I have been castigated for describing Jeremy Corbyn as ‘without obvious political passion’. It is true that I have watched him in full political flow speaking against the Iraq War, but on television during the election campaign, I found him oddly dry and unwilling to attack Johnson effectively as he so easily could, and should have: most especially in describing his own position on Brexit which seems to be a natural sympathy for opponents of Brexit and a visceral, traditional Bennite hostility to the neoliberalism of the EU, whilst at the same time wanting to defend the EU’s stance on wages and its internationalism. If this is indeed his position, why couldn’t he bring himself to say so, particularly when attacked by Johnson ? I didn’t mean to suggest that he doesn’t have deep-rooted political beliefs, because he obviously does, just not as effective as he needed to be in expressing them.
I fear, quite simply, that he is naive, which is the one thing a politician cannot afford to be
But maybe there are attractions in old-fashioned naiveté, when compared to the corruption of facile, turncoat hyper-sophistication ?
Rather than passionless, isn’t it that Corbyn has a highly principled reluctance to personally attack people, preferring to wherever possible argue positively about the issues? That could be naive, or utopian
Yes, maybe, you’re right, but it may not have been the best strategy to win an election, particularly against someone as aggressively unprincipled as Johnson. Charles
He turns out to be surprisingly vain – he has been completely seduced by the applause he gets all round the country when talking to Labour audiences, presumably because he asserts all the basic Labour values (public ownership, the NHS, Nuclear Disarmament etc,) most of which Tony Blair largely rejected.
He really cannot speak, being unable to move audiences in the way that Kinnock could.
Would that be ‘we’re all right’ Kinnock? Surely Corbyn’s flaw (given his relative honesty) is in having hidden the extent to which he is Brexiteer (and to have allowed himself to be bullied by both Blairite and pseudo-Marxist colleagues to concede a 2nd referendum after having said the 1st should be honoured). To my knowledge, none of our bullying, idiot journalists have actually asked him: ‘which way did you vote in the referendum’?