The Boys From Brazil?

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour took 40 per cent of the vote in 2017, and if that Parliament had run its course, then Corbyn’s Labour would have been the largest party in the hung Parliament of 2022. There was a General Election in 2019 only because Keir Starmer had unilaterally announced a second referendum on EU membership, Corbyn had been too weak to sack him, and Boris Johnson, barely able to believe his luck, had seized his chance, thereby delivering to Starmer his only reason for the whole move, the Leadership of the Labour Party.

None of that had anything to do with antisemitism, and nor did the failure of Zack Polanski to win Holborn and St Pancras. The Board of Deputies is avowedly Zionist, so the Green Party called it racist by calling Zionism a form of racism. In that sense, they are now even. But the Board is not used to being even. It is used to its own way. Heaven knows what would happen if Polanski turned out to be made of sterner stuff than Corbyn and just told that glorified Tory golf club to get lost.

Green anti-Zionism is dismissed as “student politics”, and the youth in revolt in France are vilified in far more robust terms again, but the victory of the Student List in Serbia is somehow a cause for jubilation. Alas, there are no Students on that List. Their only role has been to turn away from their previous demonstrations, originating in response to the 16 deaths when the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station had collapsed, and instead endorse the junta of technocrats from central casting that will now take power. That junta may eventually lead Serbia into the EU, which Aleksandar Vučić also wanted as its enthusiasts in Britain may care to keep in mind, but it will be vastly less likely to give up the claim to Kosovo or to join the NATO by which, unlike the students, the technocrats could personally remember being bombed.

Last month, Vučić announced the opening of a drone factory in partnership with Elbit Systems, and there is no reason to expect the new regime to renege. But it was on yesterday’s Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Palestine that Our Lady of Aparecida survived Her attempted dethronement by the Ian Paisley Junior of Guanabara Bay. Now Lula owes Her. The Workers’ Party of Brazil needs to become rather more the Workers Party of Britain (no apostrophe; it’s a long story) than the Workers’ Party of Ireland. Not unlike the old SDLP, in fact. That did a great deal better than the new one, and just as in 2017 the voters of Great Britain were shocked and appalled at the spectacle of the DUP, so the more powerful Sinn Féin becomes in the Six Counties, the less attractive a United Ireland is to the people of the 26.

Meanwhile, whither Flávio Bolsonaro, the only modern winner of the first round to lose the second round of a Brazilian Presidential Election? Donald Trump is rallying Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to give the Secretary-Generalship of the United Nations to Viktor Orbán, but by convention it is Latin America’s turn. María Corina Machado, if anyone has the faintest idea where she is? Juan Guaidó, if anyone has the faintest idea who he is? Or Bolsonaro, a dynastic fag end with the same stale smell as Constantine XI Palaeologus and Bahadur Shah Zafar, as Charles X and Nicholas II, as Puyi and Mehmed VI, as Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Louis Sarkozy, as Hilary Benn and Stephen Kinnock, as Yair Netanyahu and who knows which of the Trumps?