As he came under fire, the good ship Corbyn started taking on water
HE wanted us to see him as a jocular Father Christmas – deflecting Jeremy Paxman with weak banter – but there were moments last night when the dreadful flimsiness of Jeremy Corbyn’s pitch to be Prime Minister flapped around in the gale.
There is only so far you can take bluster. Last night Mr Corbyn reached that point.
The Labour leader tried to joke his way through his 1 -minute interrogation by the veteran Paxman, who initially seemed thrown by this frivolous approach.
But when Paxo got on to Mr Corbyn’s positions on the Queen (he dislikes the Monarchy), the Falklands War (‘a Tory plot’) and the killing of Osama bin Laden (‘a tragedy’), Corbyn started to flail.
He talked airily about seeking a ‘dialogue’ with the various forces vying for power in Libya. He wanted a society where ‘we are all better off’. He seemed a bit drifty on benefit payments, too, and his eyes wandered to the ceiling. Waffler.
When Paxman noted that Mr Corbyn’s sidekick John McDonnell’s wanted to scrap MI5, Special Branch and disarm the police, the Sky News/Channel 4 studio audience clapped loudly – and the good ship Corbyn started to take on water.
It had been the same earlier when Mr Corbyn faced questions from that audience and his character came under scrutiny: his support for the IRA, his credentials as a possible prime minister, his willingess to use the nuclear deterrent.
Callum, from Northern Ireland, asked: ‘How can we trust you, Mr Corbyn, to stop terrorism?’ Corbyn wobbled his head and suddenly looked a bit sticky. ‘I did make contact with Sinn Fein,’ he said slowly. Callum interrupted to point out that Mr Corbyn had attended a commemoration of IRA thugs who had been plotting to murder police officers.
REALLY, that this man is seen as benevolent is one of the most bizarre truth-warps of our time. And his ability to burble through such allegations is also astonishing.
If he were the patriot he claims
to be, would he not be angered by these accusations? When audience member David Gerrard asked about nuclear weapons, Mr Corbyn went into a waffle about his desire to see a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons.
He said he would write ‘the appro priate letters’ to our nuclear-submarine commanders, but ‘appropriate’ went undefined.
The programme suffered, as TV debates always do, from its frenzied rush. After the pre-match hyperbole about how important the event was, and the arrivals shots (giving the TV company chiefs their moment in the lights), the show itself whizzed by, questions being easily evaded because there was always the imperative to rush to the next topic.
A Leave voter asked about immigration – and she was a young, northernEnglish Labour voter. How did she make it past the censors?
Mr Corbyn claimed that under his plans, immigration ‘would probably come down’. Likely one!
A Remain voter called Miranda was a lot posher and was interested in voting Lib Dem. Sounds about right. Miranda did not seem terribly thrilled by some equivocal blether Corbyn gave her. Earlier in the day, at a Tory event in Twickenham, I had asked a rather downbeat Mrs May if she was in danger of looking a bit of a glumbucket. She shot me the sort of dirty look Mrs Herod might once have used when she saw John the Baptist’s severed head being brought in on her best silverware.
By the time of last night’s debate she had recovered some of her poise. She is never going to be a minter of memorable phrases. She is never going to be a smooth smarmer. But the audience seemed to treat her with a solid respect and she took on some awkward questions about social care, police recruitment and school funding.
Sky’s political editor, Faisal Islam, asked her how many police officers there were. Back came the statistic, sharp and immediate. No Diane Abbott, she. The contrast with Labour’s flimflam was striking.