Jeremy Corbyn has become a pragmatist, and pragmatists always win

The most interesting aspect of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in Coventry came just after it finished.

Responding to the speech, Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of the Confederation of British Industry, said: “The Labour leader’s commitment to a customs union will put jobs and living standards first by remaining in a close economic relationship with the EU.”

Admittedly, she came on to qualify this statement with some warnings about Labour’s various renationalisation policies, but even so, the significance of her words should not be underestimated.

Already Brexit, on the Conservatives’ watch, has taken the UK from the fastest growing economy in the G7 to the slowest, an utterly dismal reality that would dominate the national conversation if so many of those who define the national conversation were not so heavily invested in it.

Now, faced with a choice, the UK’s most important association of business people prefers the policies being offered by a hard left socialist of many decades standing up to the party that still, rather obscenely, considers itself the country’s “natural party of government.”

It is a reversal in positions that represents nothing short of a revolution in British politics. The Conservatives, traditionally the great power-seeking pragmatists of the political firmament, are now the stubborn ideologues. Jeremy Corbyn, a man who has not changed his mind on anything in at least three decades in Parliament, is suddenly the one who is content to compromise, to offer something like a solution, a way forward.

Brexit has already cost the Conservatives their most successful and capable Prime Minister in a quarter of a century, and poleaxed his replacement. No matter how many times the so-called Brexit war cabinet meet around the Chequers dining table, no meaningful, unified position on Brexit can be found. This is not merely because one doesn’t exist, but because the party’s hard Brexiteers are yet to identify any upper limit for the amount of damage both their party and their country should sustain for them to get their own way.

They make Jeremy Corbyn look like Frank Underwood. A vague commitment to trying to maintain in some sort of customs union is as good as we got in Coventry this morning. But if this is the best the voters are likely to get then certainly it will do.

Whether the wider voters pay much attention to the three-dimensional chess of Brexit is doubtful, but I suspect a willingness to engage with reality and with the truth will not go unnoticed.

Prior to the speech, David Davis accused Jeremy Corbyn of “putting one of the greatest prizes of leaving the EU out of reach”, – that prize being signing trade deals with other countries.

David Davis’ insights should always be seen within the wider context of everything else he has said in the last two years on UK trade policy, absolutely all of which has turned out to be thermonuclear nonsense.

There is no credible analysis whatsoever that indicates any patchwork of free trade arrangements with other countries after Brexit can replicate the advantages of the UK’s place in the world’s largest and most successful free trade zone.

Ten or 20 years down the line, it may be that deals with India, China and so on may replace or even best the UK’s current arrangements, though it is doubtful in the absolute extreme. Firstly, countries always trade the most with their geographical neighbours, it is an incontrovertible fact. Secondly, big countries like the two mentioned are already far more preoccupied with dealing with the EU than they ever will be with a fully independent UK.

That Corbyn should be the pragmatist and the Conservatives should still be in thrall to their reckless ideologues matters. This so-called “prize” – leaving the single market and the customs union in order to do trade deals with other countries – is the very thing that, not so long ago, prompted John Redwood to write a column in The Sun about how to avoid buying European food and drink in the supermarket. In the end, when reality becomes clear, British voters will not tolerate being told what they can and can’t eat or drink.

Be under no illusion: Jeremy Corbyn has spent two and a half years advertising his total unsuitability to be prime minister. He would be a worse prime minister than almost any other MP in the Commons.

This is a man who would have triggered Article 50 the day after the referendum.

He is also only now, after decades of opposition to the EU, coming around to seeing the mortal risk leaving poses to the hard won peace of the Good Friday Agreement. He operates in an intellectual sphere far below anyone who has ever held the job before. He would be the lowest rent prime minister in the country’s history.

And yet, he increasingly comes to look like the sensible choice.