From the reactions to the General Election on Friday morning, you'd think Labour had won. Unbelievably, several prominent Labour politicians, including the main loser himself, Jeremy Corbyn, suggested they had. In interviews he called it an "incredible result" and said it was "pretty clear who won the election". "We've changed the face of British politics," he said. It's time for his critics within the Labour Party to make themselves heard.
As I discussed in my previous piece, Corbyn doesn't seem to have a very good sense of history. If he did, he might not have forced his old-school socialism on the Labour Party. In fact, if he had a better sense of history, he might not have formed those political views to begin with. And if he had a better sense of history, he might show more humility than he recently has, since both James Callaghan and Neil Kinnock managed to take more seats than he did, and both had the grace and self-awareness to admit defeat and resign.
The childish I-told-you-so attitude Corbyn has shown since the results came in on Friday only proves further that he is completely inappropriate for the party and completely incompetent as a leader. He believes that his leadership has been vindicated when any half-decent Labour leader would have ground Theresa May into dust and taken the keys to Number 10. Corbyn had his best-ever chance to win against a failed Prime Minister with zero charisma and a Conservative Party in a perpetual state of civil war and he still blew it. I've worked in the media for two decades, and even I don't know how you can spin that as a "win".
But we shouldn't be surprised. The delusional thinking of Corbyn and his Corbynistas is par for the course. They sneer at the state of American politics, but it's just as ridiculous to call a loss a win as it is to claim that your inauguration as president was well-attended when it wasn't. More ridiculous, in fact, and Donald Trump is almost known for being ridiculous. Since Friday, many of Corbyn's most outspoken critics have gone eerily quiet. Maybe they've been tricked into thinking that the Corbyn "surge" represents a success. Or maybe they fear reprisal from the emboldened Corbynistas. Either way, they need to recover their voice and they need to do it fast. The battle for the Labour leadership isn't over.
Here's what will happen now: May will form a government with the DUP. At some point in the not-so-distant future the Tories will elect someone who does have conviction and charisma. And then they will guarantee that Labour remains in Opposition while they cut deeper and deeper and hurt those who need help the most. Nothing that happened last week has changed the fact that he is an unelectable hard-left demagogue with a checkered history that includes cosying up to terrorists and taking money from a theocracy with nuclear ambitions. And if we are going to help those who Corbyn claims to represent, we need to ditch him.