Jeremy Corbyn and Shami Chakrabarti: my ex-heroes!
After Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision to crown himself emperor, Beethoven was clearly very disappointed with the man he’d once thought of as a hero;
“He, too, then, is nothing better than an ordinary man! Now he will trample on all human rights only to humour his ambition; he will place himself above all others, become a tyrant!”
Beethoven even removed the dedication to Napoleon from his 3rd Symphony “Eroica”.There’s something beguiling about the almost inevitability of power or celebrity corrupting even the idealists, let alone an “ordinary man”.
I similarly had a couple of heroes who recently seem to have displayed some rather unheroic tendencies: Jeremy Corbyn, topically enough, as we’re awaiting the results of a challenge to him as UK Labour Party leader, and Shami Chakrabarti, human rights barrister. Under the banner of the organisation Liberty, she represented the essential balance when proposed anti-terrorist laws, generally reactive and hastily conceived, impinged on civil liberties. After all, at their extreme, such laws are the same as those used to control the population in totalitarian regimes
After Labour suspended MP Naz Shah and ex-London Mayor Ken Livingtone for anti-Semitism, Shami was chosen by Jeremy Corbyn to head up an inquiry into the extent or otherwise of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. Shami gave the Labour Party a tolerably clean bill of health. Soon afterwards she decided to join the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn quickly elevated her to the House of Lords. The timing looked very suspicious. Less generous souls than I could think that it almost looked like a reward for reaching the most favourable outcome for Labour. Shami clearly valued membership of the House of Lords above her required impartiality shown when acting on behalf of Liberty, and the inevitable suspicions that would fall on her after her inquiry. However, Shami is no stranger to the odd lapse in judgement. When she was on the governing board of the LSE, it accepted a donation from Muammar Gaddafi’s son of £1.5m. She also made false allegations in her book “On Liberty” resulting in the publishers offering an apology and paying damages and legal costs to a former legal adviser to the MoD.
Even though I don’t share his politics, I always admired Jeremy Corbyn for his apparent honesty and ideals, and the fact he gives the UK electorate a real choice. But he himself was recently involved in a spat with the train operating company Virgin East Coast. After having sat on the floor in the carriage vestibule, he claimed there were not two unreserved seats together available for himself and his companion. He used this to ally himself with the rail unions with a call for renationalisation of the railways when presumably everyone would have a seat for every journey, even if, like Jeremy Corbyn, they hadn’t booked. Unfortunately for Jeremy, on-train cameras showed that he had – and there’s no other word for it – lied, having passed a number of empty seats. Although Jeremy Corbyn is likely to survive his leadership challenge from Owen Smith, the spectre of being caught bang to rights lying may be more difficult to shake off.
It’s so disappointing when one’s heroes are exposed for the frail human beings they really are, and perhaps it’s our own expectations that are at fault. Nevertheless, as a perhaps selfish measure of my disappointment, my two goldfish are going to be renamed from Jeremy and Shami to Jose and Pep.
