Tragic Trenches, Brilliant Banter, Blazing Bonfire

The woods behind our house are one of my greatest sources of pleasure from living where we are in Spain. And I’m finding myself fascinated by my reading about the Spanish Civil War, when a struggling and democratic Spanish Republic was overthrown by a Fascist dictatorship that lasted nearly forty years. Finally, Danielle and I have developed a love for the sport of Nordic walking, where one goes stalking along with a stick in each hand, like skiing without skis or, come to that, snow, and watch walkers unencumbered by sticks go streaking past us.

What better pastime could there be than an activity that combines all three?

Our Nordic Walking group met in our village, La Cañada, the other day. Wonderfully convenient. We went striding through my favourite woods, to a spot adorned with the melancholy remnants of low cement constructions linked by trenches. We’d seen them before without identifying them for what they were: the final line of defence before Valencia of the beleaguered Spanish government, facing the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

Blockhouses and linking trenches
from the final line in Valencia's defeated struggle against Fascism

That terrible, literally last-ditch defence never took place. The decisive battle of the war, which lasted for nearly four months between July and November 1938, took place far away, on the river Ebro. The Fascist forces, with their Italian and German support, won a decisive victory and inflicted huge losses on the Republic. So when it came for Franco to move on Valencia, the fighting was all but over and the city surrendered without a last stand.

It was poignant to see those final, desperate defences that in the end proved futile, especially given what we know came next.

Fortunately, from there we headed for a place with far more cheerful associations: the ‘Three Oaks’ (‘Tres Robles’) restaurant in our village, La Cañada. We were served a fine paella, of the Valencian variety (with meat, not seafood), Valencia being the home and origin of that great dish. The company was good, the conversation lively and the atmosphere entertaining.

The Nordic Walking group in the Tres Robles

I particularly like the restaurateur himself. Danielle had bought some fish from the fine local fishmonger, one of the assets of La Cañada, and asked the restaurateur whether he would keep it in his fridge for us while we lunched.

This he agreed to do though, when I came to ask for it back, he carefully explained that, under Spanish law, anything left in a restaurant owner’s position for over an hour without being claimed back, was legally his. Since this is precisely the kind of banter I enjoy, I told him that I naturally assumed he’d already eaten the fish, or at any rate served it to his clients. At that point, he confided in me that he had not, since we were foreigners, and needed to be treated with unusual kindness.

Instead, he told me how I ought to cook it: in coarse salt. That’s something I’m keen to try next time, though on this occasion Danielle had already chosen the recipe and the ingredients for a traditional Spanish sea bream dish. Which was delicious. 

The restaurateur wished us every enjoyment of the fish, but on one condition: that we send the bones to Puigdemont.

For those who may not be following the debate over Catalan independence from Spain too closely, Carles (to give his name in its Catalan form) Puigdemont is the former president of the Catalan region (or nation, as campaigners for independence would describe it). He is currently living in exile in Belgium, since he faces trial and, given what has happened to those of his collaborators who weren’t lucky enough to get out, probably a long prison sentence if he returns.

In Valencia, the Catalan separatists are not much admired. In fact, I might go so far as to say they’re roundly loathed. Resented too.

“They view us as Southern Catalonia,” they tell me.

Indeed, it only surprises me that the restaurateur wanted Puigdemont sent so much as fish bones.

Puigdemont's share of our excellent sea bream

In the evening, we headed for a different village, up in the local mountains. It’s called Olocau, so the fact that I accept its existence proves conclusively that I am no Olocau denier.

They were due to celebrate the feast of Saint Anthony with a bonfire and fireworks on the main square. Actually, we’d earlier seen the wood piled up ready for lighting, and it was clear that what was going to happen there was going to be about as much like what I think of as a bonfire, as the Battle of the Ebro was like a bar brawl.

Which is why we went to see how it turned out.

We were there early and spent a while wandering around the village. Many of the houses have huge main doors, the kind you could drive a carriage through or at least a horse and cart, as I’m sure many used to in the past. You know, the kind of door which has a human-sized one set into it. As we wandered around in the night, we found several of them open, allowing us to see in to the brightly lit interiors. At several, we asked if we could take photos.

To our amazement, one family suggested we come inside to admire the tiled walls, the wooden beams, the homely fireplace and, in particular, the cellar with its oak wine barrels, the last trace of the occupation of the present owner’s father as a wine maker. The barrels are now empty.

“All but one,” he explained, “we top it up every year with the same wine from the same grape and enjoy it greatly.”

The Olocau house we visited
With a family member in one picture, and barrels in another

It struck me as typical of this region, with its warm-hearted openness to us immigrants, that they invited us into their home in this way. It made for an attractive end to a great day.

Spectacularly topped by the bonfire and fireworks. Which were just as dramatic as we were expecting.

Fireworks and the bonfire in Olocau

Two Popes, two Soldiers, two films to make a point of seeing

Historically, having two popes at the same time has tended to be a matter of conflict and bitterness. It happened between 1378 and 1417, when two men – and from 1410 three – all claimed to be the legitimate Pope and excommunicated the others.

So it’s curious to be living in a period in which there are, once more, two Popes at the same time. On this occasion, there is little bitterness and no conflict.

Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio, Anthony Hopkins as Benedict XVI

Perhaps Netflix felt that it was in the keeping of the spirit of Christmas to release its film The Two Popes in the run up to that great Christian festival. It is based around the moment in 2013 when the then Pope Benedict XVI is replaced, although still alive, by Pope Francis. It wasn’t the first time a Pope had resigned but it was the first in six centuries.

The film starts earlier, with Cardinal Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, deciding to travel to visit Pope Benedict in Rome to press his resignation as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Strangely, he has no sooner bought his air ticket than Begoglio receives a summons from Benedict to come and see him. This neatly sets an atmosphere in which we feel that forces beyond the mere will of man are at work.

The key sequence of the film is a series of discussions between the two men in which they confront their views on the nature and role of the Catholic Church. Do you know the comedy series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister? If not, you should watch an episode or two (if you only see one, make it A Victory for Democracy, from season 1 of Yes, Prime Minister). The curious aspect of the series is that they are principally concerned with the relationship between three middle-aged, white men; there is no sex and no violence; but they produce some of the funniest and most effective TV comedy I have ever seen.

There is considerably less comedy in The Two Popes (though it has some wonderful funny moments). Like Yes, Prime Minister, however, it focuses on old, white men, brilliantly played by two outstanding Welsh actors, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, who swap reflections on themselves and their lives in a strangely gripping piece of cinema.

At the core is whether Benedict even has the right to step down, and whether Bergoglio can take over. The problem with Bergoglio is that he played a most unclear role in the dirty war in Argentina, when a military dictatorship was ruthlessly cracking down on its opponents. Torture and assassination were among its weapons of choice, and in failing to stand by two priests, Bergoglio may even have been complicit in their mistreatment. He repeatedly presents himself as a sinner, and he is chiefly thinking of this murky period in his past. But does that sin rule him out from becoming Pope or, on the contrary, make him all the more qualified to lead a Church whose main purpose is to deal with men and their sins?

It’s a fascinating film using a beautifully light touch to deal with some of the deepest questions that confront humanity.

If you have the time, it would also be worth reading the tie-in book for the film. Also called The Two Popes, it is by Anthony McCarten who wrote the film’s screenplay. It gives a more factual account of the events behind the film, making it clear, for instance, that the great conversation between the two central characters, vital for the drama of the film and truthfully conveying the conflicts between them and also within them, never actually happened.

Geroge MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman set out on their epic mission

Another great film recently released is 1917. It is brilliantly directed by Sam Mendes and based at least in part on a fragment he heard from his grandfather. It tells the story of two young soldiers given a challenging assignment in the British sector of the First World War Western Front, to carry a message across territory recently vacated by German forces (or possibly not) to a unit which, without it, might launch an assault that would lead to its destruction in a carefully prepared German trap.

Sam Mendes uses long takes, giving the impression that the film has been shot in a single take, to drive the action forward with sustained intensity. It recounts just twenty-four hours of time. That’s the ‘unity of time’ of classical theatre, and it has a powerful focusing effect on the action. That is accentuated by the unrelenting concentration on the messengers, excellently played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, in their race against the clock.

It isn’t by any means a standard First World War film. There is violence, but it is limited and certainly not gratuitous. Much of the action takes place outside the trenches, and even when inside, it is mostly travelling along them, the journey being the central action of the film as a whole. Above all, it is a classic epic, of a mission undertaken against terrible obstacles. As well as having many powerfully poignant moments, it is breathlessly compelling from beginning to end.

Two fine films. And one fine book. All worth the time they take.

The Rebecca trap

Momentum is a faction inside the British Labour Party, with its own officers and policy lines which it works to get the whole of Labour to adopt.

It has just issued a document to all its members, to ‘consult’ them on which candidates to back in the forthcoming elections for Labour leader and deputy leader. It did have a recommendation to make, so essentially the invitation was to make a completely free choice from among the available candidates, just so long as they choose Rebecca Long-Bailey for leader and Angela Rayner for deputy.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbyn continuity candidate for Labour leader

There was little surprise in Momentum’s ‘recommendations’, the euphemism we like to use for instructions. Long-Bailey is the continuity candidate, the one who can be most counted on to follow in the steps of the current leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Momentum was essentially set up to back Corbyn as leader of Labour.

Just in case you haven’t been following British politics closely in recent months, Mr Corbyn is the man who took Labour to defeat in a general election in 2017, and to disastrous defeat in 2019. With the full support of Momentum and its members on both occasions. Support which shows no sign of flagging, it should be added, as they scrabble around finding others to blame for the loss.

One of the major scapegoats Momentum has identified is the Media. Mostly Tory, it’s true that the media generally gave him a torrid time. It has to be said that Corbyn fed the media plenty of ammunition to use against him. Probably the most serious was his failure to take a clear position on the question that has most troubled Britain for the last four years, Brexit. He has equivocated, trying to appeal to each side and losing the trust of both, as the election results showed.

This kind of behaviour has allowed the media outlets ill-disposed towards him to run story after story alleging that he was unprincipled, gutless and untrustworthy.

The last thing we need is a continuity candidate who continues that kind of performance. So it’s sad to discover that even before she became a candidate for the leadership, Rebecca Long-Bailey has been engaging in what, at best, we can only call a little embellishing of her track record. Embellishment it has proved frighteningly easy to trash.

In 2014, she claimed that she had “been working as a solicitor with the NHS in Manchester for 10 years” when she had only been qualified for just over six years.

In her leaflet for the 2015 election, she stated that, “I studied law and became a solicitor for the NHS to help defend our health service”. Now, the words don’t actually say that she was employed by the NHS, but don’t they seem to suggest that? And when she claimed to have been helping to “defend our health service”, doesn’t that sound as though she had been going into battle to keep our hospitals and doctors’ surgeries going and public?

The reality is that she was working for a legal firm in Manchester and did some commercial work for the NHS as client. She was drawing up documents for NHS contracts and NHS estates. A courtroom champion of our great national institution? That she wasn’t.

To some extent I don’t particularly care about her distortions. MPs are as capable of being petty and grasping as all the rest of us. In business, I’ve dealt with people who lied on their CVs. It’s reprehensible but not that unusual.

I suppose it’s rather harder to stomach from members of the Corbyn faction who are always claiming to be so much more honest than the rest of us. Frankly, though, the hypocrisy may be unattractive, but I can live with it too.

No, the real problem is that these falsifications were so easy to disprove. And the right-wing press is moving in already. The Sunday Times has already run an exposé. Imagine if Long-Bailey actually became leader. What a meal they’d make of her!

Besides, if she engages in such shallow and easily discovered deceptions now, what would she do as leader? Would she, like Corbyn, keep feeding the Tory press the material they want? Would she too forfeit any trust the electorate might feel towards her and go down to yet another massive loss, pointing to bad press as her excuse?

And what of Momentum? What are they up to?

• Have they not yet had enough of backing losers?
• Have they developed a taste for seeing Labour routed and the Tories running the show?
• Have they decided they prefer having someone they can control in the top job than to win an election and have to deliver the socialist policies they’re happier just to talk about?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. All I can see is that they’re cheerfully trying to walk their followers into the Rebecca trap, eyes wide shut. And I just hope that there are enough Labour members with their feet on the ground to say, “no thanks, not that trap, not again”.

The unrepentant Corbynite

There’s a story that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, “the buck stops here”. It seems it isn’t entirely true. A friend gave him the sign and he put it up for a while, but later removed it. 

I don’t know whether getting rid of it was symbolic of anything.

The notion’s a good one, though. It says that ultimate responsibility for what an organisation does, in this case the US government, lies with the person at the top. They can claim credit for much that goes right but the counterpart is that they have to take the blame for most of what goes wrong.

Not so, it seems, within the Jeremy Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn facing his electoral debacle: getting ready to move into denial mode

You know those doomsday cults that regularly announce the ending of the world? They usually give a date for when it’s going to happen and even a time of day. Then it doesn’t happen (so far, at least) and they usually come up with some excuse for why it didn’t: another reading is possible of the relevant Biblical text, or maybe more than one date is possible and we’ve simply moved on from one of them to the next, or whatever.

Anything, at any rate, rather than admit they were talking cattle excrement.

What’s true of a religious cult is true, apparently, of this political one as well.

Corbynists have been assuring us for years that Corbyn was set for a win in the forthcoming general election, possibly even a big win, and the consequence would be a radical transformation of British society in a socialist direction. Those of us who were a little more sceptical were invited to go forth and multiply, and courteously described as red Tories or even – and I’m told by one of them that this is the most damning political insult available today – Blairites.

This is curious because, if the mission of the Labour Party is to speak for the voiceless in British society, to protect the interest of workers, of the unemployed, of the sick, the very young, the very old, the poorest and neediest, then Tony Blair actually did them some good. He did so by simple dint of actually getting into office, where he could lead a government that hugely improved the health service, for instance, and took a lot of children out of poverty.

Corbyn, on the other hand, by failing twice to win an election, has done no good for any of those people. Indeed, by gifting the Conservatives a victory in an election that was eminently winnable, positively helped to inflict more damage on them.

I say this, by the way, as a Labour Party member who did not back Blair to be leader and would certainly not back him now. I simply state facts: Blair achieved more for those Labour is intended to protect than Corbyn ever did or, now, ever will.

Still, facts apparently don’t need to stand in the way of a good argument. And Corbyn has assured us that he won the argument in the election campaign. Just not the election itself.

Make of that what you can.

Ah, well. There’s some satisfaction, I suppose, when things turn out as you expect. That’s true even if people live down to expectations rather than up to them.

I’ve listened to and read Corbynists for four years now. I’ve been told again and again that he’s hugely popular, as can be seen from the young people chanting “oh, Jeremy” at his rallies. I’ve seen carefully constructed arguments for optimism whose authors point to the numbers of young people, supposedly pro-Corbyn, registering to vote, while old people, often anti-Corbyn, leave the electoral register (for the cemetery); they point to the number of women who have seen their pension entitlement pushed back and can therefore be counted to rally to the Guru; they point to the popularity in the polls of individual policies proposed by Corbyn and ignore his massive unpopularity in those same polls.

Why, I’ve seen analyses even in the last few months, showing that all these factors point to an electoral win for Labour, even perhaps a landslide.

The fervour of Corbynists’ beliefs left me fully dreading their reaction to the long-predicted electoral debacle of 12 December. I sadly expected the worst of them: denial of any responsibility and a feverish pursuit of scapegoats to blame instead. 

Unfortunately, the unrepentant Corbynites have entirely lived down to my expectations of them. The buck, for them, certainly didn’t stop with the man at the top. It might have been more decent of them to show a little humility now that their doomed project has failed so dismally. They might have admitted their errors, if only to ensure that they don’t repeat them. They might have stopped talking down to the rest of us, as though events had fully vindicated their baseless beliefs instead of refuting them so comprehensively.

It would have been more decent. But it isn’t going to happen.

A hard-won government in Spain can teach us a lot

It’s been a long haul, but Spain at last has a confirmed government again.

That matters to me particularly because we now live in Spain, land of our Brexit exile. Others, though, might also find much of relevance in the difficult road that got us here, littered as it was with obstacles, many of them self-inflicted.

Pedro Sánchez addresses the Cortes

Let’s start with the positives.

Spain has its first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1978. That brings it into line with most countries in Europe, where government always requires negotiation between parties and compromise to reach an agreement that commands broad support. It’s not the case in Britain, of course, where Members of Parliament are still elected by simple majorities in individual constituencies. As a result, parties with minority support nationally can command a huge majority in Parliament. As is the case today.

I’m not sure that this leads to better government.

Pedro Sánchez, now the confirmed Prime Minister of Spain after holding the role in an acting capacity since last April, and leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), has agreed a joint programme for progressive government with Pablo Iglesias, of the anti-austerity, harder-left Unidas Podemos Party (UP). That has kept the right well away from power, even though the far-right Vox now has a major parliamentary presence.

You read that right. A joint programme for progressive government. And the hard right out of power.

How many, in Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey or Brazil would give their eye teeth to have such a government? And how many, particularly in Britain, the United States, Poland, Turkey or Brazil would like to see the far right well away from government?

So, now the negatives. 

The Spanish left nearly didn’t pull the trick off, and its worst enemy was itself. As in Britain and the United States especially.

That joint programme between PSOE and UP was something that could have been agreed months ago. Say, straight after the General Election in April, which left the PSOE as the biggest single party in the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – with 123 seats, while UP had 42. PSOE was up significantly, while UP had lost seats, but at least between them, they had 165 MPs, just 11 short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat Cortes.

They couldn’t reach agreement. After six months of negotiation, new elections had to be called in November. Both parties lost seats, three in the case of the PSOE, though it was still the biggest party in Parliament, while UP lost seven. Now their task had become far harder, since they’re now 21 behind the magic number for a majority.

Far worse still was the surge in support for the quasi-fascist Vox, which shot up from 24 to 52 seats to become the third biggest parliamentary presence.

The PSOE-UP failure to compromise before the November election meant that when they finally did, the two parties of the left were working from a weaker position, and against a far more vigorous opposition. Note and learn, British Labourites or American Democrats: you risk it all when you decide to dig your heels in and refuse to budge on principle. Insisting on doing it all may leave you unable to do anything at all. The price of intransigence can be a Trump or Boris government.

Sánchez has at least avoided that fate, but by the tightest of margins. He couldn’t win his investiture on Sunday (yes, Spanish MPs can work on Sundays) when an absolute majority was required, in the first vote; on Tuesday however, with the bar lowered to requiring simply more Yes votes than Noes, he squeaked through, by just two votes with eighteen abstentions.

Those abstentions were won through hard negotiation. Sánchez had to make agreements with eight parties, covering 313 different commitments, to secure those abstaining votes. Not all those commitments are compatible with each other. Government, with so much to deliver to keep minor parties at least neutral, and up against such a powerful right, isn’t going to be easy.

This is particularly true in the specific circumstances of Spain. Some of the commitments Sánchez has had to make concern the status of Catalonia and its desire for independence. That’s something he can’t grant and retain his support in the rest of Spain; it’s going to be challenging to give the Catalans enough, short of independence, to keep Tuesday’s abstainers in line.

With a powerful and ferocious right-wing Opposition, he and Iglesias are going to have torrid time implementing their programme. It’s going to be enthralling to watch. I’m at least glad they have the opportunity to try – after the crushing defeat of the British left in December, being able to do as much as Sánchez can in Spain seems a distant dream.

There were some good moments in the investiture debate.

One of the most moving was the standing ovation offered to Aina Vidal, who turned up to vote despite undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer.

Aina Vidal stands to acknowledge the ovation for her presence

Another was Sánchez’s reference to one of the iconic figures of the Second Spanish Republic, the one overthrown by Franco. Manuel Azaña told his compatriots, “we are all children of the same sun and tributaries of the same river”.

In Britain and the US, I can’t help feeling that we’re all children of the same deeply disrupted climate system, and tributaries to the same traffic jams.

Maybe the Spanish example can help us towards a more encouraging future.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.

Please, Daddy, leave me my Corbyn blindfold. It's so comfortable

It has been obvious since the earliest days of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, that his supporters have been wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Indeed, it is their very inability to imagine any kind of flaw in their hero that marks them out as forming not so much a political current within the Labour Party, as a veritable Cult. Members have urged me to “have faith” in the leader or to “believe” in his vision for the future. That’s the very language of religion, and it leaves no place for the rational, questioning thought essential in politics.

Keir Starmer (l) and Jeremy Corbyn
Colleagues but not mutual admirers

Given that Corbynism was a Cult, it was obvious that when Jeremy led us to inevitable defeat, his worshippers would quickly set out to find explanations that cleared him of all responsibility.

In passing, I should say that the sheer scale of he defeat surprised me. I hoped right to the end that, even when defeated, we might at least deny Boris Johnson a majority. I knew that would take a miracle, but I kept hoping. It struck me as much more probable that Boris would emerge with a majority of up to 40. In fact, his majority was 80, while Labour was reduced to just 202 parliamentary seats, our worst result since 1935.

That will certainly see the Conservatives safely through to the next election and, quite probably, to the one after. Only twice, in single general elections, has Labour gained the more than 124 seats it would need for even a bare majority next time. Once, in the landslide it won under Attlee after the Second World War, it did so after a period in government as Churchill’s coalition partners; just once has it done it from Opposition, in 1997 under Tony Blair.

Labour has a mountain to climb from the pits where Corbynism has consigned it.

If the scale of our defeat was greater than I expected, I have also been surprised by the sheer relentlessness of the Corbynists in pursuing their alibis. The preferred line at first was that much-loved whipping boy, the media. Vicious, biased coverage of the election in particular, and Corbyn’s leadership more generally, had undermined Labour and handed Boris Johnson his victory.

But that was only one of many ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses. Today another seems to be gaining ground. It is that it was Labour’s endorsement of a second Brexit referendum that lost if for us. The argument goes like this:

• Labour did ‘very well’ at the 2017 election. I’ve put ‘very well’ in quotes because one Corbynist said exactly that to me today. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Labour lost in 2017, so ‘very well’ doesn’t seem terribly accurate. ‘Less badly than expected’ I will, however, allow.
• In 2019, Labour went to the country with the same leader and broadly the same manifesto, and it lost massively.
• The only thing that had changed in between was that Labour had endorsed the Second Referendum position. So that’s what caused the rout.

QED

Unsurprisingly, the argument does, however, omit to mention one or two other key factors. The stance on the referendum wasn’t the only change between the two elections. Here is a small selection of others:

• Corbyn had become better known to the electorate. The more they knew him, the less voters trusted him. By the time of the election, he was the most unpopular Opposition Leader since records began.
• The 2017 election had been flattering to Corbyn because Theresa May, then Prime Minister, turned out to be by far the weakest campaigner I had ever seen at the head of the Conservative Party. By the time of the 2019 election, she had been dumped.
• Boris Johnson, her successor, was utterly unscrupulous, entirely deceitful and ruthlessly effective in campaign mode and, as many of us forecast, ran circles around Corbyn.

So why are the Corbynists coming out with this line about its all being down to the Second Referendum stance?

It may not be unrelated to the fact that Keir Starmer has now emerged as at least the initial frontrunner to replace Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. He has a large lead in a poll of Labour members over his nearest rival, the Corbynist candidate. He is, of course, one of the chief architects of the endorsement of a Second Referendum

Naturally it suits Corbynists to paint him as the villain of the piece.

But it isn’t just to favour their candidate that they do this. It’s also because it is another piece in the Denial Wall they’re building around their Corbyn Dreamland. It was that nasty Keir that snatched our defeat from the jaws of victory. The Cult guru remains as flawless as ever.

We’ve seen that this belief takes some wilful blindness to inconvenient facts. That wilfulness is forcing me to revise my view that they wear rose-tinted glasses. It’s beginning to look to me as though they’re wearing a blindfold.

One that’s made of velvet, of course. It’s beautifully comfortable. Which is why they dread the idea of being forced to take it off.