Corbyn’s contortions

Over the years, Jeremy Corbyn “has sat down with IRA bombers, Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, foreign spies, performance poets and Piers Morgan”, said Matt Chorley in The Times. “He’ll have a cuppa with anyone” – except, it seems, the Prime Minister. Last week, Theresa May invited the Labour leader to No. 10 to help break the Brexit deadlock. But, displaying a “tediously familiar sectarian small-mindedness”, Corbyn refused to join the talks, said the Daily Mail. His price for face-to-face discussions was a demand that the PM could not conceivably agree to: he wanted her to “take a no-deal Brexit off the table”. It was a “disingenuous” request, said Tony Yates in The Independent. It is not in May’s power to take no deal off the table. Only MPS can do that. Unless there’s a parliamentary consensus for an alternative – which Corbyn could help bring about – the UK will leave the EU without a deal on 29 March. Corbyn was guilty of a “presentational” error, said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. The talks were doomed, because “May will not budge on any of her red lines”: leaving the single market, ending free movement and so on. “A more astute politician would have been filmed walking into Downing Street only to emerge sorrowfully declaring that May was deaf to compromise.” But Corbyn’s real failure is more fundamental. Where May has not managed to formulate a plan B, Corbyn has yet to come up with a plan A. Until now he has got away with having no policy “beyond dodging responsibility for Brexit, while doing nothing to stop it”. He has avoided alienating either proRemain or pro-leave Labour voters – but at the cost of making himself look like “just another politician” jostling for advantage. Labour’s Brexit policy is an opportunistic “fantasy”, said The Independent. Corbyn wants us out of the EU, but inside a customs union, with access to the single market and a voice in the EU’S trade deals. It’s the “cake-and-eat-it” approach, all over again.

This week it looked as if Corbyn might have finally taken a decisive step towards backing a second referendum, said Katy Balls in The Spectator. Labour submitted an amendment calling for MPS to be given a chance to vote for a new “public vote”. But on closer inspection, it was just more “clever politics”: Corbyn didn’t actually commit the party to backing such an amendment; he merely threw a bone to his pro-eu members by suggesting that he might. The truth is that both Corbyn and May are too “tribal” to work with the other side, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. It suits Corbyn for May to “grind away” ineptly, “painting Tory colours on the Brexit mess from top to bottom”. It suits May that Corbyn refused to talk to her: she likes having him “lurking on the sidelines, spooking Conservatives with the thought of radical socialist government”. The deeper we get into this crisis, “the louder each side will accuse the other of putting party before country. Both will be right.”