Labour's election - a failure of competence and courage

A visible lack of leadership.
Corbyn's virtual absence during the 2016 referendum campaign was a massive dereliction of duty.
Then  for a long time he refused to define his Brexit position, finally doing so simply to proclaim himself  “neutral“.  To be neutral on the most important decision facing the country since WWII struck me as politically suicidal. Rule 101 for a leader is…. to lead.  He needed to adopt a considered position, justify it in public, and persuade the unconvinced to follow. That’s what leaders do.  I made this point many times to people - including at the last Labour Conference. In vain.

Antisemitism.
Corbyn isn’t an antisemite. But when the former Labour MP Luciana Berger suffered antisemitic attacks - instead of getting on the next train to Liverpool, wrapping his arms around her, and working out with her what to do, Corbyn confined himself to stating that he had fought racism all his life. True but wholly inadequate; as was his muddled reaction to BBC interviewer Andrew Neil’s treacherous invitation for him to apologize for antisemitism. Another example of ineptness and lack of leadership.

The Flood of new party members
The huge influx of new Labour members and "registered supporters" was partly a consequence of a policy to allow anyone to join for £3 no questions asked. Some of those new entrants appear to have been spoilers, fifth columnists - and for sure there were some antisemites among them. Labour wasn’t geared to dealing with significant numbers of racists in its ranks and took far too long to meet the challenge.  More ineptness.

Jeremy Corbyn - integrity is not the same as ability
 I believe Corbyn is an honorable man with noble instincts. However, he is far from being an intellectual giant - and I found myself doubting his ability to manage either the country or the party. He is not especially articulate - good at reading prepared questions in parliament but poor on his feet, sincere but not quick witted, and definitely not a profound or well-informed thinker. Before he became party leader he had spent over 30 years as a backbencher, presumably a good constituency MP but without holding any senior cabinet or shadow cabinet position. He has never run a department - or indeed run anything requiring serious managerial competence.

Labour's Manifesto
The manifesto, allied to a plethora of supplementary policies, brought to mind the illusory dexterity of a conjuror pulling a succession of rabbits out of a hat. Both over the airwaves and on the stump the promises sounded more and more improbable, certainly for a first-term government. To accomplish all of them would require perhaps three or four terms in office - something that would have been clear to anyone who has ever tried to implement a complex initiative. The tabloids and the BBC, among others, fastened onto the cost of carrying out Labour’s manifesto pledges. In practice, that would have been a relatively trivial challenge as anyone with knowledge of macoreconomic history would know. The idea that the country couldn’t afford them is nonsense. Far trickier would have been the human and material (non-financial) resources required and, above all, the time. In politics, once you have promised something, the clock starts ticking and time is not on your side. A manifesto crowded with promises is a recipe for disbelief.

Metropolitan Myopia
 From the moment of Corbyn’s ascension, Labour’s inner circle has consisted almost entirely of London MPs: Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry, Keir Starmer, Barry Gardiner and Corbyn himself. I formed the impression - having spent the decade between 2004 and 2014 working outside the capital -  that this cosy entourage suffered from a kind of metropolitan myopia that limited their ability to see clearly beyond the M25. In a Newsnight interview with Barry Gardiner, the BBC's Emily Maitlis asked how often Corbyn had visited a hospital before or during the campaign; the answer was once. How often had he visited Wales? Also once.  Johnson surpassed the Labour leader on both counts - just as Trump had out-visited Clinton in the rust belt towns during the US presidential campaign.  Corbyn had three years to visit every part of the country from St Ives to John O’Groats. He seems not to have thought it necessary.
Le Royaume-Uni profond as the French might say (the UK’s beating heart)  has often seemed beyond the Labour hierarchy’s  experience, and present in their thoughts mainly as theory.

Authenticity and the Working Class
Of the role of Seamus Milne - Corbyn’s éminence grise - we know something but perhaps not enough. Born into privilege and educated at Winchester and Oxford, he seems to have supplied the left-wing intellectual grounding that Corbyn lacks; a grounding doubtless derived from a study of the literature (Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, etc.) and from familiarity with grand national and international politics - though poseessing, one suspects, only a theoretical, if any, knowedge of how “the other half lives”. As a scion of that “other half”, I am especially sensitive to questionable claims made on its behalf by people of more “elevated” background.  Corbyn is not entirely absolved in this respect, as he unwittingly demonstrated when he showed up at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in 2018 wearing an anorak. I shuddered at the sight, not in misplaced harmony with the gutter press, but because had my working-class aunts and uncles been invited to attend, they would have worn their ceremonial best: shoes brightly polished, ties straight, dresses, shirts  and blouses spotless and crisply ironed.  No one would have a chance to look down on them. If Corbyn was showing himself to be a man of the people, he mistook the medium for the message. This example is less trivial than it might seem because it is redolent of middle-class posturing, of inauthenticity. He showed this again in claiming absurdly that he watched the Queen’s Christmas message in the morning, when everyone with a television in the living room knows that it is transmitted in the afternoon. When I was a youngster, we didn't have a television, but I remember the whole family gathering round the radio at 3pm on Christmas Day to listen to the monarch.
During the election campaign we heard how toxic Corbyn had become in some working-class constituencies. In part, I suggest, it was because he came over as a fake, an embarrassment who posed as one of them but had not taken the trouble to internalise their concerns.
Those of us of a certain age will recall that Labour leader Michael Foot was pilloried for a similar faux pas at the Cenotaph in 1981 when he reportedly showed up in a donkey jacket. The problem with this story is that he didn’t; it was fake news. He wore an elegant overcoat that differed from the conventional solemn garb in that neither the coat nor his tie were black. Unlike Corbyn, Foot was intellectually brilliant, if sometimes careless of his appearance - a bit like an absent-minded professor. What he shared with Corbyn was that he proved to be an electoral liability.

Ideological rigidity
Finally, there is something dark and unaccommodating at the heart of the current Labour hierarchy, an ideological purity and deafness to compromise that are in sharp contrast with the oft-repeated claims that the party functions as a democracy. I saw this in action at the Party Conference in Liverpool in 2018 when the leadership sidelined the majority position of the delegates on Brexit in favour of a fudge that has turned out to be a vacillating failure. In more brutal fashion, I became the butt of a very nasty insult from a Labour politician on election day by venturing to offer an opinion mildly at odds with his own. If the Party is to rediscover its roots and its purpose, it will have to do some serious introspection - beginning with defenestration of the leadership and its deeply misguided entourage. Following this, a little travelling is in order, and a large dose of humility.