People say Corbyn’s getting better. I wonder. He seemed out of touch today. Soaring employment, falling inflation, the booming stock-market, the Trump ascendancy, the implosion of Isis, the Aleppo siege? He ignored the lot. He brought up the exiled Chagos Islanders whose right to return has been denied for decades. Having mentioned them, and enjoyed a flush of reflected sanctity, he dropped the issue entirely. Poor old Chagos. Its scattered natives are used to being abandoned by false-friend statesmen but this seemed particularly cynical.
Corbyn’s main brainwave today was to deploy all his rhetorical skill, all his mastery of the political arts, to lure Mrs May into accidentally disclosing her red-lines on Brexit. Every one of them. In full. But inadvertently. Whoopsidaisy. Clumsy me. Slip-of-the-tongue kind of thing. This is why Corbyn’s not improving. He can’t learn from his mistakes. He may think he’s never made one
Mrs May told him that gossiping about the negotiations before the haggling begins would be ‘the best way to get the worst deal’.
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