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There have been other weeks when I laughed so much my sides hurt.

The one when Norman Lamont sang in the bath as the pound went down the plughole and when Paul Burrell was reduced to a new kind of grovelling wreck on I’m A ­Celebrity, spring to mind.

But rarely have my sides rocked as hard as they have these past seven days, when a peace-loving, bike-riding, elderly man got promoted at work and unleashed a wave of panic not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis (which you probably know was caused by Jeremy Corbyn if you’ve been following the panic.)

After his resounding victory as Labour Party leader, the man the right-wing media had slaughtered for being a teetotal, veggie killjoy was slaughtered for taking his supporters to a bar and singing The Red Flag because it proved he was a terrorist spy.

The man they’d blasted for not wearing a tie, put one on for a Battle of Britain memorial service, and was blasted for having trousers their fashion police felt clashed with his jacket.

(Image: Getty)

Or was it that he’d let them down by not wearing a Worzel Gummidge donkey jacket?

They crucified him for being a staunch Republican, then slaughtered him for not asking God to save the Queen.

Apparently, refusing to ditch life-long principles makes him untrustworthy.

They monstered him for taking sandwich bags out of the mouths of war veterans, even though Costa Coffee said they’d gladly handed them to him.

They labelled him a grasping socialist hypocrite for accepting his pay rise without mentioning he claimed a mere £8.75 in expenses last year.

They lied about him abolishing the Army and agreeing to kiss the Queen’s hand to receive £6.2million party funding.

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Cabinet ministers called him a threat to national, economic and family security, while voting through plans to steal from families billions of pounds worth of what used to be called social security.

But that was all to be expected, because the further from the centre Labour moves, the more the Establishment attacks it.

And I trust Corbyn, like me, laughed at every hysterical slur.

But it was the hysteria from his own Labour MPs that threatened a stomach rupture.

Men like John Mann, Simon Danczuk and David Blunkett, who delivered poisoned pieces on their new party leader to the Mail on Sunday hours after his election.

Blunkett, no stranger to selling himself to Labour-hating tabloids, wrote an apocalyptic piece entitled “Now wait for Labour’s thugs to march again”.

Mann “made no apology” for writing that Corbyn wasn’t up to the job.

(Image: Steve Allen)

And Danczuk, who has been on our screens all week painting Corbyn as the anti-Christ, penned the least self-aware piece for years in which he claimed his new leader was a laughing stock.

This from a man who has spent the summer fighting a high-profile spat with his cleavage-obsessed selfie-posting wife, which made him look like a self-pitying clown.

Yet Corbyn is Labour’s laughing-stock for storming to victory in its leadership election.

I’m loving watching those bitter Blairites, who warn you should never trust the left because they know nothing about discipline or loyalty, wailing hypocritically from their pit of despair.

In a world short on laughs, long may it continue.