Thornberry to replace Benn in ‘revenge reshuffle’
It’s more unpredictable than ever but, among other things, I’m guessing Labour’s Sanes will rout the party’s Crazies in 2016
JEREMY CORBYN is lining up Emily Thornberry as the new shadow foreign secretary to replace Hilary Benn as part of a reshuffle expected next week, The
Sunday Telegraph understands. Mr Corbyn is planning to appoint Ms Thornberry, a former shadow attorney general, in place of Mr Benn, who defied him and backed plans to bomb Isil targets in Syria, according to friends of the Labour leader.
Mr Benn is expected to be offered another job in the shadow cabinet.
Speculation about a so-called “revenge reshuffle” after the Syria vote and ahead of a debate on renewing the Trident nuclear system, which Mr Corbyn opposes, has prompted anger among moderate Labour MPs.
One senior Labour MP said there would be “fury” if Mr Corbyn replaced Mr Benn and that moving “soft-Left” MPs out of the senior ranks sent a “worrying signal”. Mr Corbyn is said to be considering sacking deputy chief whip Alan Campbell, and Maria Eagle, the shadow secretary for defence, who voted for air strikes in Syria last year. Ms Thornberry had previously been appointed only to a junior role by Mr Corbyn. She resigned from Ed Miliband’s front bench after tweeting a picture of a house with a flag of St George and a white van while campaigning against Ukip in Rochester.
It has become the established custom of this column to begin every year with a series of negative predictions: to argue that events widely expected to occur over the following 12 months are actually unlikely. But I’m afraid that normal service must be suspended: 2015 was a year of such wildly unforeseen eventualities and bizarre outcomes that it is impossible to make any reliable guesses about what will or will not happen next.
In a world in which Jeremy Corbyn can become leader of the opposition in Britain, and Donald Trump the leading Republican contender for president of the United States, all bets are off. So instead I propose to offer a wishlist of things that I hope will happen in 2016 – and which, in truth, I believe to be entirely plausible.
First, Mr Corbyn will carry out a ruthless purge (sorry, reshuffle) of his shadow cabinet, removing or demoting his most effective critics and rivals. His intention to do this, which has been so widely trailed and anticipated, will turn out not to have been simply a terrorising bluff. He will, however, realise that the outright sacking of Hilary Benn – who is highly regarded and who bears the sacred surname of a totemic Left-wing figure – would be a step too far. On the grounds that Mr Benn’s rejection of the leader’s stand on Syria makes him unfit to be shadow foreign secretary, Mr Corbyn will offer him instead an insultingly minor position on the front bench. Mr Benn will turn this down and that will be the signal for full-scale war between Sane Labour and Crazy Labour. As soon as the forces of Sane begin to organise themselves, it will become apparent that the whole Corbynite plan for Bolshevik take-over of the party machine has been a daydream.
The idea that cadres of professional activists were ready to devote all of their waking hours to running Labour constituency parties was based on the assumption that the new members were serious people who knew what they were doing, and not a load of bourgeois fantasists enjoying a second adolescence. Corbynistas, it will turn out, were not so much a well-drilled Leninist army as an amateurish clique without a clue about how to proceed on the national political stage. An iota of resolve and coordination from the Sanes will cause the Crazies to break down into factional dispute and recrimination – which is the natural condition for the hard Left. We will wake up one morning in 2016 and discover that the whole thing was a vivid but brief nightmare.
Which brings me to the next item on my list. David Cameron claims repeatedly, as he did in his New Year message, that he is committed to radical reform, and that his government will be dedicating itself to fundamental social and economic change (meaning: we are not, absolutely not, becoming complacent just because we have no serious political opposition). But the list of things he cites as deserving of this fervent attention are vague, platitudinous goals with which almost no conscientious person would disagree: increased social mobility and greater opportunity for all, eliminating the unfairness of ethnic discrimination, etc.
What he will actually do, with quiet circumspection rather than bravura pronouncement, is make the sort of changes that only a Conservative reformer could propose. The UK’s non-contributory benefit system not only helped to turn permanent unemployment into a lifestyle but is now creating an intractable obstacle in Mr Cameron’s “renegotiation” with the EU. Whether or not great numbers of migrants really are attracted to the UK by the possibility of an immediate, automatic right to welfare, the more important point is that this is an anomaly among European countries: other member states which pride themselves on their social solidarity do not feel that it is unfair to expect people to pay in before they can take out. Nor, in fact, do most British voters – even many of the unemployed ones.
So George Osborne will move towards making our benefit rules more consistent with other EU countries, thus eliminating one of Mr Cameron’s most embarrassing renegotiation problems. And while they are at it, the Tories will take some teensyweensy baby steps toward bringing the funding of British healthcare more into line with European models. There will be moves to regularise the mixing and matching of private and public sector treatment, drawing in the cooperation of private insurers who may top-up NHS provision with policies designed for that purpose, thus providing an additional stream of revenue for core NHS funding and giving the patient far more choice and control within the system.
This will not be done with an alarming top-down restructuring of healthcare provision but with small amendments to Department of Health guidelines, which will dismantle the ideological wall between NHS care and private add-on treatment so that the general European expectation of a mixed system becomes the norm. If my wish-not-a-prediction about Corbyn’s leadership should come true, then the Tories have a smaller window of opportunity for these necessary reforms than they might think.
Now for the American mess. Donald Trump – the celebrity demagogue who appears to have taken the Republican presidential contest by storm – is a fraud. Not only does he appear not to know the first thing about the policies and principles of the party he has chosen as the vehicle for his ambition but he is clearly ignorant of the basic business of running for national office. His campaign is being run as a reality-television extravaganza: it exists only insofar as his outrageous remarks get free media attention. His “election headquarters” is apparently empty and unmanned, like a shell company created as a tax dodge. He has no ground-level, get-out-the-vote network, which is critical in both the primary contests and the later election stage of a presidential run, particularly for candidates who are relying on the turnout of people who don’t usually vote, as he is.
It is important to remember in all the excitement that no one, at this point, has actually voted for Mr Trump. All that we have are opinion polling figures. Responding to a telephone or internet poll is a passive thing with no consequences, whereas voting is an act of initiative in the real world. Incoherent, nebulous frustration on the part of people who don’t normally bother to participate in the process may produce a lot more noise than action. Anyway, it is my fervent hope that once the absurd Trump fandango blows itself out, the Republicans will fall gratefully into the arms of the brilliant candidate who can actually beat Hillary Clinton: Marco Rubio. In my happy dream, this outcome will be facilitated by his former mentor Jeb Bush who, seeing his own presidential aspirations dying on the vine, will offer his support and his campaign machine to his one-time protégé.
Finally, there is the truly terrible question of our time: will Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) succeed in reducing Western democracies to illiberal paranoia? The most hopeful sign that it will not is the calibre of its recruits. Mohammed Rehman – the male half of the married couple who have been sentenced to life for their planned terrorist activities – was described by his own family as a “lowlife idiot” drug addict who rarely washed and spent most of his time in his bedroom playing video games. The defence attorney for Craig Wallace, the Islamic convert who threatened a female MP with death for voting in favour of air strikes on Syria, claimed that his client hadn’t been taking his anti-psychotic medication at the time of his offence.
If Isil is driven back in the region – if it suffers mortifying defeat in its global ambition – won’t the wackos and the misfit fantasists drift away? Maybe that is too much to hope for.