THE hype around Corbyn was always too much. The expectation and excitement about who he was and what he would do to politics was never going to meet reality.
The British left have a tradition of building up their heroes. Corbyn is not the first.
It happens every few election cycles. A politician comes along who seems intellectually rigorous, morally just. A man or woman who cares, genuinely cares, about the poor and the vulnerable. Someone who can take on the vested interests and who fights for the worker and not the bosses.
They weep every time a dog is hurt. They feel the pain of every person stuck in the post office queue at lunchtime. They want to change this country, and make it fairer, better, nicer.
And every time this hero, this saviour, this shining white knight appears, those who believe in social justice and left-wing politics sit back excited, waiting for them to ride in and vanquish the evil all-pervasive Toryism.
They fail. They always do.
In fairness, they generally take longer to fail than Jeremy Corbyn.
His supporters will argue that it is his own MPs who are against him. It is them who have forced his hand on tuition fees as they have done on Trident and Europe.
But it is further proof that Jeremy Corbyn just isn’t very good at leading the Labour Party.
Corbynmania was never really about Jeremy Corbyn. It was about what he might represent and what he might bring. The crowds who turned out for him in Edinburgh and Glasgow were excited about the new kind of politics he promised.
The New Yorker recently commented that Corbyn was representative of “the New Authenticity” that’s seen people like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump do so well in the American residential primaries. He was someone who did not talk or look like a politician. He was genuine. Real.
He may be both those things. But he is also the man who hurriedly put more women in his Shadow Cabinet because he was “getting absolutely slaughtered on Twitter”.
Corbyn must have known difficult times were coming up over nuclear weapons and tuition fees and yet there has been little done to make these difficult times any easier. He seems to move from blunder to blunder. There is little in the way of strategic thinking and planning. This may be authentic. But it is also shambolic.
Divided parties do not win elections, even those parties where everyone’s had a big chat and agreed to disagree.
His supporters claimed that Labour under under Corbyn would be a principled opposition. The problem for Labour is that they don’t get to have the luxury of being a principled opposition.
Labour are the second largest party in Westminster. They need to be a government-in-waiting.
Corbyn’s Labour seem less like that with every passing day.
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