Why I voted for Jeremy Corbyn

Is the ‘Tories for Corbyn’ campaign politics at its most infantile? As one of the few conservative commentators willing to defend it in the media, I’ve been doing my best to rebut that charge.

The most frequent line of attack is that there’s something dishonest about it. The Labour leadership election isn’t an open primary. It’s restricted to members, registered supporters and affiliated supporters. OK, you can register as a supporter for £3 — a change brought in by Ed Miliband to reduce union influence — but only if you pretend to be a Labour sympathiser. And that’s just wrong.

The short answer to this is that no such pretence is necessary — at least, it wasn’t when I signed up via the party’s website. In response to the question ‘Why did you sign up?’, I wrote ‘To consign Labour to electoral oblivion’. Nothing fraudulent about that.

All right, say the critics. You may not have lied, but you’re acting in bad faith. You’re taking advantage of a loophole to subvert a democratic process. That’s fundamentally dishonest, even if it’s not duplicitous. It’s unethical, rather than immoral.

I think I have to put my hands up to that, but politics has never been ethical. Indeed, one of the unwritten rules of democratic politics is that it’s OK to behave dishonestly provided you don’t tell an outright untruth. This was summed up by Alex Salmond when cross-examined by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics about his slipperiness regarding the ‘legal advice’ the Scottish government had received on an independent Scotland and the EU. ‘The art of politics is not to lie,’ he said.

What he meant is that it’s perfectly acceptable to say any number of things that encourage people to believe something untrue, provided you don’t tell an out-and-out falsehood.