Hillary’s gender tip for Corbyn ...never forget Marlboro Man!

HILLARY CLINTON is nearly there. The polls are narrowing, her supporters are fretting, Donald Trump is preparing for one final, desperate charge. But the clock has finally run out on him.

Entering the last weekend of the 2012 election, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were virtually tied in the polling averages. Today Clinton clings to a small but stubborn lead. With her extra spending power and ruthlessly efficient organisational machine, it should be enough.

Not enough for some. Over the past fraught months, progressives on both side of the Atlantic have been anxiously asking themselves the same question. ‘How has it come to this? How is Donald Trump still in the race? Why hasn’t Hillary put him away?’

The answer is a simple one. And, when the dust of the election has settled, it will have major implications not just for US politics, but politics much closer to home.

The reason Hillary Clinton has not put Donald Trump away is she is a politician of the liberal Left. And the liberal Left no longer know how to speak to men.

Hispanics. Blacks. Women. The young. The disabled. Trump has offended and alienated just about every major socio-demographic group it was possible for him to offend and alienate. Save for one.

Four years ago, Mitt Romney secured the vote of 31 per cent of non-college-educated white men. This year Donald Trump is poised to secure the vote of between 60 and 70 per cent of non-college-educated white men. Remember the entreaties to ‘watch the sex tape’ and ignore his ‘locker-room banter’? While the rest of the world has gazed on in horror, Marlboro Man has decided to peruse the tape, laugh off the banter, and cast his vote for The Donald.

Indeed, British liberals have been so horrified at the sight of Donald Trump swaggering and profaning his way up to the gates of the White House that many of them will probably have missed the opinion poll published last week by YouGov. It showed what has become a fairly standard top-line lead of 13 points for Theresa May. But buried in the data was another figure – 43 per cent of men currently plan to vote Tory at the next General Election, compared to just 22 per cent who plan to vote Labour.

REMEMBER when Ed Miliband and his colleagues used to taunt David Cameron about his ‘women problem’? Well, Labour does not have a man problem, so much as a full blown existential male voter crisis. But, because of the cultural diktats of the modern Left, it will remain a silent crisis.

We will not see any special conferences convened. No gender specific spokesmen are going to be appointed. Blue vans will not be dispatched across the nation adorned with the slogan ‘Man to Man’ emblazoned on the side. Because in truth, not only does the progressive Left not know how to speak to men, it no longer even tries.

A few months ago, I was talking to Iain Duncan Smith about his welfare strategy. ‘At the heart of what I’m trying to do is to put men into a position where they can take responsibility again,’ he said.

‘Responsibility as fathers and as husbands. In a way it’s about showing men how to be men.’

I almost fell off my chair. Not because what he was saying was especially outrageous – though to devotees of Ken Loach these probably represent the words of the anti-Christ – but because I was so unaccustomed to hearing a senior politician directly shaping a policy agenda to a male audience.

This gap – or on the Left, the chasm – in our political discourse is the product of good intention: a legitimate attempt to address long-standing social inequality in issues such as women’s pay or representation in the workplace.

But those good intentions are now paving the road to electoral catastrophe for Labour.

If Jeremy Corbyn’s party wants to learn how to win again, it is going to have to learn how to talk to men again. And it’s also going to have to learn how not to talk to men.

Telling them they cannot read Page 3, or whistle at a woman in the street on pain of arrest, or address someone as ‘dear’ or ‘love’. These may represent idealistic interventions. But they are suicidal interventions for politicians who profess to wish to engage with their ‘lost working- class base’. Labour MPs – male and female – are going to have to confront an issue they have ducked for a decade. Is the prosecution of a low-grade culture war bringing them and their party closer to power?

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton will probably emerge victorious from her own culture war. And deservedly so, because she has shown great strength, courage and determination in standing tall in the face of Donald Trump’s vicious personal assaults.

At least that’s how it looks to my British eyes. But through the eyes of Marlboro Man things look very different. To him it is as if Cherie Blair is running for US President. Strength becomes aloofness, courage morphs into arrogance, determination is viewed as a sense of entitlement.

When I was in the States last year, a friend asked me: ‘Why do Brits hate the Blairs so much?’

I was going to start banging on about Iraq and the private finance initiative (PFI). But I just said: ‘Because they became king and queen of the British political establishment.’ ‘Ah,’ he responded. ‘Just like Hillary and Bill.’

I suspect that President Clinton will recognise this disconnect, and will move to bind the wounds of the most divisive campaign in US history. But whether British progressives will learn a similar lesson remains to be seen.

The unique nature of the US electoral college system allowed Hillary Clinton to build a path to power that circumnavigated Donald Trump’s angry white men. In Britain in 2020 – or maybe even 2017 – no such path will be available.

The progressive Left have lost the ability to speak to men. And like it or not, they are going to have to learn.