CORBYN’S SIMPLY TOO DIM TO BE PM

HOW dim is Jeremy Corbyn? Shatteringly so, judging from Tom Bower’s biography of the Labour leader, extracts of which were published in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday.

Admittedly, it was already public knowledge that Corbyn, despite coming from an intelligent, middle-class home, managed only two bottom grade Es at A-level (failing a third) and then flunked out of North London Polytechnic.

But Bower goes on to reveal — based on the accounts of Corbyn’s first wife and former associates — that our wouldbe PM seems not to have read a single book since abandoning his education. Not even ones on socialism, handed to him by well-meaning comrades attempting to instil some rigour, but returned still in their wrapping. I wonder what the great Labour figures of my youth would have thought of being led by such a wilfully ignorant man.

Labour was then the party of Harold Wilson, Richard Crossman, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey. All of these — most of them via grammar schools — won first class honours from Oxford University. The first three all became dons there before entering politics.

Nor does intellectual brilliance exclude commonsense practicality. Wilson’s academic record, according to one historian, ‘put him among prime ministers in the category of Peel, Gladstone and Asquith’, yet the Yorkshireman was perfectly at home in the rough and tumble of doorstep debate.

Of these Labour MPs, only Healey had been a Communist, but he left the party in 1940. And all of them modified the socialism of their youth. They had the intellectual capacity to absorb the lessons of history — that any version of Marxism leads to immiseration and oppression.

Yet Corbyn still stands by the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro, even as that nation’s population starve in the name of socialism.

Only an ignorant person could still be a doctrinaire socialist — and it is Corbyn’s ignorance that is most terrifying in a prospective prime minister.

How could such a person begin to cope with the challenges of the most difficult and demanding job in the country?

It would be dreadful to find out.