Contempt for the public as naked as a fat Fraulein on the nudie dunes
Quentin Letts sees the Labour leader ditch his beliefs and join the Establishment
SNOW job. With the white stuff blowing in from the North Sea, a faintly downbeat Jeremy Corbyn went to Coventry to signal capitulation to Brussels. His speech was a flurry of contradictions.
He opposed spending cuts, yet wanted the national deficit to drop faster. He moaned about ‘jingoistic posturing’ and ‘xenophobia’ by Conservatives, yet won a round of kneejerk applause from a smallish crowd simply by attacking America. He fulminated against ‘the global corporate elite’. Eh? They’re just the sort of people who most adore the EU. If there had been any logic to Mr Corbyn’s speech yesterday he would have attacked the Labour core voters whose views on immigration he so blithely ditched.
And in making this policy change on Brexit, he deplored what he said was the Tory tendency to ‘agree something at breakfast’ only to ‘abandon it by teatime’. Oldest rule in politics: accuse your opponents of your own worst characteristics.
The moment Mr Corbyn shuffled into the university science-block venue, he glanced left, then straight ahead, briefly unsure how to reach the lectern. That moment of indecision arguably symbolised his uncertainty over which way to face on the EU.
Likewise, he was using an autocue and its two screens meant his head kept moving from side to side. The text nearly torpedoed him. ‘Join us,’ he said, ‘in supporting the option of a new cake... a new UK customs union with the EU.’
There was something melancholy in the air – and not just because this was a cold Monday mid-morning in the Midlands. The one rather admirable thing about Mr Corbyn used to be that he stuck to his beliefs and wasn’t just another West minsteer careerist say-anything-for-power politico. He was a bold insurgent. He was different.
Yesterday, I’m afraid, he looked just as Establishment, as scheming and insincere, as the rest of them. So much for his claim that ‘change is coming’. Stodgy, boring Mrs May is now the more radical of these two party leaders. Mr Corbyn has squandered his ‘USP’.
Having found his way to the small stage, he stood in front of prototypes of Pod Zero driverless, gas-powered cars. ‘Ultra hightech – that’s the modern Labour Party,’ he quipped. The audience of about 100 (many of them men in the 30s and 40s) heard this in silence. ‘ You’re supposed to laugh,’ said Mr Corbyn mournfully. He was rewarded with a feathering of obedient chuckles. ‘We respect the result of the referendum,’ he claimed, before proceeding at length to disown that principle. The speech lasted about 40 minutes. The longer it continued, the less enthusiastic he sounded. The crowd sparked a little when he mentioned the NHS, when he attacked the selfish rich and when he stood up for immigration.
In the front row sat Blairite London lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s Brexit spokesman. He had his legs crossed and his left ankle was rotating hard while
he fingered his chin and stared at the ceiling. Alongside squiffy- quiffed Sir Keir sat shadow minister Barry Gardiner, who until recently called a customs union ‘deeply unattractive’.
ANdbeside our Barry (he went to the same public school as me) perched robotic Rebecca Long- Bailey, a grim little operative wearing more make-up than the late Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mr Corbyn claimed Labour’s message had been ‘consistent’ yet a moment later he admitted ‘ we have developed our understanding’. Translation: ‘I’ve been got at by the Brussels lobby who persuaded me our voters in the North of England are never going to vote for anyone else. We can ignore their peasant views.’
Questioned by a Channel 4 reporter about his political scheming, Mr Corbyn said, ‘thank you for coming along’.
A dispiriting day. One’s already weak belief in our politics takes another dent. But Conservatives should be emboldened. Labour’s contempt for the public is now as naked as a fat Fraulein glistening with Piz Buin on the nudie dunes of Borkum. Brrrrr.