Labour's Lost The Plot
David Aaronovitch is on great form with his opinion column in The Times in which he argues that Labour has completely lost the plot over its ridiculous behaviour in the great 'Hat-gate' affair.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/hat-gate-shows-labour-has-lost-the-plot-msv3h3dd2
Hat-gate shows Labour has lost the plot
By david aaronovitch - The Times
The cult of the immaculate Corbyn means left-wing disciples will use any means to defend their leader, whatever he says
When I was at school, legend had it that The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-48) was really about the severing of a far more delicate part of the poor man’s anatomy. So too with The Affair of Jeremy’s Hat — the daft row about whether the BBC deliberately made pictures of the Labour leader seem more Russian. Never mind the hat; it was really about a more sensitive part of Mr Corbyn’s wardrobe: his inner beliefs.
Back in 2013, the Syrian civil war was in full appalling swing and the regime of President Assad looked like losing it. The first chemical weapon attacks had occurred in the spring but the Russians, allied to Assad, claimed that the rebels were responsible. The Russian TV channel RT invited a Labour MP on to comment. What did he think? “Well,” said the MP, “it seems very strong evidence indeed.” Much stronger, he said, than the western evidence that Assad was responsible.
The MP was, of course, Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn, when he spoke to RT, was giving his own views because he was not being obliged to represent his party’s. In choosing to go with the least likely explanation for the sarin gas attacks, he was in effect stating an ideological preference.
Fast forward five years to the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal. Theresa May’s response was to blame the Russians; Mr Corbyn’s to equivocate. Maybe it wasn’t them, he said. His spokesman, Seumas Milne, said that the judgments of British intelligence agencies were historically “problematic”. A few days ago Mr Corbyn, taxed on the subject in a radio interview, reminded listeners that “I asked that the Russians be given a sample so that they can say categorically one way or the other.”
This at the same time that Andrei Lugovoi, the probable murderer of Alexander Litvinenko, remains a Russian MP who was decorated by Vladimir Putin for “services to the nation”.
No one in Labour was forced to accept such a stupid and naive sentiment as that uttered by its leader. Indeed, several dozen MPs dissociated themselves. But far more noticeable was the rush among Labour members to defend or justify him. Several, including the biggest of the pro-Corbyn news websites, went to great and discreditable lengths to discover evidence that maybe the Russians weren’t responsible. Much of this stuff was pure conspiracy theory from people who claimed, for example, that Israel was more likely to have done it.
Some of Mr Corbyn’s supporters decided to defend him by creating a diversion in the form of The Hat. The charge was that the BBC’s Newsnight programme had, in the words of the Corbynite commentator Owen Jones, altered a set-dressing picture to depict Jeremy Corbyn “as a Soviet stooge” and “photoshopped his hat to look more Russian”. This untrue charge went viral and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It, and not Corbyn’s response to the Skripal attack, has now become the issue for Labour loyalists.
Why? Because the leader was being damaged by his own ideological stance, so he had to be protected. And this objection was being made by the very people who happily sent each other that famous photoshopped picture of Tony Blair taking a smiling selfie against the background of an explosion.
It’s worth remembering that even at his height (in September 1997 he had a 93 per cent approval rating) Tony Blair was never a cult figure. While Jeremy Corbyn was idolised at Glastonbury last year, the pop world’s reaction to New Labour was best summed up when the drummer of Chumbawamba emptied a bucket of iced water over John Prescott at the Brit Awards in 1998. There was no book of adulatory poems about Gordon Brown. No one ever made a fortune selling Neil Kinnock T-shirts. At the Labour Party conference of 1945 the victorious leader was not greeted with chants of “Ooh Clement Attlee!” or (pace Tom Watson) a speech from the deputy leader Herbert Morrison simpering that “Clem has shown us how it’s better to be loved than feared”.
Indeed the Corbyn cult is just about the first I can recall from British political history; unique in Labour, almost unprecedented in any party. Never mind Eden, Macmillan or Heath, even Churchill did not receive such uncategorical support from his activists. The nearest equivalent is the treatment Tories handed out to Margaret Thatcher, but only after victory in the Falklands war.
I didn’t enjoy the Thatcher Supremacy, but most of the time the attitude even of party members towards leaders has been one of friendly scepticism. Not any more. It is enough today in many Labour gatherings simply to invoke the name of the leader to banish opposition or rally support.
Over in America, where I’ve been recently, a similar cult of personality has hijacked another great party. And ironically it was also illustrated in the matter of Russia. Donald Trump, we learnt from a leak this week, ignored advice from his security advisers and congratulated Mr Putin on his “re-election” as president and neglected to mention either Russian meddling in US affairs or the Skripal attack. In response, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator, tweeted that the “bigger outrage is this leak that could only come from someone in [Trump’s] inner circle . . . this ongoing pattern of duplicity holds potential for serious damage to the nation”.
That is a remarkable and truly Trumpian set of priorities: the telling of the truth is the real problem. But Rubio was simply a symptom of what the writer Andrew Sullivan called a creeping authoritarianism. Trump, he wrote, “is a cult leader of a movement that has taken over a political party — and he specifically campaigned on a platform of one-man rule.” Almost no Republican feels that they can cut adrift from the cult.
Most Americans don’t adore Trump. Many know he is venal, incompetent, ridiculous and unpleasant and that his compensatory strengths are almost entirely mythical. But the times are out of joint.
In South Carolina I met a woman in her late fifties from the mid-West who had just qualified as a Methodist pastor. I liked her, even though she was prickly. After sharing a meal she sought me out in the corridor. “I wanted you to know,” she said, “that I was delighted when Donald Trump was elected. I was outraged when Obama was re-elected and if Clinton had got in I would have taken all my money out of the bank. Trump’s a great president!” This was her position and it was not up for discussion. “Goodbye!” she said and off she went.
Perhaps in a complex world, with a cacophony of opinions and access to an unprecedented amount of information, the simplifying idea of The Leader is just too seductive. He knows. He’ll get us there. And stop asking all those irritating questions.
I Take My Hat Off To Jess Brammar Over 'Hatgate' (19/03/18)
Jeremy Corbyn supporters are resorting to the same tactics of 'unreason' as Team Trump with their faux outrage and false claims of bias against the media - with the BBC are their favourite target, just like Trump and CNN.
Witness this latest piece of nonsense over 'Hatgate' in which the Corbynistas accused the Newsnight programme of photshopping a Russian-style hat onto their Dear Leader's head, only to find that this allegation was completely false and that the same Kremlin backdrop had been used to set the scene for an interview with a Government minister.
I take my hat off, as it were, to the Newsnight editor Jess Brammar who put these crazy people in their place with a succession of very reasonable, rational Tweets.
I wonder if a fulsome apology from Owen Jones, a leading cheerleader for the Corbynistas, is on its way?
- By all means criticise Newsnight. That’s healthy, and we will always welcome people like @OwenJones84 coming on the show to criticise us from our own studio. But no one photoshopped a hat.
- And finally, the Russia background was a rehash of one Newsnight used a few weeks ago, for a story about Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary
- apparently (forgive me for passing on tech details I don’t understand firsthand) some detail might also have been lost with it going through the screen and then being filmed back through a camera, again the standard effect on images on that big back panel
- Our (excellent,hardworking) graphics team explained the image has had the contrast increased & been colour treated, usual treatment for screen graphics as they need more contrast to work through the screens. If you look you can see it’s same hat in silhouette
