Labour’s biggest problem isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. Its biggest problem is people you’ve never heard of, such as Andrew Murray and Andrew Fisher.
And that’s only the Andrews.
I’m being (slightly) facetious. Both Mr Murray and Mr Fisher are key advisers to the Labour leader and each in their own way symbolises, and shares responsibility for, the destruction of Labour as a party of government.
So yes, if Labour wasn’t in the hands of the hard left, and thus of Jeremy Corbyn, they’d both be as irrelevant now as they were before September 2015, when Mr Corbyn became leader.
Take Andrew Murray, whose appointment as head of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign team was revealed this weekend.
If you were to come up with one living political figure more unsuitable for a role at the echelons of democratic politics then you’d struggle to find someone worse than Mr Murray. John McDonnell, perhaps.
Mr Murray is the former chair of Stop The War. STW really ought to stand for Stop The West, since the grouping is really nothing other than a home for anti-Western Stalinists.
As its vice-chair Chris Nineham has put it: “Everyone who has got a sense of duty for the peace of the planet needs to mobilise everything they can against that and that means opposing the West.”
Andrew Murray and STW have only ever had one cause, which is resisting all attempts to undermine anti-Western tyrants.
On the anniversary of the birth of his hero, Stalin, he attacked "hack propagandists [who] abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others".
He reveres North Korea, and has pointed out that his “basic position of solidarity with People[']s Korea [is] clear”.
And in one of his Morning Star columns, Murray cited Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, “who remarked in 1956 that ‘against imperialists, we are all Stalinists’”.
His role in the election is said to be improving coordination within the leader’s team and between it and the rest of the party’s organisation, as Paul Waugh of Huffington Post, who broke the story, wrote.
Mr Murray is – of course – a close friend of Mr Corbyn, who was chair of STW until becoming Labour leader.
In Jeremy Corbyn’s office, Mr Murray is among other ideological friends, such as Andrew Fisher, the man said to have written Labour’s manifesto.
Mr Fisher was once suspended from Labour when he urged votes to back anarchist group Class War. He has called for Trident to be scrapped, MI5 to be disbanded, and for police to be barred from using weapons.
His comradely approach to his fellow party members involves calling Tony Blair a ‘scumbag for hire to scumbags’, Jack Straw a ‘vile git’ and Labour’s earlier Shadow Cabinet as ‘the most abject collection of absolute s****’.
I’ve focused on the two Andrews. But the ideological poison being injected into Labour’s veins is the work of many others – such as fellow Stalinist Seumas Milne.
Milne argues that the number of Stalin’s victims has been exaggerated for Western propaganda reasons. He has yet to find a Russian invasion that he doesn’t approve of, including Crimea, which is – of course – the fault of the West.
Islamist terrorism isn’t Islamist terrorism: it is the “predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others in eight direct military intervention in Arab and Muslim countries” as he wrote after the murder of Lee Rigby.
This is the man chosen by Jeremy Corbyn to run his communications and to act as a form of de facto ideological enforcer.
On and on they go – a collection of extremists that would shame a student union, now running the Labour Party.
On second thoughts, that should read "now destroying the Labour Party".
