Corbyn: “tantalisingly close to power”
As Theresa May “endlessly fumbles”, Jeremy Corbyn looks like a powerful “leader chiming with his time”, said John Harris in The Guardian. Thanks to him, there are now Labour MPS “in such renowned lefty redoubts as Kensington and Canterbury”. As he proved during the election campaign, and with his visit to Grenfell Tower after the disaster, people really do appreciate a politician with “moral clarity”, and an emotional connection to ordinary voters. Among his supporters, there is a mood of “understandable triumphalism”. A Labour Party expecting to be shrunk has gained dozens of MPS, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The result leaves it “tantalisingly close to power, needing just a 3.5% swing to win a majority”. Corbyn expected to be fighting for his job. Now he has “a more congenial” but even more difficult task: “taking power at the next election, whenever that may be”.
Corbyn has an image of “principled virtue”, said Stephen Pollard in The Daily Telegraph. But as we’ve seen, “the reality is very different”. Recent weeks have revealed him to be a shockingly unprincipled opportunist. He reacted to the London Bridge attack by blaming it, spuriously, on “Tory police cuts”. And he responded to the Grenfell Tower disaster with “class war”, calling for empty surrounding homes to be seized by the state, or just occupied, to rehouse the victims. His message was “crystal clear – those wealthy bastards near you are the cause of all your problems”. This is “the true face of the revolutionary ideology that has taken control of Labour”.
Left-leaning critics of Corbyn have long hidden behind the argument that “he was unelectable”, said Philip Collins in The Times. But now, the really troubling question is not: “Do you think Mr Corbyn can win?” but “Do you want him to?” Many Labour MPS do not want the nationalisation of energy companies, or “a vast giveaway to the middle class in the form of tuition fees”; they do not think that their party manifesto’s spending promises are remotely credible. For now, all but a few rebels have united behind Corbyn. But eventually Labour’s moderates will have to make “a choice between candour and pretence”.