Yahoo News Jeremy Corbyn just delivered a masterclass in how to be the worst party leader in political history
It was, in theory, another fresh edition of Prime Minister’s Questions – Boris Johnson’s first since his election victory – but it made much more sense as a kind of election Match of the Day.
Football pundits have it harder than political pundits, you see. After the big match, ex-professionals must retreat to a giant TV and, with the aid of slow-motion replays, complex graphics and thousands of camera angles, piece together for the armchair fan exactly how the game was won and lost.
In politics, it turns out, the politicians do the job for us. Because here, almost a full month on from Jeremy Corbyn stunning the world (if not himself) by losing not just the election but dozens of northern working-class seats that seem unloseable even now, even after he lost them, here he was, at the dispatch box of the House of Commons, laying on a masterclass in exactly how he did it.
If the purpose of the exercise was for Corbyn to make clear exactly how hopeless, how electorally repellent he is – and this is now a statement of fact, not opinion – he could hardly have done it better.
In fairness, he was placed an easy hand. What more perfect subject matter could be served up, as the fuel for his lap of dishonour, than the thorny subject of which side to take between an Iranian terrorism enabler and the UK’s historic ally? Could a word be whispered on whether the now deceased Qassem Soleimani may have been anything less than a standup individual? No, of course not.
We even had the standard, sixth question shouty peroration, for social media. For what purpose, one has to ask? We still had the absurd blithering on about the “Trump trade deal”, for the second time in as many days. Who is he trying to impress?
It’s a genuine question. Because absolutely nobody was impressed. Certainly not the voters – and they’ve just been asked. But here he was, carrying on carrying on, as if absolutely nothing had happened, like only he and his supporters can.
At one point Corbyn was demanding that Johnson obey the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and withdraw British troops from Iraq. These are thorny questions, though one British troop that has withdrawn from Iraq is a man called Stewart Wood. He was a tank driver in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. In 2015, he stood to be the Tory MP in Tony Blair’s old constituency of Sedgefield. I went around the constituency with him for a feature at that time; he had a stock joke about how it was easier finding WMDs in Iraq than it was unearthing a Tory voter in Sedgefield.
Still, back then, no one had considered the weapon of mass self-destruction that was about to hit the Labour Party in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. If Wood had just stuck around until 2019, he’d be an MP now. (As it happens, he’s joined the Lib Dems over Brexit. Funny old world.)
There are, in theory, 11 more outings like this for Corbyn at PMQs. One imagines he’ll be banging on about the “Trump trade deal” for each and every one of them. It is hard to know where to go with the metaphors. The thing about those Japanese Second World War soldiers found in jungles on pacific islands in the 1970s is that they hadn’t been told the war was lost.
Someone surely has told Jeremy Corbyn. But here he is, still fighting it anyway, for no greater reason than he doesn’t have a clue what else to do. He doesn’t have an idea in his head.
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