Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves Labour Headquarters, London on June 9, 2017. NurPhoto/SIPA USA/Press Association. All rights reserved.From the Times to the Financial Times, if you read broadsheet accounts of Conservative party responses to their election disaster you can see that it is not just the Prime Minister who is among the walking dead. The whole lot of them are so shell-shocked they don’t know what has hit them – or how short their life-span has become. There is talk of how good it is that someone as clever as Michael Gove has been put in charge of agriculture because the complications of rural subsidy and food supply “post-Brexit” will be formidable – as if Gove will be mucking out with the farmers for the years to come. ‘The party’, we are told, is ‘not yet ready’ for a leadership contest now – or even in six months. Vicious disputes amongst Conservatives are familiar from the early years of this century. The same fumes of entitlement still waft over from the last one. The Tories, and not just the Tories, believe they are born to exercise power while Corbyn is not seen as ‘serious’. They are in denial.
The most entertaining example of such denial comes courtesy of Peter Mandelson in the Mail on Sunday. Entertaining because he was the most ruthless of the Blairite exterminators, telling anyone who queried even mildly their version of neoliberal globalisation that they were yesterday’s story. Most followers of Tony Blair and David Cameron were confident that they were on the side of history. Mandelson has a special position amongst them: he not only divined the way the cookie crumbled, he crumbled it himself. Only four months ago he said:
The problem with Jeremy is… that he literally has no idea in the 21st Century how to conduct himself as a leader of a party putting itself forward in a democratic election to become the government of our country… Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone like Jeremy Corbyn? I don't want to, I resent it and I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day I try to do something to save the Labour party from his leadership.
