The hatred that Amis and Corbyn share

Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You do not expect underdogs to be adept, do you? It doesn’t really matter how vile, otiose or absurd their beliefs are, either. So long as they are up against someone more powerful, a certain sentimental section of the population will be rooting for them. Look at the Palestinians, for example. And look at Jeremy Bloody Corbyn.

My wife — a Tory — said to me the other day: ‘You lot want to watch it. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the bloke. The sympathy votes will be stacking up.’ We had been listening to some deposed Labour grandee laying into Jezza for his witless, virtue–signalling lapel-badge politics, his managerial ineptitude, his beard, his dress sense, perhaps even the whiff of his breath — lentils stewed in an Irish peat bog for interminable hours — his pre-teen internationalism and his utter estrangement from the electorate.

I was cheering along and agreed with every point. But there is so much to have a go at with Corbyn that in the end it sounds like overkill, like breaking if not a butterfly, then a really crap moth — one of those tiny brown micro-moths even the lepidopterists get bored by — on a wheel. You can feel, when these fusillades rain down, the audience shifting uneasily and the weight of allegiance drifting towards the dull, the stultifyingly dull Marxist idiot. It does not matter how accurate the barbs may be; simply that there are too many of them, one after the other until it becomes a barbarism. And the public, or some of it, thinks well hell, if he can arouse this level of animosity, then he can’t be all bad.