Andy Richardson: 'You can rely on Corbyn to make it as hard as possible for Labour to ever get re-elected.'
Good old Magic Grandpa.
You can rely on Jezza Corbyn to make it as hard as possible for the Labour Party to ever get re-elected. After his unhelpful – I think that’s the word diplomats use – remarks regarding the failure on his watch to combat anti-semitism, he’s been offered an olive branch. He’s welcome back into the ranks of the party that he kept from power, but will instead not sit as a Labour MP.
In decades to come, there’ll be a Trivial Pursuit question and it will be this. Having observed the chaotic and ultimately unsuccessful premiership of BoJo, the nation’s favourite quiz will ask: “Why on earth did the British public elect Boris Johnson?” Some will parrot: to Get Brexit Done. Others will say For A Laugh. Those who answer correctly will opine that however bad Boris is, Jezza would have been worse. A great protester and campaigner but a woeful leader, Magic Grandpa can spend more time with the allotment having been re-instated after a 19-day slap on the wrist.
Michael Gove has sought to make political capital from Magic Grandpa’s readmission. In unrelated news, the party he represents has cosied up to Orban and Trump and has a bit of a problem with Islamophobia. Oh yes, and then there was Windrush.
Boris is, of course, trying to reset the Downing Street agenda having kicked out two of his closest aides because they called his girlfriend funny nicknames, or something like that. The nation is going to be filled with windmills, petrol cars will be banned, fields will harvest solar energy rather than wheat and our dependence on fossil fuels will be curtailed.
It’s odd, therefore, that the person handed a key role for next year’s pivotal environment conference, Cop26, is a pro-fracking MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who has previously said people are ‘fed up to the back teeth’ with onshore wind farms. Appointing a politician at odds with her brief are nothing new, of course. Look at BoJo; he’s the man in charge and he has no time for decisiveness, responsibility or the hard business of running the country efficiently.
Incidentally, tackling the climate crisis and creating jobs is a hit in Germany and France, too. Germany is spending £42.85 billion, France is spending £35 billion and BoJo is spending, ahem, £4bn, which is roughly a third of the cost of his failed track and trace scheme. That’s the environment sorted, then.
