What is it with Labour? They are incapable of finding a spinmeister who can keep all his tales in the air.

Andy Coulson, for all his faults, would never have let Cameron be caught out with with a story of not taking an empty seat ‘because he wanted to sit next to his wife’ – when there was no sign of his wife anyway. A picture of the wife sitting on the floor would have engendered more sympathy than Jeremy on his beam end. Did Ms Alvarez take the first empty seat she saw on the grounds that she didn’t want to sit next to her husband? She does have a history of being ‘no chaired’ – she turned down dinner with the Queen, presumably because that would have meant her sitting next to her husband…Jeremy, not Phil the Greek.

What next? Jeremy filmed ‘sleeping’ in a shop doorway to publicise his call for more council houses; followed by BHS (for it would jsut have to be their doorway!) releasing footage of the limousine rolling up to convey him to a five star hotel?

I haven’t yet forgotten Ed Miliband’s spinmeister thinking he could convince us that Ed lived in a house with a kitchen smaller than the average council flat possesses – and failing to think that other visitors to the house would reveal that it was the second ‘save your legs when the guests want coffee’ kitchen. Utter incompetence. As for the #Edstone. Bacon butty? Words fail me.

David Miliband thoughtfully provided his own banana skin before dutifully laying it down in front of the assembled media and proceeding to skid, in a manoeuvre worthy of Eddie the Eagle, out of sight into oblivion.

Who put the words ‘We’re alright’ in Kinnock’s mouth, just before the 1992 Sheffield rally; who told him it was such a fantastic crowd pleasing phrase that he should shout it out three times, punching the air in frenzied triumphalism? Why the photoshoot on Brighton beach? How was that promoting policies – other than middle gaged man looks complete dork, flat on his face, when he fails to hold back the rising tide? Did Canute and Kinnock not sound faintly similar?

That ‘ordinary man’ piece as the cameras followed Gordon Brown on an opportunity to meet his fellow ‘ordinary voters’? Only served to illustrate a greater truth, that the Labour of Mandelson and Red Roses was deeply cynical and scathing of the fears of Mrs Duffy and her fellow citizens.

Labour stunts are all designed to portray the public school educated, privileged, white tribe, that rules Labour as ‘man of the people’ and the reason it comes unstuck so many times, is not that they are really a ‘public school educated, privileged, white tribe’ but that they cannot laugh at themselves when caught out.

Corbyn as Headmaster trying to persuade the Upper Sixth to give him the third declension of the noun ‘NHS’, while the class is convulsed by a torn sheet from the back page of ‘reader’s wives’ which appears to show ‘Sir’s’ ample wife in nowt more than a pink frou-frou, is a case in point.

They just can’t laugh at themselves. No sense of humour. Are the Tories any better? I would say yes.

When Anton du Beke wheeled a supermarket trolley loaded with an overstuffed sofa onto the floor of ‘Strictly’ and it was revealed, to gasps from the audience, that the sofa was in fact Anne Widdicombe, the former Minister for Prisons, the joke was on us. She was defying us to laugh at her, and yet encouraging us to do so. She wasn’t a pompous prat revealed to be a laughing stock (nor was she still a politician). She was a woman entirely comfortable with the ludicrous spectacle of her dancing the light fantastic.

As with Boris Johnson, suspended above the crowds in Victoria Park on a ‘zip wire’ – a gift for the headline writers. ‘Boris has zip trouble, yet again’. Boris wasn’t trying to be serious; he wasn’t doing it to illustrate a political belief. He was just playing the part of the favourite uncle who doesn’t mind making a fool of himself. He looked a prat because he was prepared to look a prat. You just know that a Labour politician would have been up on that highwire showing the news at 6pm that being part of the EU could ‘make the country fly through the air’….and then the wires would have been revealed the next day, along with the picture of him stuck up there…

One point that the appears to have escaped the media notice is the particular train that Jeremy was on. Until last year, the line to Newcastle was the one and only nationalised rail line in existence. It was known as the East Coast line and was run by the publicly owned ‘Directly Operated Railways’. It didn’t endear itself to the customers:

92. Posted byColin Walker

on27 Nov 2014 11:41

Again, we are told that the selling to private enterprise will enhance the service that we, the public are getting. Have any of these decision makers in government ever travelled on those intercity trains, (standard class of course as first is so expensive) where there are 20/30 people standing, services are unable to get through so are cancelled. Cattle trucks at least have numbers control. us?

The unions were furious when it was handed to Stagecoach (90%) and Virgin (10%) telling the world that the ‘taxpayers were being robbed’ of the £220 million profit the (nationalised) service had made the previous year – indeed they were – and being given in exchange a far from paltry £400 million!

I couldn’t understand why Corbyn hadn’t booked in advance – it is mandatory that you have a reserved seat when you do so. Then I remembered. I always book in advance because I’m spending my own money.

Jeremy is spending what’s left of those twenty-five quids the faithful sent him.