Corbyn is not just a liar, he is massively incompetent

All politicians lie. Even the ones that claim never to lie, lie and sometimes, as Jeremy Corbyn discovered, they get found out. Most politicians will, much like he has done, deny ever having lied or justify the lie in the face of overwhelming evidence that they lied. Nothing new about the character of many politicians in the face of train-gate then. They are a bunch of manipulative liars with political agendas and will willingly lie to advance their agenda and when it becomes apparent they have lied, they will deny ever having lied and blame virtually everyone else but themselves. To single Corbyn out is only to single him out as what he is: a stereotypical politician, who is elected to a safe seat with minimal trouble and goes around banging on about how he is going to change everything when really he hasn't a ruddy clue how he is going to do that and spends half the time lying and the other half lying about lying. 

It does not even matter that Corbyn claims to be an honourable man and this proves him to be anything but. It does not matter that this scandal has merely proved him to be just like every politician he claims to be nothing like. Obviously, it smacks of hypocrisy but who amongst us is not somewhat hypocritical. So really, it does not matter that he lied and lied about being honest in the process. What matters, from his perspective, is that his lie smacks of sheer incompetence. We can, and people do, argue all day long about whether the railways should be renationalised or whether there is some other solution to the awful state of the trains in this country. There is a valuable debate to be had on that question. It is clear where Mr Corbyn's opinions lie and he is, of course, free to make his point in any way he chooses. 

However, given the point he is making, did he not think it prudent to be on an actually busy train to make it? What did he expect would happen if he sat on the floor of a train that had empty seats and claimed it was ram-packed? Is he so stupid that he thought he could get away with this publicity stunt? And, of course, in the ultimate irony, he is correct. Having to sit on the floor or stand wedged between three people or take refuge in the toilet because there is no space anywhere else is a problem people face every day. Given that, why did he choose a train that was fairly empty? I'm not an expert, but I am sure if you want to argue trains are busy, you should be on a busy train to make the point. He could have picked a Virgin Train on a match-day at Old Trafford. Or Thameslink any weekday morning or afternoon. Or virtually any other train.

And therein lies the problem. Corbyn is so unbelievably incompetent, so unbelievably stupid, that he managed to pick one of the very few trains in Britain that was not massively overcrowded to make a point about overcrowded trains. So we can argue all day long about how much of a hypocrite this makes him (and it does). We can discuss how this proves him a liar and a manipulative one at that, which it does. We can debate the role of the media in criticising Corbyn and whether it is fair, missing the point of course given he could have chosen not to lie and avoided this criticism, but whatever.  And, of course, we can discuss the trains and how awful they are, which is what we should be doing had Corbyn managed to choose a busy train to film his video on. We can do all of those things but it would massively miss the point. The biggest problem here is not that he is a liar but that Corbyn is so unbelievably useless that he tried to argue the trains were busy on a train that was not busy. And that takes some doing.