Christ help us – Corbyn or Hodge! I think, given the choice, I’m pretty firmly with Jezza. One deranged bien-pensant half of Islington versus the other. At least Corbyn isn’t smug. It’s one of the few things you can say in his favour.

Re the anti-Semitism. There are a number of broad points to make. First, it is absolutely endemic within two sections of the Labour Party – the perpetually adolescent white middle-class lefties, and the Muslims – the latter of which now comprise a significant proportion of Labour activists and voters in parts of London and the dilapidated former mill-towns of West Yorkshire and East Lancashire. And Luton. And parts of the midlands.

For many Muslims the anti-Semitism is visceral, an ingrained part of their unpleasant ideology. For the idiotic white lefties it is an adjunct to their self-loathing and hatred of firstly Britain and second the West. In both cases it is predicated as much upon envy – at Jewish success, worldwide and in Israel – as anything else. If you handed over Israel to the Palestinians they would turn it into Somalia before you could say Yom Kippur.

Margaret Hodge, huh. It is a fact that there are more MPs from Islington in the shadow cabinet than there are from the entire North East of England. Now the only apparent rival to Jezza is from the same borough.

Incidentally, don’t you wish John Mann had actually lamped Livingstone?