Corbyn’s leadership is effectively over. Now it is our duty to laugh and jeer
WHEN Iain Duncan Smith’s calamitous leadership of the Conservatives reached its lowest point – which, if I recall correctly, was somewhere beneath the Marianas Trench – it was put to him that he could soon expect a visit from ‘the men in grey suits’ – that is, party grandees who would hand him a glass of whisky and a revolver and expect him to do the right thing.
IDS, a former lieutenant in the Scots Guards, bristled at the suggestion. ‘If they do, they will leave without their suits,’ he warned.
Tough talk but the hopelessness of his position was exposed by the exquisite response it drew from a Tory backbencher: ‘That’s fighting talk bordering on the homoerotic.’
Once they’ve started laughing at you, you’re done. Disagreement can be debated, anger confronted, disillusionment won round but the black humour of the lost cause is always and everywhere terminal.
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is already over. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-leadership.
He may stay in situ beyond the guaranteed catastrophe of next May’s various electoral tests; horrifyingly, he may even cling on, like some energy-sucking wraith, until the next general election, ensuring a historically unprecedented mauling.
If he does, he will leave behind him a desiccated corpse, a Labour Party locked in an eternal scream and out of power, and his name will live in infamy. Whatever, he will not, and cannot, lead. He makes IDS look like JFK.
Viciousness
A Nobel prize-winning scientist would be hard pushed to design a more perfect experiment to prove the incompatibility of the far Left with the real world. Literally every decision Corbyn and his team have taken since his election has been the wrong one. Each position adopted has resulted in abject humiliation. Every one of his deeply held principles has been blunted on the implacable opposition of the British public. In two months, the hapless kook has already racked up more U-turns than Starsky and Hutch.
I have a friend who is a lifelong Labour member and who still, at least once a week, will say something like: ‘I was walking along the street this morning and I stopped in mid-stride because I suddenly remembered that Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party. I keep forgetting and then it hits me anew.’
My friend has decided to resign his membership. He is not the only one. Robert Webb, of the Mitchell and Webb comedy duo, announced last week that he, too, has given up the ghost. I know Robert, and he is a decent guy – his politics are fairly standard leftie, and he gets clangingly angry at social injustice. He is perhaps the least likely person since the advent of universal suffrage to ‘get lost and join the Tories’, as the Corbynistas have so sweetly urged him to do in recent days.
This seems to be the universal advice for anyone who dissents from the lunatic pursuit of a hard-Left agenda. On Saturday, Lord Cashman, the former EastEnders actor and MEP, who now speaks for Labour on LGBT issues, felt compelled to tweet (nervously, clearly): ‘Right, I’m going to say this. There is a viciousness coming from a lot of Corbyn’s supporters, and it is not appropriate in the Labour Party.’ These people have earned a place in zoomer hell alongside the cybernats and the Ukippers.
The problem with constantly and aggressively telling people to join the Tories is that a fair number of them will think ‘Okay then’. A weekend poll by ComRes put national support for the Conservatives at 42 per cent, to 27 per cent for Labour.
In the Midlands, the gap is 44 per cent to 24 per cent; in the South-East of England it is 55-18; Yorkshire and the Humber is 43-32; in the North of England – the North of England! – the Tories are at 42 per cent to Labour’s 36 per cent. The governing party is ahead among every socioeconomic group. Only 17 per cent of voters said they trusted Corbyn ‘to keep me and my family safe’. For the avoidance of doubt, these figures are really, really bad – like, the-worst-act-on-Britain’s-Got-Talent bad. And they will terrify Labour MPs.
The door has slammed on the tiny possibility that Corbyn might have surprised us. He has not even risen to meet the lowest expectations.
Last week’s meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party saw him treated with contempt. His entry was greeted with silence, following his post-Paris unwillingness to support a shoot-to-kill policy for police when tackling terrorists and his inability to condone the killing of the Islamist murderer Jihadi John in a drone strike.
His refusal to withdraw from a Christmas dinner for Stop the War, the vile extremist group which blamed the West for the French slaughter, has driven MPs potty. ‘It was the moment that he lost the parliamentary party,’ said one in attendance. ‘There were people who had been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but you could see the scales fall from their eyes.’
Grandstanding
A shadow cabinet minister was quoted as saying: ‘He gives these grandstanding speeches [but] he doesn’t know what he is talking about a lot of the time.’
The project staggers from crisis to crisis. The appointment of the ghastly, anti-nuke Ken Livingstone to co-chair a Trident renewal commission alongside the pronuke shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle is ludicrous. The strange and sinister shadow chancellor John McDonnell – ‘socialism, but with an iPad’ – continues to place his foot in his mouth each time he opens it. Every new adviser appointed by Corbyn seems to carry enough baggage to sink the QEII.
Let’s be clear: things are not going to get better. They will not settle down. Labour is not heading towards anything worthwhile. There is no ‘new’ politics. There will be no parliamentary discipline. The voters will not be persuaded. And the Tories will win.
The Corbyn leadership is the most farcical, ill-advised and embarrassing episode in British political history. Everything about it is wrong. And, as I say, it is already over. Until he and his motley crew understand this and remove their sorry backsides from the stage, it is incumbent upon the rest of us to point, to jeer and, most of all, to laugh.