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The hard-Left Labour leader has cut a morose figure during his first full week on the stump. Tetchy with journalists and voters alike, hounded by hecklers, he has stumbled between walkabouts and news conferences in his Lenin cap and tartan scarf with his reputed enthusiasm for campaigning apparently blown away by the icy winter wind. So far, Labour’s push towards polling day on December 12 could not be more different from the party’s June 2017 election charge. Back then, the opposition leader bathed in a summer of love while being transformed from obscure politician on the far-Left fringe to a cult celebrity.
His name was chanted by adoring fans at mass rallies around the country. Swing voters warmed to his seeming avuncular manner that belied his extremist vision for turning the country into a Soviet-style socialist state.
Two-and-a-half years later, the Corbynite campaign for Downing Street has a gloomy and decrepit air with only the activists in the Left-wing Momentum faction showing any genuine hunger for the fight.
Parliament’s long war of attrition over Brexit has left the Labour leader an exhausted figure. Mr Corbyn’s struggles to keep his party together and try to appeal to both Remain and Leave voters have destroyed his image as a conviction politician who unflinchingly sticks to his principles.
Sir John Curtice, one of the country’s most respected polling experts, observed this week that the Labour leader has been vainly trying to find a non-existent centre ground on an issue that is a binary choice between remaining in or leaving the EU.
“Jeremy Corbyn is considered to be this great radical but he’s the only compromiser left on the biggest issue in the election,” the professor of politics at Strathclyde University said at a briefing for Westminster journalists. “On Brexit, there isn’t a centre ground.
“The one issue where the Labour Party leader shows Blairite moderation is the one issue where being a Blairite moderate doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Labour strategists are determined to try to steer the election debate on to any issue other than Brexit as a result.They have already reached for their traditional election weapon of choice, the scaremongering warning that the Tories will wreck the NHS.Yet even that line of attack appears to have lost its edge.
Opinion polls overwhelmingly show that the health service is seen as the most important issue for Labour voters while Brexit is the chief concern of the electorate as a whole. By repeatedly raising the NHS, Labour is addressing its own core vote.
Another dilemma for Mr Corbyn and his allies is their addiction to announcing ever more radical proposals. Labour’s 2017 election manifesto contained the most Leftwing programme for government in the party’s history with proposals for sweeping state control of the economy and a half-a-trillion pound spending spree funded by soaring borrowing and crippling tax rises.
Yet that document is only the starting point for Labour’s ambition this time around as spokesmen bolt on even more extreme pledges.
Yesterday Labour added British Telecom to the list of assets to be seized by a future Labour government that already includes the railways, water and energy firms and Royal Mail.
Mr Corbyn needs to button up his anorak and endure his winter of discontent on the campaign trail.
On the evidence of his campaign so far, he can look forward to retirement on his north London allotment by next spring.
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