Beware Jezza’s dozy grandad look – it’s his secret weapon!

HOW very dare he? The natty editor of GQ magazine wrangled the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to be on his cover. And to endure a long grooming and photoshoot sesh in his office in Westminster. Then the same editor who paid a five-figure sum to David Cameron to write his biography – Dylan Jones i s a metrosexual who dresses strongly to the right – took to the airwaves not to promote his great coup but to diss his own December star in the lowest way imaginable.

‘When he actually turned up for the shoot, it was almost like he was being pushed around like a grandpa for the family Christmas photograph,’ Jones briefed the nation via Radio 4’s Today programme (a weekly audience of seven million influentials).

‘He wasn’t particularly aware of what was going on,’ he added, as if speaking of a someone drooling in front of Jeremy Kyle in a grim God’s waiting room of a care home.

Yes, Dylan Jones went on the radio to make damn sure that, even though he’d put JC on the cover of the smartest, most Establishment men’s mag in the world, this was no endorsement. It was a takedown.

Dylan. Dylan. You may have also called Jezza a ‘rock star’, but I’m afraid you’ve still had a nasty fall. You’re forgetting that treacly hit of yore, the song with the chorus, ‘Grandad, grandad… we love you!’

You may be a groovy metrosexual but you do not have your finger on the pulse of the nation. Corbyn IS a grandpa of 68 who collects not magazines but manhole covers, who makes jam and who toils on his allotment. And that’s why millions love him, and their own fathers and grandfathers, with their holey jerseys and allotments and mugs of tea, too.

Anyway, it’s not clever of anyone in public life these days to disparage ageing baby- boomers – not when by rights we should have reading glasses not chocolate at checkouts – by insinuating they are impotent, borderline demented, old has-beens. Even Dylan’s hero David Cameron (51) gets this and is devoting himself after politics to the fight against Alzheimer’s and the ‘world of darkness’ it brings.

You can’t knock grandparents. Normal folk who are not appearance- obsessed Peter Pans – ie most people outside London – are thrilled and proud when they become grandparents.

Like Angela Rayner MP, who grew up on a council estate in Stockport. She’s just become a granny (she tweeted #grangela) aged 37. Rayner calls herself a ‘gangsta granny’ who hasn’t ‘had time to crochet’ and was also pleased when Tory grandee Nicholas Soames congratulated her on her glamour. ‘I am not going to have any problem with being called glam-ma,’ she said.

Even Margaret Thatcher – by no stretch ‘normal’ – burst with pride when it happened to her, regally announcing: ‘ We are a grandmother.’ It is an achievement, not an Achilles heel.

Dylan Jones also clearly thought he was twisting the knife when he revealed the Labour leader couldn’t name his business adviser or a book or film he’d just read or seen, as if such amnesia was inevitable with the march of time.

Again, a fail. To most of us, that was sympathetic, relatable! Look at my dad, 77, a grandfather of 13 (I think, I’ve lost count) who’s Down Under in the jungle.

DAD’S living it large with a bunch of people he didn’t know from Adam before he went to Oz (not even Ant and Dec), among them a world-famous boxer called Amir Khan (who doesn’t know we’ve ever had a woman Prime Minister, let alone two). He seems to be managing OK, gagging on disgusting smoothies, chomping on testicles, being buried in bugs. My father is even having sparring bouts with Khan and, as a result of all this, I am now not known as Boris’s sister but ‘Stanley’s daughter’.

The fact we are living so long has scattered the cards in the air. Some say it’s going to be the financial equivalent of climate change. The normal sequencing of human existence – be born, learn, earn, retire, expire – has been scrambled.

On that basis, despite Dylan’s efforts, it’s perfectly possible, nay likely, that a grandpa will not just be in the jungle but in No 10 soon. Like it or not, grizzled Grandpa Jezza is where it’s at, bang on trend, not smoothychops Mr Jones.

PS I am already older than my mother and grandmother were when they became grannies; as I’ve said before, it’s all I have to look forward to.