IT’S LIKE A DERANGED CALIFORNIAN CULT

AS HISTORIANS know, the typical cult makes strange demands of its members. The medieval Assassins, based in a remote castle in northern Syria, were said to smoke hashish before venturing forth to kill their enemies.

The Ranters, who emerged in England after the civil wars of the 1640s, liked to take their clothes off as a protest against conventional morality.

The Rajneesh, who followed the half- crazed Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to a commune in Oregon in the Eighties, dressed entirely in orange.

As for the members of the Peoples Temple, they followed the far-Left American preacher Jim Jones to a compound in Guyana, where they committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

Yesterday in Manchester, a disturbing new cult made a bid for public attention. Its activists, who venerate a bearded prophet with the initials JC, typically wear red ties or red dresses.

Poison

Like so many cult members, they travel the land handing out leaflets and attracting recruits, and they are tireless in their efforts to solicit donations.

And although no poisoned Kool-Aid was on hand yesterday, there was plenty of poison in the air, as the cult leader unveiled a long list of enemies who had ‘ rigged the system’ and would soon face a mysterious ‘reckoning’.

The cult in question was, of course, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Watching his General Election campaign launch yesterday, I almost had to pinch myself to remember that only seven years ago his party was still running the country.

For with their obsessive sense of embattlement, their wild conspiracy theories, their suffocating self-righteousness and their utter indifference to reality, Mr Corbyn and his friends increasingly resemble one of the more deranged Californian cults of the Seventies.

Only last week, Labour collapsed to one of the worst electoral defeats in its modern history, losing more than 380 council seats and being humiliated in a string of mayoral con- tests. The latest polls continue to give the Conservatives a lead of around 20 per cent, and most observers agree that when Britain votes on June 8, Labour will sink to their worst defeat since 1983, and perhaps even since the Thirties.

You would never have guessed it from the scenes in Manchester, though.

There they all were on the platform, clapping ecstatically like Bible Belt Baptists at an evangelical service: Diane Abbott, the would-be home secretary who cannot add up; John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor who promises to run the economy according to the principles of Karl Marx; and Mr Corbyn, the prospective prime minister who cannot bring himself to sing his country’s National Anthem.

As Mr Corbyn explained yesterday, he is looking forward to a long spell in office.

But if, by some strange accident, he loses, he has no intention of stepping down as Labour leader.

‘I was elected leader of this party and I’ll stay leader of this party,’ he told the website Buzzfeed. ‘I love it . . . I’ll carry on doing it.’

Most party leaders say this sort of thing, of course. But since Mr Corbyn’s aides have spent the past few weeks briefing journalists about his determination to cling on in the event of defeat, I suspect he means every word.

The real mystery, of course, is why? If the polls are even vaguely correct — and given last week’s local results, I believe they are — why cling on in the face of such a debacle?

The answer, I think, is that Mr Corbyn and his friends simply do not care about the General Election.

Let me explain. I suspect he would be relieved to lose, because he has never showed the slightest interest in running anything — a government department, a business, even a whelk stall — and even he must know that he is not remotely capable of organising a Government.

What he really cares about is completing the transformation of the Labour Party into a far-Left sect, a kind of religious cult, sealed off from electoral reality and utterly detached from the values, ambitions and anxieties of ordinary Labour voters, whom the Corbynistas regard as brainwashed capitalist dupes.

This explains, I think, why his speech yesterday was so predictable, unambitious and intellectually threadbare.

Mr Corbyn’s admirers have often hailed him as excitingly radical, a refreshingly different voice amid the chorus of professional politicians.

But there was nothing radical or surprising about the tired list of cliched villains that he trotted out yesterday. ‘Taxcheats, Press barons, greedy bankers, crooked financiers’ — we have heard all this a million times. It is a vision of Britain straight from the student union circa 1974.

It says it all, I think, that the only intellectual for whom Mr Corbyn and his friends seem to have any time is Karl Marx. According to John McDonnell, we all have a ‘lot to learn’ from a man who died in 1883, before the invention of the motor car, the aeroplane or the moving picture.

Shambolic

I am perfectly happy to concede that Marx was one of the most influential writers of the Victorian age. But I find it frankly laughable — not to say slightly sinister — that in 2017, the leaders of the British Labour Party should be fawning before the man who wrote the Communist Manifesto and believed that capitalism should be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The ironic thing is that, whatever you might think of his ideas, Marx himself was a fearsomely rigorous thinker. He would have had very little time for the shambolic mixture of protest-march ranting and Sunday- school pieties that characterised Mr Corbyn’s speech yesterday.

And this, I think, is the single most depressing thing about the Corbyn cult. Even as he steers his party unerringly towards oblivion, he has abso- lutely nothing interesting to say. Asked six times to guarantee that a Labour government would honour the wishes of the British people and take Britain out of the EU, he risibly refused to do so — six times.

Like every other party leader, he talks of a Britain ‘for the many, not the few’, but he has no practical suggestions about how to build it, other than borrowing billions for the Government to splash around.

Like every other Labour leader since the dawn of time, he witters on about ‘saving our NHS’, but he has no concrete solutions to the problems of soaring costs and an ageing population.

And he says he wants to ‘unlock every person’s potential’. But when did you ever hear of a politician who said he wanted to stop people achieving their potential?

Wretched

Even by the standards of a cult, therefore, Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party strikes me as a wretched disappointment.

The Moonies have their spectacular wedding ceremonies; the Scientologists have a lurid cosmological theology; even the Bhagwan had the imagination to come up with some orange jump-suits.

Mr Corbyn, however, just has Karl Marx, a red ‘battle bus’ and some of the laziest cliches ever served up to a national electorate. It is possible, I suppose, that he genuinely cannot think of anything else to say.

But it is more likely, I fear, that he is already positioning himself for yet another Labour leadership election after June 8, in which he hopes his followers will confirm him as Supreme Guru.

The irony of all this, by the way, is that Mr Corbyn was preceded on stage yesterday by the former Coronation Street and Broadchurch actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, a proper socialist firebrand, who introduced him as ‘a man who gives a toss’.

I admire Ms Hesmondhalgh’s passion, but I think she was dead wrong.

On the evidence of yesterday’s speech — and indeed his entire career as leader of his party — Jeremy Corbyn does not give a ‘toss’ about anything, except perhaps himself.

And in that respect, he is sadly typical of so many cult leaders throughout history.