The pure cynicism of David Lammy

David Lammy says he regrets nominating Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader. We are meant, presumably, to be impressed by this admission. Given that it was delivered at Limmud, a Jewish festival of ideas, it sounds perilously close to an expression of contrition. Lammy has every reason to be contrite given the part he played in the Corbyn catastrophe.

The guilty men of the Corbyn era typically belong to one of four categories. There were the True Believers — the pensionable Bennites and millenarian millennials with righteous faith in the leader and the (never properly defined) ideology he represented. There were the Fellow Travellers — the spineless soft-leftists (but I repeat myself) who knew the man was bad news yet were the loudest voices in the chorus of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ the minute it looked like he might not be a total electoral duffer. Then there were the Concerned of Twitter — mostly Blairite types who thought this whole antisemitism business was ghastly but not ghastly enough to do much more than post ‘solidarity’ tweets and pen the occasional op-ed in the Observer.