Jeremy Corbyn just made his first mistakes – but he’s not a sexist

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/14/jeremy-corbyn-mistake-sexist-shadow-cabinet

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Jeremy Corbyn is not a sexist. And that’s probably the most dismaying thing about the bind in which he currently finds himself, berated first for giving five out of five top jobs to men and second for dodging media questioning about it; it’s not even deliberate. This is just what happens when you’ve never previously run the Westminster equivalent of a whelk stall.

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You start with the most egalitarian of intentions – Corbyn apparently always meant to have a half-female shadow cabinet – but events overtake you. People play games, quibble about which job, remind you they were promised X or Y in return for support. And suddenly the whole thing is careening out of control and the fact that you put Heidi Alexander at health and Lucy Powell at education and chose your first female shadow defence secretary in Maria Eagle gets lost; because the first thing you did was to announce four white men shadowing the major offices of state, alongside another elected as deputy leader.

Depressingly, Corbyn’s most ardent defenders on social media this morning are people crowing that “you feminists” don’t want appointments made on merit – as if ex-Treasury minister Angela Eagle wasn’t arguably better qualified to be shadow chancellor than backbencher John McDonnell. And just like that, a little bit of air leaks out of the balloon; what felt like the beginning of something genuinely new starts to feel depressingly familiar.

In fairness, McDonnell is the logical choice for Corbyn, because politics isn’t just about merit; a leader’s relationship with the chancellor is so crucial they need to be ideologically and personally close. What we’ve seen is just the natural consequence of Corbyn being so ideologically distant from most Labour MPs that he’s fishing in a tiny pool – limiting the chances of finding someone who isn’t white, male and so offensive (given previous statements on the IRA) to the DUP that that party will surely now struggle to side with Labour against the Tories in parliament.

So it would have been pure, unadulterated spin to announce some interesting female appointments first and thus change the angle of the story. But that’s the thing about despicable old spin; it gets journalists off your back, so that you can get on with some actual work, rather than wasting months arguing plaintively that some of your best friends are women, actually.

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Which brings us to the second wasted opportunity. Corbyn is arguably right that the relationship between journalists and politicians has become dysfunctional; a strategy for resetting it would be refreshing. But agreeing to interviews on the BBC – practically the only outlet statutorily required to be impartial – and then hastily cancelling isn’t a strategy, it’s just a series of accidents that end up making someone whose whole appeal was engaging with the people look evasive.

These teething troubles could, of course, all be ironed out with experience – and maybe slightly better advice from the still small team around Corbyn. But the most worrying thing about the shadow cabinet is that few have the stature to challenge the leader if he does make mistakes, as all leaders do; some are so green they’ll merely be thrilled to have a job, others too dazed by defeat.

The hasty shoehorning of some women into more junior jobs hastily rebranded as shadow cabinet roles – like Gloria De Piero’s brief of “young people and voter registration” – meanwhile suggests they’re not exactly going to be in the heart of the arguments around what is now a very crowded table. It’s politics, all right; but somehow “new” doesn’t quite seem the word.