The party’s over

Imagine today you are one of Jeremy Corbyn’s handlers, an organ grinder, if you will, to Corbyn’s monkey. Your leader, in the very loosest sense of the word, appears on a TV show where he is interviewed by the best, most ferocious and most forensic journalist in the business, Andrew Neil, gives a performance so bad you wonder why you helped elect him in the first place. Make no mistake: the big cheeses in Labour and the trade union movement know full well that their saintly leader is a real life version of Peter Sellers’ character Chauncey Gardiner from the film Being There. They just hoped nobody would notice.

In 2015, Corbyn stood for the Labour leadership, essentially to provide an alternative point of view, that being the hard left view, from the sidelines of the party. Incredibly, the campaign rapidly gained traction, resulting in a man with zero by way of leadership qualities becoming leader of one of Britain’s top two political parties. The trick would be to maintain an illusion that Corbyn was somehow new and refreshing and very different from mainstream politicians. That myth, that lie, even, was largely maintained until the last few years and, in the glare of an election campaign, it has been shattered altogether.

Corbyn’s past was always relevant to the present. His close associations with unpleasant people, including tyrants and terrorists, matter because nothing has changed. And last night, his associations with anti-Semites that came back to haunt him.

Labour has been consumed with anti-Semitism. Repeatedly offered the opportunity by Andrew Neil to apologise for the Jew hatred he has if not led, then certainly tolerated and allowed to flourish, Corbyn could not bring himself to do so. Slippery, evasive – here was Corbyn, the cynical politician people thought he wasn’t. People can reasonably assume that Corbyn did not apologise because he believed no apology was required. “If only,” as one Corbyn supporter pointed out on a Facebook thread last night, “the Jews would stop whining.”

The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now, if it wasn’t before. Corbyn is a very poor, second rate career politician (oh yes he is) who is not up to the job of running a whelk stall, never mind a country of some 66 million people. He has no plan, no vision, no clue, beyond borrowing and spending vast sums of money. His mishandling of the Jewish question illuminates his breathtaking incompetence. And it proves beyond reasonable doubt that this man should never be allowed in or even near 10 Downing Street.

This is the fault, not just of Corbyn who stood for a position he must have known was far beyond his level of competence, but also those Labour MPs who allowed people to vote in the leadership election for £3 and nominated Corbyn for the position even though they knew he was hopeless and of course the 57 varieties of Stalinism and Trotskyism who have completed a takeover of the Labour Party.

The party’s over, comrades. And it’s not just Corbyn who should say sorry. So should you, comrades, to the millions of people who need a Labour Party, not an opposition plaything for the affluent chattering classes who just fancy a far left Labour Party and for whom it doesn’t matter if they don’t get one.