After Mr S’s colleague Harry Mount argued in the Spectator that the Labour party ‘has had a brain transplant’ under Jeremy Corbyn with a purge of the Oxbridge set, Martin Amis has accused the new Labour leader of being undereducated.
Writing for the Sunday Times, the best-selling novelist has launched a verbal attack on Corbyn over his ‘slow-minded rigidity’. The life-long Labour supporter — who says he found himself ‘close to the epicentre of the Corbyn milieu’ in his twenties when he worked for the New Statesman — has criticised Corbyn for his lack of educational achievements:
‘He is undereducated. Which is one way of putting it. His schooling dried up when he was 18, at which point he had two E-grade A-levels to his name; he started a course at North London Polytechnic, true, where he immersed himself in trade union studies but dropped our after a year. And that was that.’
All leading Amis to conclude that Corbyn is rather small-minded:
‘In general his intellectual CV gives an impression of slow-minded rigidity; and he seems essentially incurious about anything beyond his immediate sphere.’
Amis also takes issue with how serious Corbyn is, claiming that he lacks a sense of humour; ‘the humourless man is a joke’. He adds that the appointment of Seumas Milne as Corbyn’s new director of communications this week, suggests that Corbyn is unlikely to improve his electability anytime soon:
‘It is far easier to imagine a Labour party that devolves for now into a leftist equivalent of the American GOP: hopelessly retrograde, self-absorbed, self-pitying and self-righteous, quite unembarrassed by its (year-long) tantrum, necessarily and increasingly hostile to democracy, and in any sane view undeserving of a single vote.’
While it seems Labour may have finally lost Amis’s vote, he won’t be joining the other side anytime soon. In an interview with the Telegraph in 2013, Amis said that he would never be able to support the Conservatives. ‘It’s bred in the bone for me that I could never vote Conservative,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’ Mr S suspects that Tim Farron could do worse than to give the author a call.
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