I am not someone who likes to gamble with what little money I have. I have never yet met a poor bookmaker because the odds are that s/he will win most of the time. A brief check of the William Hill website tells me not to put any money on anyone other than Jeremy Corbyn to become the next Labour leader.
Corbyn is now 1/7 to win the contest, with his nearest opponent Andy Burnham a distant 6/1. For the Deputy Leader role, Tom Watson leads by an even greater margin, currently the 1/12 favourite. So there we have it: Labour’s new leadership team will be Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson. God help us all.
That’s hardly the face of Britain, is it? One white male senior citizen as leader and another white, slightly younger white male as deputy. Good old Labour, eh?
Worse still, Corbyn is also odds on to win the leadership ballot in the very first round and I don’t think the bookies are wrong.
I suspect a conspiracy here because I have not yet received my ballot paper. I’m beginning to wonder if the forces of darkness at Labour HQ have worked out that I would not be supporting the media and Tory Party’s preferred choice of leader, good old Jezza.
Until the last few days, both the media and the Tories have been very quiet about the whole election and with good reason: they both want Corbyn to win and the last thing they want to do is to encourage voters to support anyone else. Sky News made a terrible blunder yesterday by carrying an interview with Andy Burnham when they should have been ignoring him, as all other news organisations, including and especially the BBC, have done with all the candidates except Corbyn. I should imagine Rupert Murdoch will have been on the blower straight away once he heard this dreadful state of affairs. The Dirty Digger will demand an explanation as to why his news station even mentioned other candidates.
I took me 12 years to rejoin the Labour Party following my Iraq invasion resignation and it could be the shortest period of membership in the party’s history. I stuck with Labour throughout the 1980s when the traitors of the SDP walked away and I put up with the long years of Benn-inspired opposition, but I am buggered if I am going to pay across relatively large sums of cash to a party led by a man who counts jew hating islamic fascists like Hezbollah and Hamas as friends. Or for that matter a man who wants to disarm unilaterally, wants to consider handing the Falklands back to Argentina and had a dreadful history of support for the IRA when they were still blowing people up. Or a serial rebel with no record of leadership or loyalty. Apart from that, he’s a lovely bloke who is never responsible for anything, especially not sending his son to a private school (that was his estranged wife’s doing, so that’s all right then).
We’re only two weeks away from Corbyn’s victory speech and a few days after that he will be at the despatch box at PMQs where he will be badly beaten up. It will shortly after that when the Labour Party will wake up and realise what it has done in electing a man who has never been in a position of power since he was chair of the Haringey housing committee in the 1970s. It will not be a pretty sight and I am not looking forward to it.
Speaking of the bookies, William Hill is also offering 3/1 that Labour will not win a general election majority until at least 2031 which would see the Tories returned to power at the next three elections. I believe that this is exactly what will happen after Corbyn wins.
