Shameless behaviour of spiv welching on his bet
OF ALL the descriptions often attributed to Jeremy Corbyn, being a mindreader is not one. And yet before the Prime Minister’s new Brexit deal was published yesterday, the Labour leader definitively declared that he couldn’t support it.
There are two possible explanations for this.
Either Corbyn is a sage who managed to deduce the contents of the unpublished 64page document.
Or, he jumped in without waiting to read the first page.
Having seen first-hand the shameless speed with which Corbyn can denounce a deal, forgive me if I lean towards the second possibility.
Over the past three years, there has been little about Corbyn’s handling of Brexit to suggest he has any inclination to prioritise the Brexit referendum result over the demands of Labour’s own internal party politics. So much for the man who’s party went into the last general election with a manifesto which clearly stated: ‘Labour accepts the referendum result and a Labour government will put the national interest first.’
Faced with a growing Remainer insurgency along his front bench, Corbyn has also ditched his own Eurosceptic beliefs.
Whether, therefore, Corbyn has tried to scupper every attempt to deliver Brexit out of political cowardice or shameless cynicism scarcely matters.
And while Boris Johnson has staked everything – not least his own reputation and premiership – on making good on that promise, the Labour leader has behaved like a slopey-shouldered spiv trying to welch on a bet. As his actions demonstrated yesterday, Corbyn isn’t one to spend time reading important documents.
But should he ever start, he could do no worse than begin at page 24 of Labour’s own 2017 manifesto.
Time and again, Corbyn has shown how those key five words – ‘Labour accepts the referendum result’ – aren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
Under his leadership, Labour MPs opted to trigger Article 50 and set the two-year clock running on Brexit negotiations, but subsequently voted on 34 separate occasions in the Commons to block Brexit legislation.
Even when we were trying to broker a deal with Labour to break the Parliamentary deadlock, I remember how their delegation failed to take the matter at hand seriously.