Shaming of the Bollinger Bolsheviks

JEREMY Corbyn’s cult followers, who never rest in the hunt for traitors, sceptics and heretics, have a new target this week.

Their latest candidate for a place on the bonfire is the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips, who gave a typically outspoken interview to the Times on Saturday.

Ms Phillips’s ideological treachery took many forms, from dressing up in designer clothes for the photographer to mocking the hard Left’s infantile tribalism.

The Left, she noted, is dominated by rich, privately educated hypocrites. Mr Corbyn and his friends, she explained, were ‘ not exactly dockers … They don’t understand what real people’s lives are like. They have dinner parties and hang out with other people who don’t have to worry about which school their children go to, because if they can’t get into a good school, they’ll pay for it.

‘ They’ve never had to scrabble down the side of the sofa to find money to put petrol in the car.’

Not surprisingly, the Corbynistas went berserk, piling on to social media to denounce Ms Phillips as a class traitor because her mother rose through the ranks to a senior position at the NHS.

Fanaticism

But, of course, everything she said was perfectly true. The Corbyn movement is nothing if not a movement of rich public schoolboys.

Far from being a hornyhanded son of toil, Jeremy Corbyn was brought up in a large Shropshire farmhouse called Yew Tree Manor and was sent to a prep school, then a top state grammar where his efforts earned him two grade-E A-levels .

As for the people around the Labour leader, they might have been picked specifically to prove everything Ms Phillips was saying. His director of strategic communications, James Schneider, went to Winchester, where fees are currently £40,000 a year, as did his press chief, Seumas Milne, whose father Alasdair was Director- General of the BBC.

Mr Milne completely incarnates the Left’s fanaticism and hypocrisy. As a columnist at the Guardian, he never made any secret of his Communist views. An apologist for Stalin, he even claimed that the Soviet Union ‘delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment.’

Perhaps only somebody cosseted by Daddy’s wealth and connections could be so blind, so callous, so morally bankrupt, as to luxuriate in the ‘ idealism’ of a regime that starved, shot and tortured millions of people in the name of a crazed ideology.

There is a grim irony in the fact that Jess Phillips, who was born to a teacher and an NHS executive and went to a Birmingham grammar school, is painted by the Left as a class traitor, while Mr Milne is supposedly a spokesman for the working classes.

The truth is that Mr Milne, like Mr Corbyn, is a walking stereotype: the upper- class Left-wing hypocrite, motivated by a strange blend of guilt and self- righteousness. As Ms Phillips herself remarked: ‘They think their s**t doesn’t stink. They think they’re better than everybody else.’

To anybody who knows our recent history, such figures will seem immediately familiar. No one skewered the hypocrites of the hard Left with greater insight than George Orwell, who once remarked that the words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ attracted every ‘nudist, sandal-wearer, sexmaniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.

Mr Corbyn, incidentally, ticks at least three or four of those boxes. I’ll leave you to work out which ones.

At the time, Orwell was thinking of people like Sir Stafford Cripps, another Winchester product, the son of a rich barrister and Tory MP, who became a far-Left intellectual, Labour MP and enthusiast for the Soviet Union. An avid supporter of higher taxes and state control, Cripps was at least a man of immense personal integrity.

An even more obvious forerunner is the late Tony Benn, formerly Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Viscount Stansgate, until he disclaimed his peerage and adopted a more proletarian-sounding name.

Privilege

The Left-wing Benn, who was Mr Corbyn’s great hero, was another child of privilege who knew nothing about how ordinary people lived and thought. Many Labour MPs from genuinely working class backgrounds absolutely hated him.

One Labour MP remarked that the sight of Benn posing as the champion of the working classes reminded him of the German spies who were parachuted into England in 1940 wearing spats and monocles to pass themselves off as locals.

Yet like so many Left-wing patricians, Benn remained ruthlessly focused on his family’s own interests.

For although he preached the redistribution of wealth, it emerged after his death in 2014 that Benn had placed Stansgate Abbey Farm estate, his rich family’s historic seat, into a trust for his descendants, while he used a ‘deed of variation’ to give his children a stake in his £ 4 m Holland Park townhouse, so avoiding hundreds of thousands of pounds in death duties.

And here, as so often, Mr Corbyn’s inner circle have learned from Mr Benn’s example. For last weekend it emerged that Laura Murray, Mr Corbyn’s 30-year-old aide, comes from the family that sold Picasso’s painting Child With A Dove for £50 million to the Qatari royal family rather than allowing it to stay in Britain.

Ms Murray, a devoted Corbyn ally who is in charge of suppressing — sorry, handling — complaints about antiSemitism, just happens to be the daughter of Andrew Murray, another privately educated Communist of 40 years standing who believes that Stalin has been maligned, the end of the Cold War was a disaster, and that Britain needs to experience the ‘shadow of the guillotine’.

That’s Communism for you, comrade. Mr Murray, by the way, is also a close friend of Seumas Milne and is, too, one of Mr Corbyn’s closest advisers.

You might be tempted to see these people as typical middleclass champagne socialists. But that, I think, is too generous. These people are not middle class as you and I would understand it. They are practically upper class — being Bollinger Bolsheviks more likely to shop at Fortnum & Mason than at Waitrose — or rather, to get their staff to do the shopping for them.

Mr Murray, for example, is not really Mr Murray at all. He is Andrew DrummondMurray, grandson of the 2nd Baron Rankeillour, a former Governor of Madras.

Weep

These people are not socialists in the tradition of, say, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or Neil Kinnock. They are Stalinists who worship at the shrine of a dictator who killed millions and a regime that locked entire nations in a gigantic prison camp.

The obvious question is why they support an ideology that, on the face of it, would strip them of their wealth and power.

And there is, I am afraid, an obvious answer. They would have nothing to fear from such a regime, because they would be running it.

‘All animals are equal,’ runs the mantra in Orwell’s chilling political fantasy, Animal Farm. ‘But some animals are more equal than others.’

And if you doubt it, just look at the parable of Jess Phillips and the Corbyn hypocrites — and weep at the state of today’s Labour Party.