According to the immutable laws of British public life, websites offering THE TRUE FACTS about important people can be neither created nor destroyed. They can only be converted from one form to another.
Thus the recent sad loss of the rebuttal section of Heather Mills’s official website was not a loss at all. (In fact, even madam’s newest site still refers to advising the shadow defence secretary over the Balkans crisis in 1993.)
As I say, Britain is an isolated system – increasingly so – and a major new website offering THE TRUE FACTS has duly emerged, displaying a similar gift for creative rebuttal of a selective range of “media lies” about its figurehead. It is corbynfacts.com, and it offers fact-effect answers to a series of truthiness-provoking questions like “Is Jeremy Corbyn electable?” and “Is Jeremy Corbyn serious about defence policy?”.
Answers include facts such as the unsourced assertion that until the recent coup attempt, Labour and the Tories were “neck-and-neck in the polls”. After a fact-checking call from the rightwing media – that is the Daily Mirror – the Corbyn campaign has revealed this fact is based on a single Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday two days after the referendum (an ICM poll published the same day showed Labour trailing by four points, though it included some polling from before the vote). Otherwise: bupkis.
Just as there were various notable omissions among Heather’s rebuttals, meanwhile, so there are some lacunae in corbynfacts.com. It’s still early days, of course, but I notice they have avoided several of the big ones. Namely: “In what year will Topshop start selling ironic Momentum T-shirts?” and “Does even Jeremy have a handle on 50% of the current plotlines in Labour’s shitshow?” I am sure the latter answer would follow the idiosyncratically sparse prose style of the rest of the facts, and would read along the lines of, “Yes. Jeremy has a handle on all the current plotlines in Labour’s shitshow.”
For many of us, though, the Labour experience is surely becoming beyond anything approaching fully graspable. After yesterday’s appeal court decision on Labour’s endless custody battle – think of it as Lamer vs Lamer – I am now more meaningfully aware of price fluctuations on the East India Jute and Hessian Exchange.
Having gone on holiday in the middle of the leadership contest, I was expecting that traditional feeling you get if you are away when a news event occurs, and consequently can never quite get your head around the fact it ever happened. I was away during the failed coup against Gorbachev around this time of year in 1991, for instance, and spent years having to manually override my basic belief that it had never taken place.
Yet with a full two weeks of Labour leadership contest missed, it is even worse. There is more chance of catching up with an obscure telenovela (I speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese). Like many people, I suspect, I am now only capable of comprehending the Labour leadership as a moodboard. And the moodboard looks like the walls of H-block in the Maze, circa 1978.
Yesterday I read a statement by the general secretary of the Communist party of Britain condemning “sectarian” entryism of Labour by other far-left groups, and realised I needed a personal, 24-hour version of the Gabriel Byrne character in Miller’s Crossing, whose gift is to know “all the angles”. Of Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
How many people can now keep the whole equation of Labour’s shitshow in their heads, let alone care to? It’s sometimes said that people of a certain age can do two of three things – work, children, friends – really well, but never all three at once. If you are properly “doing” Labour at this stage in its journey, you have to either: 1. Walk out on all the aforementioned other three. 2. Be Jeremy Corbyn or one of his top team. 3. Be 22 years old with no dependants.
I could never fully get behind the George Bernard Shaw line that “youth is wasted on the young”, but watching crowds of Branch Jeremians cheering us to a socialist landslide/one-party Tory state does occasionally move me to adapt one of Alan Partridge’s to his son. “Fernando, you’re 22 years old and you’re spending Saturday afternoon in bed with a girl! You’re wasting your life. It’s a beautiful day. Take her out to a Jeremy Corbyn rally.”
Yes, it’s a young person’s game, this one – and that’s coming from someone who considers herself fairly politically nerdy. To many of its older friends, the party is now the equivalent of that long-standing acquaintance who still imagines you follow every cough and spit of developments in their lives (though they clearly couldn’t be less interested in yours), but whose dramas have long since caused you to glaze over. To the wider public – which, sadly, doesn’t include those attending Corbyn rallies in already safe seats – Labour has simply become something life’s too short for, a rolling resignation from the top flight that couldn’t be less watchable if it were managed by Tony Pulis.
