The salad days of Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour’s accidental leader are over. The folderol that greeted his unexpected victory in the leadership elections of 2015 has long evaporated. All that’s left is a septuagenarian career backbencher who had a longer than expected moment in the sun. The only question that remains is when Corbyn will finally realise the game is up?
Long gone are the days when Corbyn’s name was chanted wildly at Glastonbury, when thousands of twee middle class festival goers chanted his name as he made his usual wooden speech. Those kids really believed that Corbyn represented something different, something new. Time has brought it home to them that there was nothing new about Corbyn, who was merely singing an inferior cover version of Tony Benn’s simplistic sloganising rhetoric of the early 1980s. This, I suspect, is why Corbyn will not be ‘performing’ at Glastonbury this year.
Until Theresa May’s disastrous general election campaign of 2017, it was generally believed that the Tories would be in charge forever and a day. Everyone knew Corbyn was useless, yet here May proved she was, too. Millions of voters lent Labour their vote as a last, desperate move to prevent a hard Brexit, or any Brexit at all. Many of them will have been the young dreamers in a Somerset field. You’ve been had, my luvvers, and you know that only too well.
Mainstream Labour always knew Corbyn would never be prime minister. But then, so did the comrades who surround him, although they never publicly admitted it. They know, better than anyone, that Corbyn has none of the qualities to be an effective opposition leader, never mind prime minister. The accident of his elevation to party leader gave them the opportunity to take control of Labour.
In order to perform the hard left takeover, the comrades had to sustain the illusion that Corbyn was what he isn’t, a man of ideas and a man of vision. Due credit to them, they managed to do that until Brexit, and Corbyn’s hard Brexiter instincts, ensured it all unraveled.
The people who really run the Labour Party, the likes of Seumas Milne and Len McCluskey, have helped prop up and even, in the not-too-distant-past, helped sustain the myth about Corbyn. They will also have known that some day they would need to install a replacement, someone younger and more substantial. That time is almost here.
As well as his vacillation over Brexit, the visit of Donald Trump has also shown Corbyn for what he is. Instead of attempting to engage this rogue president, Corbyn chooses to address a mass public meeting consisting entirely of people who already agree with him. It must be a lovely environment for this elderly protester who has spent decades achieving nothing in politics. Even though he is a terrible public speaker, his cult following hangs on his every word. Or rather they did. Those days are coming to an end.
The final days of Corbyn, which could still stretch out for a few years, give Labour’s real leaders another problem. The far left wannabes, the likes of Long Bailey, Burgon, Butler, Gardiner and Abbott, are every bit as hopeless as Corbyn. Not only that, the hard left is also at war with itself over Brexit. And as ever, there is nothing that the comrades do better than quarrel and then split.
With the Conservatives fighting over the succession for Theresa May, the only consolation for Labour’s hierarchy is it gives them cover for their own problems. But not for long. Labour’s poor showing in the local elections, it’s disastrous showing in the European elections and, without doubt on Thursday, a defeat in the Peterborough by election will tell its own tale.
It is entirely possible that Labour’s four year dalliance with an ageing protester, the friend of terrorists and the enabler of anti-Semitism, will kill Labour for a generation, perhaps forever. The way it is today, I won’t miss it.
Labour, in government from 1997, changed Britain for the better. Shout ‘Iraq’ all you like but things only got better. Only the Corbyn cult and his handlers pretend that this version of Labour is fit for government. Most of us have observed that under Corbyn it’s not fit for opposition.
Corbynism never represented a ‘new kind of politics’. It was always reheated Bennism from the 1980s, vague promises, ambiguous rhetoric, notionally led by a man who has never held any form of power since he was chair of the Haringey council housing committee in the 1970s.
Situation hopeless in Labour and almost certainly irretrievable. The Corbyn experiment was never going to work and it didn’t. And given where the power lies in modern day Labour, controlled as it is by the voices of the past with their failed simplistic slogans, the people’s party is about to collide with reality. A mass membership party of opposition, further away from power than ever. The sad thing is there are many in Old Labour who will be happy with this. It’s all about purity, right, even if that means being in permanent opposition, with no power for the people you purport to represent?
Labour, without power, is irrelevant. And it’s never been less relevant than it is today.
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