CORBYN’S RUSSIA STANCE PLUNGES LABOUR INTO CRISIS

JEREMY Corbyn’s refusal to recognise Russian culpability in the Salisbury poisoning has plunged his leadership into a fresh crisis. Critics say the hard-Left Labour leader has exposed just how dangerously unsuited he is for Downing Street.

“Defence of the nation is the first duty of the prime minister,” one Tory minister told me. “If the leader of the Opposition cannot convince people he is up to that job he cannot convince them on anything.”

It is a sentiment shared by many on Mr Corbyn’s own side. “Our leader is a disgrace,” was how one Labour MP put it. Many Labour backbenchers accuse Mr Corbyn of betraying their party’s patriotic traditions on national defence.

They point to the fact that a Labour government was in power when the Cold War began, responding to Soviet aggression by committing the country to nuclear deterrence. “We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs,” Ernie Bevin, the then foreign secretary said of the atomic bomb, adding: “We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” MPs find it impossible to imagine such words coming from Mr Corbyn’s lips. Even the late Michael Foot, the hapless Labour leader prepared to unilaterally scrap the UK’s nuclear arsenal, unequivocally backed standing up to Argentina in the Falklands War.

The uneasy truce between the hard-Left supporters of Mr Corbyn and the moderate wing of the party that has endured since the general election campaign has collapsed following this week’s debacle. Labour MPs are talking of forming an independent grouping distancing itself from their leader’s stance.

Yet there is little sign of a backlash against Mr Corbyn among his socialist fan club in the grassroots party membership. Blinded by hatred of the Tories, many hard-Left activists simply ignore the furore. Some Left-wing websites were even swapping ludicrous conspiracy theories about who was really to blame for the nerve agent attack.

For all the latest plotting by Labour MPs the party remains in the grip of Mr Corbyn’s deluded devotees.

While moderates still do not want to surrender the Labour brand by walking away, they cannot be far from admitting that they have no realistic hope of winning their party back.