Jeremy Corbyn came straight out at PMQs today to demand the PM face him in televised election debates. Brows furrowed throughout the House at a proposition akin to a quadruple amputee breezily strolling up to Usain Bolt and going: “go on, I’ll give you a race, you chubby biped!”. Does anything faze this man? Lacking any sort of analytical or reasoning abilities? No problem. Not even really knowing how to correctly do up a necktie? Who cares?  Being as photogenic as a urine-stained tramp whisked out of the gutter and chucked into an oversized suit? “Meh! Debate me you wimp!”

One is reminded of the Black Knight, the great Monty Python character who responds to having his arm lopped off by a sword with insouciance: “tis but a flesh wound!”, he cries. Despite being torn to shreds in the chamber every single Wednesday, the Labour leader still refuses to call it a day, instead demanding more punishment. And not just from the PM, but from all the other party leaders too. At the same time. And in an arena broadcast live to the nation: sort of like a political snuff movie. Think Gladiator, but instead of Russell Crowe they chuck a demented old senator into the pit and then beam it to every corner of the Roman Empire at tea-time. “I am Jezzimus Momentus Cor-” Thwack! Wow, that was quick, dead already.

Perhaps, like his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-Jeremy is completely oblivious to all this, holed up in his allotment and fed a steady supply of propaganda from his minions. Diane Abbott pops in occasionally to inform him that he is three thousand percent up in the polls, only to have an ecstatic Jeremy reply “that’s nothing: my five year agrarian reforms have increased cucumber production by six thousand percent in this patch of the allotment alone: victory will be ours Comrade!” Then again, maybe he does know the gig is up. Maybe some days he sits in his lettuce patch and daydreams about what he’ll be doing in a year: “Riding my shiny new bike undisturbed to Stop the War meetings in my shell suit, that would be nice, and really letting loose. A man can dream, a man can dream”.

The irony of all this was of course not lost on the PM, who responded to his increasingly demented calls for a televised debate on more than one occasion with laughter and a quizzically raised brow as if to say: “we are literally debating right now you utter madman”. She later went a bit easier on him and, matron-like, gave him his medicine: “I know that it has taken the right honorable Gentleman a little time to get the hang of Prime Minister’s questions”, intoned the PM concernedly,  “but he stands up week in, week out and asks me questions and I respond to those questions”. “Ahhhh so that’s how it works”, Jeremy Corbyn thought to himself.

Sharper minds behind Corbyn were however aware that all this would be soon coming to an end. So up rose twelve-year-old-boy-in-drag Yvette Cooper to inquire – in her best hormonal schoolmarm – why the PM “was calling an election because Parliament was blocking Brexit, but three-quarters of MPs and two-thirds of the Lords voted for Article 50, so that’s not true, is it?”. Naturally the political whizzkid omitted the time the Bill was amended and sent back from the Lords. No matter, the Labour benches cheered her ecstatically. Here she stood, their hero: Yvette, wife of Glitterballs, patron saint of Tim Henman haircuts, defender of the downtrodden and persecuted everywhere. Continuing her tirade, she screamed at the PM: “She wants us to believe that she is a woman of her word, but isn’t the truth, that we cannot believe a single word she says?” Which reminds me, how are the child refugees you took in getting on, Yvette?