Look what Corbyn can do in twenty-four hours: now imagine twenty-four months

If current polls are to be believed, Jeremy Corbyn is about to become Labour leader, not just by a small margin but by a landslide.

That is, as our own Atul Hatwal pointed out on Monday, a pretty significant “if”. For a number of reasons; protest voting in polls but not in elections, “shy” voters, ease of manipulation by flashmobs of more informal polls, difficulty of accuracy polling such a select group, further change in the final few weeks and so on. Given this, it is still perfectly possible that Corbyn will fall at the ballot stage, despite Westminster’s prevailing wisdom.

But let us suppose for a moment that he is genuinely on course to win.

In this case, we are at a genuinely historical turning point – a convulsion – for the party; one of a kind it has not really experienced since Ramsay MacDonald’s “betrayal” in the 1930s.
In short, the wilderness years of the Fifties and Eighties would soon start to look like a tea-party.

In the few short weeks following the election, the psychological state of at least a segment of the party, like any person after a cruel blow, has been evolving rapidly. In this case, from initial denial; through collective tantrum, angry with the world; through to depressive isolationism and potentially actual self-harm.

And the divide over the Corbyn “insurgency” is no longer an issue of right and left. While you might expect to hear noises from the political centre at Uncut, the concern here is not merely from the point of view of his politics, disastrously out of touch with the British electorate though it might be (for the record, Anthony Painter makes an admirable fist of taking these seriously and rebutting them point by point here).

No, for many on the party’s left as well as the right, the reality is that the party is looking to take on a leader with personal credentials considerably less attractive than those of Michael Foot. If you still doubt this, read on.

We have already heard about Corbyn’s disturbing apologism for the IRA in its heyday, his “friends” Hamas and Hezbollah. Phenomena comfortably explained away by his supporters as “engagement” in the cause of peace. But in the space of twenty-four hours, two rather more damning stories have surfaced.

First, Monday night’s Channel 4 interview. Over the last couple of weeks, his campaign has sat in awkward silence over claims that he donated to, and attended meetings of, Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), a pro-Palestinian campaign which even the highly questionable Palestine Solidarity Campaign (see here) sees as extreme.

It is run by a self-confessed Holocaust-denier, Paul Eisen. Naturally, Corbyn’s supporters – in true hard-left (or SNP) fashion – have dismissed this as a “smear”. However, as that ever-polite Times columnist, Danny Finkelstein, tweeted last weekend:

@AviG123 Avi, it’s not unreasonable to ask if the prospective leader of the Labour Party is funding a holocaust denier, is it?

— Daniel Finkelstein (@Dannythefink) August 16, 2015

When pressed in that Monday interview, Corbyn finally admitted – back, metaphorically, to the wall – that he may have donated to DYR: but it was ok, on the grounds that Eisen wasn’t an anti-Semite when he met him, it would have been cash not a cheque, and that it was years ago. Today, in response to the Jewish Chronicle’s questioning on the matter he shifted position to now say “he has no recollection of contributing” to DYR. He also says “he did attend DYR events in the past but no longer does so.”

Inconvenient, then, that there’s a photo of Corbyn attending DYR’s meeting in 2013. Which was not really so many years ago and, indeed, Eisen is on record as calling himself a Holocaust denier in 2012.