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Jeremy Corbyn may say he’s ready to be Prime Minister but the evidence suggests he is far out of his depth

Matthew d'Ancona
Matthew d'Ancona

He’s not up to the job. Jeremy Corbyn, that is. It really is that simple, and it needs to be said, now, this week, more forcefully than ever. The Labour Party must, and should, choose whoever it pleases as leader: in this instance, it has done so, emphatically, twice. But the office of Prime Minister is different. And Corbyn isn’t fit to hold it.

Why say that now, when the Government — one barely worthy of the name, clinging on to power only with the purchased votes of the Democratic Unionist Party — has yet again embarrassed itself most grievously, this time over the Windrush generation?

The answer, of course, is implicit in the question. After eight years in power the Conservatives look exhausted, drained of purpose, scarcely convinced of their fitness for office.

“I’m ready to be Prime Minister tomorrow,” Corbyn told Grazia magazine in December. Unfortunately for him, and possibly for us, that is not the case, as he has shown repeatedly this week. On the Syrian air strikes he has scaled new heights of sanctimony.

He postures as the courageous voice of ethical foreign policy in a world of warmongers, neo-imperialists and strategic opportunists taking their cue from President Trump.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (PA)
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (PA)

Yet his obsession with the “moral high ground” (the phrase he used on The Andrew Marr Show) is not a guide to action but a permanent argument against taking it. He refuses to condemn Russia for the poisoning of the Skripals until presented with “incontrovertible evidence” — a criterion that he knows (one hopes) is almost impossible to meet in the real world of intelligence-gathering.

Confronted with the chemical weapons atrocity at Douma, he calls upon the Government “to now go back to the UN and promote a resolution” — as if such resolutions have not been sought time and again, only to be vetoed by Vladimir Putin.

He speaks of a “political solution” as if there had not already been eight rounds of talks in Geneva, as if hundreds of diplomats worldwide had not invested thousands of hours in the quest for such a peace. I’m sure they would love to know what Corbyn has in mind, and what has eluded them.

What is so alarming is that the man who would be PM seems blind — willfully or otherwise — to all this. “Surely the killing has to stop, a ceasefire has to come into place,” he pleads. as if this were a novel insight or an objective not honestly sought by his opponents.

The role of Prime Minister involves a hundred daily decisions, a hundred compromises. It is not a theological post or an ideological sinecure: it is a battlefield of praxis. It is a simple fact that this man could not cope with that task.

Tell me that Britain needs a Left-wing government. Tell me that after eight years of austerity the voters want a different approach. Tell me that Labour’s strong performance in last year’s general election was not a protest vote but a staging post to power. But don’t tell me Corbyn is fit to be Prime Minister. Because he just isn’t.

The mistress of post-truth soldiers on

Kellyanne Conway is one of the few survivors of the team that swept into the White House with Donald Trump. Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Hope Hicks and Michael Flynn are gone but Conway survives, performing with the hollow-cheeked resolve of a country singer reduced from Nashville to a Holiday Inn lounge.

Except the tunes have changed. Remember when Conway gave the world the phrase “alternative facts” to describe the President’s claim that more people attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s in 2009? In two words she captured the Trump team’s (presumably unattributed) devotion to Nietzsche’s dictum that “there are no facts, only interpretations”.

Trump adviser: Kellyanne Conway (Reuters)
Trump adviser: Kellyanne Conway (Reuters)

Now she must defend her boss against former FBI director James Comey. She challenges his account of meetings with Trump, accusing him of “engaging in revisionist history”. To which the obvious riposte is: in a world of “alternative facts”, what objection can there be to “revisionist history”?

If you insist reality is negotiable, you can’t complain when the other guy puts forward his version. Those who live by post-truth, die by post-truth.

*There is something absurdly retro about the case of Scott Purdy, the 23-year-old who says painkillers he took after a go-karting accident made him gay. In less enlightened times it was routinely asserted that male homosexuality was a disorder — acquired by boys who were too close to their mothers, or simply read too much poetry.

Mr Purdy insists that the medication Pregabalin made him lose interest in his girlfriend and long for “male attention”. This is a very silly syllogism: man takes pills; man realises he is gay; therefore pills made him gay.

I hope Mr Purdy relaxes about his natural sexuality — and keeps taking the tablets.