‘Here’s what Jeremy Corbyn would have been like as Prime Minister’

If there’s one question Keir Starmer hates being asked, it’s why he ever thought Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister.

He could answer that it’s not easy, being Red; that in politics, like football or an inter-departmental tussle over paperclips, you have to back the manager even if you think he’s a twit. Instead, to studio snickering, he claimed that Corbyn would have been better in No10 than Boris Johnson.

This is a pretty low bar. Johnson could make a 3am three-legged race after 13 pints look like it was running smoothly. A jellyfight in a pigsty between obese sex-pests would have won higher approval ratings. Larry the Downing Street cat would have lied less, and he lies around all day.

But 2019 seems like a lifetime ago. Let’s remind ourselves what’s happened since, and see if Corbyn would really have come out of it any better.

The first and most obvious difference is that Jeremy Corbyn would probably still be Labour leader. Boris Johnson would not have slunk off, but with just a few months as PM to whet his appetite would still be banging on about Brexit, and leading a Conservative Party united in wanting their idealised version of it.

The person in charge of leaving the EU would have been Keir Starmer. A barrister’s deal would not have damaged the Good Friday Agreement, would not have put a theoretical border in the Irish Sea, and would probably mean British businesses could still trade freely in a customs union. And as Johnson had called the 2019 vote purely to force his deal through Parliament, then if Corbyn had won… Parliament would have retained its sovereignty. Gosh.

Covid would have hit soon after the election. Would Corbyn have said ‘let the bodies pile’ high, draped himself in tinsel, raised a glass of champagne at illegal lockdown gatherings? Would he hell. He might not have noticed a wine fridge, and could have got in a muddle with the lockdown rules, but he would have managed at least one COBRA meeting and he probably would not have bought billions of pounds worth of dodgy PPE from his mates down the allotment.

He wanted earlier lockdowns – which would have made them shorter, less damaging, and caused fewer deaths. If the first duty of a Prime Minister is to keep people safe, Corbyn beats Johnson hands-down. We almost certainly wouldn’t be looking at a quarter of a million dead, and Barnard Castle would be just another market town.

With Corbyn in charge, Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry would be facing off with Vladimir Putin’s henchmen, Angela Rayner would be running education, and there’d be a lesbian at the helm of the MoD. The Covid bailouts might have cost the same with John McDonnell as chancellor, but it’d be called ‘spendthrift socialism’ rather than Eat Out To Help Out. Police cracking down on rule breakers wouldn’t just be ‘draconian’: they’d be the ‘Stalinist stormtroopers’ of Home Secretary Diane Abbott. But under her, Black Lives Would Have Mattered More.

While Corbyn was sent out for daily press conferences telling everyone to take the new vaccine, his brother Piers would be getting a lot of attention telling people not to. There’d be no gold wallpaper in Downing Street, but Corbyn might have put up a Che Guevara poster and turned the rose garden into a marrow patch. There’d be no Dominic Cummings, but there could have someone even worse from among his mindless acolytes; whoever came up with ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ would probably be ethics advisor.

Migrants would still be on boats. They’d still be in hotels. The Tories would still be racist and cross about it, inflation would still be high post-pandemic, and voters would still blame the government for it. But the nuclear veterans, Windrush generation, Grenfell families, and victims of Orgreave and the Post Office would probably have had some sort of justice by now.

Mind you, the angry knuckle that is Dominic Raab would still be on the shadow frontbench, doing judo on his lunchtime tomatoes, and we’d never know anything about tractor porn.

Whoever had won in 2019, we’d have a Prime Minister who looked like he didn’t wash behind his ears and couldn’t pull his trousers up. We’d have a government machine operated by those inexperienced at wielding the levers of power, and inclined to think if they shout a lot that will fix everything. Corbyn and Johnson would both have led governments with a worrying number of people who thought we were lucky to have them.

But where Johnson was a moral vacuum, incapable of caring about ethics, sexual assaults, loans or dodgy businessmen, Corbyn would have been sanctimonious. He’d have preached about Gaza until even Hamas begged him to stop, and be genuinely upset when accused of anti-Semitic racism, in a way Muslim-baiting Johnson couldn’t even be bothered to fake.

Under Corbyn there might be a nascent National Care Service, and noticeable levelling up. But there’d have been constant party in-fighting, no confidence votes, and Labour would not look like a dead cert to win this time around.

The greatest price to pay, if Corbyn had won, would be a vibrant Conservative Party, its unity intact and its ideologues untested. Johnson would still be a charming scruff, rather than an over-promoted blusterer. Truss would be yet to lose a battle with a lettuce, and Sunak would seem like a rich lad who could, theoretically, spread it around a bit for us.

Which means that, by losing so convincingly in 2019, Corbyn did us all a favour. The Tories destroyed themselves with entitlement, vanity, and insularity, while Labour was able to reshape and reprofessionalise. Had he won, the boot would be on the other foot – a government with more splits than an Olympic gymnastics squad, battered and bruised from a pandemic, and facing a coherent Opposition with a clear message: Get Brexit Done Again.

So Keir’s right – Corbyn would have been a better Prime Minister than Johnson. But one who was not only capable of doing far more damage, to the country and his party, in the long term, but also utterly unable to understand that he was always the Tories’ biggest electoral asset. Losing was the only way Corbyn ever had of beating them, so let’s all be glad that he did.