Opinion

Alex Kane: Some time soon Labour will have to make a decision about useless Jeremy Corbyn

Alex Kane

Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an Irish News columnist and political commentator and a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

Jeremy Corbyn tabled Labour's no-confidence motion after a three-hour political merry-go-round in parliament. Picture by House of Commons/PA
Jeremy Corbyn tabled Labour's no-confidence motion after a three-hour political merry-go-round in parliament. Picture by House of Commons/PA Jeremy Corbyn tabled Labour's no-confidence motion after a three-hour political merry-go-round in parliament. Picture by House of Commons/PA

How useless is Jeremy Corbyn? No, it's not a Christmas cracker joke, it's a serious question.

So, I'll ask it again. How useless is Jeremy Corbyn? On a scale of one to ten how woefully, monumentally, lamentably, congenitally, blindly, deliberately, irreversibly, unbelievably, off-the-scale useless is he?

At a moment when the leader of the opposition should be preparing for the highest office and short-listing his Cabinet choices, he is a national figure of fun and pity. Even his own party members and MPs - apart from the wide-eyed loons who want to drag us back to the days when trade union bosses sat in Downing Street and organised stoppages and walk-outs - fail to understand why his standing in the polls is lower than Theresa May's. Hell's teeth, more people want Boris Johnson as prime minister than want Corbyn.

There was a time when I thought he might rise to the challenges and responsibilities of leadership. But it quickly became apparent why he had languished on Labour's back benches since 1983. He really doesn't understand grown-up politics. He is trapped in some sort of la-la land where Wolfie Smith (from the wonderfully funny late-1970s BBC comedy Citizen Smith) was a hero to young lefties and every day meant leafleting outside a Students' Union for the latest half-baked cause. He is cut from the same cloth as those pretend revolutionaries who believed that every problem could be solved with someone else's money; and if there wasn't enough money then just keep on taxing and printing the notes until someone - usually the International Monetary Fund - bailed you out.

His latest schoolboy wheeze was to propose a motion of no-confidence in Theresa May, even though he knew he was never going to win it. I presume he thought that he could have a bit of fun at the expense of the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Sammy Wilson, knowing they would have had to support the very person they were calling on to resign last week. The trouble is, he is too stupid to realise that they were - like most of the rest of us - laughing at him because, bad as May is, she is still preferable to him. That's why he didn't want a motion of no confidence in the government; because such a motion would have required him to list the reasons why a government led by him would be a better option. Even his own front benches couldn't have kept their faces straight.

And now, as blow after blow is rained upon Mrs May and once-loyal supporters aren't bothering to return her calls or catch her eye, opinion polls still have her and the Conservatives ahead of him and Labour. That's some achievement. Regarded as more useless and more unpopular than a party which is imploding in front of our eyes and a leader who wouldn't be able to stand upright were it not for the starch in her blouses.

Every time I see Corbyn at Prime Minister's Question Time I am reminded of Sybil Fawlty's dressing down of Mr O'Reilly in The Builders episode of Fawlty Towers: "I've seen better organised creatures than you running around farmyards with their heads cut off. Now collect your things and get out."

At some point - and it will need to be fairly soon - the Labour party will need to make a decision about Corbyn. At the very moment when the United Kingdom needs the leader of the opposition to be capable of winning an election and forming a strong government which can produce and deliver credible alternatives to the present mess, they are lumbered with Corbyn. He is worse than Michael Foot. He is worse than Neil Kinnock. Many of the young who seem to have been inspired by him when he became leader in September 2015 are unambiguously pro-Remain. They want someone who can sort out the mess we're in. But they're not looking to him any more.

Opposition is the place where future prime ministers are tested. Corbyn has never held office in a Labour government. He was never even a member of a shadow government. He is, in many ways, an old-fashioned campaigner; an anti-establishment player on the political fringes from the mid-1970s. If May is the 'accidental' prime minister, he is the 'accidental' leader of the opposition. His problem is that he doesn't even seem to think it is necessary to convey the impression that he is a PM in waiting. He is still the perpetual revolutionary: Wolfie Smith the pensioner.