If it’s not about Jeremy, who is it about? Don’t ask...
We are not a cult. That was the message all last week from Momentum, the Left-wing campaign group. A colleague of mine interviewed numerous attendees at Momentum’s conference in Liverpool, and she heard the same line again and again. “This isn’t about Jeremy,” they would tell her. “It’s about the movement. It’s about hope.”
My colleague glanced around the venue, at the Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, the Jeremy Corbyn mugs, the Jeremy Corbyn badges, and the vast banner decorated with a slightly wobbly painting of Jeremy Corbyn. She decided to put their claim to the test. If this wasn’t “about Jeremy”, then who would they like to take over as Labour leader, were Mr Corbyn for any reason to stand down?
Not a single person she asked would answer the question. Indeed, it seemed either to bewilder or offend them.
“Why are you asking this?” demanded one man. “Jeremy was democratically re-elected yesterday!”
“That’s not a helpful question,” retorted another attendee.
Yet another replied that Labour party members were right behind Mr Corbyn, and so Labour MPs had better start getting behind him too.
My colleague tried suggesting names. “How about Andy Burnham?” she asked one Momentumite.
“Andy is one hundred per cent behind Jeremy!” came the indignant reply.
Up to this point, everyone at Momentum had been very friendly to my colleague. Yet now they were unmistakably annoyed.
On sale at the merchandise stand were copies of a book called Poems for Jeremy Corbyn, written by his supporters. “Someone crept in/ And lit a candle in our hearts,” read one poem. “That someone happened/ To be him.”
Out in the street, representatives of various other Left-wing groups were attempting to combat the neoliberal propaganda of the hated MSM by selling newspapers of their own. Keen to learn what news looked like when stripped of bias, I bought some. It was fascinating.
A newspaper published by the Revolutionary Communist Group reported that Theresa May was “an unrepentant ruling-class racist”. A couple of pages later, a headline revealed that “History Has Absolved Fidel Castro”. A report on Brexit, meanwhile, referred to “northeast Ireland”, rather than “Northern Ireland”, as we imperialists call it. A recurrent theme in all the papers was treachery. Workers Hammer, for example, reported that Neil Kinnock was an “old hypocrite” who had been “wheeled out” by “Labour traitors” to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. My favourite piece of far-Left literature, though, was the leaflet that attacked the Morning Star for being insufficiently radical. Too right. Those communists are so bourgeois.
My favourite shop in London has closed. The Vintage Magazine Shop, in Soho, was a blissfully fusty grotto crammed with decades-old copies of Vogue, The Face, Private Eye and countless others. I particularly loved the old music magazines. Just to open them would beam me back to another world. A world that teenagers of today would find not only unrecognisable, but ridiculous.
When I was a teenager, in the days before the internet ate music, it was considered perfectly normal to spend £15 on an album by an act you’d never even heard before – simply because the NME had given it a glowing review. Critics, in those days, had genuine power. You couldn’t go on YouTube and find out for yourself what the act sounded like. You just had to take the critic’s word for it. Either that or listen to the radio for hours on end, in the hope that a song by the act in question would turn up.
If there was a song from the past you wanted to listen to, you had to buy its parent album. You couldn’t buy the song individually, unless you stumbled upon a second-hand copy of the original single at a jumble sale. Still, you were dying to own that one song. So either you handed over your £15, for that song plus 11 or so others you didn’t want, or you went without. What a rip-off.
I can remember telling a friend how amazing it would be if you could go into a shop with a list of 15 songs you wanted, and the shop would put them all on a CD, just for you. Thanks to the arrival years later of iTunes and the rest, I effectively got my way.
But there are times when I wish I hadn’t. Today I can listen to practically any recording in history, whenever I want, without paying. Yet I often can’t be bothered.
Now music is free, it’s worth less.
Gravesend, the town in Kent where I live, will never be fashionable. I think partly it’s because of the name. Gravesend. It sounds so dark and grim and grey, so dingily and grubbily bleak. When friends or colleagues complain about house prices in London, I recommend they try Gravesend. But they just don’t fancy it. “Gravesend. No, thanks. Don’t like the sound of that.”
All very unfair, I was thinking the day before last, as I strolled with my two-year-old son in a local park. All right, so Gravesend wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t have posh restaurants or fancy theatres. But I liked it – and, on a day like this, it was really quite lovely.
I stood, watching the sunbeams dancing on the lake. The reeds, swaying in the breeze. The lilies, the ducks, the fountain, the trees.
Yes, I thought, Gravesend was far prettier than anyone gave it credit for. People from hoity-toity London should stop making such snobbish assumptions about it.
I was awoken from this reverie by my son.
“Look, Daddy!” he cried, pointing excitedly at the lake. “Big fish! Big fish, swimming in the water!” I looked. It wasn’t a fish. It was a rat.
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