Jack Kessler has left the group

The pain of breaking up with your closest friends

The view from the Good Bench, Haggerston Park (Jack Kessler)

It’s all Eric Joyce’s fault, really. Because if Joyce hadn’t punched the Conservative MP Stuart Andrew in the face, he wouldn’t have been suspended by Labour. And if he hadn’t been suspended by Labour, there would have been no Falkirk selection scandal, in which Unite the Union, the party’s biggest financial backer, was accused of trying to fix the selection in favour of its preferred candidate, Karie Murphy.

And if there were no Falkirk selection scandal, Ed Miliband wouldn’t have reformed how Labour elected its leader, which included a move away from an electoral college in favour of a one member, one vote system. And if Miliband hadn’t reformed how Labour elected its leader, Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t have won the 2015 leadership election.

And if Corbyn hadn’t won the 2015 leadership election, I wouldn’t have broken up with my closest friends.

Gradually, then suddenly

I should be clear, these people were no Corbynites. Most were so Blairite that they would have been up for invading Iraq again. Nor was it as if Corbyn was elected on the Tuesday and we had a big falling out on the Wednesday. This was a slow burn. And, ok, this is embarrassing. But it’s also how you know I’m telling the truth. The tipping point arrived with the formation of Change UK, or rather The Independent Group.

You know — the breakaway movement initially founded by Labour MPs including Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Chris Leslie. It became a lesson in how not to launch a new political party but at the time, that was neither apparent nor my primary concern. These were people who were saying things I was so desperate to hear.

Labour was stuck in an endless slurry of antisemitism allegations. More than allegations, in fact, given that the party subsequently became the first since the BNP to be served with an unlawful act notice following an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which found it responsible for acts of harassment and discrimination against Jews.

As for Corbyn himself, a great many Jewish people thought him not only unsuitable to be prime minister, but a threat to their safety and way of life. It is not difficult to see why. Around the same time, antisemitic incidents in the UK reached a (then) record high, according to the Community Security Trust. It is almost as if anti-Jewish hatred was invented before 7 October 2023, or indeed the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

But this is a story about friendship, not hatred.

Meagre expectations

I’ve gone back and checked. With my notes, my husband and my therapist — because there’s little value in rewriting history now. So I feel confident in stating my expectations back then were not that people who had invested so much time, emotional labour and social capital in the party had to depart forthwith for Change UK.

I’d been around politics for almost a decade by this point. Friendship aside, I understood that the next Labour leader would not only have to be a dues-paying member, but also sat around Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. A strategy Keir Starmer executed to perfection.

By 2019, it was also clear that the alternative to a Corbyn-led Labour government was not going to be a return to Third Way politics, or even Cameroonism. It was Boris Johnson and specifically, a hard Brexit. Sometimes, there are no good options.

Heck, at the 2017 election I found myself voting for the Liberal Democrats even though its leader, Tim Farron, clearly thought I was a bit suspect. I’m of course referring to when he was asked three times by the indefatigable Cathy Newman whether he thought gay sex was a sin (I honestly don’t recall how it came up), and three times Farron declined to give a direct answer, instead choosing to say: “We’re all sinners.”

I’ve watched roughly a bajillion political interviews and am not easily surprised by contorted phrases and non-answers. But I happened to be watching this one live and my jaw connected with the floor like an imitation Looney Tunes character. But we’re getting distracted. The point is only that I understand there are few perfect choices in life, let alone British politics.

All I wanted was a semantical grain of acknowledgement. For my friends to tell me, either of their own volition or out of social awkwardness, that they felt a little shitty about what they were doing — that they knew why I couldn’t vote for Corbyn, that he was the world’s unluckiest anti-racist and so on — but they were going to vote and go door-knocking for him anyway. I just wanted to hear them say it.

That they would never have supported him, and Corbyn would never have got so far in left wing politics, had he been quite so hostile to any other persecuted minority, did not cross my mind at the time. It was just as well.

The Talk

Here, I made my first mistake. I tried to talk about it with my best friend in the group of 12 or 20 (it’s hard to know where the cutoff lies). The one I would message on and off all day. The one I would regale with stories about how a date had gone and knew I could wake in the middle of the night in an emergency. Basically, the one I trusted with my life. It did not go well. No voices were raised, but it was clear my perspective was unwelcome, if not a grotesque breach of convention.

So I started attending fewer group events. Nights out, weekend walks — the things I loved to do with the people who meant the most to me. It was deeply unsatisfactory, but not as painful as the times I chose to show up. Word had inevitably leaked from my one-to-one chat. The new rule seemed to be that I could still come, but the price of admission was that I had to pretend everything was fine.

A few months later, Labour lost the 2019 election (there must be a German word for something that is more than a working majority but less than a landslide) and, after the relief subsided, I hoped that 2020 might be the year of kissing and making up. Jews don’t have the luxury of holding grudges. That’s why practically every festival can be reduced to: “They tried to kill us, they were only partially successful, let’s eat.”

Then, Covid happened. All of a sudden, there were no catch-ups, no weekday pints or Royal Vauxhall Tavern Sundays. There were only lockdowns and, belatedly, Zoom quizzes. I know now that the die had already been cast and it had been decided behind closed doors that there would be no way back for me. But at the time, the pandemic felt like a particularly cruel intervention.

“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.” — Paul Newman

The WhatsApp group

There’s always a WhatsApp group. Actually, there’s usually more than one — you know, for organising events where exclusivity is imperative, or for critiquing the main group, like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show, but less camp.

Statler and Waldorf (Wikimedia Commons)

I perhaps should have made it clear earlier but this wasn’t just any friendship group to me. These people unwittingly helped me to become the fully realised person I always wanted to be, at a time when I didn’t even know how. They weren’t the greatest friends in the world, but they were my friends. As Dad used to say of the old Wembley Stadium: it may be a shithole, but it’s our shithole.

Anyway, the WhatsApp group. The thing was incessant. Memes, explicit photos, “happy birthday mate! x x”, the usual. I was dead set against leaving it — that felt far too definitive. I tried muting it but Meta, in its infinite wisdom, still sends muted chats to the top of the home screen whenever a message is sent. So it was always front of mind.

I was so in my own head that, in early 2020, in preparation for sending my first message in the group for several months, I asked a couple of friends with whom I’d managed to stay in touch if they would make an effort to respond to it so I’d feel less exposed. [Future Jack: Jack! What are you doing?!]

I have no proof and a near-unbroken streak of getting almost everything wrong. I thought Gareth Gates would win the first season of Pop Idol and was convinced England were going to come home with the 2004 Euros. And I also truly believed that my friends would take me back. In other words, I may be way off here. But I don’t think I am.

I’m pretty sure many times I sent a message in the chat following my re-admission (I make it sound like I’m South African cricket post-apartheid), it would have a chilling effect on the group. This chat, a constant stream of content, would instantly go quiet the moment I contributed anything.

Things got so bad that by the middle of 2020, I would only send messages when I could see that someone else in the group was simultaneously typing — so my text wouldn’t be left hanging as the last one. Even this was no guarantee of salvation. That person would often never send their message. Or, perhaps, they put it in the ‘other’ WhatsApp group instead.

Bear in mind that I was an otherwise fully functioning 30-year-old. I had drafted parliamentary speeches, sections of the Northern Ireland Executive’s Budget and would soon have my own newspaper column. I was loved by my parents and my partner, a seemingly respected member of the community. But in this geriatric schoolyard, I was reduced to tactical messaging. It couldn’t go on like this. But somehow, it did.

Lord, make me brave — but not yet

The trouble with England cricket in the 1990s was that the team wasn’t very good. And part of the problem was that the players knew that one bad performance and they’d be dropped. But the other extreme can be harmful too. Allowing players (naming no names, Zak Crawley) chance after chance on the basis that one too many is preferable to one too few. I know the feeling.

As lockdown restrictions lifted, I would agonise over showing up to social events. Had my presence led to arguments or people visibly recoiling, I would at least have known where I stood. Instead, I was left to work it out for myself. It’s bad writing, but I’m doing it anyway: it was like the central conceit in The Sixth Sense: I didn’t know the friendship was dead.

At the parties, I’d play a part. Like at an interview for a job I didn’t want. That of someone who wasn’t nervous but happy to be there. Intensely relaxed about seeing my former best friends. This is the period of time I’d like back, please. Not the many years of happy memories or the six months of self-imposed isolation, but the 18 months I spent in the bargaining stage of grief. Here, I would ask myself and my partner endless questions:

Would I ever feel that sense of belonging again? And if not, could I accept being a four-or-five-event-a-year-friend, when I had previously been a fully paid-up member of the gang? Did one of them replying to my messages mean anything? Is there any there, there?

It’s too late to cut a long story short. But the penny dropped as late as 2022 when I built up the courage to message the person I had been closest to all that time ago. For context, he was trying to win selection as a Labour candidate and this was several messages in:

“How about a drink? And good luck for selection day.”

His reply was… well, it was incomplete:

“Thanks, Jack! I live to fight another day.”

That was as close to a definitive answer as I was going to get. I left the WhatsApp group soon after.

The end

I long ago stopped kicking myself about how I could have reacted differently. I can see now that I was in pain. I withdrew. And they let me go. There was no special sequence of actions I could have taken that would have allowed me to keep both the friendship and my sense of self. Sometimes, relationships just don’t survive circumstances. Perhaps it’s a weakness inherent in all large friendship groups — keeping the show on the road tends to win out over having difficult conversations.

Of course, the narratively satisfying way to conclude this would be to say I made new friends. Better friends. And to some extent I have. But I’m not ashamed to say that I miss being part of the group, even if I don’t miss the people themselves. Belonging is a hell of a drug, especially for someone who is, in so many ways, an outsider.

For me, that’s a happy ending. But more to the point, it’s an ending.