Desperate Dan Departs Labour

Like a scene from a Monty Python film, the return of the Telegraph’s not at all celebrated blues artiste Whinging Dan Hodges to the Labour Party has finally brought forth the revelation that he only rejoined the party so he could reprise his earlier flounce against Mil The Younger and walk right out again - and, of course, relate the whole thing to his adoring readers in order to secure More And Bigger Paycheques for Himself Personally Now.

He's desperate, Dan

But Desperate Dan could not merely walk out. There had to be one last parting gesture, one last pointless act as he moaned off into the sunset. And so it has come to pass, as he has penned “Jeremy Corbyn has become the Left's Enoch Powell”, just to show all those who criticise him for being unable to sustain a half-credible political argument that he, er, cannot sustain a half-credible political argument.

Here’s the Hodges pitch: “Powell was always at pains to paint himself as someone who did not personally entertain prejudice. He was merely an interlocutor between the body politic and those that did. He did not endorse racism. But he thought it important to engage with those who held such views, to understand them, and provide an outlet for their opinions”. And to that I call bullshit. Only one piece of evidence is required to refute Hodges.

And that is Powell’s infamous speech later referred to as “Rivers of Blood”. There is no “interlocutor” about it at all. At the outset, Powell quotes one of his constituents - someone who was never located, despite the best efforts of Fleet Street. Likewise the elderly woman who was allegedly the only white resident of her Wolverhampton street, who Powell claimed was being abused by her black and Asian neighbours.

There was no “interlocutor” in Powell stating “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants … It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen”.

There was no “interlocutor” in Powell claiming that anti-discrimination legislation used against the “indigenous population” would be like “throwing a match on to gunpowder”. Enoch Powell was not merely engaging with others: he was engaging in his own campaign of racist smears and alarmism. It says much about Dan Hodges’ desperation that he is prepared to make such a ridiculous and utterly wrong comparison.

Nor does Hodges do his cause any good by bleating “I voted for Ken against Labour. Does that make me a Tory too” when we already know he supported Boris Johnson against Livingstone, then embraced Lynton Crosby when Bozza won. It does not help him to whine “So what action would you take now to try to prevent Syrian children being murdered by Isis tomorrow” when dropping bombs would not stop that happening.

And he sells the pass in no style at all by asking “Isis start lining up a group of children in main street of Raqqa to kill them. Our drone spots them. You say ‘do nothing’?”. If a drone strike were ordered on someone adjacent to a group of children, the result would be not only dead ISIS members, but a group of dead and dismembered children. Dan Hodges has truly crossed over into La-La Land. Hopefully without a return ticket.