Evidently the political cabinet of the Tory party almost collectively wet itself it laughed so much at the thought of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Opposition. It was of course thinking back to Michael Foot. Like everybody else and especially the sulking troops of New Labour, unable to take in what has happened to them. But the Tories should think not of Foot, but of Thatcher, and her ghost should strike fear into the hearts of them all. This is why.
In 1983 socialism had overplayed its hand and was failing, all across the world. Foot offered even more socialism. Thatcher turned the clock back to pre-war values of challenging the unions through very high unemployment, reducing taxes, rolling back the state, selling off all the nationalised industries (an act Tory grandee Harold Macmillan described as selling off the family silver), selling off the nation’s stock of social housing ( much of it built by Macmillan) and inaugurating the era of the sharp elbowed and the primacy of the individual, with the declaration that there was ‘no such thing as society’. She became unstoppable. Had she put such a programme to the people twenty years earlier the Tories would have lost every seat. But she understood that the political weather had changed. The Attlee Consensus, which had shaped British politics since 1945, was over.
The reason nobody took Corbyn seriously and the reason he has won by a landslide in every section of the Labour party electoral register, not just the new supporters, is that he has tapped into something we can again call a change of political weather. The Thatcher consensus, out of which the centre left politics of New Labour was born, is over. The inequalities, the austerity, the debt, the wars, the food banks, the billionaires, the housing shortage and much else has brought what started as a breath of fresh air, to a dank and suffocating depression. Like all political weathers, change is what is needed now. People crave a new dawn. Like all new weathers that dawn will bring a new interpretation of an old theme. New Labour is now in the same place as Foot’s Old Labour, wrongly dressed because they do not see the weather has changed. If Corbyn delivers a modernised Left, as Thatcher delivered a modernised Right, like her he will be unstoppable. From a Tory Downing Street as May 2020 looms, will that still be funny?