moir Good grief! A woman MP even ghastlier than Diane Abbott . . .

Questions have been raised about new shadow Defence secretary emily thornberry’s suitability for the post, but shut up everyone! she’s got this covered. on a BBC Forces tV interview this week, emily pointed out that, yah, her brother-inlaw is a general and there is a regiment in her constituency — so stand at ease, naysayers.

‘i actually have quite a lot more experience than people think i do,’ she said, in the kind of breathy, rinkle-tinkle voice that a duchess might use to instruct a chimney sweep. My good man, i once toasted a marshmallow by a fire, so i know what i am talking about.

Mrs thornberry also pointed out she was once made an honorary lieutenant colonel while working as a barrister on courts-martial, which must make the Army rank-and-file warm to her even more. this is i n addition to her acceptance of almost £50,000 from the controversial law firm Leigh Day, currently under investigation over its handling of claims against British soldiers who fought in iraq.

And in the week that north Korea possibly let off a hydrogen bomb, she’s still strident about being anti-trident and on the record as saying: ‘i don’t think being against nuclear weapons is that zany.’

no, what is really zany is emily being appointed to Defence in the first place, but there is no stopping Jeremy Corbyn now. the only question that remains about his revenge reshuffle is exactly who he is going to appoint to be Chief isis Liaison officer.

not so long ago, shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said that the new opposition would be a broad church, but the Cor-pews are now jam-packed with Cor-disciples, hanging on to his anorak toggles for all they are worth.

EMiLy thornBerry didn’t even vote for Corbyn, but she wasted no time in smarming up when he got into power, like a great bear shinning up a drainpipe smeared with honey. All of which is really depressing. For until now, i firmly believed that Diane Abbott was the ghastliest woman at Westminster, and that she was as bad as it could get in terms of female MPs giving us all a bad name. however, i fear that grisly emily might give Diane a run for her money.

After all, she is the MP who openly mocked working-class people with her snobbish white-van-man tweet back in 2014. (she said she’d ‘never seen anything like it’ after sharing a picture of a terrace house with three england flags and a white van parked in the drive.)

in real life she is Lady nugee, married to a rich lawyer with a small property empire that includes former social housing stock, which they rent out.

in a bid to emphasise her street cred, emily has pointed out that she lived on a council housing estate and failed her 11-plus, but that is not the whole story, seeing as her father was a united nations Assistant secretary General and her mother was a mayor.

yet thornberry has come to epitomise everything that is reprehensible about grand Labour politicians dictating to the little people whom they seem secretly to despise. Living in a £3 million house on the same posh street that was once home to tony Blair, she is a fully paid-up member of the north London liberal elite, the clique whose devotion to socialism ends at their own handsome, Georgian front doors.

Like Diane Abbott, who sent her son to private school, thornberry bucked the system by sending her children to a selective state school more than ten miles from the family home — excusing herself by saying that the school was originally in her borough.

such hypocrites! emily and Diane condemn other children to local state schools while ensuring their own offspring slip into superior establishments elsewhere when no one is looking. that’s because Labour rules and doctrines don’t apply to them.

it’s enough to make any true Leftwinger’s blood boil, but here she is, getting more powerful and high profile by the day. on her every television appearance and interview, emily likes to narrow her eyes like a Comanche chief scanning the horizon for muskets. i fear she thinks this makes her look wise and shrewd, although it tends to suggest nothing more than trapped wind.

Certainly, she always acts as if the sanctimonious platitudes that fall from her lips are pearls of wisdom cast before unwashed swine, and if you didn’t know she was once a human rights lawyer, then her supercilious manner must surely give it away. it’s all human rights, darling! however, the rise of someone like emily thornberry is a truly depressing development. After ed Miliband’s failure to connect with his party’s core voters and now Corbyn’s lurch to the Left, where is this all going?

some say that Labour have turned into a laughing stock, banished to the political wilderness for years to come.

But there is no comfort in this, certainly not for me. A government needs strong opposition to become strong in itself. the current fiasco is not good for the country and it’s not good for democracy.

And anything is better than someone like emily thornberry making an important defence decision — any decision — that might affect the future of the country. But hey, she’s got a relative in the Army, so it should be oK.