Alastair Campbell has written a longish ‘open’ letter to Jeremy Corbyn, helpfully explaining why he has decided not to contest his expulsion from the Labour party. The remarkable thing is that Alastair believes there is anyone of importance in the party, or indeed outside of it, who gives a monkey’s one way or the other. For all of Jeremy Corbyn’s myriad faults, he has not visited upon this country the two greatest crises, foreign and domestic, that the UK has endured since the second world war (by which I mean the Iraq war and unconfined immigration). Nor has Magic Grandpa lied to the British public and parliament with quite the same level of barefacedness as Mr Campbell; nor used the death of a government scientist to settle a personal vendetta with a journalist.
It is a mystery to me why Alastair is still wheeled out by the BBC to opine about anything, frankly, given that there is almost nobody left in the country who values his opinion. I am rather with the Momentum hordes who think he should have been kicked out for his role in the illegal invasion of Iraq, rather than for voting Liberal Democrat. In his letter, though, Campbell unwittingly revealed why the far left was able to take over Labour, banishing Blairism for good. Campbell’s main criticism is that Corbyn has not built a machine for winning an election — sod policy and principle, then. He also attacked Corbyn over Brexit, and yet — until recently — that is the one area where Corbyn, against enormous opposition from within the parliamentary Labour party, has behaved with a degree of fortitude, resisting calls for a fatuous second referendum until effectively bullied into it. That Corbyn resisted for so long, despite knowing that it was costing his party votes, is to his credit, I think.
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