WHY WE’D BE SUNK UNDER CAPTAIN CORBYN

WITHIN minutes of walking into 10 Downing Street, a new Prime Minister is asked to write letters to the commanders of our four Vanguard-class submarines, carrying a total of 64 Trident nuclear missiles.

These letters are to be opened in the event of the UK itself coming under nuclear attack, and assuming there is no other way for contact to be made between them and the head of government.

So, Jeremy Corbyn was asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr yesterday, what would you put in those letters if you became PM? eschewing the only sensible response (‘it’s secret, Andrew’) this is what the labour leader replied: ‘i want to achieve a nuclearfree world.’

if it were not such a serious topic — there is none more serious — i would have laughed. imagine the faces of those naval commanders as they opened their letters to read their Prime Minister’s orders, only to discover they contained nothing more than a pious wish.

Marr tried again, pointing out that these men would require an actual instruction, upon which they could act. What would it say?

At this point one could almost see some thoughts crossing Corbyn’s mind (not a long journey). ‘ Obey your orders,’ snapped the labour leader, with a satisfied smile that suggested he had just found the answer to a tricky crossword puzzle.

So their order will be to obey their orders. Brilliant: but they haven’t got any, cut off from all contact, unless you have already put them in writing.

This illustrates the biggest problem with taking Corbyn seriously as a putative Prime Minister.

it’s not so much that his policies are ill thought out — some of them might be rather popular. it’s that he isn’t willing to engage in rigorous thought at all, either out of laziness or inability.

This manifests itself in an almost pathological indecisiveness: as our nuclearsubmarine commanders might discover, if ever Mr Corbyn became their boss. But if he does, we might all wish to be submerged offshore.