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Corbyn’s Moment: the End of Diminishing Returns?

At the time of the recent UK elections, it was easy to assume that the major hoorays who had put themselves up had studied the same large-type political primer.

Between the childish jibes, they advanced the same one-dimensional ideas and shared an almost identical lack of vision.

We’re fairly comfortable with political and managerial incompetence in Britain. It’s just our way, and we know our place.

We’ve been fagging for and fawning on upper class twits and posh-school duffers since Elizabeth the first was a lad.

It’s part of being British. We die in wars to protect them from reality.

Our only acts of revolution since Wat Tyler and Guy Fawkes received their terminal thrashings from the prefects have been to go cap-in-hand for a decent wage and to stop voting for any of them.

One lot or the other of them still gets in. It was matron’s favourites last time, although none of us supported them. Less than a third is a pass in the upper sixth remove maths class.

Only now, when a rare man of the people throws his cloth cap into the ring, do we find that those that failed to be elected last time did so by the spectacular idiocy of trying to grab part of the same 30 per cent.

Think about it: by imitating the policies of those who can only inspire a few diehards to vote, you expect to win power. It’s wonderful in its absurdity.

Yet that’s what the failed Labour leadership candidates are worried about. Jeremy Corbyn is going to upset the few Tory don’t-knows who might have been persuaded to vote for the same policies under another brand.

Forget the 70 per cent who would never vote for any of them and who are now lining up to join the Labour Party – or at the very least an alternative that hadn’t existed since wormtongue Blair oiled his way into Number 10.

Whether you agree with him or not, what Corbyn is doing is enfranchising the young, whose vote thus far has been a snare and delusion, and the teeming millions of other people with sufficient education and intellect to know that democracy has been missing for decades and is about to make a spectacular return.