Will a fanatic whose idea of fun is a trip to Marx’s grave really be our next PM?

He left the room as his wife was about to give birth to call his agent about a political leaflet

WHEN I released Dangerous Hero, my biography of Jeremy Corbyn, earlier this year, the hard Left suffered a collective meltdown. They were particularly wound up by the subtitle, ‘Corbyn’s ruthless plot for power’, and demanded to know how a Labour leader fighting ‘to make the world a better place’ could be seen as anything except a trustworthy, cuddly grandfather.

Corbyn, they insisted, was an honourable campaigner backed by millions of Britons in the 2017 Election for offering an inspiring vision of reform and social justice.

Eight months have passed since then, and today – with an Election taking place on December 12 – the spotlight once again focuses upon the Labour leader and his followers. Do I regret my book title? Not a bit.

It is clearer now than ever that Corbyn’s manifesto of mass nationalisation, confiscation of wealth and opening Britain’s borders to ever-increasing immigration would fundamentally change our country for the worse.

However much Brexit might dominate the news, the really big story is that we are facing nothing less than a seismic battle between capitalism and communism.

Corbyn’s recent declaration of war on ‘the corrupt system’ of tax dodgers and bad bosses confirmed that, after a lifetime of political agitation and support for terrorists, he has rolled the dice for a lifeand-death gamble: to win the Election and transform the United Kingdom into a Marxist state.

Thirty years after Eastern Europe was liberated from Soviet oppression, Britain now stands on the edge of succumbing to a group of Stalinist sympathisers. Despite early encouraging polls for Boris, make no mistake: this Election is entirely in the balance and the vote could go either way.

And once Corbyn is in Downing Street there will be no reprieve. The locks will be turned. No Marxist government in history has ever relinquished power democratically.

To Corbyn’s discomfort, Dangerous Hero exposed his route towards the political extreme through a lifetime of duplicity and dogma, and it raised disturbing questions about the company he keeps. He never conspired alone, of course.

Corbyn’s most important allies have been life-long Trotskyists and Stalinists, fellow revolutionaries plotting to seize control of Labour. And to the astonishment of many, they have succeeded.

Corbyn and his sinister deputy John McDonnell have entered the General Election offering the poor and dispossessed a crude bonanza of riches – confiscated from the middle classes.

And if that led – as it surely would – to an exodus of Britain’s wealthcreators, then neither man would particularly care, for they want to replace equality of opportunity with equality of poverty. In so doing, they are echoing their hero Hugo Chavez, the extreme Left president who brought Venezuela to its knees.

Perhaps the most damning testimony of all in Dangerous Hero, however, concerns the deeply flawed character of the man who aims to take control of Britain. For Corbyn is a joyless fanatic.

What kind of man fails to tell his closest friends about his wedding – or invite his own mother? The kind of man, presumably, who left the room as his second wife, Claudia, was about to give birth – because he wanted to call his constituency agent about a leaflet on Northern Ireland. ‘Haven’t you got something more serious to worry about?’ asked Keith Veness, the agent, at the time. ‘What’s that?’ Corbyn replied.

The marriage collapsed amid Corbyn’s financial incompetence, his neglect of his family, his arid lifestyle and his apparent misogyny – not a good set of characteristics for a husband, let alone a future leader of the country.

Throughout his time with Claudia, Corbyn’s lack of interest in material things had meant that he ignored her need for comfort.

Days out together meant trips to visit Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate. At one stage Claudia had planned for the family to move from Islington to leafy Kingston upon Thames, but was quickly disabused of the idea.

Corbyn had no intention of moving away from his world of political agitation in gritty North London. ‘He has to live in his constituency,’ a political aide told her bluntly.

She got the same short shrift from her husband when she tried to hire a cleaner, a move that prompted one of Corbyn’s friends to question whether his wife had ‘bourgeois tendencies’. Over the years, a succession of women have made similar observations: Corbyn rarely thought about them and never changed his ways. He wore the same shabby clothes, ate the same bland food and stuck to the same dogmatic political convictions he first developed as a teenager.

With Corbyn at the helm in No 10, Britain will no longer be the fundamentally decent and tolerant society that we recognise.

He has never shown any shame for presiding over a spate of antisemitism that has resulted in successive Labour MPs like Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger from Liverpool resigning in disgust at his tolerance of history’s oldest hatred.

Indeed, that is why one of Britain’s leading religious figures took the unprecedented move last week of calling on his congregation to not vote for Corbyn.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, who is a minister at Maidenhead synagogue and former chair of the Movement for Reform Judaism, said that ‘a Corbyn-led government would pose a danger to Jewish life as we know it’. His letter was a departure from an understanding that rabbis do not tell people how to vote.

What does that say about how bad things have got? Perhaps the most depressing example of the Labour leader’s apparent tolerance of antisemitism is the case of Labour MP Chris Williamson: he was suspended from the party in a row about antisemitism but was never expelled.

Under Corbyn and McDonnell, other notorious antisemites were reinstated and investigations curtailed. Shamefully, Labour politicians, such as Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and Barry Gardiner have meekly collaborated with Corbyn rather than revolt against his racism.

Playing the role of what Lenin once described as his ‘useful idiots’, such politicians have put self-interest ahead of their principles.

How can they bear to keep quiet and campaign to put Corbyn into No 10? And if these people really think Corbyn will keep to his promise of holding a second referendum, they are sadly deluded. Whatever he now says, he has been a lifelong opponent of the European Union.

No doubt Corbyn will face protests from Labour’s soft-Left MPs when he eventually betrays this and other pledges, but the moderates are powerless. The fundamental split between the Marxists and the democrats is already lost. The majority of party members now belong to the extreme Left and they will never relinquish power.

The zealots want to take control of the country. And, despite the opinion polls showing Corbyn trailing, their belief in victory is terrifying.

Dangerous Hero, by Tom Bower, is published in paperback at £9.99 by William Collins on Friday.