A grievous error and the question:Who’ll save us from Corbyn?

THE Mail on Sunday has always sympathised with the Prime Minister in her Brexit predicament. Her patience, her readiness to endure and forgive abuse and disloyalty from colleagues, her dutiful readiness to stay at her post, have been personally admirable and politically brave.

So it is with a heavy heart that we now conclude she has made a terrible mistake by inviting Jeremy Corbyn to help her resolve the European issue.

In normal circumstances, such a move would have been tempting. She has faced the obdurate refusal of many Tories to help her obtain a reasonable compromise, and has been let down through the whole process by her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, supposedly her most important supporter and ally.

Some ally. First, he failed utterly to prepare the country for the clean break with the EU which many seek, and now he talks openly of abandoning Mrs May’s ‘red lines’ on Brexit while refusing to rule out a second referendum.

But exasperation does not excuse folly. Mr Corbyn is a real national danger.

He is not a normal Leader of the Opposition. Like his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, he does not come from the usual civilised spectrum of Labour Party politics. He comes from a revolutionary Marxist tradition which threatens the institutions, the freedom and the prosperity of this country. And he is prepared to consort with apologists for terrorist violence and with open antiSemites. He is not a flexible negotiator. He has not changed his mind about anything important since the 1970s.

He may now dress in a suit and tie, and Mr McDonnell can be genial on TV and radio broadcasts. But both men still cling to the hardest of hard lines.

To usher him into the high councils of the country as if he were a proper democratic politician is to give him a respectability he does not deserve, and to help him hugely at the next Election. If, during the campaign, he is assailed for his Marxist ways and thoughts, he will be able to reply that the Prime Minister trusted him to help her.

And what if he then wins? If such people obtain power, they do not give it up. They use political office to make sure that their actions are irreversible and t hey cannot easily be removed. Through constitut i onal change and cynical moves such as introducing votes at 16, and by making unprincipled pacts with the SNP, Mr Corbyn and his comrades could stay in office indefinitely, ravaging the economy and doing all the other damage that such people invariably do.

The only ray of hope is that the British people, who are infinitely wiser than their current crop of leaders, will see through this in time.

But they need a leader who shares their good sense.

The second most pressing question in British politics now, almost as urgent as the need to implement the people’s will over Brexit, is: ‘Who can save us from a Corbyn government?’

Mrs May’s era is drawing to a close. The past few years have broken and exhausted many reputations and careers.

But the wise government of the country must somehow be resumed. The Tory Party now urgently needs to find and choose a man or woman of stature and vision, who has the confidence and energy to turn that vision into hard, effective policies which will revitalise and renew the nation.