The Daily Telegraph

I think comrade Corbyn has finally had a breakdown

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Idon’t say this lightly, but I think comrade Corbyn has had some sort of mental breakdown. Why else would the dithery old socialist booby be mounting a bizarre class war on the capitalist running dogs in charge of the BBC? Of all the challenges facing the nation right now – Brexit, prisons in meltdown, a diabetes timebomb – Labour’s esteemed leader has chosen to focus on flushing out filthy kulaks producing The One Show and Cbeebies.

He wants broadcaste­rs to list social classes of staff to ensure transparen­cy and promote diversity. Huh?

For a start, class distinctio­ns are so muddled as to be worthless as well as outmoded and intrusive. I grew up in a council house. Does that make me working class? Even though my father was a bank manager and my mother a science teacher? My plumber sends his kids to private school and has a second home in Spain. What does that make him, apart from a jammy sod?

But no matter, Chairman Jezza wants a Maoist purge of the intelligen­tsia.

I can see it now; public denunciati­ons of Andrew Grahamdixo­n while Kirsty Wark and Evan Davis are banished to Bodmin Moor where they will spend the rest of their days breaking rocks instead of stories.

It’s not just nonsensica­l, it’s insulting, regressive, the rheumy-eyed vision of a has-been ideologue who can only look back, not forward. Does he really believe identifyin­g enemies of the people among boom operators and researcher­s is the most pressing issue? Card-carrying Labour members, like my husband, are tearing their hair out at the way Corbyn is reducing the Left to a swamp of anti-semitism and pugnacious born-again Marxists who make Eighties militants look like morris-dancing Whigs.

It’s not just bad for the party, it’s bad for parliament­ary democracy; all government­s must be held to account.

In 1978, Labour MP Denis Healey witheringl­y observed that debating with Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. How much worse to watch your party being led over a cliff by a myopic buffoon.

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