So Funny It Hurts

A year ago, I was convinced that Jeremy Corbyn was the person best placed to lead the Labour Party and I cast my vote in the election accordingly. One year on, when my ballot paper drops through the letterbox tomorrow, I am certain that I will not be doing so again. The writer and actor Alex Andreou has set out an eloquent and lengthy exploration of the causes of his own disillusionment with Corbyn. I won’t repeat his litany of the shortcomings of our leader, but Andreou’s reasons for his volte-face chime very closely with my own and it is well worth a read.

For Andreou, it was Corbyn’s performance in the EU referendum that was the final straw; for me, it was his refusal to stand down when his own MPs overwhelmingly delivered a vote of no confidence in him. I do not think it matters how The Coup started – it’s called politics - but the fact is that scores of young and talented left-leaning Labour MPs also lost faith in the leader of their party. I know that the membership is now deemed to have holy sovereignty but we are a party that seeks parliamentary power to deliver our socialist beliefs and MPs need to be a well-led and cohesive force.

I suspect that Corbyn would have stood down but for John McDonnell; if you watch Jeremy’s video plea to members at that time, when he blinks at 1:38 you can just see HELP ME written on his eyelids. And for all the faux outrage over The Coup, we seem to forget that Corbyn is leader as a result of his own coup: pleading for nominations from MPs to broaden the debate and then very efficiently signing up thousands of supporters to deliver victory (marginally more full members voted against Corbyn than with him last year, but amongst supporters it was a landslide).

If I am disillusioned, I fear that others are deluded. We have experienced a lifetime of losing on the left and Corbyn suddenly makes us feel like winners. Indeed, the mailshot I have just received from his campaign is branded with the slogan Winning Values; but these victories are all inward looking. Corbyn wins the right to automatically be on the ballot: victory! Corbyn defeats the legal action to make him seek nominations: victory! Corbyn’s slate is elected to the NEC: victory! New members win the right to vote in the election: victory! All this winning but there is absolutely no sign that the people – the voters - share the new-improved-size Labour Party’s love for Corbyn. His supporters point to some average mid-term election results but the pattern shows that Labour is in danger of becoming a metropolitan party: there have been some devastating council by-election losses in provincial areas as well as damning national opinion polls.

I do not think Corbyn is interested in becoming Prime Minister; what is important to him is leading a party of political purity: the means has become the end. I support his core ideas around employment, housing and transport but Owen Smith has done more to present how these will be realised in the past few weeks than Corbyn has done in the past year. A more effective and efficient leader will be able to communicate the policies that, up until now, have been hidden behind the person. The problem is, Labour has become ‘Just Jeremy’ and this is not entirely his fault.

The worst part of the mess we are in is what is being ascribed to Corbyn by those who follow him. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny - or do I actually mean that the other way round? My main reaction to recent events has been to find them incongruously funny – I cannot take Jeremy Corbyn seriously anymore. The more po-faced and humourless his adoring Momentum masses become, as they spiral towards electoral oblivion with their matching graphic design, the more hilarious it gets; and I keep being reminded of two comedy films from that most politically significant of years, 1979.

Whenever I see footage and images of the mass Corbyn rallies, presented as proof of just how popular Jeremy is, I immediately think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Graham Chapman, playing the eponymous hero mistaken for the saviour, is pursued through the streets by a horde of persistent and devoted pilgrims that he cannot shake off – “Now, fuck off!” “How shall we fuck off, O Lord?” – and he has to fall back on his mum to convince his followers that “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” And whenever I see Corbyn interviewed, delivering messages that a year ago seemed refreshing but now, with hindsight, seem rudimentary and ill-thought out, I am reminded of Peter Sellers’ character, Chancey Gardener, in the film Being There, where the statements of a simple gardener - “as long as the roots are not severed, all is well” - are taken for words of profound wisdom by the political class. Both of these films are perfect metaphors for what is happening in the Labour Party at the moment. I have no idea how this movie will end, if indeed it ever will, but once you have seen the emperor naked, there is no going back; you have realised the joke and it is very funny – but it is so funny it hurts.

The Rusty Sword of Truth

In the graveyard of St. Mary Magdalene church in Whatlington, a village hard by the A21 two miles north of Battle, there is a small unassuming gravestone bearing the legend “valiant for truth”. Having ploughed miserably through John Bunyan’s allegorical A Pilgrim’s Progress a few years ago, because I thought I should, I recognised the phrase as the name of a character appearing towards the end of the pilgrim’s journey to the Celestial City: Valiant-for-Truth is engaged in a single-minded pursuit of the truth.

The trusty sword of truth was not something I associated with the occupant of the grave, the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge. As someone born just over fifty years ago, I was familiar with Muggeridge for his regular appearances on television in the late 1960s and 1970s. But, picking up on the responses of my mum and dad, I formed the impression that he was a figure of fun.

My view of him as a pompous moraliser was cemented around the time I became an adult, when he famously appeared with the Bishop of Southwark on the television chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning to take on two of the Monty Python team and denounce their film Life of Brian as blasphemous and “tenth-rate”.

However, having read Muggeridge’s obituary – he died in a Hastings nursing home in 1990 at the age of 87 – I realised that his Christian evangelism was something that only developed in the late sixties. Prior to that, he had been an acerbic and rebellious journalist, challenging the social order of Britain and the world in the middle part of the 20th century.

Born in Croydon to socialist parents – his solicitor’s clerk father later became an MP in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government – Muggeridge was fervently left-wing in his youth. And when the Manchester Guardian posted him and his wife, Kitty, to Moscow in 1932, the Muggeridges’ admiration for the Soviet Union was such that they intended never to return to Britain. However, the widespread famine he discovered that year, and the censoring of his journalism, quickly disillusioned him. On his return, he wrote Winter in Moscow, a fictionalised condemnation of Stalin’s system.

Continuing his journalistic career before and after the Second World War, there was no target too sacred for Muggeridge - his agnosticism and republicanism were constant themes. In a 1957 article entitled Does England Really Need a Queen? he denounced the monarchy as “a royal soap opera” and caused an international controversy. And in 1965 he courageously attacked the virtual sainthood bestowed upon the assassinated John F. Kennedy as hypocritical. However, in 1969 he hung up his sword, published Jesus Rediscovered and began to attack the permissiveness of society, hanging-out with that monumental figure of fun Mary Whitehouse and her Festival of Light reactionaries.

Picture by Lori Oschefski