Good grief: I am finding myself defending the bloke who was my last choice to be Labour leader and the man who I firmly believe will lead the party not just into but beyond the wilderness. Jeremy Corbyn – let’s give the man a break.
Tonight’s non story is that Corbyn cannot attend a do (I think that is the royal term) tonight in order to become a privy councillor. He has to attend another engagement which is believed to be a fundraising engagement in Scotland. If the engagement was arranged before the privy council meeting, then he is quite right to attend the fundraiser and there are two good reasons. The first is that Labour is skint and the current Tory government is hellbent in destroying it altogether. The second is that it took David Cameron three months to join the privy councillor so Corbyn is not exactly dragging his feet.
There is also a contrived fuss about the apparently obligation on anyone being given privy council status having to get on their knees before the queen as she invites him on board. Like Dennis Skinner, I too am a republican but also like Dennis Skinner I do not see the abolition of the monarchy as an immediate or even distant priority. It’s there, most people seem happy enough with it. Let sleeping corgis lie as far as I am concerned.
The fuss, I suspect, is not emanating from the public, most of whom will probably not have the first idea what the privy council even is, much less giving a toss about it. It’s a right wing media creation, backed up by rent-a-quote Tory MPs giving their unconsidered views.
Corbyn has done the right thing to pretty well ignore the storm that isn’t raging and he will do well to not put himself in the position of having to reply to every single piece of nonsense written about him. To do that, as I said yesterday, the old boy will have to try to steer the debate to where both he and the electorate want it to be and to counter the lies of the Tory Party, currently spinning off to another galaxy. And that’s giving them the prospect of something better than Cameron and the Nasty Party.
