Quote of the day 15th June 2017

"For me, thinking back, a pivotal moment in this election came during Corbyn’s interview with Jeremy Paxman, when Paxman, in full Spanish inquisition mode, asked him why the Labour manifesto included nothing on Corbyn’s long-held ambition of scrapping the monarchy. “There’s nothing in there because we’re not going to do it,” retorted Corbyn, visibly amused.

Hidden beneath the audience’s guffaws, this was the sound of a man wryly acknowledging the fundamental impracticality of his own radicalism.

All of a sudden, Jeremy Corbyn was a moderate."

"If compromise was in Jeremy Corbyn’s DNA, then he wouldn’t have spent three decades on the back benches, condemning every effort that a succession of despairing Labour leaders made to make their party more electable. Once electability became his problem, though, he seems to have picked up a taste for it."

"On the stump, a lifetime’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament (even as a vice-chairman of CND), retreated last year to “I wouldn’t personally use them” and last month, quite astonishingly, to something more like, “I certainly wouldn’t use them first”. Greenham Common it ain’t. More striking still was his response to the London Bridge attack, where having previously quite explicitly opposed a police shoot-to-kill policy, pretty much for ever, he now found himself explicitly supporting one. It was as if he had realised, finally, that to achieve broad electoral support you need to make the odd concession. “Took you long enough, Grandpa,” a generation of Blairites might have said."

"For Corbyn’s hard core, the real enemy has never been the Tories. They don’t really notice the Tories. Rather, they see a hated coalition of political and media Corbynsceptics who, they fervently believe, have smeared a good man as cranky and unelectable because it is easier than opposing his policies.

This simply isn’t true. "

"Labour didn’t win this election, but Corbyn did far better than almost anybody ever expected, probably including him. He didn’t do well because his critics were wrong but because, belatedly, he realised that they were absolutely right."

"Want to stop people deriding you as a disaster? The very best strategy is to stop being one."

(Hugo Rifkind, extracts from an article in The Times about how Jeremy Corbyn changed some of the policies and habits of a lifetime during his campaign,

"It was Corbyn's flip-flopping that saved him.")

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