Corbyn’s post-Budget response is doomed before he starts to speak

Throughout a six-month period of barely broken turmoil, Corybn’s calm has been supernatural

There have been reports of internal fighting in Jeremy Corbyn's inner-circle (Getty/Christopher Furlong)

As he prepares for the scariest ordeal in domestic politics, our task is to console Jeremy Corbyn. That good and gentle man must shortly give an instant, semi-off-the-cuff response to the Budget, and he’ll need every ounce of encouragement we can feed him.

For all Opposition leaders, this is a nightmare. They have as much advance warning as the rest of us. They know whatever specific details the Treasury has selflessly leaked, and memorise some generic bletherings around those. But any Budget’s complexities take days to unravel, and whatever theatrical surprise the Chancellor unveils demands a dazzling talent for thinking quickly under pressure that none of them seem to possess.

You’d rather be the one lavatory attendant on duty at one of southern Mexico’s higher-capacity football stadiums during an amoebic dysentery pandemic, I think, than give the Leader of the Opposition’s Budget response.

Yet there are consolations for Corbyn. First, he is impervious to the crippling terror you or I would suffer. Paradoxically for a humble man, he has staggering self-confidence. Monday brought an anniversary for the plucky allotment-holder from Islington. It was six months to the day since he became Labour leader, and throughout that period of barely broken turmoil his calm has been supernatural. No sporting analogy properly conveys the leap in class from irrelevant back-bencher to alternative PM; Rocky Balboa’s rise from undercard bum to title contender – perhaps – comes close. But Rocky at least had the passionate support of his Philadelphia home town crowd when he fought Apollo Creed.

When Corbyn rises to answer George Osborne, almost the entire audience will expect him to fail, though no part of it as fervently as the supposedly home-town crowd on the Labour benches. Which brings us to the second consolation: it couldn’t matter less how Corbyn replies to the Budget, because (unless he trumps John McDonnell’s hilarity by lobbing Das Kapital at Osborne’s head) everyone will have pre-judged the speech before he begins it.

If he spent 20 minutes singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, or took out a tickling stick and gave the House his Ken Dodd, or spoke in a new hybrid tongue melding Esperanto with Klingon, it would get the same reaction as a superlative forensic dismantling of the Chancellor’s proposals. Whatever he says, the Tories will bray, the Tory press will dismiss him as a dangerously naive fool, and 95 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party will fidget on their arses, waiting for the debate to end so they can resume huddling in alcoves and scheming about ousting him.

In recent days, cabals of New Labour recidivists inside and outside the Commons, too driven by the toddler’s sense of entitlement denied to accept Corbyn’s democratic mandate, have been up to their familiar tricks. They have tainted him by association with a couple of anti-Semitic cretins with whom he has no connection whatever. They’ve cited Momentum, that self-styled Praetorian Guard, to support the fantasy of a vast, well organised Marxist conspiracy, when what remains of the hard left has neither the numbers nor the organisational ability to co-ordinate the opening of a fridge. And they have touted a ready-made replacement in the square-jawed form of former paratrooper Dan Jarvis.

With soldierly courage, Jarvis has overcome his objections to leading Labour. Last summer, he refused to run because his children were too young. My, my, but how quickly they’ve grown. Jarvis, who is hoovering money from previous Labour donors, auditioned for Corbyn’s job on the weekend by repositioning himself a few inches to the left, criticising New Labour’s failure to recognise the pressure on workers’ pay exerted by globalisation. Whether that suggests Jarvis is a trade isolationist, or a fan of restoring lost trade union powers, or both, no one could know. Least of all, you suspect, Jarvis himself.

But then there is no discerning what, beyond a nicer world and their own advancement, the politically insipid enemies of Corbyn do believe. Almost a year after the election calamity, there is no sign of his detractors developing any coherent alternative philosophy to these brutal neo-Thatcherite Conservatives or to Corbyn himself.

Nor do they seem to appreciate that they are in precisely the same bind as the Republican hierarchy is with Donald Trump, pincered between a leader they loathe and a base they hold in contempt. Both establishments would prefer Pol Pot as leader. But if either defied its base by robbing the leader of his democratic dues – by keeping Corbyn off a leadership ballot, or cheating a delegate-leading Trump of the nomination at a brokered convention – they would unleash a tidal wave of fury that would wash the party away.

If the last election taught us anything, it is that the Labour movement is on the verge of extinction. And if the subsequent Corbyn landslide taught us anything, it is that its long-term survival depends on reigniting and harnessing passions rendered moribund by two decades of anodyne cynics whose paramount concern was assuaging the Daily Mail. Like the Republican establishment that never saw Trump coming, the Labour narcissists who sneer at Corbyn are victims of a lethal failure of the imagination, too blinkered by their own narrow world view to see how outmoded it has come to seem anywhere beyond their cosy little enclave.

The union between Corbyn and the PLP is the worst passive-aggressive (he’s endearingly passive; they’re repulsively aggressive) marriage of inconvenience in history. If a resurrected Ian Dury was commissioned to rewrite his biggest hit to raise funds for Labour, the new chorus would go “Reasons to be cheerful. Erm? Arrgh? Hmmmm?”

Of course, those who deny this counsel of despair could try to encourage Corbyn, as he prepares for his ordeal, by reference to an ICM poll showing Labour and the Tories tied on 36 per cent. And actually, on reflection, this is massively encouraging. The parties haven’t been deadlocked in the polls, after all, since the morning of the last general election.