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.

Boris, Trump and tripping the lie fantastic

There was a time when voters valued honesty in politicians. Not that they expected ever to find any. There’s an old joke about a man lost in a wood and stumbling into a clearing, in which he sees a blind old woman, a pink elephant and an honest politician. So who does he ask to show him the way?

The answer is, of course, the blind old woman, as the other two are just figments of the imagination.

Boris and the great lie

But even if we didn’t expect honesty from them, we kept up a vaguely optimistic pursuit of the honest politician, or maintained the notion as some kind of ideal towards which we might aspire.

Not any more, it appears. In Donald Trump, we have a US president who, if we really push our generosity, may feel is not an actual liar, in the sense that he may not always be deliberately stating as a truth something he knows not to be true. It may rather be that he suffers from a pathological inability to tell the truth from anything he happens to want to believe. Or, worse still, happens to want his voters to believe.

He may simply be lying, but it may actually be that he thinks that his wanting to believe something is true, makes it true.

North Korea hasn’t actually disarmed at all? So what? The disarmament deal that Trump proclaimed after his first meeting with Kim Jong Il is the best disarmament deal there ever was.

All that nonsense about Trump putting pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his opponent? All made up. The fact that a transcript of the call exists, and it confirms the allegation, is neither here nor there. It never happened.

Isn’t a great achievement that China is paying for the tariffs Trump has put on its exports to the US? The miserable line about tariffs being paid by the population of the importing country, not the exporting one, is just an inconvenient factoid. An unattractive notion, and therefore untrue.

But in Britain too we have our version of Trump. Like Trump in the US, Boris holds the highest elective office in Britain. Unlike Trump, I think he has sufficient knowledge and intellectual horsepower to know when a statement is actually false. So when he utters a falsehood, he is undoubtedly lying.

And he seems to lie as naturally, as casually, as automatically as he breathes.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance came when he visited Whipps Cross hospital in North London. When the father of a child who had been admitted to the appallingly understaffed and overstretched emergency department accused him of only being there for a photo opportunity, Boris replied that there were no press present. That was despite the fact that, as the father pointed out, the press were clearly visible just a few steps away. 

Omar Salem points out the photographers at Whipps Cross
whose presence Boris had just denied

The father, Omar Salem, is a Labour activist. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s a father, his child was seriously ill, and the staff were hopelessly overstretched. It seems that Boris’s first instinct is to lie, even when it’s obvious that he’s going to be caught out almost immediately.

There were so many other instances. Another was the decision of the Daily Telegraph to apologise for an article Boris published in the paper, forecasting that a post-Brexit Britain would overtake Germany as an economy within a few decades. It seems his argument was based on an analysis he’d ready which simply didn’t bear it out.

Perhaps the most notorious deceit ever was the one Boris associated himself with during the Brexit referendum campaign, that leaving the EU would free £350 million a week to invest in the NHS (the National Health Service). It was particularly barefaced, because it deliberately overstated the contributions the UK made to the EU, ignored the subsidies it received back from it, and left out of account the additional costs associated with Brexit and the revenue loss it was likely to entail.

A far wilier campaigner than Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, far being put off by his terrible track record in this field, Boris has boldly taken the battle to his Labour opponents, precisely on the grounds of the NHS. That takes courage for a Conservative, because this is traditionally Labour’s strong ground. But Boris is promising to spend more on the health service, to employ more clinicians, even to build more hospitals.

In other words, Boris is promising to address the very scandals that the distraught father tackled him over at Whipps Cross.

And yet Conservative Central Office has instructed candidates to sign no pledges on the NHS (or indeed on climate policy). So Boris is making the promises but preparing the ground for reneging on them. As he did over Brexit, when he promised to deliver it by 31 October, “do or die” – he didn’t do, but he didn’t die either.

What’s most surprising about this trail of blatant lies and broken promises is, in an election as wide open as any I’ve seen, with four major parties contesting nationally, as well as the SNP massively powerful in Scotland, Boris continues to lead the polls. At nearly 40%, his standing is weak, but way ahead of anyone else’s.

Above all, what that 40% means is that, for two voters out of five, honesty in a politician is simply not an important consideration. They see it as perfectly legitimate to vote for him anyway.

Sadly, 40% is enough to win in a wide-open field.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but in Britain, you only need to fool 40% on election day to get to do what you want for the next five years.

Boris Coup: Day 59 (yawn)

He came in with a roar, and is going out with a whimper.

Benito: an autocrat who kept Parliament and judges under control
But, in the end, it didn’t work out for him either

Boris Johnson, in his autocratic ambition, wanted to dominate British politics like Mussolini dominated the politics of Italy. He gaily suspended parliament, and only discovered afterwards that he didn’t have the judges on his side (Benito was much more careful in ensuring he could count on the judiciary), so his bold and splendid Trumpian act was ruled illegal by the courts.

No sooner had the suspension been overturned than it became clear how necessary it had been to him. He has yet to win a substantive vote in the Commons. Every time he pushes for something, the MPs push right back…

This has enabled him to present himself as the people’s representative blocked at every time by those pesky MPs trying to flout the people’s will. A latter-day David taking on the Goliath of the Establishment.

This is amusing. What can be more British establishment than a man who was educated at Eton and Oxford and has lived the life of an entitled grandee ever since?

There are, however, people sad enough to fall for this tale. But then there are people out there sad enough to believe that Britain will be better off outside the EU than in. Basically, there are a lot of sad people.

They’re also misled. By blocking Boris, MPs are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re holding government to account. Those who feel they should let Boris do just what he wants are endangering the very basis of our democracy. I hope we never see governments that can do what they want whether our representatives like it or not.

Now Boris has come up with a new Brexit arrangement rather worse than the one Theresa May agreed. He tried to force it through in just a few days (coup habits die hard) and was told by Parliament that they weren’t having that. So now he’s proposing a deal to MPs themselves: if they’ll let him have a General Election on 12 December, he’ll give them more time to scrutinise his bill.

This is a curious and interesting approach to compromise.

MPs are taking the extra time anyway, whether or not he concedes it to them. So it’s hard to see how Boris is offering them anything they couldn’t take for themselves. In return, he wants them to do him a favour. Poor Boris. He needs to take a few more classes on the art of the deal, which usually involves both sides offering the other something they couldn’t get any other way.

He should certainly take those classes from someone other than Donald Trump, who, like Boris, seems much better at claiming he’s made deals than actually concluding them. As he’s shown with North Korea.

Why does Boris want a general election? Well, he’s tired of being defeated in the Commons. He thinks an election would give him a majority. With a ten-point lead in the polls, that makes sense. Unfortunately, plenty of people even in his own party aren’t so sure. Boris has always liked to play the buffoon, but unfortunately a lot of voters now seem him as a buffoon. That lead might vanish in the campaign.

To get an election, Boris needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament. For that, he needs Labour MPs to agree. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been demanding an election, long, loud and frequently, pretty much since the last one. Why? He thinks voters love him and he can win. A ten-point poll deficit? He reckons he can turn that around.

His supporters agree, because last time he came from even further behind and came a far better second than anyone had expected. They seem to forget that coming second is of no value. There are no silver medals in parliamentary elections. Come second, and you’ve lost.

A lot of Labour MPs are beginning to wonder whether a general election right now’s such a good idea. After all, Corbyn did better than expected when he was barely known to the electorate. He was also up against a dismal campaigner, in Theresa May. This time, voters have had plenty of chance to see how he dodges the difficult questions, how he dithers in reaching a decision – why he’s even dithering now, over an election – and he’s up against a far better campaigner in Boris.

The net result of all this? We have no idea of how things will turn out. Will Boris get his deal through Parliament? Will he get his election? Will he win or will he lose?

Looks like we have further exciting times ahead. Rather like the last three and a half years since the referendum. Yawn.

Brexit started as a spectacular catastrophe. It’s morphing into a boring disaster. Alas, poor Britons.

The Boris coup: day 3

Boris has announced that he’s now going flat out to get a deal with the EU.

Why now particularly?

Because now he’s doing away with the interference of those pesky members of parliament. Of whom he happens to be one. And by no means the least pesky (ask Theresa May).

If anyone was in any doubt of the plans of the Downing Street junta, a source from inside the bunker cleared them up on Thursday, as Heather Stewart tells us in the Guardian:

We’ve been very clear before that we will deliver Brexit by any means necessary and that remains the case.

Any means that they deem necessary. If that means trampling mere constitutional niceties, say by removing the only means of democratic oversight of government that Britain has, well, you can’t make brain soup without breaking heads.

Citizens out in the streets to resist the coup
And where was the Leader of the Opposition? Nowhere to be seen

Boris Johnson, we have come to learn down the years, may not always be entirely truthful in his public pronouncements. Few can have been naïve enough to believe him when he announced he was proroguing parliament to give himself time to refine his domestic agenda. If they were that innocent, there was a lovely hot-mike moment, also on Thursday, when, as Heather Stewart also points out, the defence secretary Ben Wallace was caught saying:

”Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want. It has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality. So eventually any leader has to, you know, try.”

He continued: “Our system is a winner-takes-all system. If you win a parliamentary majority, you control everything, you control the timetable. There’s no written separation, so … you pretty much are in command of the whole thing. And we’ve suddenly found ourselves with no majority and a coalition and that’s not easy for our system.”

Ah, yes. He belongs to the lazy right that believes things should be easy. 

In a democracy, when parliament can’t decide what it wants, you wait until at last a majority emerges for one solution or another. A system where one man decides he can do without a majority, and does away with parliament to impose the decision himself, is called an autocracy.

But Boris can dress up what he’s doing as democratic because there is widespread voter support for him. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone either: whenever an autocrat takes power, he does so with a large minority, or even a majority, backing him among the people. Right now, the Tories enjoy a lead over Labour in the low double figures, small but enough to encourage him down the road he’s taken. Indeed, add in the Brexit Party vote, which he would get if Farage’s party chose not to stand candidates against Tories, and he’d be sitting on 45%, a dream level of support for an autocrat.

Also enough to win him a sizeable majority in parliament if he decided to go back to ruling through it. Which, as Ben Wallace indicated, he would probably do if he had the majority that gave him the control he wants.

His strong position isn’t only down to Boris. It equally depends on the sad weakness of the official opposition to him. It’s interesting watching all these developments from abroad, in Spain. One of the better Spanish papers, El País, had this to say about developments in Britain:

A triple offensive, with appeals to the courts to overturn the prorogation, calls to citizens to block the streets and a final attempt in Parliament to prohibit by law a disorderly exit from the EU, are laying the groundwork for a decisive week in the history of the country.

Well, the appeals to the courts have started badly, with a Scottish judge refusing an interim order reversing the prorogation. Still, the efforts proceed, under the leadership among others of the doughty, impressive Gina Miller.

Citizens have been taking to the streets to try to block BoJo’s coup. Now here’s where one might expect a radical left-winger to prove his credentials. A man from that political tendency would, one might imagine, be a strong proponent of direct extra-parliamentary action by the population, to reinforce any action in parliament.

In other words, the protest action called ‘stop the coup’ gave Jeremy Corbyn, the official Leader of the Opposition, the opportunity to prove his worth. Sadly, it has proved exactly that. His is a business-as-usual approach, and instead of joining the protestors, he preferred to go campaigning in a Scottish constituency.

Most of us already knew this about him, but his failure to pick up the baton offered him by ‘stop the coup’ proves it: he’s a Leader of the Opposition who can’t lead, and who doesn’t even oppose much.

No wonder BoJo is opening up a commanding lead in the polls.

That leaves Corbyn with only the legislative route open. To push a bill – or help push someone else’s bill, since there are real leaders in the House of Commons – through Parliament, in the brief time it’s allowed to meet before it’s prorogued.

Then hope for the best against the odds, since BoJo has already shown his readiness to ignore Parliament.

Oh, well. As El País says, it’s a historic moment for Britain. And, given the quality of the leadership on display, a pretty dire one.

Now that May is out

Whenever I look down from the aircraft window at the kind and welcoming city of Valencia, where I live but which I’m leaving yet again, I wonder at the irony of an existence that has taken me somewhere so pleasant but prevented me staying there any length of time.

The Jacarandas are flowering in Valencia

The feeling is particularly strong when I leave my home bathed in sunshine in 24-degree weather (the mid-twenties are my favourite, warm enough without being too hot) and I’m heading for England where, the pilot assures us, the temperature has struggled to get into double digits and the rain is chucking it down. Why, I wonder, am I exchanging early summer for mid-autumn?

Joyous welcome at Heathrow

Ah, well. England has many charms – the glorious green, for instance, the upside of all that rain – and I suppose one just has to live with the conditions, doesn’t one? After all, it’s often said of the country that it has no climate, only weather. Cold, wet June? Unexpected, maybe, but Britain is the country where it’s best always to expect the unexpected.

In any case, England has no monopoly on lousy weather. Valencia may have less but when it lets itself go, it can be thoroughly maddening. My family from Scotland joined us in Valencia at Easter and had to put up with day after day of rain, while the weather at home was apparently glorious.

Bad weather is international. Indeed, it provides one of the more entertaining illustrations of the cultural links across nations, at least in Europe. Weather wisdom shows just how strongly we all belong to the same family, across our continent, and that our differences are matters of degree only.

For instance, many countries have old sayings warning people of the need to keep wearing warm clothing later than they might think. In England, for instance, we say:

Ne’er cast a clout till May be out

Just for clarification, this has nothing to do with getting the leader of the Conservative Party out. Theresa May’s out already, and the pantomime to select a successor’s already under way. Topical though it might be to interpret the proverb as relating to her, it is in fact meteorological, not political.

I’ve always enjoyed the double ambiguity of the expression.

The first ambiguity is easy to resolve. Since a ‘clout’ can mean a blow, ‘cast a clout’ sounds like ‘throw a punch’ or slap someone. But it only takes a moment’s reflection to realise that in this context, ‘clout’ must be clothing in some archaic form of English, so we’re being told, ‘take off not a single article of clothing’.

But what about ‘May’? It could mean the month of May. My suspicion, though, and other authorities seem to agree, is that it might mean the ‘mayflower’, hawthorn. So don’t abandon any of your clothing until the hawthorn’s in bloom – which happens at the end of April or beginning of May. A little early, in my judgement, given my experience of what an England do in late April or early May.

Hawthorn in bloom:
England can be lovely when the may is out

The French are more explicit:

En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil; en mai, fais ce qu’il te plait

“In April, don’t take off so much as a thread; in May, do what you like.” France is further south, of course, so maybe they can afford to take more of a chance.

Strangely, though, travelling further south still, to Spain, leads to a far less optimistic view of the weather prospects:

Hasta el cuarenta de mayo, no te quites el sayo

“Until the fortieth of May, don’t take off the tunic.” Possibly they mean a smock, rather than a tunic. It’s a more rustic form of traditional clothing, and I suppose most of these weather proverbs have agricultural roots.

Isn’t it amusing that all three nations have such similar advice? All three use a little epigram, with an internal rhyme and a witty structure, to generate a smile and stick in the memory. There is only a small difference on the dates. But that’s a mere detail, in contrast to the similarities between nations that obviously belong to the same family and have so much culture in common.

It’s curious, too, that the Spanish advise going right into June before casting a clout. The fortieth of May would be the tenth of June. That felt inappropriate as I made for the airport this morning, on just that date, through the sun and warmth.

It seemed far more applicable in England, where the pilot had to warn us about stepping from the plane to the jetway, where driven rain had made the floor slippery. And where the first thing I had to do once I’d recovered my suitcase was pull out a sweater and a waterproof jacket (yes, I’d had a little foresight).

In England, I had to put on an extra clout or two though May was well out. For any understanding of the word May: blossom, month or Conservative leader.

Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.

Brexit: what a brothel

It’s amusing how often you get quizzed about Brexit, as a Brit abroad. In fact, I’ve so often been asked “Brexit? What on earth’s that about?”, that I now deliver my stock response with the pat monotony of long repetition.

“No idea,” I say, “but if you ever find out, do please let me know.”

Brexiters always told me that the whole point of leaving the EU was to take back control over our own affairs. In a highly interdependent world, where no country, not even the most powerful, has full control of its future, let alone a middle-ranking power like Britain, that always struck me as a questionable notion. But today, with both main parties having lost control of themselves and the government having lost control of the country, my inclination would be to paraphrase Gandhi: asked for his opinion of Western Civilisation, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Well, in that same spirit, I think some measure of control would be suit Britain admirably. But that’s an aspiration, not a reality, and it looks a long way from being reached while the Brexit chaos continues.

Look at the current situation. May has negotiated a deal of some sort. The EU has made it clear no other deal is on offer. Parliament has rejected that deal. It has also voted against leaving with no deal. It has voted not to have a second referendum. It hasn’t, however, come up with any alternative deal.

It seems Britain has shown great skill in saying ‘stop’ but has yet to develop the ability to find a path along which it might say ‘go’.

It strikes me that we’re in the situation of three friends who have gone on holiday together, say to Southern Spain. When they get there, they find it’s not quite as they’d hoped: the accommodation isn’t that comfortable, the sea’s a long way away, restaurants and bars serve food with a distinctly foreign flavour to them.

So one friend suggests heading home. Another suggests they stay a while but cut the holiday short. A third wants to go somewhere else. But no one can agree with either of the others.

Mightn’t the most sensible thing be to decide to make the most of where they are? To try to enjoy what the place they chose might have to offer despite its failings? To learn, in other words, to like what they’re doing, if they can’t work out what they’d like to do?

It seems Britain still hasn’t come around to reaching that rational conclusion.

I’m told that it’s wrong to refer to voters, even Brexit voters, as stupid. Of course, my first reaction is to think “if voters don’t want to be thought of as stupid, they shouldn’t vote stupidly”. But, OK, I can see how it might be counterproductive to say so out loud. So I will not refer to Brexiters as stupid. However stupid their behaviour. Instead, I’d simply ask, “how smart can it be to wish for Brexit if no one can agree on what Brexit they want?”

Foreigners have little difficulty answering that kind of question.

The Spanish daily El País points out that, given the “wicker” she has to work with, it’s absolutely no surprise that Theresa May’s Brexit basket is empty. She has nothing to offer. But more than that, the paper is adamant that the Brexit mess is entirely of Britain’s making. The country, it claims, is incapable of agreeing with itself. It feels the EU has already been far too generous in its concessions. Certainly, El País is clear that the EU should concede nothing more.

El País illustration for a leader article headlined ‘Moribund Brexit’

That, however, is a well-constructed, carefully argued case. A much more succinct view was offered to me in Italy.

“Brexit? Che casino.”

That literally means “Brexit? What a brothel.” Though these days ‘che casino’ has just become a familiar way of saying “what a mess”.

Personally, I think a brothel, with its implications of questionable behaviour, outright deception and the meretricious pursuit of financial benefit through behaviour dubious to the point of corruption, sums up Brexit perfectly.

Even better, though, is the smile or chuckle that tends to accompany such comments. It should be a matter of pride that Britain amuses the world these days. However, generally we want people to be laughing with us, rather than at us. Unfortunately, Brexit has reduced our once-proud nation to a laughing stock. Even if the laughter is sometimes accompanied by tears.

Oh, dear. Brexit. What a brothel indeed.

The Seven: Magnificent? Or misguided?

The departure of seven MPs from the Labour Party is not the most significant political news of the last few days.

That was a poll published by the anti-racist group Hope not Hate which found that over two-thirds – in fact, 68% - of British voters felt that no party represented their views or interests.

Followers of Jeremy Corbyn in Labour will deny that, convinced as they are that the policies on which he secured significant support in the last general election are massively popular. That denial is part of a broader state of mind that denies anything that seems to conflict with their world view. They seem to forget that though he won far more votes than expected, he still lost that election, coming second in a competition where there is no sliver medal.

What they also deny is that times have changed. Back in 2017, Corbyn was the new kid on the block. He seemed to have a fresh message, to have come from a different mould that produces most politicians. Above all, he seemed honest, principled and courageous. Two years on, little of that remains.

He brought a great many people into the Labour Party, the vast majority of them opposed to Brexit as well as attracted by his stance. But then he spent eighteen months trying to hide his true position on Brexit, which left his reputation for honesty in tatters. And when he finally made a few grudging remarks on the subject, he revealed that he was indeed, as many had suspected, a Brexiter. He has yet to confirm that with a vote in parliament – so far, his Brexit voting record is unblemished – but many of his erstwhile supporters haven’t waited for that, but are already drifting away, disappointed.

Opposite him is Theresa May, chasing an impossible dream of a compromise Brexit deal which will allow her somehow to hold together the battling wings of her Conservative Party. She ducks and weaves and fails to deliver. The result is a growing lack of confidence in her, so that her fellow MPs only resisted voting her out for fear of provoking a general election in which their own seats might be in danger.

In other words, the leaders of both main parties are trying to be all things to all men, and failing, as always happens in these cases, to be anything to anyone.

It’s not at all surprising, therefore to see both parties in a race to the bottom in the polls. They are currently neck and neck on 37%, a level of popularity that, in the past, would have guaranteed defeat in a general election, were it not that the other lot are doing just as lamentably.

In the light of this fine track record it is, if anything, surprising that only two-thirds of the electorate feel let down by both main parties. Certainly, it’s hard to deny – well, if you’re not a Corbynista it’s hard to deny it, but they can deny anything – that the political system is broken and badly needs fixing. The departure of the seven MPs might trigger a political realignment that could be a first step towards that repair.

Certainly, that’s what they seem to hope. And they may be right.

Seven MPs quit Labour: but will they be magnificent champions?

It’ll only happen if they can draw some more MPs to them. Seven is far too few. Maybe less than a handful of Tories from the left of the Party, though it’s hard to see how you can really build a Centre-Left movement with the Tories – look at the disastrous damage that Nick Clegg inflicted on his party by trying to play that game. Above all, they need thirty or forty more Labour MPs.

If they reach a critical mass, they may pull the trick off. Then they may indeed emerge as the Magnificent Seven. The pioneers with the courage to break free from tribal loyalty, to set the political system on a new and more hopeful course.

But if they don’t, they’ll just be seven lonely voices clamouring in the desert. They’ll look as though they had merely jumped before they were pushed, which is hardly a path to the moral high ground. And it will be remembered about them that they may have damaged the best hopes of success of the anti-Brexit movement: as anti-Brexiters, they may have made their stance look anti-Labour.

It’s all down to timing. If they’ve got it right, they’ll look like champions. But if they’ve got it wrong, they’ll simply turn into an obscure footnote in history.

Quite a gamble. Times are going to be interesting...

The vote she lost. The vote he lost. The vote neither wants to give us

Exciting times!

First there was the vote she lost. Theresa May denied MPs a vote on her Brexit deal in December for fear she’d lose by upward of 100 votes. Then in January she held it and lost by upward of 200.

Then there was the no confidence vote in the government. Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t propose it in December for fear he’d lose. Then he put it down in January and duly lost it.

Now there’s the vote neither of them wants us to have. Another referendum to ask the people whether they still want to go ahead with Brexit, after all this mess it’s landed us in. And May and Corbyn don’t want that, for fear they might lose it too.

They both denounce a new referendum as an affront to democracy. An interesting position. I mean, if it confirmed the result of the previous one, in favour of Brexit, I think us remainers would just have to bite our tongues. We might think the decision wrongheaded, boneheaded even, but with two popular votes going that way, we’d just have to put up with it.

Fun following the debates from Italy
A cartoon by Giannelli in the Corrriere de la Sera
Theresa May is asking 'Redo-rendum?'

But May and Corbyn still don’t want another vote. And why not? Because there’s a chance it might reverse the previous decision. And though both made a bit of a show of campaigning against Brexit last time, deep down they both want Britain to leave the EU. 

Actually, not that deep down. May keeps talking about her goal being to deliver Brexit. As for Corbyn, he told the Guardian on 21 December that Brexit would go ahead if he were elected. So they offer different flavours of Brexit, but no relief from Brexit in either case.

So, they don’t want a referendum for fear they’d be denied their Brexit.

In other words, in declaring it anti-democratic they’re using a special but not unusual definition of democracy. To them, democracy is obeying the will of the people when it gives them what they want in the first place.

You may feel that’s not terribly honest. And you’d be right. But spare a thought for Corbyn. His own dishonesty is particularly difficult.

See, his fans point out that his is a fresh take on politics since he wants, insists even, on policy being made by members. Unfortunately, he heads a party in which three out of four members want a new referendum, and four out of five want to stay in the EU.

How do you handle that situation if you’re a Brexiter and the party leader?

A conundrum. But Corbyn, such a traditional politician however much his zealots say he’s an innovator, has simply adopted the ‘listen and ignore’ stance.

In line with party policy, he wants a general election and only if he can’t get one will he consider other possibilities. At that point, all options including a second referendum, would still be on the table.

That’s listening.

Here’s where the ignore bit comes in.

His reaction to defeat in the no confidence motion, his only route to forcing an early general election, wasn’t to say, ‘ah, well, we’d better consider another approach’. It was to say ‘we’ll keep bringing in no-confidence votes’.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Of course, it makes you wonder why he bottled proposing a no-confidence vote in December, given he’s happy to keep bringing them in. And you might think it odd that he’s OK with holding repeated no-confidence votes until he gets the result he wants, but won’t countenance repeating a referendum.

That, though, is to miss the cunning of his stance. While he keeps proposing no confidence motions, he doesn’t have to consider any alternative. A second referendum is an option on the table, but that’s just where he chooses to leave it: on a table he won’t go near.

Again, not necessarily all that honest a way of following party policy, you might feel. A bit Jesuitical. Like crossing your fingers when you make a promise. But it allows him to say he’s doing what he’s been told, while being able to keep his Brexit.

Trouble is, it may not be that safe. For the rest of us, of course. But even for him

Because, as the saying has it, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

A little humour, a little much-needed bloody-mindedness

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching the French film Ridicule, which focuses on how the court of Louis XVI – yes, the one who ended up losing his head on the guillotine – had made a cult of wit, deemed to be fiendishly clever though it was often also fiendishly cruel. 

The film contrasted such wit with a more British quality, which it called  ‘humour’, and clearly viewed as greatly superior.

At one point, the protagonist, a celebrated wit, meets the King who asks him to say something funny, there, immediately, on the spur of the moment.

“Be witty this minute!”

But on what subject could he be spontaneously witty? The King has a suggestion.

“Use me, for example.”

The wit has the perfect answer.

“Sire, the king is not a subject.”

I thought that was brilliant, but I suppose you could argue that it is perhaps spoiled by a deferential quality verging on the obsequious.

The contrast is emphasised at the end of the film by a French aristocrat, by then in exile in England while the revolution is running wild in his country, walking along a cliff path above a breath-taking seascape. A gust of wind takes his hat. He cries out.

“My hat! I’ve lost it.”

“Better than your head,” his English companion replies.

“Humour!” replies the Frenchman, “it’s marvellous!”

Ridicule: A hat is lost, but a head is spared

To me, that is as witty as the first rejoinder. But there is indeed a difference: it doesn’t establish any kind of hierarchy between the speakers, it shows neither deference to the other person or superiority over him, but merely shares a smile between equals. If that’s humour rather than wit then, yes, I too prefer it.

Sadly, in the last two or three years that famous British sense of humour has been a little scarce in public discourse. The leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties take themselves far too seriously to allow of any smiles. So it was good to see something of the spirit reappear a little, even though it was  on the Tory side at the expense of Labour, and it felt more like wit than humour: the comments were designed to belittle opponents.

It seems that Environment Minister Michael Gove, even though he’s generally someone to laugh at rather than with, showed some elegance when he described MPs who hope Theresa May can get a better Brexit deal than she has so far, as swingers in their fifties hoping that Scarlett Johansson would show up at one of their parties. Quite amusing though I was glad to read that Amber Rudd, speaking up for the female side, suggested “or Pierce Brosnan”.

The Justice Secretary, David Gauke, went one further and described the official Labour Brexit position as hoping for Johansson to show up on a unicorn. Cruel but hardly unfair: Jeremy Corbyn keeps suggesting that if elected, he will somehow bring home a hugely preferable deal to May’s, with absolutely no evidence to suggest that he could do any such thing.

At least the comments were worth a smile, not something that marks British politics much these days.

But there’s another quality my compatriots regard as quintessentially British. It’s a certain cussedness, if not downright bloody-mindedness, which refuses to allow power to do just what it likes. “Over my dead body,” it seems to say, or even “over your dead body” – after all, we cut off our King’s head nearly a century and a half before the French more famously did the same to theirs.

It’s particularly welcome to see that spirit stirring again.

Twice in 24 hours, the May government has been defeated in the House of Commons by MPs across parties working to prevent a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. It is heartening, in this parliamentary democracy, to see parliamentarians asserting their right to resist the government.

What’s more, the initiatives came from the backbenches, not the party leaderships. Yvette Cooper, leadership candidate defeated by Corbyn led one attack. Dominic Grieve, ex-Tory Minister, guided the other. The leaders merely opposed, in the case of May who was defending her deal, or followed, in the case of Corbyn who is, well, Jeremy Corbyn.

The government was particularly angry over the second defeat, with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who allowed the vote to take place. Precedent was against him, and it was a decision that seriously threatened the government’s usual prerogative to decide what gets discussed and what gets voted on. But what it showed was a Speaker intent on seeing all parliamentarians able to decide national policy, and not just the minority of them that form the government.

A refreshing notion.

The Speaker, though originally a Conservative himself,
getting right up Tory noses by asserting the authority of Parliament

And there’s a delicious irony to it, too. Brexiters keep saying that the aim of leaving the EU was to ‘take back control’. I don’t think this is what they had in mind, but I’m revelling in the spectacle of Parliament reasserting its authority over the Executive, which had been allowed to erode away far too far.

Now, that’s the kind of control I’m only too glad to see us taking back.

Especially as it’s so cussed. And gives us a lot to smile about.

Mould events. Or watch them pass you by.

With hindsight, William Yale, the main US intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War 1, would criticise the reaction of his President, Woodrow Wilson, to major events. The winner isn’t:

…he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realise this simple truism.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read those words, in Scott Anderson’s excellent book Lawrence in Arabia, since they struck such a bell. Last week, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had to pull a vote in the House of Commons on the Brexit deal she’d spent two years negotiating with the European Union, because it was obvious she was going to lose and lose massively. She wasn’t so much in retreat as in precipitous flight.

Theresa May in the House of Commons
Admitting defeat, in her very attempt to dodge it,
by pulling the Brexit deal vote

Such a government rout would normally present an Opposition with a golden opportunity, to make a bid for office itself. Many of us were, therefore, surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, who as leader of the Labour Party also leads the official opposition, declined to take the obvious next step and propose a vote of no confidence in the government. He said he wanted to wait for the ‘appropriate moment’ to do so.

That seems to mean waiting until the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten MPs, turned its back on Theresa May and committed to vote with the no confidence motion. In other words, he wanted to wait until he could be sure of winning.

Let’s step back over forty years, to 5 April 1976, when Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

With the promised support of the then-Liberal Party (today the Liberal Democrats), Callaghan enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. He was fairly secure against a no-confidence motion. Besides, a new Prime Minister – you might think he deserved a bit of a honeymoon.

Thatcher gave him just two months.

On 9 June 1976, she brought a no confidence motion against his government.

With his majority, Callaghan could, of course, see it off. She lost by 290 votes against 309. Close, but still a defeat. Many might have dismissed her, feeling that she’d overreached and failed, proving poor judgement.

But that wasn’t the lesson she learned from the experience. Instead, a little over nine months later, on 23 March 1977 she tried again, and was beaten again. Indeed, this time, the margin was even bigger: 298 to 322.

What was she playing at? Let’s be clear: I found Thatcher a bigoted, ruthless, often cruel Prime Minister. But she was an effective politician. Those two failed attacks issued a clear statement of intent: she was going to harry Callaghan and keep on harrying him until she beat him. She was saying, not just to MPs but to the electorate as a whole, that she was serious about taking the top office herself. That displayed qualities much admired by voters: toughness, guts and tenacity.

Finally, in 1978 the Liberals withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government. That’s the equivalent of what Corbyn’s waiting for from the DUP: the withdrawal of support by a small but crucial partner. So Thatcher came back to the attack again. She brought her third no-confidence motion on 28 March 1979. And this time she pulled off the trick, beating him in what became a famous photo finish: 311 votes to 310. Just one vote. And it was enough to bring down his government.

A general election was held in May, which the Conservatives comprehensively won, and Thatcher was in office for eleven years. The Tories, indeed, through her and her successor John Major, were in power for eighteen.

The only no confidence motion she won was in 1979. And even then, there was no guarantee of victory. After all, she scraped through by just one vote. By the Corbyn definition, that made it only barely an ‘appropriate moment’. But she pressed ahead anyway, as she had twice before in the previous three years, though the moments then were so inappropriate that she lost.

The defeats didn’t stop her. Because she moulded events rather than waiting for them to turn favourable to her. Like her or dislike her – and I don’t like her at all – she was undeniably one of those who, in William Yale’s words, ‘consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events’. The reward was eighteen years of rule by her party.

Corbyn’s waiting for events to come to his rescue.

Where Thatcher got stuck in, as a player in the game, and flourished, he’s sitting on the sidelines. Inviting history to sideline him.

Labour languishing where once it soared

They’re funny old things, opinion polls. A bit discredited, in Britain. At the 2017 general election, they pointed towards a sizeable Conservative win, which would have justified Theresa May’s calling of an early General Election. She’d hoped to increase her small majority in the House of Commons. In the event, she did far worse than the polls suggested and lost her majority altogether.

That left egg on the faces of the pollsters, Theresa May, and those, including me, who felt that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a defeat of historic proportions.

Indeed, Corbyn supporters never tire of telling the rest of us that under his leadership, Labour achieved the biggest increase in its popular vote since World War 2. Which is true. It’s also true, however, that he still lost the popular vote to May and emerged with far fewer MPs. His supporters are less inclined to mention that, though it’s also true.

Given how much better their man performed than the polls predicted, they now like to dismiss unfavourable polls as fake news. Curiously, that doesn’t stop them triumphing on those occasions when a poll, even a single, isolated one, shows a Labour lead – not a frequent occurrence these days. I suppose its very rarity makes it all the more welcome to those frantic to prove that Corbyn is proving effective.

Well, the polls may indeed be only a poor guide to what will actually happen in an election. But between elections, we have no other indication of the state of the parties. And in the past, they’ve often proved more accurate than in 2017.

For instance, most of us in Labour went into the 1997 general election confident, though not complacent, about winning. The confidence was justified by the massive win, and it was based on excellent poll standings. Take a look at the graph. It shows the standing of the two main parties, as an average of the previous fifteen polls, from the moment where there are fifteen onwards.

How Labour fared in the polls in the runup to victory, and now

The lower pair of lines shows how, in the first seventeen months following the 1992 election, Labour had gone from trailing the Conservatives to establishing a healthy lead over them. The lead tightened in the actual election but Labour still won a landslide victory.

They were helped by the fact that the Conservatives were massively split, above all over Europe. The then Prime Minister, John Major, even called his anti-EU colleagues ‘bastards’. It has to be said that he was also rather a colourless figure, short of charisma or even any manifest talent for his office.

Today, the Conservatives are led by a colourless, uncharismatic leader with no manifest talent for her office. Her party is even more split than Major’s over the issue of Europe. Moreover, some of the most outspoken among her Brexiter critics, notably Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, have set a new benchmark in bastardy.

Now look at the upper pair of lines, covering the seventeen months since the 2017 election. Unlike 1992, Labour under Corbyn started with a lead over the Tories, which seems to have dissipated. Now the two main parties are essentially level-pegging, and Labour may well be a little behind, though the difference is well within the margin of error for any opinion poll.

Things can change, of course, as they did in the 2017 election. But there is one big difference: back in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn was still a fresh face, a break from the old style of politics represented by establishment figures who were beginning to look well past their sell-by date. Since then, Corbyn has become far better known. He’s tried to steer a careful course between Brexiters and anti-Brexiters, committing to neither side, in order to avoid offending Labour voters from either. Unfortunately, that is very much the old-style, tired electoral game, where it matters more to count votes than to defend principles. His is a stance which rather takes the sheen off his appeal as a fresh, more principled figure and leaves him, instead, looking just as stale as his predecessors.

That might not matter if the approach were working. But the polls suggest it isn’t.

A big last-minute surge? Well, it can’t be ruled out. But given the image Corbyn projects today, I think it would be reckless to count on it.

Back in 1993, we’d already had fourteen years of Tory rule. But John Smith had taken the Labour Party to a position where, for the first time, our poll standing meant we could look forward to a forthcoming election with some optimism.

That is emphatically not the case today. At the moment, it looks as though Labour might win enough seats to form a minority government, as May leads now. Or it might lose again.

Opinion polls may not be reliable, but we have no other measure of where we stand. And the picture they paint today is far from pretty.

Corbyn supporters, and Corbyn himself, are calling for an early general election. Maybe they ought to be more careful what they wish for.