Probably a semantic distinction, but I think you’re confusing ambition and ruthlessness with conviction. Lad doesn’t give a poop, which can be a useful trait. leading us to...



Indeed - ultimately Corbyn’s ‘new politics’ was an attempt to avoid politics, so he could hold on to his precious principles. Integrity doesn’t win a fight, and nor does pretending you’re not in one because you wish you weren’t. In fairness, for all that he played it badly, fate dealt him a poop hand in some ways. On the other hand it gave him Theresa May and Boris Johnson, as well.



Everybody has flaws, but a lot of people have redeeming features too. What are Johnson’s positive qualities? The best I can come up with is ‘charm’, but even then it is the charm of a charlatan, so it is more of a mask than true virtue or even a talent.




If it isn’t the money that drives them, then they’ll be cool with paying a little more tax to support the society that provided the basis on which they could build their success, yeah? A better educated, healthier society with better infrastructure will no doubt support them and their successors in contributing to further progress. Within sensible parameters (such as Labour’s plan to tax earnings over £80k at 45p rather than 40p) I think the UK could benefit from some rebalancing.



So I read that as not being a case for immediate redistribution of existing wealth. Are you saying then that new wealth generated by our economy should benefit poorer people first?



You saw his efforts as Foreign Secretary?

My expectations are so low (ranging from clown car comedy disaster to death camp dystopia), that he’ll struggle to fail to meet or exceed them. Nice to know i’m unlikely to be disappointed!

This is petty, but... the whole ‘Boris’ thing, I find this national faux-familiarity a bit weird, bordering on the sinister. 1. It’s not like you’re his mate. 2. If you were you’d be calling him Al.

People who didn’t go to one of the major public schools and Oxbridge aren’t really people at all to Johnson (or Cameron before him). Even if you made it to Oxford, you’d be a ‘tug’ (minor public school) or ‘stain’ (state school). It is a very English type of class deference that keeps them in power, and makes ‘ordinary’ people think they have shared values and interests. But then, I don’t even think the Queen Mother’s smile was unusually lovely, Gawd rest her!

There's an irony about Corbyn and principles in that pretty much the only issue on which he changed/compromised his lifelong views was on Brexit, seemingly between the time he gained the Labour leadership in September 2015, and the referendum in June 2016.

If he hadn't become Labour leader, I reckon he'd have been out with Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart as part of Labour Leave, bringing up a lot of quotes from his old friend Tony Benn who was a long-time campaigner against the UK being a member of the EU. You could really see this by his reaction to the referendum result, when all the other big figures in Labour were saying it was a disaster, he came out the next morning to tell David Cameron he should trigger Article 50 straight away and start the process. Seems like JC found it easy to get over that defeat!

The big irony then is that Corbyn's great unique selling point was his authenticity. You knew he took political positions because he sincerely believed them not because he was compromising to chase power. But he did compromise with the Labour party on coming out (reluctantly) for Remain. And now he is told that he lost because Labour lost the trust of leave voters through vacillating for so long and then seemingly sliding towards Remain.

It was the sole issue on which Corbyn compromised his real views and as a result his position on Brexit was always incoherent because he is useless at 'playing politics' or taking positions for strategic benefit. He isn't a tactician and never was, his background was as a campaigner. He is quite an effective speaker about issues he cares about because he believes them so strongly, so his peaks were in the two Labour leadership elections that he fought, and the 2017 election. Once he was put onto this sitting on the fence on Brexit he was nonplussed.

I bet Corbyn wishes now, that he had campaigned for Leave in 2016. He could have been an effective campaigner there for the form of leave that he would have wanted, a kind of 'socalism in one country' version of coming out of the EU to pursue a domestic industrial policy, some aspects of which Johnson is now leaning towards. He would have loved having an argument about the [iform[/i of Brexit, with the Tories, if he had the authentic guarantee of having been a leave campaigner from the start (which he had been since he joined Parliament in 1983).

In practice though, if he'd have declared himself for Leave before the referendum, he would have torn the Labour party apart and immediately lost a large chunk of his youth support base. There would probably have been a leadership challenge in early 2016 when he was having all those problems with his shadow Cabinet before the referendum, and he might have been susceptible to being toppled by say Yvette Cooper or Clive Lewis back then.

I don’t despise Cummings. I think he has some interesting ideas, though maybe a tendency to run too far with them.

My point wasn’t about Oxford or Cambridge broadly - I know many fine people who have studied and taught there, and I have hung out and dined at Colleges at both (including ‘properly’ at Cameron’s old College, Brasenose - the others were just conferences and the like) - but a specific subset of its student body, who are spoilt, conceited, obnoxious and good at winning elections.

Yes, I think this was why he was a bit unlucky. Politics was dominated for much of his tenure by something he was ambivalent about but just couldn’t escape.

Another irony that occurs to me - Corbyn has been Labour leader since September 2015. One could make a strong case that, in that time, Johnson has done a lot more to thwart the ambitions of Conservative Prime Ministers than Corbyn.

Yes Johnson basically did for both Cameron and May.

But also Corbyn must have a private chuckle at the way the terms of debate have shifted since he's been Labour leader.

Just think back in 2015 when Corbyn came in if you could have a crystal ball and said this is what the government will be doing in 2020:

- Raising the minimum wage by 6.2% despite business groups condemning it as a crazy rise in the current unstable economic climate

- Promising to use taxpayers' money to subsidise ailing manufacturing industries

- Talking about a huge swathe of public investment to reinvigorate the north

- Stripping Northern Rail of their franchise and putting the government on standby to take the line back into public ownership

- Using price-capping in energy markets

....what would the Tories have been saying? They would have seen this as the kind of apocalyptic vision of what a Corbyn-led government would inflict on the UK and destroy the economy.

Now I bet Sal Paradise will be able to make a good argument in favour of each one of those. In 2015....not so sure. He'll have been on an ideological journey like the rest of the Tories and ended up in some spaces that Corbyn has occupied for a long time.

What's really been killed off dramatically in a short space of time, by both Johnson and Corbyn, is the 'Cameron agenda' of small-state, free-market austerity-focused economics mixed with Blairite social liberalism. Given Cameron wasn't going to run again in 2020, I think 2019 was supposed to be the year he handed over to his heir Osborne to carry the torch in to the 2020s.

I disagree I think it is simply of the mind is mightier than the sword - a contributory reason as to why these people are so successful is their intelligence being out thought by a faster more precise mind is the one thing that is difficult to counter. They are very good at networking but first and foremost it is the mental agility that gives these people an edge. This comes across as arrogant because most simply cannot keep up - I see it even on this board. They are the SAS of young talent in this country - they are not the only source of talent - my son went to Durham and there are some clever people there but there is a distinct gap between Oxbridge and the rest.

Cummins' views on the civil service make a lot of sense - too many generalists - too wishy/washy - very too arrogant. Kerslake was on Today this morning - his it can change but it takes decades is the root of the problem its jobs for the boys!!

Corbyn/McDonald - were so far off the mark intellectually and it showed - McDonald invited John Cauldwell to discuss Labour's policies and he was so far off the mark it was embarrassing - Caudwell was three steps ahead of him all the time. McDonald spent all his time thinking about what he could and couldn't say he sounded ponderous and incoherent most of the time - simply not joined up.

Chill out brother.
I detest the mindset of grubs like IR80 and Sal more than you could ever imagine.

Just out of curiosity, are you suggesting that I (for example) find Boris Johnson (for example) arrogant because I can’t keep up with the agility and precision of his thinking? This could be a rich seam of trolling for you.

Does your intellectual-SAS metaphor apply to all Oxbridge graduates or just the Bullingdon-types? If the former, I have some friends who I think will rather enjoy it on a couple of levels. Or maybe more than a couple, as they’re no doubt thinking in more dimensions than me.

No and also wouldn't have predicted in 2010 what would have happened in Scotland from 2015 onwards. In both cases there was a game changer in terms of a referendum.

But also when you look at politics over time, you see how unpredictable it is and how foolish many of the prevailing political predictions are1992 - "If Labour can't win now they can NEVER win"

Major wins against the odds after the Tories had already been in power 13 years, coming off the debacle of the Poll Tax, a recession and with many of the 1980s homebuyers stuck in negative equity. The general take was that Labour couldn't win in those conditions, their only hope was an alliance with the Lib Dems to try and get a coalition in 1997 and establish proportional representation.

Result2003 - "The Conservative party is dead"

Everyone talks about how bad this Labour defeat in 2019 was - 202 seats, lowest since before the war, worse than 1983. The Conservatives went sub-200 seats for three consecutive elections, 1997, 2001 and 2005!

Blair at this time - before the lies of Iraq had really sunk in - was unusually successful as a PM, at least in political terms. Even Thatcher went through periods of deep unpopularity between her election wins. Blair had sky high satisfaction ratings, Labour had huge leads in the polls for basically 10 straight years from when he took over as leader. The business community was pro-Blair, the tabloids were pro-Blair, the Tories really had nowhere to go. This was the time when we had Ian Duncan Smith saying "the quiet man is turning up the volume" and all that crap. He got deposed as leader and out of desperation the party went to Michael Howard - who epitomised the 'nasty Tory' image the 'modernisers' said they had to shed, but at least seemed like he could be credible across the despatch box against Blair. But at this point it looked like the Tories' demise was terminal.

Result2010 - "Cleggmania - end of the two-party monopoly"

After the first ever leaders' debate, the Lib Dems shot to the top of the polls for the first time since the brief SDP-Liberal Alliance lead in the early 80s. But this was about 2 weeks out from an election! Although the Clegg bounce had dipped a bit before polling day, there was talk of the Lib Dems pushing 100 seats and rewriting the two-party system

Result2017 - "Theresa May's coronation"Resultlater in 2017 - "Jeremy Corbyn will be the next Prime Minister"Result: Two things really screwed Corbyn. His inability to deal with antisemitism, and his prevarication on Brexit. The first exposed a lot of nasty things within the Labour party, and made him toxic to a lot of the liberal-minded centre left, who decided they couldn't vote Labour again while he was leader. The second separated him from his big youth base, who switched towards campaigning for a second referendum instead of turning up to his Oh Jeremy Corbyn rallies. In the end, Corbyn led Labour to the kind of defeat in 2019, that most people predicted would happen in 2020, when Corbyn first took over the leadership in 2015!