You wanted honest leaders – so stop whining now that you’ve got one

WE SAY we want politicians who are open and honest. And then, when we get one, we angrily pelt him with slime until he cringes to the mob, starts hiding his real views, and hires a spin doctor just like all the others.

So don’t let me hear you complaining again that our leaders are too smooth and obsessed with their images.

I loathe and despise most of what Jeremy Corbyn stands for, but a reasonably long life has taught me that quite a lot of people agree with him and not with me.

I think our wonderful laws and constitution thrive because of this difference. Nobody is right all the time. A fierce and principled opposition stops a fat, complacent government from making stupid mistakes.

We all live in that inch or two of difference that ought to exist between the two main parties, but which recently vanished.

And I might add, these freedoms were what the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots saved when they won the Battle of Britain. Some of them may have been unsure about the Monarchy, if they’d had time to think about it. And I wonder how many of the soldiers who slogged doggedly through the Western Desert, Burma, Italy and Normandy were a bit Left-wing, too.

THE world’s full of countries where you have to salute the leader and sing the party song in public. This isn’t one of them, so to hell with all the superpatriots who condemned Jeremy Corbyn for not singing God Save The Queen.

What are they patriotic for, exactly, if not the freedom to dissent, the crown of all our liberties and our greatest achievement?

And do you really think that the Blairite smoothies, who pretended to be patriots and monarchists, really were? Do you prefer liars to honest men?

I’d much rather have a lone and awkward Jeremy Corbyn, respectfully staying silent during the singing of a song he didn’t agree with, than the ghastly pretence of Anthony Blair’s fake welcome to Downing Street in 1997, when Labour Party workers were bussed into Downing Street and ordered to impersonate a patriotic crowd.

How most of them must have hated waving the Union Jack, a flag such people despise. Yet through such fakery, attacked at the time only by me, Blair came to office and was able to smash up much of our free constitution.

As for the rest of them, I have to note that Mr Rupert Murdoch, owner of the media keenest to harry Mr Corbyn, has pledged his own allegiance to the American Republic and said, in a Sydney lecture in 2008: ‘If I were in a position to vote, it would be for a republic.’

Mr Murdoch, who kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford, declared during Australia’s last referendum on the Monarchy: ‘The British Monarchy has become irrelevant to this generation of Australians.’

Which brings me to Malcolm Turnbull, new leader of Australia’s answer to the Tory Party, and another avowed republican. There’s no organic connection between these careerists and our ancient traditions.

As I survey the smarmy, modernising ranks of Mr Cameron’s Blairite rabble, I feel pretty sure that they would abolish the Crown in a moment if they thought it would help them stay in office.

I want Mr Corbyn to lose any Election he fights, but I want him to lose it to people who really disagree with him, not people who pretend to do so.