A hint of Nicholas Parsons from the old codger
FOR once we did not have some suave 45-year-old selling us political soapsuds. Instead we had a bearded codger doing the same, with less finesse. He wore an Oxfam-issue jacket and kept a hand in his pocket while he nurdled away about Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and a Nigerian novelist, the ‘genius’ Ben Okri. That ‘genius’ verdict may be a bit strong but it was good to hear a political leader talk of novels rather than pop bands and football teams.
He recited some African-American poetry. And he recalled a protest vigil outside the Iraqi embassy in, ooh, it must have been the late 1980s.
There was the time he was cycling home through London at 5am after voting for the minimum wage. And we had a short lecture on Keir Hardie. A Guardian reporter afterwards suspected that most voters will think Keir Hardie is a cocktail.
Our history-chewing codger was Jeremy Corbyn making his first Leader’s Speech to the Labour conference. By conventional gauges of political communication it was an undernourished affair. Apart from a ‘kinder, fairer politics’ slogan which he kept mumbling, it had no Great Theme. Policy detail was absent. Many commentators will adjudge the speech risible.
When he declared that social media rather than broadsheet newspapers were the future, the hall was too polite to shout ‘you’re 15 years behind the times, grandpa’.
There were gaping Unmentioneds: the deficit, National Anthem, IRA, Hamas, immigration.
YeTMr Corbyn did convey something of his character. Here, unashamedly, is a political obsessive who has spent his life on marches, at rallies, holding placards, deploring the injustices of western capitalism. A passage about ‘property, class and capital, status and power’ being in the hands of the elite was textbook Trotskyism of a sort satirised by Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite character in the 1959 film I’m All Right, Jack. And yet Mr Corbyn is more naive than a Kite. He is the sort of earnest nerd Kite would have stiffed.
When the world scoffed at Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘quiet man turning up the volume’ speech in 2003, I argued that it was an honourable effort because he had tried his best and had (by his standards) never spoken better. The same was true yesterday of Mr Corbyn.
It was not much cop but he gave it his best shot. It is hard to feel personally threatened by him, dotty and dangerous though his ideas might be.
He told Labour activists not to be rude. This message did not get through to an elderly woman reading the communist Morning Star who at one point yesterday hissed at me that I was ‘vile’. Public schoolboy that I once was, I thanked her.
For the first time in his career, Mr Corbyn used an autocue. On television this may have made him look a bit sideways-eyed but in the hall it lent his delivery an intimacy.
There had been no smarmy prespeech video. His warm-up artiste was a sweet, poshly spoken girl whose father had been a political
prisoner in Pakistan. She described Mr Corbyn cycling around Islington.
Without fanfare, the man himself appeared (without bicycle clips). For about a minute he clapped the activists while they clapped him right back. He started well, teasing us journos for being a little rough on his first two weeks as leader. Then there were endless thanks to party stalwarts. At this point he sounded like Nicholas Parsons at the start of Radio 4’s Just a Minute.
The tone changed when he noted his ‘huge mandate’ and said Labour politics would no longer happen ‘just in Westminster’. Near me sat peers and MPs. They heard this in chilling silence. Nor did the parliamentarians like it when Mr Corbyn sternly restated his opposition to nuclear weapons.
Labour people were ‘fizzing with ideas – let us give them space for that fizz to explode,’ cried Corbyn. The Parliamentary Labour Party may go bang first.