“We’re jammin’… And I hope you like jammin’, too.” As Bob Marley was faded out across the airwaves, Jeremy Vine turned his attention to Jeremy Corbyn. The playlist compiler at the BBC knows how to put the boot in. It is not at all clear if the Labour leader likes jammin’ or is just jammed, but jammin’ is exactly what he has been doing for the past few days as he has struggled to maintain any kind of party line on bombing Syria. On Monday, it was going to be a three line whip. On Tuesday, it is a free vote. On Wednesday, who knows?
This latest instalment of Labour’s ongoing Edward Albee re-write of “Who’s Afraid of Jeremy Corbyn?” was played out on Radio 2 as the existential divisions in the party have now become so wide no one is even able to agree if a Labour party conference motion has been met or not.
They might as well cancel next year’s party conference right now on the grounds that anything it agrees to will be completely meaningless. It cannot be long before everyone in the party fails to agree on whether up is really up as it could be down if you were upside down in the first place. Even the most optimistic therapist would recommend separation as the only humane resolution when faced with such irreconcilable differences.
“Why don’t you whip them?” asked Vine. There’s nothing Jezza would like to do more right now. Literally. Especially those members of the shadow cabinet who he had appointed just months ago and were now in open disagreement with him. Tom Watson. Chris Bryant. Vernon Coaker. Angela Eagle. Mike Dugher. None of them were nearly as afraid of him as they ought to be. If there was a Commons vote to launch airstrikes against the Labour hawks, Corbyn would be first through the yes lobby. And who could blame him? Every pacifist has his limits.
Jezza’s were soon tested still further as, just as he was trying to convince the other Jezza that the shambles had actually been a cunning plan to unsettle the Tories and unite the party, there was his shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, over on Sky News saying he was all up for “bomb, bomb, bombety bombing”. Not so much the Divided Self as the Divided Selves. RD Laing would be thrilled. Corbyn’s breathing became audibly heavier as he tried to explain away the free vote as an exemplar of enlightened democracy and diversity in action rather than a threat to his authority.
Vine went in for an airstrike of his own. “Diane Abbott said a free vote would hand victory to Cameron on a plate,” he chuntered happily. “That was Diane’s view yesterday,” Jezza replied, as if he was sure she would have changed her mind now that she had had 24 hours longer for proper reflection on the matter. That was the nature of re-education; if only his refuseniks would learn the errors of their ways so quickly.
“I’m not a dictator,” Jezza insisted, somewhat menacingly. “All I would say is that I urge those MPs who are thinking of supporting military action to think and think again.” And if that wasn’t enough, they should carry on thinking and thinking again until they had come to the right answer. And if that didn’t work they could take their chances on deselection. Let’s see how much you lot like that.
Somewhere over the past few days, the morality of going to war against Syria has become secondary to the far more pressing issue of the civil war in the Labour party. No one on the Labour benches seems to really care that David Cameron has spent much of the day building himself an Airfix model of a Tornado. Priorities, priorities. Still, at least the relatives of all those civilians who will be killed in the inevitable bombing campaign can console themselves that at least there was some collateral damage back in Britain. Just listen to the Tory shrieks of “win, win”.
As Corbyn left to bend more ears and twist more arms, the playlist compiler had the last laugh by lining up Hey Little Girl by Icehouse. “When everything goes wrong / Sometimes it makes no sense / There once was a time / I should have known better then.” Shouldn’t we all?
