Thornberry’s bunting may be too much for the flag-waving van drivers

She’s trying. You’ve got to give her that. In 2014, Emily Thornberry, the resplendently grand Labour MP for Islington South, was forced to resign from Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet for tweeting sniffily about a van driver in Kent hanging St George’s flags from his house. She insisted that she hadn’t meant to “upset or insult anybody”.

All the same, it didn’t look good. And even though she’s long since returned to the shadow cabinet, as shadow foreign secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, it’s the kind of story that sticks in voters’ minds. If she fancies becoming Labour leader some day, she’ll need to dispel any notion that she’s unpatriotic or a snob. But how should she go about it?

One way, I suppose, is to laugh at herself. Yesterday she was invited to speak at a lunch held by the parliamentary press gallery. She swept into the room – only to find that her table had been engulfed in St George’s bunting, and the wall behind her chair had been covered in St George’s flags.

As it happened, she took the joke very well. She honked with laughter, and happily posed for photos. For good measure, she told a man from The Sun that it’s “kind of one of the things about the World Cup, we do get lots of flags out” and “I think there’s nothing wrong with that… This is a time for us to celebrate… The World Cup is a great event…” On the other hand, though, it is possible to try a bit too hard. Which she did a moment later, when

‘It’s unlikely Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland will make the final, given that they’re not at the World Cup’

announcing an idea she’d had. The Government, she said with patriotic zeal, should declare a bank holiday if “any of the home nations” gets to the World Cup final. And what’s more, “we should do it every five years”.

Personally, I love the thought. On the whole, however, it seems a little unlikely that Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland will make the final, given that none of them are actually at the World Cup. And the tournament is held every four years, rather than five.

Then again, perhaps the proposal is only in its early stages. Hopefully she and her team will get together soon to work out the finer details. (“What if all four home nations get to the final? You know, if it’s England v Scotland v Northern Ireland v Wales? Do we give the country a whole week off?”)

Overall, though, Ms Thornberry’s campaign to win back flag-waving van drivers has made a promising start. It might have helped, though, if she hadn’t said to a northern correspondent: “I don’t know when I last visited the north of England” – and then turned to her aide and said: “Could you look it up?”

Still, at least the aide didn’t reply: “Yes, it’s the bit at the top of the map that used to have lots of coal mines.”

So that was something.