Just down the road from Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency, the Greek drama Bakkhai is playing at Islington’s Almeida Theatre. Euripides’ last stage work tells the story of Dionysos, a marginalised God who returns to command worship from frenzied supporters. Unlike classical deities, politicians rarely achieve cult status. Labour has boasted only two such figures in the last 20 years, both of whom inhabited the same north London borough.
The contrast between the sun-dried tomato belt where Tony Blair once lived and the impoverished estates of Corbyn’s adjoining patch gives only the first hint of the gulf dividing the first and the second Islington Dionysos. Blair has advised any Labour supporter whose heart is drawn to Corbyn to “get a transplant”, while Corbyn indicated that the party’s most successful leader may be put on trial for war crimes over the “illegal” Iraq invasion. In the battle for Labour’s soul and survival, it is accepted without question that the two antagonists are polar opposites.
That false dichotomy explains why both devotees and foes of Corbyn continue to misread his appeal. The accepted parallel by those on Labour’s Right is that Corbyn is a dead-ringer for Michael Foot, who led the party to catastrophe in 1983. The truth is that, for all their differences, Corbyn is much more like Blair. While neither north London messiah would see the other as an agent of social justice, they have more in common than they would like to think. Both exude moral purpose, both favour a cavalier approach to the parliamentary party, and both sought to put education at the heart of their prospectus.
Where Blair broke new ground by imposing the Minimum Wage Act, Corbyn has called for a “maximum wage” to rein in excessive pay. On foreign policy, both see themselves as agents of conciliation able to forge alliances that others would not dare broker, with Sinn Fein and in the Middle East. While Corbyn has been vilified for urging that Hamas be drawn into peace talks, Blair is said to have held several meetings in recent months with the militant group in an attempt to secure a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Strenuous efforts have been made to discredit Corbyn for consorting with dubious characters, but the Blair photo album, featuring holiday pictures with Silvio Berlusconi and warm handshakes with Muammar Gaddafi, may raise more eyebrows at Snappy Snaps. Even those who think that Blair, at his best, was a master statesman and Corbyn a tinpot meddler, may concede that the latter foresaw outcomes to which much of his party was wilfully blind.
Although Blair must shoulder the blame for the Iraq disaster, those who voted for him did so in the knowledge that they were mandating a war devoid of either a clear legal justification or a proven casus belli (an act that justifies war), in the form of weapons of mass destruction. Whatever their differences, both Blair and Corbyn rose to prominence at a moment when certainties were waning.
Global problems
In 1997, Thatcherism had run its course, leaving the way open for a renaissance of social democracy and the longest Labour tenure in the party’s history. Though this year’s general election proved to be a rout for the opposition, that trouncing does not bespeak any confidence in a Government whose competence and humanity have proved wanting. Hideous scenes of weeping children and exhausted women fleeing from Syria offer a daily rebuke to a Britain that bet the house on military solutions to global problems (the Afghan war cost Britain an estimated £40 billion or Dh226.11 billion) and which now invests little mercy or money, bar the cost of a few rolls of barbed wire, into dealing with a growing refugee crisis.
Meanwhile, panic is spreading from Beijing to London as stock markets plummet. The next recession may not be made in China, but any wise British government would take the current turmoil as a warning that Britain’s debt-fuelled economy is once again heading for the rocks. The very suggestion that Corbyn is the man to deal with such vast challenges seems ludicrous to opponents within Labour who think that even the basic housekeeping of opposition would defeat him. How, insiders wonder, would a man who scribbles down his own speeches deal with the machinery of power, let alone maintain control of a parliamentary party in which fewer than three dozen MPs back him? Yet, with more than 60 per cent of the leadership vote in, the consensus is that Corbyn is certain of victory, possibly in the first ballot. With almost three weeks to go, nothing should be taken for granted.
But if it falls to Corbyn to help tackle the momentous problems facing Britain, it will be because none of his opponents has been deemed equal to the task. Should his parliamentary colleagues be tempted by immediate revolt (and many are), they should think again. Coups, resistance and warnings of legal challenge would invite civil war within the party and scorn from those outside it.
While he may fail the great and small tests that would await him, Corbyn’s enemies should be humble. If he wins, he will be swept into office on a tide of grass roots hubris not seen since 1997. That emotion would be more no fake than the excitement that clung to Blair in the pioneering years before his appeal turned sour and it may prove unexpectedly durable. It is possible, even likely, that Corbyn would, for a few months at least, discomfit the Tories and gain public support.
While even the most fervent Corbynista would doubt whether he could win one election, let alone three, many Blairites horrified by his rise have a different and unspoken fear of the adulation accorded to Corbyn. They understand that the anointing of a successor who is both the mirror image and the antithesis of their hero would mark the death of Blairism. Those who still hope to avert a Corbyn victory know, in their hearts, that the ill-starred military adventures and neoliberalism of Tony Blair were the incubator for another, still-untested evangelist. Though his enemies would never admit it, Islington’s vest-wearing Dionysos is the true heir to Blair.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
