Making sense of the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn: Towards an ambiguity-centred perspective on authentic leadership

Abstract

When Jeremy Corbyn was first elected as leader of the Labour party in 2015, he was framed in the media as a new type of authentic political leader. Corbyn seemed to represent everything that a typical politician was not: honest, straight talking, principled and someone who always stayed true to his beliefs. In the aftermath of the December 2019 general election and the worst defeat for the Labour party since 1935, this article takes stock of how authenticity featured in the media discourse during Corbyn’s tenure as a party leader. Three competing discourses are identified. The first discourse categorised Corbyn as authentic and framed his authenticity as a leadership strength. The second discourse framed Corbyn as inauthentic. The third discourse framed Corbyn’s authenticity as a leadership problem. The study reveals a deeply ambivalent and contradictory set of discourses of authenticity that circulated in the media and highlights the ideological function performed by these competing discourses, which juxtapose ideas and ideals of personal authenticity against ideas and ideals about what constitutes effective political leadership. The article concludes by advancing an ambiguity-centred approach (Alvesson M and Spicer A (eds) (2010) Metaphors We Lead By: Understanding Leadership in the Real World. London: Routledge) to understanding authentic leadership, where authenticity is understood as a set of ambiguous and competing discursive attributions made within a contested social and political context.