Worthy Farm is getting ready for the return of cows. The slebs have stopped preaching about carbon emissions and single-use plastics, and got into their helicopters to preach at the next gig. Litter-pickers set to minimum-wage work cleaning the festival site of thousands of discarded tents, surprise repositories of human waste, and any number of single-use plastic items including an inexplicable quantity of small plastic pouches with dusty white, brown or green residue at the bottom.
It may have been the uplifting effect of these packages that fuelled the festival’s enthusiasm, in 2017, for the leader of the Labour Party.
Fresh from his heroic, transformative failure to win that year’s General Election, Jeremy Corbyn was given a rock star’s welcome on the Pyramid stage. For two years now, an excellent song by the White Stripes has been almost impossible for anyone who isn’t a Corbyn cult member to hear without physically snarling in the way Jezza himself snarls when he sees a journalist or a kippah.
Corbyn avoided Glastonbury this year. Had he turned up, it’s unlikely that he would have headlined the pyramid stage the way he did two years ago, though he may have been able to fill a tepee in one of the corners of the site populated by the less physically attractive naked people. “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” is no more. Hope was a short-lived commodity. Stormzy filled the void left by hope with the more realistic sentiment “F**k Boris”.
It’s not just at Glasto that the Lenin-capped loon’s support is going up in smoke. We learnt this week that Jezza has led his party to the soaring, commanding height of 18% in opinion polls. This is a similar proportion of the public to those who believe the moon landings were faked; a correlation which may not be coincidental. Labour is now less popular than at any point since WW2; any point, in fact, since polling began.
Jeremy Corbyn is also very nearly –with the exception of Michael Foot’s dismal 13% in August 1982– the least popular leader of any party ever on record. Only 18% (presumably the same moon-deniers who say they would still vote Labour) rate him positively as a leader.
Among the useful idiots who saved Labour from electoral annihilation in June 2017 –including almost everyone who chanted his name at Glastonbury two years ago– more than half now support other parties. Here in Wales, Corbyn is about as popular as the expensive new signs on the Severn Bridge, or the glowing mud EDF recently dumped off Cardiff Bay.
It is, of course, Brexit wot done it. Corbyn’s deeply-held hostility to the EU, and his refusal to let his 88% pro-Remain party explicitly support Remain, have left loyal followers feeling bewildered and betrayed. Labour now appear doomed, unless and until they find a way to drag Corbyn, Seamus Milne, Len McClusky and Laura Murray from the presidential palace and do whatever you do to expired commie despots, to them.
One consequence of Corbyn’s Savilian unpopularity is that the Conservatives are once again the most popular party on, um, 24%. This despite the excitement of a leadership contest, enlivened by a desperate Jeremy H**t running an entertaining sort of charisma-by-computer campaign. Watch Jeremy score blue-rinse bonus points by shouting loudly at Johnny Chinaman! See him promising new gunboats for the Navy –perhaps to re-take Hong Kong! Look confused as he tears a faintly disastrous leaf from Theresa May’s First Big Book of How Not to Win Elections by expressing a previously unsuspected and rather unconvincing enthusiasm for fox hunting!
Anyone in possession of a Conservative leadership ballot paper and a conscience should vote for H**t, rather than letting an amoral semi-competent self-absorbed bluffer loose on No. 10 Downing St. But, being realistic, Boris is going to win this and become our Prime Minister, Gawd ‘elp us.
When he does, Boris will be looking greedily at the 23% claimed by the second-placed Brexit Party. A vast preponderance of its supporters are really Tories, albeit the ones who got the Tories the name of The Nasty Party. The temptation will be to nasty up, and win a substantial load of these (mostly English) shockers back.
The ground is shifting elsewhere. Wales’ narrow endorsement of Brexit in 2016 allowed its supporters to create a mythology that this wasn’t really just an English project. That has changed; recent polling suggests that Wales is now split 55/45 in favour of Remain. The centre also seems to be back: the LibDems are creeping ahead of Labour with 20% of the voting intention; pinching themselves to check this isn’t the product of too much cheese before bedtime. Even the wretched Greens are climbing in the polls at Labour’s expense.
Politics in Britain has had nothing but realignments since 2016, and it is sloughing another skin as we wait for the Conservative Party to emerge from two years of Brexit stasis. Boris may be able to change all that, but it’s hard to see how without the risk of another election, or –as Tories may see it– the betrayal of a second referendum.
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