Princess Zarah and the Corbyn Delusion. The band is getting back together.

When they aren’t being politically insufferable, occasionally the far left are quaintly naive.

Last week “Your Party” – not my party, or possibly not your party but the party still to be formerly known as ‘Your Party’ – had a public online form you could suggest what their party, “Your Party”, should actually be called.

It’s as if BoatyMcBoatface never really happened.

I’ll admit to sniggering at suggestions, from people who I doubt support this new party, of “Jezbollah”, and “The people’s front of Judea” – but I only sniggered because the harder left have absolutely no sense of humour. I didn’t send one in, myself, I just watched from the sidelines – you know – present but not involved.

Long time lefty comedian Tracy Ullman, stoked brocialist rage when she did a sketch about Corbyn, which you did not need to be remotely right of centre to see was very funny and bitingly accurate satire.

My favourite incident was not in fact Jeremy Corbyn’s fault.

The BBCNews subtitles are created by an AI system and sometimes famously get words wrong. Jeremy, no royalist, had been asked to comment on the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. Given his views on the monarchy he quite reasonably stuck to the human loss aspect for the family as he passed “condolences to Prince William and his brother”, which the BBC subtitling machine interpreted as “Prince William… and Hizbollah”

You could not convince a single Corbynista that some malicious BBC Tory (anyone who wasn’t in their gang was a Tory, or acted like one) hadn’t set the whole thing up, even though it would have been impossible.

Such moments will probably again, and always used to, prompt a social media bout of socialists’ favourite sport: whataboutery. “It’s only funny if he really was a joke, and he isn’t – not like you stuck up clowns”, or “How sad you have time to make snide jokes at him, when people are starving/dying/oppressed in the world“. The latter often being triggered by things utterly unrelated to the man.

Of course in Jezworld, where the faithful gather to hear magic grandpa speak, under the shade of the magic money tree, ad-hom attack, whataboutery, even a dash of racism are all ‘OK’, as long as the person is the enemy. Otherwise it’s behaviour they would condemn in the strongest possible terms. I was on the receiving end back in the day, and I haven’t forgiven or forgotten.

My recent evidence for this behaviour? The number of emboldened self declared socialists, who in classist attacks ‘fat shamed’ Lucy Connolly. They actually accused her of being an ‘Aldi shopper’, which given they are suspicious of anyone who has any money, bar themselves is revealing. It’s not the first time. There were plenty of angles they could have taken about the Connolly case – odd, but not surprising, some went for that.

I notice I keep saying Corbynistas, but the erstwhile Robin to his Batman gets upset if you focus on the name Sultana, and you get quickly labelled with misogynoir – I think it’s just sour grapes.

Zarah is the self appointed heir-to-Jez, who may eventually get him to move aside, but for someone who has never done anything but politics, she seems very happy with the student protest genre of the subject.

But what I really like about this collection of idealist zealots (oh they’ll hate that won’t they- sorry) apart from the fact they could damage Labour’s vote – as Reform has done to ours by the way – is their extraordinary level of delusion. They simply cannot see the evidence before them and believe in the possibility of the wildest things. Not bad dreams per se, just unworkably bad ideas.

One of Germany’s finest exports Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director at the IEA, wrote an excellent book on this called “Socialism: The failed idea that never dies” – well worth a read – and it was as “Your Party” was having a nomenclature discussion that his colleague Dr Christopher Snowden tweeted (I still can’t say X-ed) this:

“Which is your favourite loony left theory a) The politician I dislike is only popular because the BBC put him on Question Time. b) The billionaire press only focus on an issue you care about to distract you from the issue I care about.”

It sparked a lively debate. The first option of course ignores the case of former BNP leader Nick Griffin, who for once, with those people who spray the word at almost anybody, actually was a racist. There were many more suggestions, but mine was based on probably my strangest and not altogether pleasant period as a political journalist – when Corbyn was actually leader of the Labour Party.

It was basically the delusion, vituperatively defended, that the ‘establishment and elites’ tore him down because they were terrified if they didn’t, he’d surge to power on an unstoppable wave of popular acclaim, with middle England’s pensioners singing “Oh Jer-emy Coooorbyn” at the top of their lungs all the way to a polling booth.

Milliners working with aluminium roasting foil couldn’t have had more business. Still I guess I should have ‘educated myself’ and ‘read a book’.

It was hard to know how to reflect this in an objective way, because I knew, from talking to Conservatives, they weren’t remotely rattled, they were bemused.

I don’t think it’s dismissible as a theory that Corbyn’s period as leader so wonderfully described in ‘Left Out’ by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire was responsible for keeping the Tories in power – good or bad thing though that may have been, with hindsight. It was certainly a factor in the 2019 election victory, and people should be wary of giving Boris all the credit. Corbyn’s flexible stance on Brexit helped of course.

The hard left hate Starmer far more than they hate the right, bar the populist right – with whom ironically they share a lot, not least the conviction they ‘speak for the people’. All of them. All of the time.

By ‘the people’ one assumes they mean Palestinians in Gaza, because whilst it’s not a crime at all to take such a position after nearly two years of killing in the middle east, they spend the vast majority of their time talking about them. As for the people of Britain, well it depends if you are a fellow comrade or demonstrably the working class, otherwise they are less interested.

Which is odd of course because so many of their most vocal supporters are anything but working class. Plummies, who believe they walk the path of lefty righteousness; ‘up the revolution as long as daddy can keep his shares’. The leader of Momentum whose family happened to own a Picasso is still a belter.

As Margaret Thatcher once said:

“Communism was the regime of the privileged elite, capitalism the creed for the common man”

Our fault is we’ve got terrible at selling the last bit. The first bit stands undiminished everywhere it’s been tried.

Odd to say it, at this point, but I do know some hard left people I can have a good debate with, who I like personally, but again they baffle me. If it’s not a personality cult, it’s a form of political religion to which it is ridiculously easy to be labelled a heretic.

Having seen the ‘be nice’ crowd be anything but in the past, on the one hand I’m sad this delusional politics is back on a roll, I’d rather defeat Labour without them, but even if the Tories do disappear as some predict, or even hope, I still think the majority of the electorate can spot undeliverable, uncosted pie-in-the-sky politics when they see it.

Let’s hope, because right now on the right, it’s getting harder to sell that idea, and easier just to give up and believe in easier solutions than truly exist.

Or miserably watch just it happen.

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