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| Eyes down, apocalypse bingo players: Labour’s Jedi council has spoken | Eyes down, apocalypse bingo players: Labour’s Jedi council has spoken |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| The rules for the Labour leadership ballot are the most incomprehensible thing since Fizzbin, the card game Captain Kirk invented to play with Spock and McCoy while being held hostage on Sigma Iota II, with the specific intention of distracting their guards. Only three people have ever been able to keep the whole equation of them in their heads: Erwin Shrödinger (deceased), Tony Blair (discredited), and a hermit guru who lives in a cave four star systems away. No one sought him out in time. | The rules for the Labour leadership ballot are the most incomprehensible thing since Fizzbin, the card game Captain Kirk invented to play with Spock and McCoy while being held hostage on Sigma Iota II, with the specific intention of distracting their guards. Only three people have ever been able to keep the whole equation of them in their heads: Erwin Shrödinger (deceased), Tony Blair (discredited), and a hermit guru who lives in a cave four star systems away. No one sought him out in time. |
| Related: Jeremy Corbyn will be on Labour leadership ballot, party's executive rules - live | Related: Jeremy Corbyn will be on Labour leadership ballot, party's executive rules - live |
| And so to the NEC, Labour’s Jedi council, and a roughly 37-hour meeting to determine whether or not party leader Jeremy Corbyn could automatically appear on the ballot paper now that Angela Eagle has formally challenged him, or whether he has to gather 51 MPs’ signatures like any other candidate. After a secret ballot was agreed for fear of intimidation the upshot – subject to 432 threatened legal challenges - is that he’s on. | |
| In the meantime, the accounts that filtered through suggest the NEC meeting was almost unbearably dignified. The NEC chair asked Corbyn to leave the room for the section where his future was discussed; Corbyn was reported to have refused. He later insisted this hokey cokey was a “total fabrication”, even as one of his loyalists was texting a journalist to declare “Watson has stitched it up”, and Momentum were tweeting: “whatever happens we must #stayput and fight for JC and his policies”. To paraphrase the NEC communiqué on the matter: “Begun this Corbyn war has.” | In the meantime, the accounts that filtered through suggest the NEC meeting was almost unbearably dignified. The NEC chair asked Corbyn to leave the room for the section where his future was discussed; Corbyn was reported to have refused. He later insisted this hokey cokey was a “total fabrication”, even as one of his loyalists was texting a journalist to declare “Watson has stitched it up”, and Momentum were tweeting: “whatever happens we must #stayput and fight for JC and his policies”. To paraphrase the NEC communiqué on the matter: “Begun this Corbyn war has.” |
| In fact, it formally began on Monday, with chief Corbyn ally Diane Abbott telling two separate broadcasters that Angela Eagle was “the Empire Strikes Back candidate”. Yes, you were living in a world where Abbott had effectively cast herself as Han Solo. This was the moment to start rooting for the AT-AT warriors. | In fact, it formally began on Monday, with chief Corbyn ally Diane Abbott telling two separate broadcasters that Angela Eagle was “the Empire Strikes Back candidate”. Yes, you were living in a world where Abbott had effectively cast herself as Han Solo. This was the moment to start rooting for the AT-AT warriors. |
| Needless to say, though, Abbott’s was not the only dystopian vision on offer. Eyes down, ye players of apocalypse bingo, because the Labour leadership contest had also notched up its first “false flag attack”. And that means we all moved one square closer to a full house. | Needless to say, though, Abbott’s was not the only dystopian vision on offer. Eyes down, ye players of apocalypse bingo, because the Labour leadership contest had also notched up its first “false flag attack”. And that means we all moved one square closer to a full house. |
| Not 24 hours after Eagle declared her candidacy, a brick was thrown through the window of the Wallasey MP’s constituency office. And not one hour after that news, people were taking to social media to cast the attack as a “false flag” organised by anti-Corbyn forces. By Wednesday, I expect one of them to have fashioned a Loose Change-style viral documentary, in which it is shown for it to be impossible for the brick to have come from anywhere but the hand of Tony Blair. Jet fuel can’t shatter glass windows. | Not 24 hours after Eagle declared her candidacy, a brick was thrown through the window of the Wallasey MP’s constituency office. And not one hour after that news, people were taking to social media to cast the attack as a “false flag” organised by anti-Corbyn forces. By Wednesday, I expect one of them to have fashioned a Loose Change-style viral documentary, in which it is shown for it to be impossible for the brick to have come from anywhere but the hand of Tony Blair. Jet fuel can’t shatter glass windows. |
| There are, naturally, alternative criminal theories in circulation. Could this act have been the work of The Mandate Family, also known as the Branch Jeremians, the devoted sect who have attached themselves to a bearded leader and believe him to be a prophet of a kinder, gentler politics? As one of their increasingly glassy-eyed hashtags had it this week: #whatyoudotojeremyyoudotome. | |
| Before the NEC’s decision was known, Jeremy issued one of his signature relativist statements, condemning the attack on Eagle’s office “as someone who has also received death threats this week and previously”. Which raises several crucial questions. Namely: are the attacks on Corbyn false flags, or is it just the ones on Eagle? Is a false-false flag just a flag? And could whoever is Labour leader this autumn conclude conference with a rousing rendition of new party anthem The False Flag? | Before the NEC’s decision was known, Jeremy issued one of his signature relativist statements, condemning the attack on Eagle’s office “as someone who has also received death threats this week and previously”. Which raises several crucial questions. Namely: are the attacks on Corbyn false flags, or is it just the ones on Eagle? Is a false-false flag just a flag? And could whoever is Labour leader this autumn conclude conference with a rousing rendition of new party anthem The False Flag? |
| Against this malarial backdrop, then, the NEC meeting felt like an anachronism of political apparatus, a throwback to an era when facts beat truthiness and people did not regard the desire to win elections as an out-of-touch preoccupation of the Westminster bubble, or claim that the Winter of Discontent was a Zionist plot or something. “Let’s be clear,” John McDonnell insisted during a joint interview with Jeremy Corbyn before the 2015 general election, “we don’t believe in leaders.” And yet, it would appear they came round to the idea of them eventually. If pickings seem slim today, they will only feel slimmer when you consider that in the 1976 Labour leadership contest, the candidates were Jim Callaghan, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Denis Healey and Michael Foot. Not so much big beasts, you might say, as galaxy class beasts. | Against this malarial backdrop, then, the NEC meeting felt like an anachronism of political apparatus, a throwback to an era when facts beat truthiness and people did not regard the desire to win elections as an out-of-touch preoccupation of the Westminster bubble, or claim that the Winter of Discontent was a Zionist plot or something. “Let’s be clear,” John McDonnell insisted during a joint interview with Jeremy Corbyn before the 2015 general election, “we don’t believe in leaders.” And yet, it would appear they came round to the idea of them eventually. If pickings seem slim today, they will only feel slimmer when you consider that in the 1976 Labour leadership contest, the candidates were Jim Callaghan, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Denis Healey and Michael Foot. Not so much big beasts, you might say, as galaxy class beasts. |
| Related: Corbyn calls for calm after Angela Eagle's office attacked before NEC meeting | Related: Corbyn calls for calm after Angela Eagle's office attacked before NEC meeting |
| But did any Labour supporter ever get a tattoo of one of them on their back? Advances both in body art, and toward the endtimes, mean political tattoos are more in vogue these days. First there were Nigel Farage ones, now there are Jeremy Corbyn ones. One such portrait adorns the back of 19-year-old Kierran Horsfield, and after a round of interviews last year at the time of the inking, Kierran was back in the papers at the weekend to confirm he had absolutely no regrets. Of Corbyn, he declared: “There is no universe in which he is just going to fizzle out.” | But did any Labour supporter ever get a tattoo of one of them on their back? Advances both in body art, and toward the endtimes, mean political tattoos are more in vogue these days. First there were Nigel Farage ones, now there are Jeremy Corbyn ones. One such portrait adorns the back of 19-year-old Kierran Horsfield, and after a round of interviews last year at the time of the inking, Kierran was back in the papers at the weekend to confirm he had absolutely no regrets. Of Corbyn, he declared: “There is no universe in which he is just going to fizzle out.” |
| The pyrotechnic certainties of this made me recall something Alan Moore once said about Rorschach, the antihero he created for his graphic novel Watchmen. According to Moore, he only realised quite late that the character’s absolute refusal to morally compromise meant he couldn’t survive the story. Yet the same surely cannot be said for a character like Corbyn, despite Kierran’s predictions to the contrary. Jeremy Corbyn will absolutely survive this story. | The pyrotechnic certainties of this made me recall something Alan Moore once said about Rorschach, the antihero he created for his graphic novel Watchmen. According to Moore, he only realised quite late that the character’s absolute refusal to morally compromise meant he couldn’t survive the story. Yet the same surely cannot be said for a character like Corbyn, despite Kierran’s predictions to the contrary. Jeremy Corbyn will absolutely survive this story. |
| Corbyn is a creature of such serial moral compromises – unwitting or otherwise – that whenever it is that he finally parts company with the job of Labour leader, I can only see him returning to the exact same life he always led before. I can’t think of a Westminster character more made for the movie bookending device , where the final scene is an almost exact echo of the first. Everything is the same - except it isn’t. In the first scene of the Jeremy Corbyn story I picture him where he spent decades of relative obscurity before becoming Labour leader: in some forgotten meeting room, addressing the ragtag faithful of some questionable cause. And this will be exactly where we’d see him for the dark reprise that is the final scene. Everything is the same as it ever was. Except the Labour party is now dead. | Corbyn is a creature of such serial moral compromises – unwitting or otherwise – that whenever it is that he finally parts company with the job of Labour leader, I can only see him returning to the exact same life he always led before. I can’t think of a Westminster character more made for the movie bookending device , where the final scene is an almost exact echo of the first. Everything is the same - except it isn’t. In the first scene of the Jeremy Corbyn story I picture him where he spent decades of relative obscurity before becoming Labour leader: in some forgotten meeting room, addressing the ragtag faithful of some questionable cause. And this will be exactly where we’d see him for the dark reprise that is the final scene. Everything is the same as it ever was. Except the Labour party is now dead. |