Mick Hartley

In a decent Labour Party an old stager like Alan Johnson would be treasured. There isn't a decent Labour Party though – not at the moment. We have Corbyn, we have the Corbynistas, and we have Momentum.

Johnson is interviewed in the Times today (£):

For his party’s moderates, AJ is the great leader Labour never had….

This working-class lad who rose up the ranks of the trade union movement before becoming an MP could not be more different from the scruffy middle-class protester Jeremy Corbyn. “The big debate in Labour right now is, are we a party of government or not?” Mr Johnson says. “Some of these people say that’s not the priority, but to have principles without power is futile.”…

Mr Corbyn has taken his party to an all-time low in the polls and lost the confidence of 80 per cent of his MPs but he still looks set to be re-elected as leader by party members next week. For Mr Johnson this left-wing folly is chattering-class self-indulgence of the worst kind.

“It’s conducted mainly by middle-class people who are not going to feel any difference with changes of government,” he says. “The most vociferous Corbyn supporters are in swathes of East Yorkshire and Sussex and Surrey. They live very nice lives, they are harking back to their student days when they were occupying the chancellor’s office.

“It makes me really depressed and sometimes angry when I see some smart-arse 26-year-old saying, ‘We’ve always felt the Labour Party is a place of nasty Blairites but now Jeremy is there we’ve decided to give them the honour of our membership”.

There is, in his view, something cult-like about the Corbynistas. “It’s like a religion, they follow Marx, Engels and Trotsky as if they are the Bible, but they were creatures of their time. If Marx was alive now he would have a completely different view, but they crystallise it into a faith. You have to be a true believer.”

They are, he believes, completely out of touch with the modern world. “It’s like when Bob Dylan went electric. He had the folk music with the harmonica, they thought that was proper music. When he went electric they booed him. Labour went electric when we revised clause four and appealed to a much wider group and they want us to go back to playing folk again.”

Momentum’s mass rallies and social media tirades frighten him. “It’s worse than self-indulgent, it’s . . . tyrannical. Loads of people get together and shout and scream at anyone who doesn’t believe. When you say at a meeting, ‘Tony Blair was a great prime minister’, or mention Harriet Harman, they boo. I used to go to loads of really tough union meetings, telling Liverpool strikers to go back to work. They always listened, they never booed.”

The leftwingers see going into government as a betrayal. “They are not interested in getting into power because victory is a bourgeois concept. These are the people who thought Nelson Mandela was a sell-out because he was magnanimous and worked with others.”

Mr Johnson is scathing about Mr Corbyn himself. “He is totally incompetent and incapable of being the leader of a political party and he knows it,” he says. “He hasn’t got a huge ego but it’s got bigger and he’s self-righteous. There’s this adulation out there, it goes to your head. No compromise with the electorate was the left’s theme in the early Eighties and God forbid we go back to that.”