Which Bit Of The Fence Will The Corbyn Labour Nutters Sit On?

Now that Jeremy Corbyn is Labour leader, the hard work begins.

In particular, some very difficult maths.

I don’t mean Corbynomics, or fiscal theory, or even long division.

I mean basic, bog standard maths of the 2+2 = 4 variety and which are going to give Corbyn his biggest headache.

I’m not a big fan of sums myself, being a words person, so let me lay this out for us all as simply as I can.

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Despite his landslide victory, Corbyn does not command a majority of support in his own party.

Of the 554,272 people eligible to vote, only 422,871 bothered to take part.

Of those, 207 were spoiled. Corbyn won 251,417 of the 422,664 votes counted – enough, under the rules, to claim a 59.5% win.

Unfortunately, if you add up all the people who didn’t vote at all and those who actively voted against, never mind the spoils, you get 302,648.

Which means, ahem, his mandate is suddenly only 45.4% among Labour Party supporters.

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On top of that, reports have claimed that as few as 15 Labour MPs – possibly fewer, if some of them are trying to curry favour with the new leader – voted Corbyn, which means 217 of them didn’t, or don’t want to admit they did.

That means his support within the Parliamentary Labour Party, an organisation whose meetings Corbyn rarely, if ever, bothered to attend, is a woeful 6.4%.

A Corbynite would say the MPs should obey the grass roots’ wishes, and perhaps some will. It’s pretty unlikely that 93.6% of them will suddenly swing behind the new leader, or that they’ll fail to notice half the grass roots didn’t want him.

And it’s the MPs who he will need to support him in Parliament. If they don’t, he can expect to be a laughing stock in the space of a fortnight.

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The trouble is, that’s probably going to be harder for Corbyn than most other leaders.

There are suggestions he will rarely, if ever, use the whip system which usually enforces loyalty – easy to do if everyone agrees with you, more risky if the vast majority are against.

And he’s already suggested his shadow cabinet will come up with policies “collectively” – ie, by committee, not through leadership.

This means he’s going to have to trade policies between factions in his cabinet.

If he does that, he won’t look like a man of principle for very long.

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He could overcome some of this by appointing a cabinet that is a broad church of all in the Labour Party.

Unfortunately, he’s cocked that up.

There’s Andy Burnham, who called him a “disaster” and who is in almost every way evidence that man can de-evolve back to jelly.

He’s shadowing Home Secretary Theresa May who I firmly expect will be able to reach across the Despatch Box and staple him to the wall until all that’s left of him is eyelashes.

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There’s John McDonnell, who was Corbyn’s only friend in Parliament and is already being attacked for praising the IRA’s armed struggle.

He’s a terrible choice, and here’s why.

Corbyn has just experienced three months of extreme Press attention where his every utterance for three decades has been pored over and used to produce a slew of negative headlines.

His top team should consist of people who won’t get the same thing – to make it seem like these are personal attacks on Corbyn, and to keep his economics above reproach.

The fact that his Shadow Chancellor will have a target the size of Dresden on his forehead is a disaster, and shows a worrying lack of realism.

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Corbyn has also sacked or demoted people who offered to help him – Ivan Lewis and Chuka Umunna – which in his current position seems daft. But the worst things he’s done are to do with women.

He’s firstly kept Angela Eagle a junior shadow minister when she could have shadowed Osborne quite competently, secondly left women out of all the top jobs, and thirdly fudged it by letting Angela cover for him at PMQs whenever he doesn’t want to do it.

Fourthly, and worst of all in my view, he’s given a job to Diane Abbott.

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My dog wouldn’t give a job to Diane Abbott. If I were a Syrian refugee fleeing Tripoli and she said she had a dinghy for sale I’d choose to swim. Even Ed Miliband sacked her, eventually.

She’s not just loony, she’s a raving hypocrite who repeatedly puts her foot in it and the kind of person whose record shows she is about as capable of taking responsibility as I am of producing champagne from my eyeballs.

All of which is going to yet further irritate his 96 female MPs and the female section of his grass roots which, as already detailed, are not exactly as supportive as advertised.

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There is one further bit of maths to consider.

He might well be able to change some policies without being elected Prime Minister. For example, it’s more than likely the Tories will tack to the centre ground, in the hope of gathering more support and forcing him even further left.

That might, just might, benefit the whole country.

But if he wants real change, Corbyn needs to become Prime Minister.

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Depending on turnout, that will require somewhere between 12million and 23m people to agree with him.

So far, he has just 251,417 – between 1% and 2% of what he needs.

Where’s he going to get the rest from?

Well, Labour gained votes last time but still lost because it lost Scotland. Corbyn and the SNP might be able to co-operate somehow, and if the SNP imploded he might be able to regain 1m lost votes.

But the Lib Dems lost more than 4m votes which didn’t seem to go anywhere much, and are unlikely to come out for Corbyn. UKIP managed 3.8m votes, and they’re not going to vote for the party of asylum seekers.

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His best hope is the 16m people who didn’t vote at all in the last election.

But they’re not all of one type – they didn’t, however Corbynistas prate, all stay at home because Ed Miliband wasn’t socialist enough.

For example, I have one friend who would have voted Labour but didn’t because he’s in a safe seat. I have another who didn’t vote because they couldn’t be bothered with any of them, and a third who was working late and didn’t make it.

Perhaps if we’re being generous we’d say a third of those non-voters might go for Corbyn. But it’s unlikely he’d retain every one of the 9m who voted Labour last time, so he’s still going to need the Tories to implode if he’s to avoid embarrassing failure in 2020.

So, yes. We’ve had a lot of people join a political party to have a say, most of them bothered to say it, and there’s a new leader who’s promising a new way of doing things.

But the sums so far show:

(Party + MPs) x Votes

= a negative amount of Jeremy Corbyn

Which is bad news if you’re Jeremy Corbyn, and flipping marvellous if you’re George Osborne, hoping to take over after 2017, and under normal circumstances about as electable as Lord Voldemort.

Hopey-changey hokum, eh? Amazing how often it’s bought and sold, yet never gets delivered.


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