@RColvile: 'Boris may be bruised and battered. But he still wears the crown.'
Political Reporter comments.
Looking at Mr. Colvile’s record of Jeremy Corbyn hysterics is instructive:
December 5, 2019
Headline: The devastating proof Jeremy Corbyn is no Robin Hood: He posed with a statue of the Nottingham folk hero, but his latest claims he can slash household bills by £6,716 are just NOT accurate, writes Robert Colvile
Sub-headlines:
Labour claimed that since 2010, average household bills are now £5,949 higher
The party's dossier also claimed that under Labour, they would fall by £6,716
Neither of these claims is accurate, with these costs not for average household
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7757353/The-devastating-proof-Jeremy-Corbyn-no-Robin-Hood-writes-Robert-Colvile.html
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February 22 2018
Headline: The truth about Jeremy Corbyn: not a spy but a fool who hates capitalism and the West
Four decades of public record show a man who never failed to praise an enemy of the 'imperialist' USA
Was Jeremy Corbyn a spy? It’s certainly delightful to imagine him shuffling scruffily around St James’s Park with his cling-filmed sandwiches, looking for dead drops – or screwing tiny microphones into the lids of his jars of home-made jam before presenting them to unsuspecting colleagues.
The truth is, of course, that on the “knave or fool” spectrum, Corbyn has always been far more the latter. Yes, he hung around with Soviet sympathisers. Indeed, he’s now hired some of them to work for him. “Labour Action for Peace”, the anti-NATO group he helped lead, was “notoriously and idiotically pro-Soviet” – and, we now learn, riddled with Eastern Bloc agents.
But Corbyn himself, while he might well have been a Communist source, was almost certainly not a formal “asset”. His ideology sprang from the same wellspring, but had flowed in a different direction: he was a socialist, not a Communist; Team Trotsky, not Team Stalin.
…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/02/21/truth-jeremy-corbyn-not-spy-fool-hates-capitalism-west/
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February 24, 2018
Headline: ‘Corbyn the Commie’ smear is all about tabloid press fear of regulation – Ivor Gaber.
…
Now it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s turn – and he’s a far easier target in many ways because of his long and public record campaigning for left-wing causes.
The attack on Corbyn was apparently based on detailed evidence from a former Czech spy backed up by files found in the archives of the Czech secret police. Following The Sun’s revelations, the rest of the right-wing press weighed in. The Mail’s favourite historian, Dominic Sandbrook (who had played a major role in smearing the Milibands), was wheeled out to denounce Corbyn under a headline:
The useful idiot: Jeremy Corbyn’s assignations with a secret agent were part of the gullible British Left’s love affair with a totalitarian Russian regime that murdered millions.
But the use of the word “gullible” might more aptly applied to Sandbrook and his ilk. Corbyn has had no love for the Soviet Union nor its Eastern bloc allies. As anyone with only a passing knowledge of contemporary British history – and that should include Sandbrook – would know, Corbyn’s politics grew out of the “new left”, which was determinedly opposed to the Soviet brand of communism.
As Robert Colvile, the director of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies noted in the Daily Telegraph: “He was a socialist not a Communist; Team Trotsky not Team Stalin.” And The Times columnist Daniel Finklestein reminded us, in an odd piece apparently about Corbyn’s “attachment to the Soviet Union”, that in 1988, Corbyn was publicly calling on Moscow to rehabilitate Trotsky. That’s not exactly the action of a potential, or active, spy.
https://inforrm.org/2018/02/24/corbyn-the-commie-smear-is-all-about-tabloid-press-fear-of-regulation-ivor-gaber/
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Note that Mr. Colvile in his essay of June 26 , 2016, in Politico Europe, under the heading of ‘The Dirty Dozen’ strikes a less strident note on Corbyn and Johnson ( Colvile realizes that he isn’t on home ground, like the Daily Mail and Telegraph!). And the other members of that ‘Dirty Dozen’ ( Never underestimate the power of Hollywood Movie Kitsch!) of ‘Brexiteers’:
Headline: 12 people who brought about Brexit
Sub-headline: How a combination of persuasive Leave personalities and poor Remain strategy created the perfect Brexit storm.
https://www.politico.eu/article/12-people-who-brought-about-brexit-leave-remain-referendum-campaign-euroskeptics-tension/
On Johnson:
Without Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, there would have been no Brexit. While Gove emerged as a powerful and articulate voice for Brexit, and provided the intellectual heart of the campaign, it was his fellow Tory cabinet minister who really turned the tide. Johnson’s announcement he was jumping ship to Leave caused the pound to slump — and with good reason. As a journalist in the 1990s, Johnson was instrumental in making the EU an object not just of fear but of mockery, with his stories about bumbling bureaucrats and bendy bananas. As a campaigner, he put a cheerful, optimistic face on Brexit — and made it much harder for Remain to label the Leave side as a bunch of backward-looking xenophobes, as they did in the first EU referendum in 1975. Johnson will surely seize the spoils of victory by succeeding David Cameron as prime minister.
On Corbyn:
Remain lost because Labour voters turned out for Leave. In part, this happened because, while the Labour Party wanted to stay In, its leader obviously wanted to get Out. Focus groups were clear that voters had picked up on Corbyn’s ambivalence towards the EU, and that his pro-Remain speeches sounded more like hostage videos than rallying calls. Of course, it turned out that Labour’s voters were equally skeptical — but thanks to Corbyn’s ambivalence, the party’s Europhile MPs and activists could not persuade them otherwise. The argument that Brexit was a right-wing conspiracy was just waiting to be made. Instead voters got the impression the party was divided, or just didn’t care very much. A special mention here too for the near-invisible Alan Johnson, the leader of campaign group Labour In, whose performance is best described, to use a Trump-ism, as “low-energy.”
All this , I hope, a revelatory introduction to Mr. Colvile’s essay of December 26, 2021 in The Times?
Headline: Jettisoning Johnson will not be the cure-all that troubled Tories crave
Ever since Boris Johnson became prime minister, the parallels with Henry VIII have been irresistible. A larger-than-life figure of lusty appetites who presides over a historic split with the Continent. A ruler surrounded by a swirling court who destroys his most powerful councillor because he doesn’t want the competition. And a leader capable of inspiring both extraordinary admiration and extraordinary vitriol in others.
This paragraph shimmers with thwarted literary ambition, tinctured in Movie House historical revisionism, struggling to escape from the dank prison of toxic Thatcherite Nostalgia? The image of Charles Laughton, in black and white, won’t go away! ( A bit too purple?)
I was almost close as this paragraph demonstrates?
So is it the public’s settled view that, to quote Dickens on Henry, the prime minister is not just “a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, swinish looking fellow”, but “a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England”? To mix Dickensian metaphors, if the Ghost of Christmas Future were to visit No 10 this weekend, would he show Johnson a vision of his political grave?
Here is that thwarted literary ambition in the form of quotations from Dickens ?
So is it the public’s settled view that, to quote Dickens on Henry, the prime minister is not just “a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, swinish looking fellow”, but “a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England”? To mix Dickensian metaphors, if the Ghost of Christmas Future were to visit No 10 this weekend, would he show Johnson a vision of his political grave?
The Stage has been carefully set, at this point Mr. Colvile, now, demonstrates his talent for exploring, extemporizing on the themes of the currant political moment, its actors and possibilities, as they evolve. Subject to a revisionism, in the face of an accelerated Political Time. Who should appear on Stage, but Sir Lynton Crosby as deus ex machina, a possible answer to the Boris Dilemma?
It was Crosby, indeed, who gave Johnson the template for how to escape his current troubles. In November 2012, the Australian strategist was brought in by Cameron to right the Tory ship. His prescription was to “get the barnacles off the boat”, to focus ruthlessly and exclusively on delivery, in particular on those issues that would decide the next election.
The Reader encounters the last paragraph of Mr. Colvile’s essay, call it a flaccid Johnson defence, framed as a maladroit riff on Shakespeare?
Yet while the prime minister has been divorced, and frequently almost beheaded, he has somehow always survived. Boris may be bruised and battered. But he still wears the crown.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jettisoning-johnson-will-not-be-the-cure-all-that-troubled-tories-crave-nt0sfsn27
Political Reporter