I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people who take the film’s plot not as a brilliant comic device but as a ‘how to’ guide to running a political party.
Despite a meagre 2,000 people attending the conference, they have still managed to find ways to split into a multitude of factions
The Producers is about a Broadway impresario who comes up with the ruse of luring investors to back a guaranteed flop which will close after one night, so he will get to keep the over-inflated investment money. Which leads us neatly to Your Party.
In September, Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, sent out an email to supporters, urging them to sign up for membership of her new party at £5 a month. Some 22,000 are said to have joined on that very day. But there was a problem: her male co-founders, the four ‘Independent Alliance’ sectarian Muslim MPs along with the Magic Grandpa himself, Jeremy Corbyn, were unhappy with her taking the lead, and so they sent out an ‘urgent email’ telling people to cancel their direct debits.
Corbyn and Sultana were supposedly the co-leaders of Your Party but over the past couple of months the atmosphere between them has worsened to the extent that there would have been more chance of Ted Heath and Maggie deciding to be co-leaders of the Conservative Party than of this pair even being in the same room together.
Literally so. At this weekend’s Your Party conference, Sultana and Corbyn held separate opening rallies and on Saturday, Sultana refused even to enter the conference hall, in protest at the expulsion – or ‘purge’ as she put it, making sure to use the correct jargon – of Socialist Worker Party members from membership. Gloriously, however, Your Party has not just split between Corbyn’s People’s Republic of Judea and Sultana’s Judean People’s Party acolytes. Despite a meagre 2,000 people attending the conference, they have still managed to find ways to split into a multitude of factions. ‘At one point we had six MPs and four different factions’, according to one report.
It’s ironic that this is the stuff of caricature Jewish jokes, given Your Party members’ obsession with Israel. The most apposite is the one about the Jewish man stranded alone for twenty years on a remote island where he has been shipwrecked. His puzzled rescuers ask why he has built two synagogues. ‘Oh, the other is the one I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’
In the end with these people it always comes back to Jews or, as they put it, Israel. I never thought I’d feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn, but he has spent much of this weekend being assailed by accusations that he doesn’t hate Jews (sorry, Israel) sufficiently well. There is one video on social media of an exasperated Corbyn saying, ‘I’m fed up with being painted into a corner of being seen as a pro Zionist…what do you think I’ve been doing with my life?’ To which comes the response: ‘It was under your leadership the IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted, you condemn the resistance in Palestine, you haven’t called for one unitary state…’ The revolution always devours its children (or in this case, I suppose, its grandpas).
There really isn’t enough popcorn in the world for Your Party. It’s the gift that keep on giving and it’s got it all: misogyny, antisemitism, factionalism and…insert your chosen label.
As for The Producers’ parallel: Zarah’s recruitment campaign went so well that she is said to have raised £800,000. And, according to the reports, she alone has control of the funds for a party – a production, let’s call it – which has had such an epically catastrophic opening that it is, surely, finished. (Just to be clear, because the last thing I want is for Zarah to spend any of that money suing me, I am not suggesting that she is filching any of it. Only that she is an idiotically comic figure.)
On second thoughts, it’s not such a great analogy. Because the main joke in The Producers is that the guaranteed flop, Springtime for Hitler, turns out to be a hit. God help us if the parallel holds. Although the main characters do all end up in prison.
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