Now voters will see Corbyn for what he really is
IKNOW...I know...one should beware of triumphalism but, in all probability, a Labour Party led by the ineffectual, hard Left and — let’s face it — slightly dim Jeremy Corbyn will crash in spectacular fashion come June 8. Which is why I believe that Theresa May will be accorded the role of its saviour.
Corbyn’s reaction yesterday on hearing there would be an election was hardly bullish. He looked stunned. Perhaps even he fears the worst.
Many Labour MPs certainly do, realising their party is heading for a bloodbath, and in many cases expect to lose their seats.
Tom Blenkinsop, whose Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland marginal constituency seems likely to be seized by the Conservatives, has said that he will not be standing for re-election, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ with Jeremy Corbyn.
Others will stay and fight as best they can, while knowing in their hearts that Corbyn’s hopeless leadership and extreme views will almost certainly lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1983 under Michael Foot — or perhaps an even more cataclysmic result.
Indeed, it seems possible that a Labour Party led by Corbyn and the more sinister figure of John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, may do even worse than the polls suggest as the media shine a spotlight on their policies and past allegiances.
So far both men have only been scrutinised during two internal Labour leadership elections which Corbyn easily won. Now they will have to justify themselves to the wider electorate who are unlikely to relish what they see.
Corbyn, of course, has never disavowed his former support for the IRA. Nor has he explained away his endorsement of Hamas and Hezbollah, two terrorist organisations committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. He has described them as his ‘friends’ — something that last year he admitted regretting — and has met several of their leading lights.
AS FOR McDonnell, here is a man who in 2003 hailed the ‘bravery of the IRA’. In 2010 he famously said that he would like to go back to the 1980s and ‘assassinate’ Margaret Thatcher. Admittedly McDonnell apologised not long ago for this shameful statement, which he pretended was ‘an appalling joke’, but there are some things that can’t be unsaid.
It’s true that these days McDonnell likes to present himself as a suave and avuncular character whom we have no reason to distrust. But beneath the recently applied veneer lurks an extremist who may be revealed in his darker colours over the coming weeks.
Not least damaging are the lunatic economic views of a man caught on video last year describing himself as ‘a Marxist’. He hasn’t bothered to change
his Who’s Who entry, in which he asserts that his hobby is ‘fermenting [he means fomenting] the overthrow of capitalism’.
I don’t imagine that his barmy plan to throw £250 billion at a ‘National Investment Bank’ or his idea of a ‘universal basic income’ (i.e. free cash hand-outs) are going to play very well with most levelheaded voters.
Nor can we expect anything resembling unity in the upper echelons of Labour. Only two weeks ago, Corbyn’s criticisms of an American missile strike in response to a chemical weapon attack seemingly perpetrated by the Syrian government were promptly contradicted by his deputy, Tom Watson.
Labour is a divided, fractious and unhappy party dominated by mostly third-rate extremists whose views, I suggest, will be unpalatable to the great majority of British people once put under a microscope.
Almost laughably, these same extremists are in the grip of a delusion, namely that ordinary voters hanker after their madcap policies. Michael Chessum, a big-wheel in Momentum — the hard Left group trying to take over the Labour Party — tweeted yesterday that there ‘absolutely is a path to victory for Labour’.
What tripe! I’ve no doubt that such fantasies will be exposed for what they are on June 8. And I fervently hope that decent, moderate Labour people will then use a calamitous defeat to revive their party as an effective Opposition.
Granted, Jeremy Corbyn is as stubborn as he is intellectually limited. Last August, when asked whether he would quit as leader if the Tories won another term, he replied that ‘nothing is inevitable’. Backed by Momentum and John McDonnell, as well as by misguided and sometimes half-witted acolytes such as Diane Abbott, he could try to cling on after a rout. But, deflated as he would undoubtedly be, he might finally grasp what most people have already seen — that he is unfit to be leader of the Labour Party.
And after an electoral wipe-out there would surely be a good chance that Labour moderates would finally reclaim their party from the ideologues who have captured it, and made it so palpably unelectable.
Labour is never going to be an effective opposition party as long as it remains extremist and is led by Jeremy Corbyn. By calling an election Theresa May has offered it a path to eventual salvation. That is why everyone who treasures a robust democracy should be pleased.