Left bereft

Dear Jeremy,

Please don’t go. I know you’re even more unpopular than the England football team right now — your shadow cabinet is currently emptier than the promise of a weekly £350 million for the NHS. Every few seconds a disloyal minister sends you an insincere letter full of veiled enmity which might as well say: ‘Dear Jeremy, since nobody likes you I’ve decided I don’t like you either, so I’m taking my ball back! Find someone else to play with — if you can.’ So I thought I’d write you a letter of my own, to let you know that someone still thinks you’re wonderful and wants to be in your gang.

You don’t know me, but I feel I know you intimately (though not as intimately as I’d like). You see, I’m a comedian and have been travelling the UK with a JC lookalike, performing an ode to your magnificence. ‘Love Song for Jeremy Corbyn’ starts:

“Though you look like a tramp, you’re a hit with the ladies

Nick Cohen and Ayesha Hazarika discuss the Labour party's woes:

And I’d love to have your little Corbabies

OK, so I’m 35 and you’re 67, but I still dream of visiting the Co-op with you to buy your favourite Fairtrade coffee, and lying in bed with you in our Palestine Solidarity Campaign T-shirts as we peruse the Morning Star.

Fantasy aside, I feel sad on your behalf, watching your purportedly left-wing detractors seek to replace you. It is frankly ludicrous that they’d prefer a robot such as Chuka Umunna to you. They think Blairites like Chuka and Liz Kendall are potential winners, disregarding the fact that they are pro-austerity and don’t have integrity like you, my love. How can they say that we have to move towards the centre to win? We both know that Labour performed well in May’s elections. Unlike your humble self, your enemies are arrogant, dismissing the fact that you’re extremely popular with the membership and have a huge mandate (as Diane would know).

There’s no doubt in my mind that you’re the man to lead Labour into the next elections. As you know, there’s a real appetite for anti-establishment politicians right now, such as Bernie Sanders (let’s not mention Trump). You have broken the mould — you’re not the usual oleaginous hypocritical politician, and that makes a lot of oleaginous hypocrites irritable. So the hostile centre-lefties don’t take issue with your policies: what is there to take issue with? Helping the oppressed? Instead, they rail against your having shared a platform with anti-Semites, and dredge up embarrassing moments from your past, as though every other politician’s cupboard doesn’t rattle with skeletons.

It can’t be easy volleying such a broad spectrum of insults, having everything from your dress sense to your republicanism torn apart. Rest assured that I don’t care about these superficial things. As I sing on stage:

“Though most of your clothing is fit for the bin

This won’t be an issue when we’re living in sin.

Nor am I fussed that you don’t sing the national anthem. I hope you won’t mind if I let slip that I know your little secret: I found a clip of you singing ‘Happy Birthday’ on YouTube, and discovered that you’re completely tone deaf! So I quite understand why you don’t want to caterwaul out of key.

Yes, people are questioning your commitment to the Remain campaign — but would the press really have covered your efforts anyway, unless you made an embarrassing faux pas such as forgetting to wipe your nose or do up your flies? They were too focused on the homoerotic tussle between senior Tories to pay any heed to what you were up to. If you’d campaigned more publicly, you would no doubt have been lambasted for being a Eurosceptic in disguise and the headlines would have said you weren’t a man of principle after all.

So please don’t go, my darling. The Labour party needs you. Without you, a faceless Blairite droid will fill the vacuum, the Tories will romp home endlessly, and the country will be all the worse for it. On a personal note, my song implores you to:

“Get on your bike, and pedal me home

You’re all that I like, my sweet garden gnome.

Can we make a date to do this very soon?

Yours with great affection, Ariane