The Corbyn coalition

One of the most disappointing things about the general election for me was how few people must have read Nick Cohen’s article ‘Why You Shouldn’t Vote For Jeremy Corbyn’ before entering polling booths on 8 June. Or perhaps they did read it and thought: up yours, mate. The more I think about it, the more I suspect it’s a case of the latter.

Mr Cohen, quoting from a Labour party member, listed the perfectly sensible reasons why sane people would not want Corbyn as prime minister. These included, but were not confined to: his support for the IRA and opposition to the Northern Ireland peace process; his admiration for the genocidal anti-Semites of Hamas; his infantile leftism in general; his appearances on Iran-backed Press TV; his readiness to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands; his general incompetence… and so on, ad almost infinitum. And then, come election day, the public marched down to their local church or school and gave Corbyn’s Labour the biggest increase in its vote share since 1945. The opinion polls now put him well ahead — if they are to be believed (which I always doubt), and an election were to be held tomorrow, Labour would win. So what has been going on?

Of course, it was a staggeringly inept Conservative campaign for an election that wasn’t wanted by the populace — and Theresa May was revealed to be aloof, robotic and, worst of all, incompetent. It takes a leader of monumental ineptitude to make Jezza look capable — but look capable (and likeable) he did, by comparison. But either way, the stuff outlined by Nick Cohen simply did not play. Or maybe it did, except not in the way Nick intended.

In the two weeks before polling day, the press and broadcasters laid into Corbyn on a daily — nay, hourly — basis, on precisely the points that Nick outlined.