The scale of the present Tory predicament can be measured by the increasingly hysterical slandering of Jeremy Corbyn. According to those on the right who are in the know, Corbyn is a wife beating, heroin injecting, fetishiser of borderline insane black women. He is also a frenzied, carpet-chewing anti-Semite, who spends his spare time popping into libraries across London and carefully blacking out Israel from every geography book he can find.

If the right is to be believed Corbyn’s election will certainly precipitate the end of civilisation as we know it. 

If Corbyn were a Russian spy, his superiors would never have dared to dream of inflicting the present political carnage upon Britain that has been instigated by the current Tory faithful.

Imagine (if you dare) the youthful, bright-eyed, Jeremy Corbyn meeting his fabled Russian handler, Big Boris Kapanski, on a lonely, cold bench in a reasonably deserted park. 

Big Boris calmly lays out a simple, ratherelegant career plan for his charmingly gauche agent. The party will help Jeremy secure a winnable seat, and Jeremy will spend most of his parliamentary career on the back benches building a persona as a dedicated ideologically driven thorn in the sides of both the Labour and Tory sell outs.  Oh, and if Jeremy happens to provide any personal information about his parliamentary colleagues that leaves them susceptible to a spot of well-timed blackmail, well, he’ll have more than fulfilled his potential. 

Imagine Big Boris’ stunned reaction when Young Jeremy suddenly grabs his hand and announces, “My dear, Boris, I had a dream last night! I dreamt I became the leader of the Labour party! Do you think such a thing is possible?”

Big Boris was trained under the legendary Arnold Deutsch. Deutsch wasa geniu- level case officer who recruited the helpless fantasist Philby and the monstrously deviant Burgess into the legendary Cambridge spy ring.   Deutsch has had enough of self-consciously witty Cambridge gadflies who drink and screw around too much. He wants a reliable plodder who won’t attract any unwanted attention. So far, Young Jeremy, has been the dream candidate.

“My dear Jeremy, are you sure you didn’t happen to misunderstand your dream? Perhaps you became the head of a local teacher’s union, not the Labour party.”

Big Boris’s lack of confidence in his own abilities hurt Young Jeremy’s feelings, but he refused to let the older man’s understandable pessimism throw him off course.  “Boris, please don’t worry. Everything worked out splendidly in the dream. I managed to bring England to its knees and made Europe the laughing stock of the world!”

“My friend, I never saw this coming. May I ask how you accomplished this amazing feat?”

Young Jeremy looked anxiously over his shoulder to make sure no one was about to bust him before he sold his wonderful dream to the best man he’d ever known. “In my dream, once I got the top job, I set about undermining race relations in England by deporting and persecuting elderly West Indians.”

“I can see that causing a few wrinkles in the system,” said Big Boris with a resigned smile. “Even though you know we believe all peoples to be as one in the brotherhood of man.”

“Of course. Of course,” replied Young Jeremy quickly, “I was merely being expedient. To break this greedy, money- obsessed world, we sometimes have to hurt those we love.”

“Of course. What did you do next?”

“Naturally, I broke the National Health System.”

Big Boris coughed repeatedly. he could hardly breathe. How could the young be so selfish? So wildly undisciplined?  “What a splendid idea, Jeremy. I can hardly wait to hear what happened next.”

Young Jeremy was so excited he couldn’t wait for Boris to stop coughing. “And then I allowed housing prices to go through the roof. And then I gutted the nation’s social support system, and still no one stopped me. Naturally, I upped my game by slashing the nation’s defence budgets. I was riding high, so I went for it. “

Boris feared he was going to faint. “Don’t mind me, dear boy,” he coughed. “Please, go on.”

“To cap everything off, I turned the British people against my European allies and held a referendum to leave the EU.”

“No!”

“Yes!”, retorted Young Jeremy with growing confidence

“It failed of course?” said Big Boris with what he hoped was a hearty chuckle. 

Young Jeremy couldn’t help laughing too. “No, I won. The people went along with me and voted to leave the EU. All those silly EU talk-shops and silly security agreements, I broke them all up.”

“How? I mean, just so I kno.w After all this kind of inspired brilliance shouldn’t go unshared.”

Young Jeremy modestly waved away this entirely unnecessary compliment. “It was easy, I convinced Britain’s fifty million or so white working-class members that their own government was being held hostage by lazy immigrant workers who were forcing the government to write policies against their own interests”

“My God, Jeremy what an incredible dream.”

“Wait for it. I’m not finished yet. Here’s the real kicker. After I declared independence from the EU, Scotland got all uppity and demanded independence from England. And then Wales followed. I know it sounds too good to be true. But in this dream, I actually broke up the United Kingdom into tiny little pieces.”

Time passed. Neither man spoke.

Big Boris enjoyed the silence more than he could say.

And then Young Jeremy asked his mentor. “Do you think our comrades back home would back me to pull this off?”

Dear reader, how do you think Big Boris responded? 

Did Big Boris A) hug Jeremy warmly and race from the park as quickly as his ageing knees could carry him? And did he immediately inform his vaunted superiors of this incredible master plan?

Or B) slip a concealed pistol against his young charge’s ribs and said something like the following. “Listen to me you gibbering, pin-headed moron. If I even suggested a fraction of the nonsense to my bosses they’d assume I was a double agent who was out to ruin Mother Russia’s good name and put a bullet in my head. No, don’t interrupt me. Keep your impossibly reckless lips still. If you ever became a Labour Prime minister and MI5 got wind of you planning to hold a referendum to pull England out of Europe, risk the peace process, and possibly split the United Kingdom asunder, they’d put a bullet in your head. Let this go. Now!”

I’m going for option B.

Big Boris may not have existed. But we can be sure that if a Labour leader was screwing Britain over as profoundly as the Hapless May and her Confused Cohorts, this Labourite would be denounced by right-wing media as a traitor who deserved the death penalty. The Tories genuinely believe the very worst of them is singularly better than the best the left has to offer. They’re obviously delusional.