Reader TTS

The spectre of Jeremy Corbyn as caretaker Prime Minister, propelled into office by the Scottish Nationalists and other members of the “rebel alliance”, is being raised again. The prospect

has made me almost physically sick. The SNP are, of course, rabidly anti-Tory enough to do it. And if we are to see the nightmare vision of Corbyn strolling through the door of Number 10, I

think many of us would blame the uselessness of the current parliamentary Conservative Party. For me personally, in imagining this lifelong anti-Western Marxist as Prime Minister, the

overriding thought has been: whatever would my dear late parents have made of this? How would they have reacted to the spectacle of Corbyn, put into power courtesy of the bloodthirsty

Momentum mob and manipulated by his Stalinist “strategist” Seumas Milne, backed by communist trade unionists and surrounded by anti-British and anti-American Leftists of every hue,

threatening to nationalise industries, expropriate private property and punish the “privileged”, while purging any remaining moderates in the Labour Party? It all sounds so familiar. Did my

family really escape from communist Hungary in 1956 to end up with this? Britain has always, infuriatingly, had its fellow travellers, its useful idiots. Those who spent their lives in the

comfort of a democratic, pluralistic country, protected by its justice system and its human and civil rights, who yet professed to prefer the political systems practised in the old Soviet

Union and its satellites, or in totalitarian Cuba, or more lately in starving socialist Venezuela. Well, they preferred them for other people, of course; they weren’t crazy enough to want to

live in any of those places themselves. Perhaps the worst example of this breed was the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. He never had the bad luck to live under communism, but swore by it

nonetheless. In a 1994 BBC TV interview, he famously stated that he believed the deaths of millions under Stalin were worth it in order to create a communist society. How I wish the

interviewer, Michael Ignatieff, had gone on to ask Hobsbawm whether they still would have been worth it, had they included the deaths of his parents, his wife, his children? But I suspect he

was only prepared to sacrifice other people’s families in the name of the workers’ paradise. I’ll never forget an interview I did with Ken Livingstone back in the early 1990s, when he was

Labour MP for Brent East. As it happens, he was my own MP and I had met him earlier in that capacity, when I found this notorious member of the “Loony Left” to be a rather amiable fellow.

But halfway through our interview in the hallowed rooms of the House of Commons, I suddenly realised quite how astonishingly misguided he was, and probably still is. Somehow we got on to the

topic of the United States and he casually remarked that it was a mistake to assume that Britain had some kind of “special relationship” with America. No, no, he insisted, the real special

relationship we have has always been with Russia. _Come again_? He explained that there were deep, historic bonds between our two countries, we had so much in common, a unity of spirit and

purpose. I don’t recall his exact phrases but that was the general gist. So, our true affiliation was not with the country that had twice bailed us out of the inferno of world war, and with

whom we share a devotion to liberty and democratic values, but with the country that has only ever known state-sponsored cruelty and mendacity? I didn’t quite know what to say to that — and

I’m not often lost for words. Yes, I’ve always been well aware that Britain has more than its fair share of incorrigibly hypocritical Leftists. As someone whose family suffered under

communism — excuse me, _socialism_ — and finally managed to flee from it, this has often been painful to witness. But never before has a British politician of this ilk been close to assuming

power, of taking the reins of government, of calling the shots. It hasn’t happened yet. And along with, I am sure, all the other rational souls in our country, I sincerely hope and pray

that it won’t. But if Jeremy Corbyn does walk through that shiny black door on Downing Street, the crashing noise that follows will be the sound of my parents turning in their graves.