Corbyn the sad old muso turns into a stadium god

IN the last days of the British election campaign, there was a moment when Theresa May could have reclaimed a bit of honour for herself and her abysmal party.

The terrorist attacks had raised issues of “human rights”, and May could have gone with a previous line of hers, something like, “we are not going to curtail the rights of our own citizens, because that is what our enemies want”.

Instead she went for the most miserable option — a grim promise to her supporters that if human rights laws were becoming a problem in dealing with the terrorists, then she would change the laws.

And there was a kind of logic to it, a sense that having offered nothing for weeks but a series of crude cliches aimed at the most stupid people in Britain, it was too late now for a bit of nobility.

Meanwhile, there was Jeremy Corbyn, connecting with all the better instincts of a suffering nation, knowing the right things to say, at ease with the crowds who were proclaiming him as their beloved leader, determined that, regardless of the result, he would offer some decent alternative to the desperate emptiness of the increasingly ludicrous May.

That would be Jeremy… Corbyn. That would be the same man who, until this campaign, had been regarded by any reasonable person not just as a spectacularly useless individual for all practical purposes, but as the chief enabler of Tory misrule — due in particular to his ineptitude on Brexit, his incapability or just his refusal to give leadership to the large number of British people who know that the only good Brexit to be had is no Brexit.

Yes, I think it is fair to say that I was not alone in despising old Corbs until his recent improvement, which in the juvenile vision of the politico would suggest that I had been wrong about this singular man, and now I was doing “a U-turn”.

But, of course, I was not wrong. I was right.

When he was a terrible leader I thought he was terrible, and when he stopped being terrible and started getting good, I thought he was good. But still it felt profoundly strange at times, to be listening to his opponents berating him about his friendliness towards the IRA, and to be thinking: “will you leave the man alone, do you not realise nobody cares about that nonsense any more?”

A few weeks ago — so long ago now — I regarded Corbs’ association with the Provos as the definitive mark of his awfulness, and I was right about that, too. Indeed, when his own parliamentary party was walking away from him last year, I was pointing out that some of us had known he was a wrong ’un since about 1986.

Yet in these chaotic times, all it took was for him to start saying a few intelligent things about the state of the world, to display some sliver of understanding of how people are living in the 21st Century, and straight away I was able to set aside a lifetime of his foolishness and to get on board with the Corbynator.

But was it him or was it them? I couldn’t quite figure out if the emergence of the best version of Corbs after 68 years of struggle was a tribute to his own hidden powers — or just a natural consequence of the fact that he was up against these disgraceful people who had so little to offer to any human being other than the fathomless bulls**t that is Brexit, a solemn commitment to rip up human rights, and a few obviously risible lines like the one about the “magic money tree”.

That would be the “magic money tree” that doesn’t exist. According to them at least, it doesn’t exist for the purposes of paying for all the mad things that Corbs was promising.

Maybe they’ve just got used to winning with these twisted tales, but you’d have to hope than even among the most catatonic of Brexiteers, there would be a few with the ability to recognise that the magic money tree does in fact exist. It’s just that the Tories have it planted in their back garden and have been distributing the fruits only to their most cherished supporters, and high net worth individuals in general.

And yet, traumatised as they were by the omnishambles that is Brexit, all it took was Corbs coming across like quite a normal fellow really, to give a lot of people the sense that that there might be some kind of way out of here. That they did not necessarily have to be helpless prisoners of this weird nationalist fantasy, and of a political culture best encapsulated in Frankie Boyle’s immortal line about David Cameron, “a bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from government to corporations”.

And so Corbs, who had somehow personified the fall of Britain even more than those responsible for creating it, was transformed in a few weeks — a few days — from the old muso who’s been playing a bit of folk/ jazz fusion upstairs in the Dog & Duck since 1978, into some kind of a stadium god.

It’s been a long time coming Corbs, and we can’t really say that the revolution starts here. But you certainly started something, old comrade, and frankly we have no idea how you did it.

‘Tories have a “magic money tree” planted in their back garden’