Boris Johnson’s outburst in the Sun, gratuitously mean, insulting and cruel, will not sit well with voters in any party and will backfire. It is the flagrant bullying by the silver spoon public schoolboy of the lad with the scholarship from the terraced home. Corbyn is probably the most honest and transparent politician in the UK today. As this blog has remarked in previous posts, he is not a conventional politician and he does not do point scoring politics. He is a campaigner for causes in which he believes and which resonate with millions as the inequities of the current economic settlement become ever clearer. Corbyn does not do personal attacks either.
So Boris has no fear of reprisal. In fact Boris has form at mocking those unlikely or unwilling to respond. It is his style. It is also, in this Corbyn incident, a blunder. It has echoes of Churchill’s ill judged 1945 speech, warning that Labour would introduce a totalitarian socialist state if elected, with Gestapo style controls and surveillance. It was recognised as a tactical disaster which contributed in no small measure to the Labour landslide.