British Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn curse

With British Labour in disarray over a successor to Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson’s ambition to move the House of Lords from London to the northern city of York makes political sense. His landslide victory last month owed much to voters in Labour heartland seats in the Midlands, northeast England and Yorkshire, all strongly pro-Brexit, “breaking the voting habits of generations” to vote Conservative. With a 4 per cent swing across the region, Conservatives won 28 more seats than in 2017, a result crucial to achieving their 80-seat Commons majority. Giving a victory address in Tony Blair’s former Sedgefield seat, which returned a Tory MP for the first time in 84 years, Mr Johnson promised to repay northern support.

With the Palace of Westminster falling down and due for extensive refurbishment over several years, Mr Johnson sees an opportunity to consolidate gains and appeal to regional sentiment by relocating the Lords, a move with major symbolic and economic significance. He should be forgiven for seeking to make life even more difficult for Labour as it struggles to recover from its worst electoral performance since 1935. What was expected to be a sensible, root-and-branch, post-election process of ridding the party of Mr Corbyn and the failed, lunar left and shamefully anti-Semitic policies rejected by the electorate is turning out to be vastly different. Mr Corbyn set the tone with a bizarre claim that though Labour lost, it won the argument, whatever that was.

None of the four women and one man seeking the succession has done much to challenge him. Even the leading “moderate”, the unlikely titled (for a Labour leader) Sir Keir Starmer, has been pandering to Mr Corbyn’s far-left base and its manifesto of pie-in-the-sky election promises. As The Times noted, “his campaign has consisted of articles of unpublishable emptiness whose only hints of content are signals to the left that he is a fellow traveller”. Another frontrunner, Rebecca Long Bailey, Mr Corbyn’s preferred “continuity” candidate, has been described as a “charisma-free Corbyn clone”. Labour’s path back to power, she said, “lies in taking on the political establishment with a commitment to democratising and decarbonising our economy”. Labour has yet to learn that it will remain unelectable until it rids itself of Mr Corbyn and his vacuous legacy. No wonder Mr Blair, arguably modern Labour’s most successful leader, wrote “the party is presently marooned on Fantasy Island”.