The majority opinion is that it is a disgrace that Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party. Actually, the real disgrace is that Tom Watson is its deputy leader.

It is a question of character, not of political views. Mr Watson is an inveterate plotter (see, for example, his almost successful political assassination plot against Tony Blair in 2006, to assist Gordon Brown). He is also the purveyor of utterly unsubstantiated malicious rumour.

In 2012, collaborating with the website Exaro, he used parliamentary privilege to allege “clear intelligence” of a “powerful paedophile network” in Parliament and Downing Street. He called on the Metropolitan Police to investigate, and later passed them “information”. This led to a series of operations by the police – Fairbank, Fernbridge, Midland – which looked credulously into allegations, some blatantly crazy, about child abuse, torture and even murder by leading figures in politics and society.