WASHED AND READY TO EAT

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is in the news at the moment, as she’s been elevated by the Vatican to sainthood. I admit that I’m not fully up to speed with the criteria for canonisation, so I’ve visited the Saints for Dummies web page to check whether Jeremy Corbyn also qualifies. (It’s written by a couple of priests, so it must be kosher.) My mission has been prompted by the way in which some of Jez’s loyal supporters talk about him online. Take this example, for instance, of someone writing to the bizarre Corbynista blog Vox Political and comparing the Islington North MP to the author J K Rowling. The Harry Potter author is noted as having the ‘Judas Trait’ about her, which stands in stark contrast to the Labour Leader.  The correspondent notes that Mr Corbyn is a man ‘who did not let fame go to his head and instead, rather than paying lip service to human suffering, was actually willing to do something to alleviate it’. It’s certainly a touching portrait of a...

Traingate is the kind of political flashpoint that has all the hallmarks of a peculiarly British farce.   The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition camps out on the floor of a Virgin carriage making a propaganda film about nationalising the railways. He claims his predicament is due to overcrowding, but the billionaire entrepreneur who owns the train company (and presumably doesn’t much like the idea of nationalisation) releases CCTV footage to show that there were, in fact, empty seats. And from that starting point, what’s our ultimate destination? Who the hell knows? But we have all kinds of fantastic station stops to visit along the way. Perhaps the empty seats were reserved? Maybe they had bags on them? Or young kids? It may have been that Jez was keen to spend time with Mrs Corbyn III, but couldn’t find a double berth in which to chit-chat about his anti-austerity policies. The train, according to Mr Corbyn, was ‘ram packed’. But when aides tried to con...