DIFFICULT WOMAN’S WINNING TACTIC
It started last July. In an unguarded, hot- microphone remark following an interview on Sky News, the former Conservative cabinet minister Ken Clarke was overheard chortling about the “fiasco” of the Conservative leadership race — an event triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron, which was itself triggered by the surprise win of the “Leave” side in last June’s British referendum on membership in the European Union. “A bloody difficult woman,” Clarke said, describing the grey- faced and notoriously uncharismatic Maidenhead MP Theresa May, who would go on to win the race.
May says she took it as a compliment. “During the Conservative party leadership campaign I was described by one of my colleagues as a bloody difficult woman,” she told reporters earlier this month. “And I said at the time the next person to find that out will be Jean- Claude Juncker,” the president of the European Commission.
After being sworn in as prime minister, May insisted she would not go to voters for a renewed Conservative mandate because political stability was necessary for a firm British hand in the looming Brexit negotiations. Parliamentary elections would proceed in 2020, as scheduled, she insisted. But then, on April 18, May called a snap election because “certainty and stability” in the Brexit talks required a firmer mandate. British voters go to the polls next Thursday.
Ordinarily, it’s bloody difficult in politics to say one thing one minute and the opposite thing the next, but by last month there was nothing ordinary about the state of British politics. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party stood at an abysmal 25 per cent in the polls, against the Conservatives’ 46 per cent. While last summer’s Conservative leadership race may have been a Brexit-induced fiasco of comically uninspiring contenders, 172 Labour MPs had just voted no confidence i n Corbyn. Only 40 supported him.
It was only a surge in the more ghoulish and marginal elements in the British Labour movement that brought Corbyn to the party’s helm in September, 2005, and ever since he was elected the Labour Party has been wracked by internecine blood feuds, eruptions of anti-Semitism, and persistent reminders about Corbyn’s general creepiness and lack of moral judgment.
But election campaigns matter. After the Conservat i ves’ catastrophic bungling of their own election manifesto, the party’s entire campaign has had to be rebooted, only this week, with just days to go before the vote. Corbyn’s campaign team has managed to transform Corbyn’s image from that of a Hamas- admiring friend of Holocaust- deniers to that of a tweedy, likable old duffer who delights in his allotment garden and generously distributes jars of homemade jam.
The Conservatives still enjoy a 12- point lead, with a forecast 45 per cent vote share compared to 33 per cent for Labour. But even Labour’s best- case outcome — in a seat- by- seat projection released Tuesday by the You-Gov polling firm — still puts the Conservatives on track for 310 seats, with a gain for Labour from 229 to 257 seats. In other words, a hung parliament.
The Conservatives have made such a hash of the campaign that May’s caricature as a “bloody difficult woman” is now their strongest selling point. The hope is to make the election all about Brexit, and Corbyn’s weakness. It might just work. On Tuesday, May warned that Corbyn would be “alone and naked in the negotiating chamber” in the Brexit talks, which begin next month. This statement prompted an oddly wimpish, own-goal response from Corbyn: “It’s totally inappropriate to describe anyone as naked — even me.”
In this last full week of campaigning, the Conservatives are hammering home the proposition that the Brexit talks are “central to everything. . . control of our borders, immigration levels, and even our national security arrangements,” and that Corbyn can’t be trusted with the job. Labour, meanwhile, is hitting the Conservatives’ hardest where they’re weakest: the lingering British apprehension that the Conservatives are the “nasty” party, that they can’t be trusted to protect the elderly, that they don’t care about poor people or the sick.
It’s an easy argument to make, given May’s contradictory statements about what has come to be called the “dementia tax:” a proposal to means- test home care for the elderly that could oblige children to repay the costs of home care during their parents’ dying days. Even so, Labour has had a hard time explaining how to pay for the generous welfare state Corbyn is promising. On Monday, Corbyn fumbled and drew a blank on the projected costs of Labour’s proposed childcare program, which is central to Corbyn’s election platform. It’s what the Woman’s Hour interview was supposed to be about, but interviewer Emma Barnett had to remind Corbyn what the projected costs of his own plan amounted to.
That might have been a run- of- the- mill campaign foul- up, but what followed was the telling thing. Barnett was subjected to heaps of anti-Semitic online abuse from Corbyn’s followers, which Corbyn was later forced to furiously denounce as “unacceptable.” This is the central difficulty dogging Corbyn and the Labour Party factions that form his most devoted support base. It’s that old creepiness — a darkness that has been at the fringes of the Labour Party for years — that is now at the pinnacle of the Labour leadership.
It’s one thing to give Corbyn the benefit of the doubt and accept his excuse that he was “just using inclusive language in order to get a meeting under way,” when he referred to representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” It’s not so easy to overlook that time Corbyn protested to the Church of England when it disciplined the lunatic vicar Stephen Sizer, a trafficker in the deranged allegation that Israel was behind the 9/11 atrocities in New York and Washington. Corbyn complained that Sizer was being persecuted for having “dared to speak out against Zionism.”
Corbyn has donated to a self-proclaimed Palestinian-solidarity organization run by the notorious Holocaustdenier Paul Eisen, who had been drummed out of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign after his septic views became too obvious to ignore. Corbyn praised the jihadist hate preacher Raed Salah as an “honoured citizen” and invited him to tea in Parliament, either indifferent or oblivious to Salah’s insistence that Jews make Passover matzoh with the blood of gentiles, and that Jerusalem should be the capital of a global Islamic caliphate.
On and on it goes like this. Corbyn has consistently downplayed the overt anti- Semitism that flourishes within sections of the Labour Party. Last October, an 11-member British Parliamentary Committee — five of them Labour members — concluded that Corbyn’s handling of ant- Semitism within the party (which included two internal probes that largely whitewashed the problem) had given credence to the notion that “elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti- Semitic.” Corbyn’s leadership, or lack of it, “has created what some have referred to as a ‘ safe space’ for those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people,” the committee report concluded.
It should come as no surprise that a poll commissioned by the Jewish Chronicle and released this week shows that only 13 per cent of British Jews intend to vote Labour next Thursday.
Theresa May is clearly a “bloody difficult woman.” But what does all this make Jeremy Corbyn?