Mick Hartley

The devotion inspired by Jeremy Corbvyn among certain sections of the progressive classes is one of the great mysteries of our time. The man has been a disaster as Labour leader. As I argued last year, he's the last person Labour should have chosen:

There's what I'm tempted to call a category mistake at the heart of Jeremy Corbyn's campaign for Labour leadership. Corbyn is an eternal rebel; a thorn in the side of the establishment. He could never have survived if his constituency – my constituency, Islington North – wasn't solid Labour. Labour's success, and the particular make-up of the North Islington population, has given him the platform to parade his virtue simply because he's never had to get his hands dirty through the actual business of wielding power. No Labour government in the past would have dreamed of giving him any kind of cabinet responsibility. As it is he's been free to indulge himself in every "progressive" cause, no matter how absurd. Cuba, Venezuela, the IRA, out of NATO…he's never yet met an Islamist he didn't want to share a platform with. It's a politics that hasn't grown up.

Since then he's proved himself to be as useless as predicted. Add to the charges above a complete lack of humour or wit, an inability to think on his feet, and a total inflexibility in his ideas. He hasn't had an original thought since the Seventies, and I don't suppose he had too many even then. In short, he's a disaster. So why do so many people still cling to the illusion that he's some kind of messiah, rather than just a rather stupid and charmless man? 

For Sarah Ditum it's because Jeremy Corbyn is a risk the middle-class can afford to take:

Corbyn's heritage, heirloom leftism is a luxury good – you can afford it if life under perpetual Tory government is something you can bear the cost of. And, like most retro pleasures you find at the farmers’ market, it’s a very modern version of the old: Corbyn’s Labour is a Labour movement for a world where labour has lost most of its former power. A Labour of the herbivores, headed up by a grammar-school boy, flanked by his Winchester-educated press-strategy man, still expecting the working classes to fall into grateful line. That’s an expectation that can no longer be relied on. I know I'm middle class now because Labour’s failure doesn't hurt me. 

There's some truth in that, I suppose. More worryingly, the sect-like feel that used to characterise hard-left groups back in the Seventies and Eighties now seems to have infested the mainstream Labour Party, with Momentum as Corbyn's Revolutionary Guard. And yes, these are predominantly the children of the metropolitan middle classes. They used to populate hard left groupuscules; now they have Labour itself – and they're not about to let go without a fight. Any pretence that this is a party that can appeal to the mass of the working class is now being abandoned. It's not about gaining power any more: it's about the purity of the vision. It's becoming a cult. A generation brought up in disdain of smooth-talking politicians, thanks to glib TV shows and the like ("Have I Got News For You" springs to mind), mistakes Corbyn's total inability to change a single one of his ideas, or acknowledge any mistakes, as some kind of moral integrity. "A breath of fresh air" is a phrase I've heard many times now about the man, when in fact all he brings is the stale old air of seedy fringe political meetings in the back rooms of pubs.

An obvious comparison, in terms of political stupidity being taken for wisdom, might be Peter Sellers' Chance, aka Chauncey Gardiner, the hero of Being There, whose simple-minded homilies are mistaken by Washington society as profound comments on the world. Or there's "The Last Hippie", from Oliver Sacks' book "An Anthropologist on Mars" – the sad tale of a young man who's assumed by all his hippie friends to have reached some kind of spiritual enlightenment, when in fact he has a brain tumour the size of an orange. Not, I don't suppose, that Corbyn is similarly afflicted. But really, as Robert Harris argued last week, we're seeing Labour marching to oblivion under the man.