As Cameron prepared to put his bomb-Syria proposal before the House of Commons, it quickly became the received wisdom among Westminster journalists that Corbyn had shown himself to be out of touch with the country and effectively unelectable. Cameron got so carried away that he accused Corbyn and others who opposed him of being a “bunch of terrorist sympathizers.”

Nobody paid much attention to the fact that polls suggested that, while public opinion was resolutely in favor wiping out ISIS, a majority remained uncertain that Syrian airstrikes were a good idea. Labour’s rebellion against Corbyn was the real story, and the merits of intervention were secondary to the discussion.

Corbyn didn’t help himself. He vacillated between letting his MPs make up their own minds and trying to force them to follow his lead. He told his shadow cabinet to think the decision over on a weekend so that the party could come to a “collective decision”—then promptly wrote a letter to all Labour MPs underlining his implacable opposition to airstrikes. He then went on television to insist that “it is the leader who decides” on such matters. Labour politicians understandably felt confused. Corbyn’s rivals within the party scented blood. Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, son of the famous Labour stalwart Tony, took to the airwaves to back the strikes and undermine Corbyn’s credibility. He informed the BBC that, while his leader was “perfectly entitled to his view,” he himself believed intervention was the right thing to do. Under severe pressure, Corbyn eventually agreed to allow a free vote. But the time he wasted making that decision had made him look insecure and politically vulnerable.

The parliamentary debate and vote turned out to be a bizarre piece of drawn-out theater, stage-managed to humiliate Corbyn and secure the result the government wanted. Corbyn, never the most charismatic public speaker, was besieged by his fellow MPs. He failed to articulate a convincing argument against Cameron’s proposition that “it is wrong for the United Kingdom to subcontract its security to other countries, and to expect the aircrews of other nations to carry the burdens and the risks of striking ISIL in Syria to stop terrorism here in Britain.”

Following ten hours of exhaustive and uninspiring debate, Hilary Benn was invited to make the closing speech. He began by berating the Prime Minister for calling Corbyn a terrorist sympathizer—thus establishing himself as a non-Tory—and then proceeded to make a relatively compelling case for action.

“We are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. And it is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view, Mr. Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil.”

The speech was hardly a twenty-first-century Gettysburg Address, relying as it did on that tired rhetorical reductio ad Hitlerum device which Leo Strauss first identified in 1951. Yet most politicians and political journalists, desperate for some consensus after a long and repetitive debate, fell about themselves in wonder and praise. As Benn sat down, Maria Eagle, the then Shadow Secretary of Defence, leant across Corbyn to shake his hand. “One of the great parliamentary moments,” declared the Daily Telegraph. “Syria may not have been liberated,” wrote John Grace in the Guardian, “but Hilary Benn has been.”

 

CORBYN HAD BEEN outmaneuvered in the chamber, and the vote was a formality. Cameron’s motion passed with a landslide. Senior Labour and Tory MPs congratulated each other on having put aside party differences and come together in the national interest. Politicos immediately said that Benn had emerged as the clear frontrunner to lead the Labour Party and save it from the walking disaster that is Jeremy Corbyn. And Cameron and Osborne felt vindicated, their authority restored.

What about the rest of the country? It’s possible that most of the public sensed that the decision to join in the strikes on Syria was a charade, which would only feed the general contempt for politicians. Indeed, the day after Corbyn’s supposed humiliation, a by-election took place in Oldham, in the north of England. Oldham is traditionally a Labour stronghold, but political experts and pollsters had been warning for weeks that the party was about to get a bloody nose. Voters were put off by Corbyn’s far-leftism, they said, and were angry at the feebleness of response to the terror. At the election, however, Corbyn’s party triumphed, increasing their share of the vote from 54 to 62 per cent, while the Tory share halved. Perhaps the result had little to do with the Syria debate and more to do with the ongoing economic struggles in the north of England. Yet it does suggest that, while Corbyn may be a wet peacenik, he is not as hopeless as his opponents believe. Or perhaps the public doesn’t care as much about Britain’s mojo as does Osborne.

Freddy Gray, deputy editor of the London Spectator, is a regular contributor to the National Interest.

Image: Flickr/Number 10