Lisa Allardice
Sat 4 May 2024 

THE GUARDIAN

“I’m the great sage on top of the mountain,” Margaret Atwood says with a smile, on a video call from her home in Toronto. “If you’ve lived to a certain age people think you know something because they haven’t got there yet.”

At 84, most writers could be forgiven for taking it easy, but especially Atwood, after a tumultuous few years that have seen The Handmaid’s Tale become a hit TV series; the publication of its long-awaited sequel The Testaments, joint winner of the Booker prize in 2019; and the death of her partner of nearly 50 years, novelist Graeme Gibson. He died of a stroke two days after the UK launch of the novel, and Atwood, with typical grit, carried on with the tour.

Since turning 80 she has published a book of poems, Dearly, many in memory of Gibson; a doorstopper volume of nonfiction, Burning Questions; and a collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood – maintaining her average of writing a book a year for more than 60 years. Not to mention a steady flow of articles and an energetic Substack. These days she can hardly go out in public without requests for selfies. “The most perilous location is the women’s washroom,” she confides.

At the end of last year, Atwood had a new pacemaker fitted, a procedure she tap danced through, posting a video of herself doing a post-op routine to Singin’ in the Rain in a hospital gown. Her heart condition is progressive – “Now there’s a cute use of the word ‘progressive’ for ya!” she writes on her Substack – but under control with medication. Her main worry now is turning a “not very attractive shade of blue” if she goes in the sunlight, due to the drugs; factor 50 is essential at all times.

The perils of old age form the background to her latest publication, a standalone story, Cut & Thirst. “Don’t say ‘old’, it’s ‘older’,” one of three friends insists, as they meet to plot the murders of nine “has-been” male writers, as revenge for sabotaging the reputation of a female novelist many years ago. The story is as sharp and sparkling as the G&Ts the ladies knock back. “This is a cosy crime that doesn’t come off,” Atwood chortles of her take on the Richard Osman geriatric crime genre.

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The National Ballet of Canada performs Wayne McGregor’s version of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

 Photograph: Photo by Karolina Kuras. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada

Her “three harmless older ladies with PhDs” plot against a cabal of bookish bullies, in particular “The Humph”: “Humphrey had come from England. Where else? … His Englishness was thought by him to confer a superpower in matters literary, a view once shared by many others; though it surely is shared no longer, Myrna reflects with satisfaction.” Ouch!


Tantalisingly, this literary feud is apparently based on real events. “How could it not be?” she twinkles mischievously. “In the age of Martin Amis, that kind of thing went on quite a lot.” But it’s not about Amis and friends (Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan et al) back in their swaggery heyday, she insists. “It’s one of those situations in which you know who you are,” is all she will say.

In the story the “has-beens” avoid being killed off completely – a complicated plan involving brownies laced with laxatives backfires. “People have done that,” she says, raising one of her owlish eyebrows even higher. “We will be hearing from old white guys again,” she predicts, with a smile. “We went through a number of years in which people were saying ‘Oh, old white guys, boring, boring, boring’,” she drawls. “But now they can write about being old white guys in this climate, which is quite different from being old white guys 20 years ago.”

Atwood likes to take the long view, pointing out that “literary feuds are a long-standing thing. Ever since Roman times they were slanging epigraphs about each other around.” Though the fallout from such spats is far more toxic than in the days of poison pen letters in literary magazines. “I think we are getting through that phase of behaviour,” Atwood muses on what she calls “modern-day guillotining” via social media, predicting that the heat will eventually die out of the current culture wars. “These things get too extreme, and middle-of-the-road people turn against them.”


We have met the “gaggle of hags” in Cut & Thirst in an earlier story, Airborne. All three are retired academics – “What sort of panel?” one asks of a recent radio appearance. “Chrissy drops her voice. ‘Gender.’ ‘Fuck,’ says Leonie. ‘Snake pit!’” She has great fun with her sweary bluestockings who balk at the use of “totally” as a modifier and are triggered by trigger warnings.

Leonie’s speciality is the French Revolution. Atwood has been reading a lot about the French Revvie, as Leonie calls it, lately. “It was like a snowball beginning to roll down the hill, and then it gets bigger and bigger. At any point people could have made decisions that would have turned it the other way,” she says. “It was the template for a lot of later revolutions, both on the left and on the right, and I would count [Trump’s] Maga movement among those.”
A lot could happen between now and the US election. Either one of these people could just fall over

In an article for this paper following the attack on Salman Rushdie in August 2022, Atwood wrote that American democracy is under threat like never before. “It is definitely under threat,” she says now, though she’s reluctant to predict the election result. “A lot of things can happen between now and then. Either one of these people could just fall over,” she warns. But she is very clear on what the outcome will mean: “You have a choice between somebody who without a doubt, and has said so, will impose a vengeful tyranny, and another person who wouldn’t,” she says. “You get dictatorships when times are bad and chaotic, because people are willing to trade in their democratic rights for somebody who says they can fix it. That is usually a lie. But that’s how you get there.”

Questions of freedom of expression are “front and centre” right now, she believes, with both left and right turning to censorship. “‘You have to take this book out of the school because it hurts my child’s feelings,’ says one hand, and the other hand says ‘Well this other book hurts my child’s feelings, so you have to take it out.’ And that goes on until there aren’t any books left. If you go too far down the road in either direction, you shut down political speech.” While she doesn’t think this is likely to happen in Britain any time soon – “the British are quite mouthy, you may have noticed” – it is happening in parts of America.

When Atwood speaks the world listens, with good reason: the financial crash, the rise of the extreme right and the infringement of women’s freedoms in recent years have all been anticipated in her work. “I just pay attention,” she likes to say. Her status as an international treasure and seer means she is frequently sought out for her opinions on the hottest issues of the day, as well as panel discussions and events.

“I’m a kind of walking opinion poll,” she says. “I can tell by the questions that people ask me what’s on their minds. What is the thing they’re obsessing about at the moment.” The backwards turn of women’s rights, with the ruling just this month that the 1864 total ban on abortion be enforced in Arizona, for example, is high on the list. But as always she is careful to stress that there is no one answer to questions about the future for women. “I have to ask which women? How old? What country? There are many different variations of women.”

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Atwood is interviewed alongside her daughter, Jess, and husband, Graeme Gibson, in 1982. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

She attributes her outspokenness to the fact that she doesn’t have a job: “You can say things that other people might be afraid to because they will lose their job or get cancelled.” In the wake of the #MeToo movement, for example, she was accused of being “a Bad Feminist” for demanding a fair hearing for a Canadian creative writing lecturer who had been sacked for sexual harassment – the tag didn’t stick.

Once again we are back to the French Revolution, and a group known as the “toads of the Marsh”, the moderates in the French House of Commons. “The toads were usually quite silent, but they did hold the balance of power,” she explains. Be they in 18th-century France or the swamp of modern American politics, the toads are always courted by those on the extremes to win their votes. “So it’s not all bad being a silent person in the middle,” she says. “I’m not one because I’m not silent. But I do feel that my position on these things is usually more towards the middle than anywhere else.”

In short, she is rigorously even-handed about everything (“the orange guy” aside). “Annoying, isn’t it,” she agrees. But it didn’t always save the toads from getting their heads cut off. “All that means is that you get attacked by both sides.”

Whereas once she used to be asked why she hates men, now everyone wants to know “Is there hope?” Typically she answers this question not by consulting her crystal ball, but by looking to the past: every generation has a tendency to think they are living through the end times, she argues as someone born on the brink of the second world war, and who had just published her first book at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Hope itself is “a come with”, she says. “It comes with being human. It comes with the grammar that we have devised, which allows us to talk about the future, which doesn’t exist yet. It’s a construct of the imagination.”

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Bernardine Evaristo and Atwood share the Booker prize in 2019. 

Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian


When she was 18, she wrote a story about an elderly woman, who “was dusty and used up and without hope and covered with cobwebs,” she says. “And that person was 40.” Now, nearly halfway through her ninth decade, there are no cobwebs on Atwood. At one point in our chat, she leaps up to show off her orange orthopaedic chair (“Look after your back!” is her number one tip for writers), lifting it to camera height in a way that would do for lesser mortals.

Every so often she pops up to leave her study (an orderly clutter of books and photographs), returning with a book she wants to recommend: one about utopian experiments, “an intimate” history of pockets and a book by an expert on violent behaviour – this evening she is attending a fundraiser for a Canadian organisation called Shelter Movers, which helps victims of domestic violence.

Like the older ladies in Cut & Thirst, when she meets up with her friends there is a routine health check. The “Organ Recital”, as they call it: a stroke; a bad fall; cracked vertebra from going over a speed bump too fast. “Do you know what a strangulated femoral artery hernia is?” she fires off at one point, the most recent drama to befall one of her circle. “The list goes on,” she says cheerily.

For Atwood herself, “nothing has changed. I’m very busily at work.” She’s just back from a couple of months writing in San Miguel, Mexico – “it’s quite slippery in Toronto in February and March” – where she also had a steady stream of house guests, on the condition that they did all the cooking.

After years of insisting that she would never write a memoir, she is finally doing just that. “They ganged up on me,” she says of her editor and agents. “I got talked into it.” So far she’s having lots of fun: “I’m an inherently frivolous person and what you can usually remember is stupid things that happened,” she says. “I haven’t got to the sad parts yet. Everybody is still alive.”

Pay attention, she tells me sternly. “I’m from a different generation. We don’t do grief in public.” Writing of her decision to carry on with the UK tour for The Testaments after Gibson’s death, she asks: “Given a choice between hotel rooms and events and people on the one hand, and an empty house and a vacant chair on the other, which would you have chosen, Dear Reader?” The empty house and vacant chair came her way later, she writes, “as such things do”.

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Elisabeth Moss in the 2017 TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Photograph: Sophie Giraud/Hulu


But she does do grief on the page. The elegiac Nell and Tig stories about a long-married couple that frame her most recent collection, Old Babes in the Wood, are tender dispatches from the empty house, where Nell lives “like a student again” after Tig’s death: “the same formless anxiety, the same bare-bones meals”. Suffused with sorrow, these stories are among the most personal of Atwood’s writing. “Everything in them is true,” she says. “I loved him dearly,” she writes in the poem Dearly.

Next month she is off on her annual trip to Pelee Island, where she and Gibson would always go birding in May (he founded the Bird Observatory there). She has inherited several of his projects to keep her busy. Then she is off to a literary festival in Dublin, where she is appearing at an event with Mary Robinson, the former – first female – president of Ireland, and American musician Laurie Anderson (Atwood’s a fan). In the autumn she is coming to London for the opening of a ballet of her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy (about a group of survivors after a global pandemic), a smash hit in Toronto in 2022, on which she collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor. In yet another instance of alarming Atwoodian prescience, the ballet was due to open at the Royal Opera House in 2020, but was postponed because of Covid. And she will be in the UK in time to launch the publication of a new selection of her poetry.

Still jetting about, I say.

“Still! I love the way people use this word ‘still’!” she shoots back. “My God, is she STILL alive?”

Cut & Thirst by Margaret Atwood is published by Amazon Original Stories.

 Chicken or egg? One zoologist’s attempt to solve the conundrum of which came first

The writer of a new book about life on Earth seen through the prism of the egg says the age-old paradox actually leads us back a billion years – to the bottom of the ocean


Jules Howard
Sun 5 May 2024 05.00 BST


The chicken or the egg? Sometimes, as a zoology author, I am asked this question by the kid at the front with the raised hand and large questioning eyes. Sometimes it’s the older guy at the back with a glint in his eye. Sometimes it’s a student who approaches the lectern at the end of a lecture while everyone else files out. The same mischievous eyes, the same wry smile. “So which came first?” they ask, beaming, unaware that this is not the first time I have been asked.

I hadn’t foreseen, years ago, when I began exploring the evolution of the animal egg and the role it has played in the long history of life on this planet, that it would become pretty much the only question I would be asked. I spent years reframing the evolution of life on Earth as a story told from the egg’s perspective, tracing this strange vessel’s adaptation to land, its movement across continents, the evolution of the umbilical cord, the evolution of the placenta, menstruation, menopause… but even now, having finally turned this journey into a book, I expect that a great deal of my dialogue with readers will be chicken-based.


Luckily, I consider chickens a fascinating gateway species for anyone who has never really stopped to think about how strange and beautiful animal eggs are when you consider them for a moment.

So, the question at hand – chicken or egg? Which really came first?

Like an egg, the question itself needs some space to breathe. The chicken and egg paradox – the classic causality dilemma – playfully expresses the difficulty that human minds have in sequencing actions where one thing depends on the other being done first and vice versa. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, considered it to be an example of an infinite sequence, with no true beginning. It was a way of imagining what infinity represents. Later, Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer, talked of the chicken and egg being a “great and weighty problem” that forced philosophers to engage in questions about whether the world had a beginning or whether it would ever end. The chicken and the egg were, in a way, precursors to modern-day questions about cosmology, deep time and physics. Later, through a series of exciting discoveries in the 19th century (particularly the ideas of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discovers of natural selection), biologists and geologists were able to offer a more evidence-based perspective on the age-old question. And so, what follows in the next paragraph is the standard response you are likely to get should you throw a “chicken or egg” question at a modern-day zoologist.
A more thought-provoking way of approaching the question is to ask: ‘What came first, the egg or the egg tube?’


If you think of an egg as something with a hard shell that you can crack with a spoon, then the egg did arrive long before chickens. Because birds, which all lay eggs, go back a long time in history, many millions of years, whereas chickens, according to DNA studies and archaeological evidence, have been around for less than 10,000 years. So the answer to the paradox is a simple one. Egg wins. By a country mile. In fact, shelled eggs evolved in some (but not all) dinosaur groups, one of which was the ancestor of modern-day birds, about 160m years ago. Other dinosaur groups, including the earliest long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods, may have evolved shelled eggs 195 million years ago. And so, in a very real way, there you have it: the egg, almost 200m years and counting, is considerably older than the chicken, which is, at most, around 0.01m years old.

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Fossilised titanosaurus dinosaur eggs. 

Photograph: Chris Hellier/Alamy

But that doesn’t feel satisfying. My problem with this go-to zoological response is that it shortchanges the egg. Because eggs are very varied indeed. These numerous organic vessels, whose primary function is to fire genetic lineages forward through time, deserve a little more space to… cook. So, when asked this question, I like to elaborate.

A more thought-provoking way of approaching the question is to ask: “What came first, the egg or the egg tube?” For it is not chickens, but egg tubes (known as oviducts; fallopian tubes in humans) that make many eggs look the way that they do. Egg tubes abound across the animal kingdom. From egg tubes that leak milk from their walls like the eyes of holy statues (see: some flies), to egg tubes that paste cement-like glue all over the eggs, so that they can be stuck on to human hair (see: head lice). There are egg tubes where embryos wrestle and fight to the death (see: some sharks); egg tubes inhabited by blood-sucking placentae (see: some mammals); egg tubes flanked by paired vaginas (see: marsupials).

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A lion’s mane jellyfish. Jellyfish, among the earliest animals to have evovled, shed eggs directly into the water. Photograph: Alexander Semenov/Getty Images


The chicken’s egg tube really is astonishingly beautiful. Every chicken’s egg you have ever held was first dressed in a dizzying, constricted, complicated life-corridor. Every egg you’ve ever cracked into a mixing bowl or boiled and served with soldiers graduated from it. Deep within the chicken, the egg you held in your hand began as a gloopy, slimy blob. As it passed through the egg tube, it was tended to by glands in the walls of the egg tube which sprayed different chemicals on to the egg, almost as if it were a vehicle passing through a car wash. Some nozzles sprayed a foamy calcium-rich layer that hardened into shell. Some sprayed tiny pencil-like markings on the eggshell; others painted constellations of dots and spots. In some birds, the eggs can be made all manner of blues and greens by these tiny nozzles. The blackbird egg (laid in spring and early summer in a shrub near you) looks almost as if it has been carved in jade. There are even pores in the wall of the chicken’s egg tube that secrete a waxy layer to the external shell of the egg, to protect it from microbes. And then the egg is delivered, like a shiny executive wagon on a car forecourt, polished and ready to go.

Which came first, the egg or the tube that made it? Why would an egg tube evolve if there were no egg for it to serve? How could there be an egg if there were no egg tube? Deeper we go. The truth is that the egg came a long way before the evolution of the egg tube, and by an extensive margin – many millions of years, clearly visible in the fossil record. In jellyfish, among the very first animals thought to have evolved, eggs are grown in the body and then shed directly into the water, often in their thousands. Perhaps the earliest eggs were shed this way.

Eggs are truly ancient. They go back 600m years or more, as documented by discoveries of sphere-like specimens found in slabs of ancient sea floors. Barely a millimetre or so across, some appear surprisingly intact. Some even have what are argued to be primitive cells within them – two, four, eight, 16 – dividing to become new life: an embryo, a hatchling, a generation. The truth is that we don’t yet know much about the animals that hatched from these mysterious prehistoric eggs. Some are claimed to be jellyfish; others may have been primitive marine worms. Either way, these eggs are very old. Far older than chickens or egg tubes. These fossil eggs go back to the Ediacaran period, about 100m years before animals (as we know them) really got going. The very idea of the existence of a chicken – a walking, squawking, feathered thing with an internal mineral-enriched skeleton, eyes and a beak – would have been unimaginable to anything capable of imagination back then. Yet, incredibly, the egg probably goes back further in time even than this.


If you expand the parameters of the question to allow the inclusion of sex cells (gametes), eg ova and sperm, then eggs beat chickens by, give or take, 1bn years. The uniformity and commonality of sex among distantly related modern-day groups, such as algae, plants and animals (then mostly little more than single-celled specks, hoovering detritus from rocks), suggests that eggs and sperm likely evolved at some time around 1bn years ago. This leads us to conclude that there were eggs and sperm on this planet long before animals as we know them today evolved. This was long, long, before egg tubes.
View image in fullscreenAn embryo-like fossil of the Ediacaran period. Photograph: Zongjun Yin et al/Wikipedia

And so, in this great paradox of recent millennia, it’s the egg. Always the egg. The egg is older than the chicken. That’s what I’ll say next time I am asked, before readying myself for a final flourish. Because the paradox, like the egg, still has many fascinating layers that continue to attract human minds.

There is the genetics to consider, for instance. There must have been a moment when the chicken’s ancestor, wild jungle fowl laid a fertilised egg, within which were the exact combination of mutations that gave rise to the lineage that was then given the spoken label “chicken” (or its early language equivalent). And what is a “chicken”, exactly? The chicken of old, striding around back yards pecking at grain? Or the modern-day broiler, the monstrous perversion bred into existence by the poultry industry? What we call a “chicken” is really, when viewed across millennia, a tumbling river of genes and genetic lineages flowing forwards in time, shuffling in and out of novel combinations as generations pass, chiselled and finessed by the whims of unthinking planetary surface forces or, more commonly for this species, the sculpting, selective hands of industry. Like countries upon continents, the concept of “chicken” only exists because there is an upright ape on this planet with a kink for categories and a fondness for labelling things as they stand at this precise geological moment in Earth’s history. And what are animals, really? Are animals organisms that produce eggs in order to make more animals? Or are animals the vessels that eggs use, in an evolutionary way, to make more eggs?

Chicken or egg? Eggs or egg tubes? Eggs or animals? An enduring paradox, dreamed up 2,000 years ago, remains, in my eyes at least, as delicious and thrilling as ever to consider. We are living in an age of science, of rigorous evidence and journals and discoveries galore, yet still this simple question has the potential to exercise the mind in a very satisfying way. And so, long live the egg, the leftmost bookend to every animal life. Modern graduate of the egg tube. A truly marvellous thing.

Infinite Life: A Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth by Jules Howard is published by Elliott & Thompson (£20). 

 ‘I’m happy we’re not killing them any more’: Ireland’s last basking shark hunter on the return of the giants

For 30 years, Brian McNeill hunted the world’s second-biggest fish from small boats off the wild west coast of Ireland. Now the species has made a recovery so rapid it has astounded scientists

by Rory Carroll on Achill Island
Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by
THE GUARDIAN
Sat 4 May 2024


The ambush was simple. A spotter on a hill would scan the sea and when he saw the big black fins approach, he would shout down to the boatmen. They would ready their nets and quickly row out to the kill zone.

When a shark got tangled in the mesh, Brian McNeill would wait a minute or two while it struggled, then steady himself and raise his harpoon. This was the crucial moment. The creature would be diving and thrashing, desperate to escape. If the blade hit the gills blood would spurt, clouding the water. The trick was to hit a small spot between the vertebrae.


“It was very hard to get him exactly in the vertebrae,” McNeill recalls. “He’d be spinning and diving all the time. If you happened to get the spear in that inch and a half, that was him. His eyes would roll back in his head and he wouldn’t move again.”

And so another basking shark would die off Achill, a County Mayo island on Ireland’s Atlantic coast that was a gathering point – and then a graveyard – for a mysterious, majestic species.

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Brian McNeill at Keem Bay. The former chef left London for the remote Irish island and turned to fishing for sharks.
Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Guardian

The slaughter in Keem Bay began in the 1950s when islanders discovered there was money in the livers and fins of the plankton-eating visitors, which arrived in spring and left in summer.

Crews in currachs, traditional wooden boats, greeted them with nets and harpoons. Some seasons more than 1,500 carcasses littered the island’s beaches and jetties.

Over the years the visitors became fewer and the catch dwindled to a few hundred, then a few dozen and by the 1980s just a handful every season.

In 1984 only five were caught, after which hunting was abandoned. McNeill was part of the crew that caught the last shark. After that, sightings became very rare.

Whatever sharks were left, they seemed to forsake Achill. “The sharks disappeared,” says McNeill.

Now aged 76, he is one of the last living connections to the hunting era – and a witness to an unexpected coda: the sharks are back.
The crazy part is that the fishery used to be the biggest, yet it seems to be where they have recovered mostAlex McInturf

Sightings of Cetorhinus maximus, the world’s second-biggest fish after whale sharks, have proliferated in Achill and other parts of the coastline of Ireland and Britain in recent years.

The phenomenon has intrigued and delighted researchers, given that the species is classed internationally as endangered and facing a high risk of extinction, according to the Irish government.

“It’s astounding,” says Alex McInturf, a coordinator for the Irish Basking Shark Group, an international team of scientists. While sightings in New Zealand and the north-west US have declined, they have surged in Ireland and Scotland.


“They are one of the only locations where you can see basking sharks regularly and in large numbers,” she says.

“The crazy part is that the fishery in Ireland used to be the biggest in the world yet Ireland seems to be the place where they have recovered the most. You would have expected the opposite.”


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Islanders corner their prey and kill it with a gaff and a handmade spear.
Photograph: H Magee/Getty

Despite their size – up to 10 metres long – the sharks are hard to count and track, says McInturf, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University’s Big Fish Lab and a visiting researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

In some seasons, dozens are spotted; in other years its hundreds, she says. “We don’t know what’s driving those variations, we’re trying to figure that out.”

One theory concerns connectivity between Irish and Scottish waters. Sharks have been filmed circling each other in tight formations, prompting speculation of courtship rituals.

In 2022 Ireland extended legal protection by making it an offence to hunt, injure or wilfully interfere with basking sharks’ breeding or resting places, a move long sought by campaigners. The UK has similar legislation.

McNeil blames the visitors’ long absence on offshore salmon trawlers inadvertently snagging the sharks in drift nets, a practice that was made illegal in 2007.

Whatever has brought the creatures back, McNeill shares the delight of islanders and tourists, who flock to beaches to savour the spectacle. “I’m happy they’ve made a comeback,” he says. He does not, however, regret hunting them.

View image in fullscreenTourists now flock to Keem Bay to spot sharks on calm days. A ban on trawlers using drift nets, as well as the end of the hunting, has helped numbers recover. Photograph: Poadium Solutions/Shutterstock


Originally from County Monaghan, McNeill worked as a chef in London before moving with his wife to Achill in 1971. “I just got tired of the tube and the crowds.”

He joined a four-strong team on a currach that fished salmon and sharks. “They were such enormous fish and they were really quiet until they went into the net.” Sometimes they escaped the trap. “If they were big and strong they could bust through the net, no problem.”

He estimates he killed up to 300, using harpoons they made from a car chassis, but admits he felt some sympathy for them. “They were doing no harm to anybody,” he says.

View image in fullscreenA basking shark scooping up plankton. The mouth of the world’s second-biggest fish can be up to 1.5 metres wide. Photograph: Charles Hood/Alamy

But he had no compunction during a hunt, when a boat risked being overturned by the huge fish. “You’re only thinking about getting rid of the danger as quickly as possible.

“I was happy that they were dead so we were out of harm’s way,” he says. “It was self-preservation.”


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Livers were turned into oil and the fins sold as delicacies to countries in Asia, yielding income that let fishers and their families on the borderline of poverty stay on Achill rather than emigrate, says McNeill. “Everybody had money and it was a good life.”

He looks forward to calm, sunny days, ideal conditions for shark-spotting from his home in Dooagh village, which overlooks another bay.

“It’s lovely to see them. I’m just happy that we’re not killing them any more.”

 

The Searchers by Andy Beckett: ‘A vivid profile of left MPs, down but not out’

Morgan Jones

Andy Beckett’s new book is, he writes in the introduction, “the story of a group of political explorers and of a series of interlocking political journeys which are rarely considered as a whole”. The explorers in question are Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell and Tony Benn.

Beckett’s The Searchers is a group biography-cum-long durée history of Bennism that tracks their political lives through the wilderness and up onto the main stage of British politics with close attention, empathy and verve.

In their time, Beckett’s searchers have been regarded with “fear, contempt or hatred”, but the group – who the author describes as the closest mainstream British politics has to heretics – have also had a complicated, arguably outsize influence on their party and the country’s politics.

Beckett’s subjects came to full political awareness in the same era

Of the five, Benn would seem to be the odd one out; he was first elected to parliament in 1950, long before the others were political, let alone politicians.

Beckett convincingly argues, however, that all of his subjects came to mature political awareness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, influenced by the new left and leftist currents beyond Labour including “anarchism, anti-racism, Marxism, pacifism and identity politics”.

Benn just experienced this awakening at a slightly later stage in his life, while happening to be a cabinet minister. The younger politicians may have been Benn’s “disciples”, but the five’s completely politics-dominated lives shared a common vision.

The drive to fulfil this politics carried Livingstone and McDonnell to innovate at the Greater London Council in the 1980s and on, less fruitfully, into Westminster in the 90s. Abbott started her career at the Home Office before becoming a TV researcher and being elected to parliament in 1987, joining Corbyn, who had become the MP for Islington North in 1983 after some years as a Haringey councillor.

Benn’s later-in-life radicalism led him to contest Labour’s deputy leadership contest in 1981 and lose by a whisper (49.574% to 50.426%). Sitting as an MP until 2010, his long career saw him become, somewhat unwillingly, a national treasure.

Vivid eye for detail meets seemingly effortless narrative pacing

I review a lot of books, and a lot of books about the Labour Party, and the praise one can normally give the prose and writing style of these books is somewhat limited. Beckett’s, in this regard, is a breath of fresh air: a vivid eye for detail meets narrative pacing that seems effortless – but obviously isn’t.

As a character study, and as an evocation of Britain in the last century, it would be worth reading even if you had no particular interest in the subject matter. Beckett takes the reader from the polluted streets of a London quite different to that of today’s to the carpeted quiet of the slightly run-down hotel in Chesterfield where Benn made his constituency home from the mid-80s.

If the latter is channelling Philip Larkin’s Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel, the book as a whole put me in mind of Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau, making sure – as that book does –  in a sparing, unshowy way, that the reader feels all the distance between the recent past and now and understands that the actions described are products of a particular moment.

These were always people convinced another world was possible; what that other world looked like has changed over time. “This is not the world I would have created,” Livingstone said when he was mayor of London in the 2000s, “but it’s the world I have to live in.”

Beckett gives a carefully observed portrait of Corbyn

Beckett is clearly sympathetic to his subjects, but one of the book’s many commendable features is its focus on how their differing characters factored into both success and failure, effective team-work and devastating fall-outs.

Livingstone was nimble, and a very skilled politician, but inconsistent and self-interested; McDonnell principled and organised but prone to alienate with a “curt” manner; Abbott fiercely self-sufficient but subject to “the double-edged prestige of being a pioneer” and stubborn to a fault. They’re prone to acting in ways unhelpful to themselves, from Livingstone’s GLC-era declaration that “everyone is bisexual” to Abbott’s mid-90s small-scale diplomatic spat with Finland. 

Perhaps the book’s most interesting character study is of Corbyn himself, who it details as hard-working, if not particularly brilliant; intensely personable and genuinely interested with his constituents, collegiate and disengaged from gossip in Westminster. “In a country that often values these qualities,” Beckett writes, “he was seen as reliable, dogged, humble, and seemingly not in any way hypocritical.”

It was this modesty and consistency, delivered by a soft-spoken, middle-class man, that ultimately took Corbyn to the very top of Labour politics – but left him, the author argues, perhaps most ill-prepared for the demands of power, inflexible and considered even by some allies prone to “courting martyrdom” rather than coalition-building.

In Beckett’s carefully observed portrait of Corbyn, the reader sees both all the things that made him so potently appealing to his supporters and the failings that made him profoundly unsuited for leadership.  

The Labour left may be down – but it’s foolish to count it out

Beckett maintains an approach of disciplined sympathy for almost all of the book, but things begin to overbalance in the last section, which concerns Corbyn’s time as leader. The author argues, not unconvincingly, that Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott and Livingstone are underrated as electoral politicians, able to marshal broad coalitions within their constituencies and consistently increase majorities.

There’s something in this, I think, but it’s the kind of reasoning that will have you shot on sight by the Labour Party’s more important Irish Morgan – there are few “hero voters” in London, after all – and it has limited wider electoral utility.

Beckett begins to over-egg this kind of argument when discussing Corbyn’s general election campaigns – so what if the campaign-produced ‘Corbyn Run’ game garnered more downloads than there are Tory members?

If the first 400 pages of Beckett’s quite substantial book are a masterclass in teasing out complex stories of simultaneous failure and success, the final chapters are a more standard blow-by-blow strung up between quotes from jostling advisers. Here, he ends up reasoning along the lines of Corbyn’s infamous post-2019 “we won the argument” piece. And argument aside, they very much lost the election.

Beckett is more convincing, however, in his argument that our social politics – how Britain deals with race, or aspires to, how it thinks about gay people, or the role of women – is closer to that presented by Livingstone’s GLC than those professed by the Thatcher government. “We won the argument” is stubbornness and cope rather than actual analysis, but that doesn’t mean that short-term defeat cannot mask longer-term forms of success.

If there is a political lesson from The Searchers, it is that dormancy should not be confused with death, and that the politics Beckett’s protagonists champion may often, as it does now, find itself down, but it is patient over long durations and foolish to ever count totally out.

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett will be published by Allen Lane on May 2nd.

The Searchers by Andy Beckett review – the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn


An absorbing study of five Labour radicals – Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Ken Livingstone, plus Benn himself – makes a convincing case for their cultural victories but romanticises Corbyn’s years as the party’s leader


Jason Cowley

THE OBSERVER
Sun 5 May 2024 

This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.

In the long, final section, covering 2015 to the present day, Beckett writes nostalgically about the excitement of the early years of Corbyn’s leadership when the left, for so long ridiculed, traduced and marginalised (Peter Mandelson joked during the era of New Labour dominance that they had been contained in a “sealed tomb”), seized control of the party and unlocked a spirit of radical countercultural optimism, especially among younger voters.


The author misses those days but in seeking to recreate the social atmosphere of the country during that period he is perhaps too forgiving of Corbyn’s failures, anti-Zionist zeal and toxic associations. Not forgetting his crass stupidity. This was demonstrated, most emphatically, by his response to the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 when the Labour leader gave the benefit of the doubt to Putin’s Kremlin.

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Tony Benn, inspiration to the other subjects of The Searchers, at the Edinburgh international book festival, Edinburgh, 2003.

 Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

In 2023 Beckett attended a Bernie Sanders event at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The cross-class social mix and febrile mood reminded him of old Corbyn rallies. “The audience was multiracial, male and female in roughly equal proportions … It did not look like a Britain whose political time had gone for good.”

But London is not Britain. The Corbyn events that Beckett attended while reporting for the book were invariably in London – or Bristol and Brighton, cities with similar demographics to the vibrant multicultural capital. We never encounter him in those faraway Brexit-supporting former Labour towns in which Corbyn and his movement were loathed.
Livingstone and McDonnell worked together in the 1980s at the GLC, which was widely mocked as “loony left”, but its equity, inclusion and diversity policies are now mainstream

But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn.

Beckett’s Gang of Four (as I shall call them) were all products of the London left. Livingstone and McDonnell worked together in the 1980s, respectively, as leader and deputy leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), which championed municipal socialism and delighted in tormenting Margaret Thatcher. Her response: she abolished the GLC in 1986.

Abbott, a former TV journalist, reported on the GLC and later worked as a press officer for it. She was encouraged by its embrace of minority rights and identity politics. The GLC back then was widely mocked as “loony left”, but its equity, inclusion and diversity policies are now mainstream.

Corbyn, who later had a relationship with Abbott, moved to London after working with the Voluntary Service Overseas scheme in Jamaica and then travelling through Chile, where he observed the rise of Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president whose Popular Unity government was toppled in a US-backed coup in 1973. (The fall of Allende was a cautionary tale for the internationalist left.)

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Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour party conference in Brighton, September 2017. 

Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

On his return to England, Corbyn, who had messed up his A-levels, studied desultorily at North London Polytechnic before working for several trade unions. He became the MP for Islington North in 1983, the same year that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were elected to parliament (Livingstone and Abbott were elected in 1987; McDonnell in 1997).

The Gang of Four shared a politics and were inspired by Benn’s campaign to empower members and activists in pursuit of “change from below” and greater party democracy. They supported Benn’s attempt to win the deputy leadership in 1981, a bitter sectarian struggle against Denis Healey that poisoned Labour for a generation. As a restless, technocratic senior minister in Harold Wilson’s governments, Benn had become disillusioned with the resistance his reforming ideas had encountered, from within the civil service and his own party. Through the 1970s he moved further to the left.

The Gang of Four were “Bennites” but had different styles and methods. Livingstone was the Machiavel of County Hall, a pragmatist and dealmaker. “There’s no permanent friendships [in politics],” he told Beckett. He was ruthless in achieving what he wanted but, in the end, was a local rather than national hero. His rise in the parliamentary party was thwarted by Neil Kinnock. “He hated the London left,” Abbott said of the former party leader.

McDonnell was an uncompromising ideologue and, according to Beckett, a Gramscian. He was an autodidact, having gone to Brunel University as a mature student. He was from an Irish-Catholic Liverpudlian family and considered becoming a priest. He was patient and relentless and would later emerge as the de facto leader of the parliamentary left and chair of the Socialist Campaign Group, which is now a demoralised faction.

McDonnell was the Corbynite who impressed me most when I interviewed him. He was interested in big ideas and political economy. He was a hard worker, shrewd strategist and desperately wanted to win. And he had a theory of history and of how he wanted to transform the state. For McDonnell, Corbynism was a counter-hegemonic project. For Corbyn himself, the accidental leader, not so much.

The young Corbyn was a rabble-rouser and agitator. He was intoxicated by the upheavals and student rebellions of the late 1960s and the world of leftwing politics as he found it in London: the radical magazines, the rallies, the festivals, the demonstrations. He relished protest but was a reluctant frontman and had intellectual insecurities. He agreed only to run for the leadership in 2015 because both McDonnell (twice) and Abbott had tried and failed before him, and the Socialist Campaign Group wanted to be represented in the contest. During a brilliant campaign, he unequivocally rejected austerity and spoke directly in a manner that inspired activists who were weary of the tortured triangulations of senior Labour politicians. Corbyn won convincingly but was overwhelmingly rejected by the parliamentary party. A long civil war had begun.

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Ken Livingstone (left) and John McDonnell (second left) with GLC Labour colleagues Ken Little and Lewis Herbert (far right) in 1984. 

Photograph: PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images

Abbott was a true pioneer, a state school Cambridge graduate and the first black female MP. She was an adept media performer as well as being a passionate campaigner for racial, sexual and gender equality. Perhaps no other modern MP has suffered more sustained abuse and vilification and today Abbott is an unhappy exile within the party. She, like Corbyn, is stained by accusations of antisemitism.

The book shares a title with John Ford’s great western, from 1956, starring John Wayne as a Confederate veteran of the American civil war. He embarks on a quest, in the desert landscape of west Texas, to find his niece whom he believes has been kidnapped by members of the Comanche Native American tribe. What were the searchers of Andy Beckett’s book looking for?

They were looking for a lot of things but most strikingly for an enduring socialist alternative. They were opposed to rampant capitalism, entrenched privilege, social conservatism and American hegemony. They were economically statist and socially ultra-liberal. On social and cultural matters, Beckett writes, “the left has won so many battles that its victory has become invisible”.

So why the ultimate disappointment, why the sense of lost opportunity that flows like an underground stream through the book? The answer, I think, is that when it mattered most, when they had the opportunity to lead the Labour party to power and effect the political and economic transformation for which they had long campaigned, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott were abjectly defeated by Boris Johnson, the clown prince of Tory politics. They told the people who they were and what they wanted and the message in return was: “Enough. No more!” The tomb had been resealed. It is now left for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to lead Labour into a new era of government.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply