Chip off the old Mogg.. so you have to pity poor Peter

Jacob Rees-Mogg took his 12-year-old son Peter to the polling station.

Lucky Peter got to dress just likel papa for the spiffing trip… in an exquisite buttonupup cocoat and a big flouncy rosette roset (someone get the boy a hoodie for Christmas, for ggoodness sake).

Rees-Mogg Re increased his majority in North East Somerset despite his claim during the campaign that Grenfell fire victims should have used “common sense” to flee the building.

He’s tipped for a place in the Cabinet. Johnson says his is the People’s Government. Which people, we wonder, because it’s not us.

It was a staggering discovery. Literally. I challenged him on it, convinced he’d made a mistake. But no.

That my son disagreed with me is nothing new. What surprised me is that, when I recovered enough to think it over, I understood why he’d sent the tweet.

He was genuinely hoping for something better. He could remember no other government but Tory and, with the optimism of youth, he thought the change he was looking for could be achieved despite Corbyn, not because of him.

Because the fundamental belief system of the Labour Party is such an attractive one: social justice, equality, looking after those honest, decent ordinary people who work hard for a living or who can’t work, for whatever reason, and need the support

Now the UK party has hit the same constitutional outcrop, by failing to take a clear position on Brexit. And, as a result, Corbyn’s failed my instinctivelyLabour son before he’s even had the chance to cast his first vote.

He will be 21 by the time this Tory government faces another general election. We may have lost our beloved NHS by then. We’ll certainly have lost our place at the EU table. We’ll be choking on titbits of chlorinated chicken while playing lapdog to President Trump.

We are all the poorer for the demise of the Labour Party as a powerful opposition, and we’re about to get poorer still as Prime Minister Johnson tightens his grip.

Corbyn must go now, no more hanging about like the whiff of failure. Those who put him there should go with him. Every one of them. Their epitaph shall be: “Under them, former miners voted Tory.”

A fulsome clear-out is required, a complete reinvention, an apology.

And a promise that any voter who retains youthful optimism of something better will not be failed again.