After THAT video nasty, will Corbyn’s pro-EU youth cult finally see him as the conman he really is?

BACk in October 2015, a few weeks after Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, his spin doctors released a video to introduce him to the masses.

The tagline was ‘Straight talking, honest politics’, the same slogan Mr Corbyn had used during his leadership campaign.

Ever since, his perceived honesty has been one of Mr Corbyn’s greatest political assets. As his adoring acolytes in Momentum never cease to remind us, he is supposedly the one straight man in a Parliament of crooks, the only politician who can always be relied upon to tell us the truth, the messiah who will lead Britain to the promised land.

I have always had my doubts about that. And now Jeremy Corbyn has revealed just how honest he is. And although I hate to say I told you so — well, you can guess the rest.

Favour

First, a bit of background. For the past two years, Mr Corbyn has consistently claimed that he voted Remain in the EU referendum. He has constantly decried Theresa May’s attempts to strike a deal with Brussels, insisting that he would do a better job.

He has flirted with holding a second referendum, though, oddly, he has never quite committed himself despite immense recent pressure from his party. Above all, he’s gone out of his way to curry favour with idealistic young voters, many of whom are passionately attached to the EU and believe that St Jeremy would give them a ‘People’s Vote’.

To anybody who knows anything about Mr Corbyn’s dogmatic hard-Left prejudices, all this has always smelled very fishy. After all, he inherited his much-trailed principles from his political hero, Tony Benn, an avowed opponent of Brussels who always regarded the EU as a capitalist conspiracy.

For Benn, the EU was the Great Satan, because its rules prevented the wholesale nationalisations, state subsidies and capital controls (limiting the amount of money that can be brought into or out of a country) that would turn Britain into an Atlantic version of East Germany.

Indeed, in the early Eighties, Benn and his allies — a prominent example being one J. Corbyn of Islington — insisted that a future Labour government must pull out of Europe immediately, paving the way for massive wealth taxes.

Mr Corbyn has not changed his mind about a single thing in the past half-century, so it always struck me as very implausible that he’d become a latter- day convert to the Gospel according to Brussels.

Indeed, his efforts during the referendum campaign were so half-hearted that many of his own aides suspected he wanted Leave to win.

And now, in a video filmed in 2009 and obtained by a Leftwing website, we have the proof. For what the video shows is what the Labour leader really believes. This is Jeremy Corbyn when he really was Jeremy Corbyn: not the darling of the Glastonburygoing classes, but the hardLeft backbencher for whom no tax was too high, no dictatorship too anti-Western.

It was filmed in Ireland where Mr Corbyn was speaking during a referendum campaign on the Lisbon Treaty, which aimed to strengthen the unity and power of the European Union. The Irish had rejected it a year earlier, but were forced to vote again by Brussels and by their own political elite.

In the video, Mr Corbyn urges the Irish to vote No again. ‘If you succeed in getting a No vote here,’ he says passionately, ‘that will be such a boost to people like us, all over Europe, who do not want to live in a European empire of the 21st century.’

Entertainingly, and very satisfyingly for those of us who have long argued that Mr Corbyn is a 24- carat, oceangoing idiot, he goes on to explain that the EU is ‘a military Frankenstein ... one massive great Frankenstein which will damage all of us in the long run’.

The EU, a military Frankenstein? I don’t think so. (Evidently the Labour leader is not bright enough to realise that Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the monster.)

To ultra- Remainers, the video is a devastating blow. Watching Mr Corbyn’s unvarnished comments, it is perfectly obvious that he loathes the EU, wishes Britain had never joined and will never support a second referendum in this country.

Of course, there are plenty of Brexiters who would agree with all Mr Corbyn’s stuff about a European empire. The difference, though, is that they are honest about it.

But it seems to me that Mr Corbyn has not always been honest. Indeed, has he in fact been positively dishonest since the referendum was called?

The reason is obvious. To win an election, he would need to win the votes of millions of young, idealistic voters in well- heeled Remain-leaning university towns — the kind who would run a mile from a Venezuela- adoring old Trotskyist who thinks the EU is just a bosses’ racket.

Prejudices

Thus, Mr Corbyn announced he had voted Remain, and blathered about a better deal and a second referendum, without ever quite committing himself — and his followers lapped it up.

knowing nothing of his background, they cast him in their own image, fantasising that he was the walking embodiment of their own prejudices. At the Glastonbury music festival, they even sang ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ as though he were an adored rock star, turning this hitherto obscure hard-Left politician into a cult hero.

But with every month, Mr Corbyn’s pretence has worn thinner. And as the video shows, it seems to me Jeremy Corbyn may not be an entirely honest man. He claimed to youngsters during the 2017 election he planned to abolish university tuition fees, when everyone knew that it was logistically impossible.

He has been less than clear about his record of supporting terrorism, being forced to deny that he had held a wreath laid at the graves of the butchers behind the Munich Olympics massacre, despite the photographs that suggested he had. He even claimed he was unable to find a seat on a train, posting a picture of himself squatting in the gangway — only for CCTV footage to show him walking past empty seats.

Fooled

Now, on the single most urgent issue of our time, I believe his dishonesty has been laid bare. How can this duplicitous man expect anybody to believe him again, even starryeyed millennials who are too naive to understand what has really driven him for so long?

How many times, I wonder, can you be proved wrong by photos and videos before you lose your reputation for straight talking? How many times do you need to lie before you qualify as — well, a liar?

Still, every cloud and all that. For it is clear that even the most short-sighted Remainers are losing confidence in their tarnished idol.

A poll published last weekend showed the Tories with a seven- point lead — their biggest since the election. Labour’s support dropped by six points in a month, while its support among former Remainers has dropped to less than 50 per cent.

As for the crucial young generation, YouGov polls showed that in the year or so to last November, the number of 18 to 24-year-olds supporting him had declined by 12 percentage points. Nobody now talks of Corbynmania; nobody sings ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’

To be fair to Mr Corbyn, he fooled his fans for longer than I thought possible. Indeed, when future historians compile a list of the great political conmen, his name will surely come near the top.

But that is all he is. Not the messiah, not a saint, but a brazen, shameless liar.

So much for straight talking and honest politics.