Boris is right to say Corbyn is not JUST a mugwump
AS SO often with the insults which tumble liberally from the lips of our Foreign Secretary, his description of Jeremy Corbyn as a “mutton-headed mugwump” comes across at first as a little misplaced. The original mugwumps were Republican activists who switched sides to the Democrats in the 1884 US presidential election in protest at the corrupt practices of their candidate James Blaine. Say what you like about Jeremy Corbyn, he certainly isn’t going to turn his back on Labour.
But the more you examine Boris’s remark the more you realise how it hits the nail on the head. Labour’s protests about the Tories descending into personal language fall flat because to call someone a mutton-headed mugwump doesn’t come across as nasty at all. On the contrary it sounds rather endearing.
And that is the point. What Johnson was actually saying was that Corbyn is not just a mugwump but that he would be a serious danger to the country if, God forbid, the polls turned out to be even more drastically wrong than they were last time and Labour found itself in power.
The Conservatives’ problem is that a Labour victory at present looks so highly improbable that it could lower the guard of the electorate. If people don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is electable, they are perversely more likely to vote for their Labour candidate.
IT BECOMES very easy to say: Theresa May is so obviously going to win this election that I can safely vote for that nice Labour candidate in my constituency. Or people start to think: I want the Conservatives to win but I don’t want them to have too big a majority and so I will register a protest vote with Labour.
If a few people do this, it won’t change the result. But if a couple of million people were to be lulled into voting Labour out of a false sense of security, it could conceivably tip the election in Corbyn’s favour – he would end up winning precisely because people hadn’t taken him seriously.
But we should take Jeremy Corbyn seriously. For the first time since Michael Foot in 1983 we have a prime ministerial candidate who is personally opposed to Britain retaining an militant groups associated with Jo Cox’s killer Thomas Mair. It would of course be an outrage for anyone to do that. So why is it any different for militants and murderers who represent a Left-wing cause?
C