Reading Owen Jones’s account of the Corbynite Labour movement, one image in particular stuck in my mind: it is of a young child in a classroom letting off a stink bomb.
As the first malodorous waves reach his nose, and the nostrils of those around him, the perpetrator suddenly panics. The stench is far more toxic and powerful than he had expected, and as the scale of the nasal assault becomes obvious the child attempts to transform himself from culprit to observer, even eyeing up the opportunity to move, in due course, to victim. So it is with Owen Jones’s This Land, a turgid and strangely dull account of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.
You might have thought that Jones would be well placed to perform the task. Jones was an early cheerleader for Corbyn, campaigned for him, spoke at his rallies, advised him, served as his most prominent mainstream media defender and was otherwise central to the whole movement.
Sure, that move meant transgressing the boundaries of journalism and political activism, but this was a move already mastered by Jones’s comrade Russell Brand. When Brand was pinned down on any of his political pronouncements he would say “I’m just a comedian”. Yet his political pronouncements were only ever taken seriously (to the extent they were) because the stage was given to him as an entertainer.
Similarly, when Jones organises protests outside the offices of papers of which he disapproves and speaks at rallies for his preferred far-left candidates he clearly does so as a political activist. Yet whenever it gets too much for him he slips back into pretending (as he does here) that he is merely a writer, with a dispassionate eye and a judicious historian’s pen.
Perhaps it was inevitable that once the fumes of the Corbyn experiment surrounded him and then (thanks only to the British electorate) dissipated, Jones should try to get away with a book pretending that he was only really an observer of this movement. The desire to get away from the scene of the offence is understandable; what is unforgivable is that the results are so slyly dishonest.
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