Shot Their Fox

On and on and on they are determined to whine and moan about Claire Fox's peerage. The Labour front bench is now aboard the bandwagon, for all that anyone may care about that. 

Srebrenica? Well, perhaps the prototype neoconservative wars in Yugoslavia were a bit more complicated than you pretended, and perhaps Jeremy Corbyn was prescient in opposing them?

The IRA? There are now three likely answers to that one. "The what?" "Didn't they win in the end?" And, "Weren't they the good guys, at least by comparison?" Whatever you may think of any of those answers, you would almost certainly now get one or more of them.

And all that Corbyn ever did was meet them. As John Hume did, in fact. Corbyn never defended any of their actions, and he certainly never told them to reject the Good Friday Agreement and fight on.

The Revolutionary Communist Party and its successors do seem of late to have done a 180 degree turn on Israel and Palestine, but I clearly remember Fox on The Moral Maze telling Melanie Phillips that she did not accept Israel's right to exist. Corbyn has never, ever said that.

Corbyn has never called himself a Trotskyist, for the perfectly good reason that he has never been one. But Fox probably still does call herself a Trotskyist. Someone should ask her. Certainly, she still calls herself a Marxist, which Corbyn has repeatedly and accurately denied ever having been.

All in all, the Labour Right knows that with this ennoblement, Boris Johnson has well and truly shot their Fox. Oh, well, the whole thing can be played out after next year's Labour meltdown at the local elections, when there ought to be what there ought to have been this year, a head-to-head Leadership Election between Corbyn and Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile, if the RCP can end up at the heart of a Conservative Government, the only kind that there is going to be for anything like the foreseeable future, then there really is hope for us all yet.

My online activity makes me the linchpin of a small but, I have to say, a very highly intelligent and well-informed network, mostly of men, and mostly 15 to 25 years younger than I am, who at least broadly share my views. There may very well be other such networks, of which I am unaware. Indeed, I have no doubt that there are.

But even within mine, if I may call it that, there are figures who, given 20 years, could perfectly easily end up as something like the Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, as Munira Mirza now is. They could speak at my funeral. Oh, yes, there is hope for us all yet.