BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
Even against the backcloth of today’s air-conditioned luxury, long car journeys in the summer holidays with children in the back can be taxing. Either my daughter seems to get her way with the pulchritudinous whiner Taylor Swift blaring out from the car stereo or my little son wins the day with relentless games of I spy. Or both.
How I have tried to attract my daughter to more bearable Radiohead or REM but she’s simply not for turning and cruelly threatens me with Bieber if I silence Swift – I refuse to allow her headphones in the car as I believe it’s important we travel as a family.
At least with my son it’s possible to get him involved in a game of “See that, that’s your wife that is” and one of the more amusing games we both enjoy is the Game of Opposites where you make a statement diametrically opposed to what you see or believe. So, “that Lollipop Lady is Brigitte Bardot’s twin”, “worm medicine is scrumptious” and “Scientology is a wholly credible religion” would score one point each. Better than Swift and far better than a dose of Bieber.
Recently during a journey across Cornwall, it dawned on me in the course of one such game that Labour’s supreme leader, Mr Jeremy Corbyn, is actually a lovely fellow after all. In a Damascene moment on the A30 I worked Jeremy out. He’s not an evil Marxist at all. You see, he too is merely playing a jovial Game of Opposites…
Just look at the evidence:
- Jeremy has declared himself a supporter of a Kinder Gentler Politics yet rides on the wave of Momentum who bully and troll while selling mugs and shirts at their annual conference featuring the quote “Tories are lower than vermin” alongside a stand offering a spoof Army recruiting leaflet offering “free prosthetic limbs”.
- Jeremy is said to have told Michael Eavis last month that he will be our Prime Minister inside 6 months yet there is a Fixed Term Parliament Act and he soundly lost the General Election.
- Jeremy has commended Chavista economic and social policies in Venezuela yet these same socialist policies have been proven ruinous and divisive leading to a bloodbath on Venezuela’s streets.
- Jeremy declares himself a crucial mover in the peace process in Ireland yet stood in honour of dead IRA terrorists at a Wolfe Tone Society meeting in London in 1987 and, as Mike Gapes has pointed out, was not even peripheral in the Northern Ireland peace process..
- Jeremy is a huge supporter of the LGBT community yet he enjoys the hospitality of Press TV, belonging to the Iranian State which hangs our gay friends.
- Jeremy blames Margaret Thatcher for the closure of coal mines yet we all know Labour’s Harold Wilson closed 272 mines to Maggie’s 156.
- Jeremy has taken a valiant stand against nasty zero-hour contracts yet he grandstands about zero hour contracts at Glastonbury where zero hours contracts are used.
- Jeremy has declared Fidel Castro a “champion of social justice” yet Castro was known for his jailing, torture and murder of gays, forced labour camps and brutal repression in Cuba.
- Jeremy has announced that Labour does not have an Antisemitism issue yet the Labour party is institutionally anti-Semitic and Jeremy’s failure to expel his friend Ken “Hitler” Livingstone and the anti-Semitic MP Naz Shah underline the ongoing problem the Labour Party has.
- Jeremy has declared the Labour Party is returning to the same ideas that drove Attlee and Bevan, Gaitskell and Wilson, Healey and Callaghan yet Labour’s original values have been abandoned by the current leadership.
- Jeremy has talked recently about the Magic Money Tree and the Labour manifesto for the 2017 General Election seemed based on one as it didn’t add up yet there isn’t one and a fiat currency like the pound would certainly not support any attempt at one if Jeremy was at the helm with Marxist John McDonnell as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Do you see the pattern?
It’s the Game of Opposites, stupid! And Jeremy’s really good at it!! He’s made a career out of it! What silly chumps we have been not working out that Jezza is still playing a childish car journey game he probably played with his brother Piers when they were boys.
Of course, the best news for all concerned is that Jeremy’s taxing journey will never get started.