If Jeremy Corbyn beats smarmy Owen Smith and is re-elected it will spell the end of Labour
Corbyn leading his disciples reminds me of a cult leader sending his followers to their death
WATCHING Jeremy Corbyn launch his leadership campaign on Thursday, I was reminded of Jim Jones, the US cult leader who ordered his followers to commit suicide in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana.
Make no mistake. If Corbyn is re-elected, it will be the end of the Labour Party.
A poll last week showed the Conservatives opening up a double-digit lead.
Among over-65s, 58 per cent said they’d vote Conservative and only 15 per cent Labour.
That’s one of the largest gaps there’s ever been among this age group.
And remember, they’re the people most likely to vote.
It’s just as well Theresa May is prevented from calling an election by the Fixed Term Parliament Act because if one was held in six weeks’ time, Labour would be wiped out.
In Wales and the Midlands, where Labour trails the Tories by 27 points to 44, we’d see a repeat of what happened in Scotland last year.
There wouldn’t be a red rosette left standing.
Yet in spite of this, the party’s spellbound members seem determined to re-elect their vegetarian guru.
Corbyn is leading them straight over a cliff, yet they’re content to march in lockstep beside him.
The bookies have him down as the six-to-one favourite to win the leadership.
Part of the reason is that the challenger, Owen Smith, is such a smarmy little weasel.
The 46-year-old MP for Pontypridd, nicknamed “Oily Smith”, has positioned himself as a slightly less dogmatic version of Corbyn.
Someone who shares his leader’s political convictions but who is pragmatic enough to command the loyalty of the 172 Labour MPs who called for Corbyn to resign last month. But could he?
If Smith isn’t prepared to challenge the MP for Islington North over his backing of Islamist terrorists, his belief in open-door immigration and his willingness to hand the Falklands over to Argentina, why should sensible, grown-up Labour MPs give him their support?
Smith, who’s been described as a political chameleon, has decided he has a better chance of winning the leadership election if he signs up to Corbyn’s crackpot policies than if he tries to haul the party back to reality.
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One area in which Smith parts company from Corbyn is that he wants to hold a second EU referendum.
Smith was a passionate Remain campaigner and refuses to accept the democratic result.
No doubt he’ll want to re-run the Labour leadership election when he loses that too.
The difficulty for “Oily Smith” is most of Labour’s 500,000 members support Corbyn, as do most of the 185,000 who signed up this week.
Like Jim Jones’ followers, they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
They’re convinced the 67-year-old manhole enthusiast will lead them to the promised land.
And why vote for Corbyn Lite when they can opt for the real thing?
I expect each session of Theresa May’s new Cabinet begins with five minutes of jubilant laughter and back-slapping
It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Labour’s dwindling band of moderate MPs.
The leadership election is due to drag on for another two months — that’s two months in which the public will be exposed to a bitterly divided party — and will almost certainly end with Corbyn being re-elected.
After that, Westminster’s answer to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan will set about avenging himself on the MPs who participated in the failed coup.
Corbyn made this clear at his leadership launch, when he announced that all Labour MPs will have to be re-selected by their constituency parties if they want to stand again at the next election.
I doubt many of the 172 rebels will be, given the party’s takeover by swivel-eyed Corbynistas.
Meanwhile, over at 10 Downing Street, I expect each session of Theresa May’s new Cabinet begins with five minutes of jubilant laughter and back-slapping.
At this rate, the Tories will be in power until 2030.
ID mix-up is Blumen' annoying
THE actor Michael Caine has decided to change his name – to Michael Caine.
He got fed up with airport security staff becoming suspicious when he handed them his passport, in which he’s identified as Maurice Micklewhite, his real name.
“I could stand there for an hour,” he complained.
I know how he feels.
I’m getting increasingly irritated by people mistaking me for Heston Blumenthal.
Not long ago, an attractive young woman came up to me in the pub and asked if she could take a selfie with me.
“Finally,” I thought. “Fame at last.”
Just before she took the picture, I jokingly pointed out that I wasn’t the celebrity chef – not imagining for a second that she’d actually mistaken me for him.
“Aren’t you?” she said. “How embarrassing!”
She then shoved her phone in her bag and sprinted to the other side of the room.
Perhaps I’ll take a leaf out of Michael Caine’s book and change my name to Heston Blumenthal.
That way I won’t have to spend any more time explaining that I’m not actually him.
BT blackout like being lost in space
I WAS one of the BT broadband users reduced to staring at a blank screen last week after a power failure in London’s Docklands left hundreds of thousands of customers unable to access the internet.
When the outage dragged on for a second day, I went round to my next-door neighbour’s house and asked if he was having the same problem.
He very smugly told me he was a Virgin customer, so no.
I used his internet connection, which I grudgingly acknowledged was faster than mine, to go to BT’s website, where I was invited to chat with the company online.
“Open every day 7am-10.45pm,” it boasted.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t click on the link because it was greyed out.
Not open every day then. Only sometimes.
I then tried calling the BT help desk and was told I’d have to hold for half an hour.
Not surprising, because at this point the company was logging 2,500 complaints a minute.
But after holding for 15 minutes, the music stopped and the line went silent.
“Hello?” I said. “Is anybody there?” Nothing. It was like gazing into an endless abyss.
Being a BT broadband customer reminds me of the Alien movie poster: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Big Sam has it all
AS someone who’s followed the England football team for more than 30 years, I think Sam Allardyce is a good choice of manager.
After all, he’s got a proven track record of getting decent performances out of second-rate teams.
Seriously, I’m quite optimistic about big Sam.
As we all know, Premier League players are overpaid prima donnas used to getting their own way.
And for that reason, the only leaders they truly respect are those that can scare the living daylights out of them – whether on the field or in the dressing room.
The most successful football managers combine brilliant tactical brains with volcanic tempers, like Field Marshal Montgomery and the Kray twins rolled into one.
Unfortunately, Roy Hodgson was more like a cross between Captain Mainwaring and Norman Wisdom.
Sam Allardyce, by contrast, fits the bill.
Trump is leading us to World War Three
I CAN understand Donald Trump’s appeal to ordinary Americans.
They’re fed up with being preached to about the benefits of multiculturalism and globalisation by rich white liberals while their wages fall and jobs disappear.
Making Trump president would be a slap in the face of the Washington elite.
But isn’t the end of Western civilisation rather a high price to pay to register a protest vote?
OK, I’m exaggerating a little, but not much.
In an interview in the New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said that if Russia invaded a member of Nato, he’d have to think carefully before leaping to that state’s defence.
That surprised a lot of foreign policy experts because America refusing to come to the aid of a European ally would violate Nato’s Article Five, which commits each member to the defence of every other.
But Trump’s intention was clear.
He’s sending a signal to Vladimir Putin that if he’s elected president, the Russian despot will have free rein to invade the Baltic states.
That would plunge Europe into its worst crisis since 1945 and could lead to World War Three.
I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton but if she’s the only candidate prepared to defend Europe from Russian aggression, I hope and pray she wins in November.
Loo move is loony
A NEW report commissioned by the Speaker of the House of Commons has called for various measures to make Parliament a less intimidating environment for women, including gender-neutral toilets and an end to the breastfeeding ban.
But is this really necessary? According to Jane Merrick, an ex-lobby correspondent, most male MPs are pretty well-behaved.
During her 15 years on the beat, just one MP got fresh with her – a Tory whom she generously refuses to name.
This was after a boozy lunch in an upmarket Italian restaurant called Quirinale.
“On the way back to the Commons, as we walked through a quiet corridor off Westminster Hall, the MP lunged at me, kissing me on the lips,” she writes in Spectator Life.
“I shrank back, horrified and embarrassed, before running away.”
She didn’t report him at the time because she was only a junior reporter and didn’t want to cause a fuss.
“If this happened now, I would give the MP a slap, although this might only excite him,” she says.
“This was probably the one time the line was crossed in all my years in the lobby.”
I knew Emily would be on the fast train to stardom
I WAS excited to see the first trailer for The Girl On The Train, starring Emily Blunt.
I saw her in a play at the National Theatre in 2002, when she was just 19.
I was reviewing it for The Spectator and knew it was the birth of a star.
“Mark my words,” I wrote. “She’s the next Kate Winslet.”
I tipped a lot of young actresses for stardom and most were never heard of again.
But I was bang on the money about Emily.
- Tony Parsons is away