This self-styled ‘man of the people’ is now exposed as prize hypocrite

AWASH with self-righteous indignation, Jeremy Corbyn views his personal integrity as his greatest asset.

In his habitual pose as a man of the people, he likes to portray himself as the virtuous radical above the squalid compromises of the political arena.

Yet now he stands exposed as a prize hypocrite, whose earnest socialist rhetoric fails to match the reality of his money-grabbing association with wealthy financiers and lawyers.

Corbyn rages against corporate “fat cats” but he is all too eager to acquire some of their cream for his party’s coffers. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday in the Commons, he wailed about poverty in Tory Britain, but that very night he spent his time with the gilded elite as he launched Labour’s exclusive new fundraising drive in the heart of London’s legal establishment.

These plutocrats represent everything that Corbyn has spent his entire political career raging against since he became an MP in 1983.

Having continually denounced Tony Blair for selling out socialism, he now apes his despised predecessor in his cash-fuelled flirtation with the City.

It turns out that the anorak-wearing, slogan-mouthing, bike-riding

anti-capitalist is happy to seek out the capitalists, as long as they stuff Labour with their gold.

The depths of cynicism to which the Labour leader is willing to sink are extraordinary.

What is also remarkable is how these wealthy donors are willing to collude with Corbyn, given his record as a hardline, left-wing ideologue.

He might be a hypocrite, but his affluent supporters are masochists, for a Corbyn government – with the sinister John McDonnell as chancellor – would embark on a revolution that would swiftly bring our country to its knees.

If these new donors think that his government would be anything like previous Labour administrations under Attlee, Wilson or Blair, they are woefully mistaken.

Corbyn is a quasi-Marxist zealot, as I know from my own experience.

For a decade from 1985 I was an activist in his Islington North Labour Party, and I witnessed at first hand his economic extremism.

“Our job is not to reform capitalism but to overthrow it,” I heard him once declare at a party meeting.

Tellingly, he used to proclaim the South American socialist republic of Venezuela as his role model, though he has recently been a bit quieter on that subject since the country sank into utter bankruptcy and destitution. A Corbyn premiership could do the same for Britain, with its plans for confiscatory taxation, mass nationalisation, welfare expansion, and a return to trade union power.

The Soviet leader Lenin famously described the western supporters of his Russian revolution as “useful idiots”.

The same words could apply to today’s breed of Labour’s corporate backers.