Please calm down... it is only Comrade Corbyn

AT FIRST it sounded like the kind of raucous roar you get at a football match. But then it became apparent that someone was speaking, or to put it more accurately, shrieking to the assembled masses and on closer investigation it turned out that the racket broadcast on television was being made in response to a speech by the clown currently in charge of the Labour party. How they yelled. How they cried. Looking more like Albert Steptoe than ever, Jezza lapped it up, as well he might, because out in the real world his approval ratings are plumbing depths never before seen for the leader of a mainstream party. Not that you would have known it in that hall.

It was positively Stalinist. You remember how Uncle Joe received ovations that went on for up to 10 minutes because everyone was too terrified to be the first to stop clapping? That’s the way the Labour lot came across.

And like the poor souls under Stalin who got carted away in the dead of the night because they actually stopped applauding the dear leader, you could just imagine getting a knock on your hotel room door and the order: “You stopped clapping Jeremy. You are coming with us.”

I love going to Russia: I have seen plenty of standing ovations there, but they are in response to ballets, not communist dictators, and if you don’t join in with the required gusto, you don’t risk getting shot.

But in Brighton this week there was a hysteria surrounding the hapless Jezza – quite definitely a person who is one pledge short of a manifesto – that is not quite, how shall we say this, British. And it gives cause for alarm.

Even our greatest leaders, Churchill and Thatcher, while inspiring reverence and adulation, did not give the impression of causing their followers to have lost the plot. I was once at a Conservative party ball when the Blessed Margaret made an unexpected appearance and you would have thought the Good Lord Himself had manifested among us, such was the rapture among her admirers.

But there was nothing forced about it and it certainly never gave you the impression you were in a Stalinist plot.

Perhaps it’s the times in which we live: politics has gone so insane and bizarre that it has driven the rest of us completely mad. And given that anyone who admires Jeremy Corbyn can’t be taken seriously, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised to see them screaming as if they were teenage girls and he some superannuated rock god.

But all this hysteria and unseemly whooping is frankly getting wearisome. Jezza’s politics are extremist. And so, too, amongst the deluded, is the reaction he provokes.