Poor old Jeremy Corbyn – emphasis squarely on the “old”.
News emerged this weekend that Labour aides have been sheltering him from meeting with his own deputy leader, Tom Watson, who wants him to stand aside.
Their excuse? “He’s a 70-year-old man. We have a duty of care… there is a culture of bullying”. [Corbyn is in fact 67]
You may balk at the thought of the leader of the opposition not being able to handle, well, some opposition.
But perhaps we’re judging Mr Corbyn too harshly.
Heat Street would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the Labour leader’s limitations, and suggest some more areas where we simply expect too much of the man who would be Prime Minister:
Remembering which way he voted in the referendum
Did he vote Leave? Did he vote Remain? Nobody can say (though we have our suspicions). It was more than a week ago now – geriatric Jez probably doesn’t remember.
Telling the difference between Israel and ISIS
We get it, the Middle East is complicated. If I were 70, maybe I would be breezily equating a murderous terror group with the world’s only Jewish state as well.
And can anybody reasonably expect him to stop one of his activists abusing a Jewish Labour MP right in front of him? By the time he realised it was probably all over.
Filling his shadow cabinet
Hiring is a young man’s game. So many vacancies, so few MPs who don’t want to throw you off a bridge.
His innovative solution of getting someone a decade older than him to do two jobs at once is surely a victory for grey power – but probably not for the Labour at large.
(NB, if you fancy stepping up to the plate, take our quiz to see where you’d fit in)
Getting through a committee hearing without notes
Corbyn appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee yesterday, hoping to brush off claims that his party is riven with anti-Semitism.
But he struggled to answer for himself and needed to be passed notes by allies – which earned him a telling-off from committee chair Keith Vaz (watch here).
Bit harsh – he’s never had a great memory for anti-Semitism, and he’s probably having more trouble than ever at his age.
Keeping his temper with reporters
Corbyn’s “kinder, gentler politics” burst to the fore again when he had to be held back from an ITN reporter at the weekend who, stating the obvious, asked whether he was “running away” from scrutiny.
To be fair, this is not the most furious Corbyn has been to those with the teremity to ask a question. His growl in this video from last year is quite something:
Video of Jeremy Corbyn losing temper with ITN cameraman who doorstepped him leaving home today "Get out of my way!" https://t.co/gK4qrgMD71
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) September 11, 2015
Working out whether his paymasters are torturing people
Corbyn famously claims relatively little in parliamentary expenses (being able to draw on his pension at the same time probably helps). But, for big chunks of his career he was getting cash from Press TV, Iran’s sate-backed broadcaster.
Now, you or I might wonder whether taking cash from the Iranian government is a wise thing to do. Especially when that TV channel gets kicked off of the air for colluding in torture.
But Jeremy may not have caught up on Iranian domestic politics since the 1979 revolution, so we can let him off.
Riding the bus
Now I think we can all agree on this one – the guy is in no shape to be getting public transport by himself.
Jeremy Corbyn on the bus going home after another day of meetings. He has the lowest expenses of any parliamentarian. pic.twitter.com/UjTsMM4dfM
— AngelCakeLIVERPOOL (@angelcakephotos) August 1, 2015
Nobody said leading the Labour party would be easy, but Jeremy has had an especially rough time. Perhaps he just needs a nice, long rest…
