Corbyn is no kindly Robin Hood, but a hard-left activist and agitator

The Labour leader’s ‘authenticity’ consists of being dangerously wrong for the past 40 years

It is a measure of how unconvincing the Conservative election campaign has been that Jeremy Corbyn has improbably projected himself as a potential prime minister when his own MPS in the last Parliament did not even consider him fit to be the leader of the Opposition.

But we have been here before, notably in 1987 when the Labour Party ran a slick campaign while the Tories squabbled and faltered, only for Margaret Thatcher to romp home with a 100-seat majority. That was partly an endorsement of her but also a repudiation of the Left-wing agenda that Labour offered at the time and is doing so once more. Unless the country has changed beyond recognition, it will be rejected again, decisively, tomorrow.

Whatever the polls say, enough voters know that a Left-wing Labour government would be a disaster and they also know Mr Corbyn is utterly unsuited to lead the country. He is not a kindly grandfather posing as a latter-day Robin Hood but a longstanding hard-left activist and agitator. To listen to the Labour leader denouncing the Government for failing to ensure the safety of its citizens you might imagine he was an ardent champion of the police and the security services. You might even be persuaded that he has often warned of the risk to social cohesion of unprecedented levels of immigration, or cautioned against the baleful impact of multiculturalism on the integration of minority communities into society’s mainstream. You may even have been given the impression that Mr Corbyn is a doughty defender of the institutions that make Britain the country that it is, such as its monarchy and Armed Forces.

In all of these assumptions you would be mistaken. For more than 40 years, Mr Corbyn has been on the other side of the road, ploughing a lonely hard-left furrow with his band of fellow believers, waiting patiently for the day to arrive when they would get the chance to take power. That day is tomorrow.

The man who would be prime minister on Friday morning has acquitted himself better in this election campaign than many had expected because he has been consistent in his views for four decades. Other Labour candidates fought the 1983 general election on a manifesto dubbed “the longest suicide note in history” because they felt they had no choice, even if they did not believe in its contents – Tony Blair, for one. But Mr Corbyn did believe in it. Indeed, he was one of its architects or at least an acolyte of some of the party’s leading Left-wingers like Tony Benn, whose views it reflected.

In the days of the Left’s ascendancy, when Benn almost beat Denis Healey for the deputy leadership, Mr Corbyn was often seen at meetings of shadowy groups like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy whose main ambition was to eject moderates from the party through the mandatory reselection of all MPS. The CLPD was a classic Leftist caucus, burrowing away in the party, measuring its time-scale for success not in years but in decades.

He has always believed in the public ownership of the means of production and was opposed to the abandonment of Clause Four (in which this ambition was enshrined) – the great symbolic moment that announced the arrival of New Labour. He remains a unilateral nuclear disarmer, just as he was in 1983. That policy may not have entered the Labour manifesto because the unions wouldn’t wear it, but that is neither here nor there since it would be Mr Corbyn in No 10 who would have to take the necessary decisions in the face of a direct threat to the nation. He has made it clear that he would never use a nuclear weapon in any circumstances, rendering the deterrent useless.

He has campaigned well because he is able to say what he believes: it is why he won the leadership in the first place after his colleagues at Westminster were daft enough to give him the required 15 per cent support to get him on to the ballot.

But most of them don’t agree with him and don’t trust him. Just a year ago 80 per cent of Labour’s MPS backed a motion of no confidence in him, but he appealed to the predominantly Left-wing membership and kept his job. If the people who know him best have so little faith in him, why are they now happy to foist him upon the country?

The conventional wisdom holds that Mr Corbyn cannot win so none of this matters. Many Labour MPS have been telling voters this on the doorstep because they fear his unpopularity will cost them their seats. But if the Tories fail to get a majority then Mr Corbyn has a chance of becoming prime minister of a coalition or a minority government. Anyone thinking of voting Labour or Liberal Democrat or Green needs to ask themselves whether the risk is worth taking.

At a time when the country is facing a renewed terrorist threat, Mr Corbyn should be judged not by his desperate attempts to recant from past statements on terrorism but by the company he has kept, from fraternising with IRA leaders in the 1980s at the height of their campaign against the British mainland to meeting with representatives of proscribed Middle Eastern organisations. As an MP he even took part in a vigil in support of the IRA bomber Patrick Magee during his trial at the Old Bailey for trying to blow up the Cabinet in Brighton in 1984, a more direct attack on democracy than which it is hard to imagine.

Mr Corbyn has been an arch-apostle of the multiculturalist approach that has proved so disastrous to community relations. He has opposed a slew of counter-terrorism legislation and equivocated over the ability of police to shoot terrorists. His economic policies would bankrupt the country and he cannot be trusted with the defence of the realm.

There is a premium placed nowadays on what is called “authenticity” and the Labour leader is said to possess it because he has stuck to his principles. Over the years, indeed, Mr Corbyn has been consistent in his views; but he has been consistently wrong. His authenticity is merely a manifestation of holding a hard-left position on everything that matters long after everyone else has understood that it is an ideological dead-end.