Due

Nick Cohen has had little or no connection to the Left for almost the whole of the present century, which is most of my adult lifetime.

Already at The Spectator, a regular Telegraph gig beckons. With any luck, The Observer will now give his column to someone like Neil Clark. 

Or, if it keeps him on, then it ought to stop pretending to be anything other than an organ of High Whiggery in all its Gladstonian military adventurism for the sake of big capital.

That was, of course, how it started. It and The Guardian are Liberal papers, with a capital L. They always have been, and they always will be. The Observer is the senior paper of Anglophone Liberalism.

Cohen need not bother closing the door on the way out, because plenty of other people are making use of it in the other direction.

Jeremy Corbyn became Leader a mere five days ago. Since then, 40,00 – forty thousand – people have joined the Labour Party.

Most of them will have parted with £46:50 for the privilege, since it is £21:50 more expensive to join the Labour Party than to join the Conservative Party. That is practically double.

There is a reduced rate of £23:50, but that is mostly for people who are already paying the political levy through their trade unions, so it represents no overall saving.

Note that the reduced rate to join Labour is only £1:50 lower than the full rate to join the Conservatives, and is for the convenience of those who are in any case making up the difference elsewhere.

Yes, any organisation that costs as good as fifty quid to join is making it perfectly clear whom it wants as a member, and whom it does not want. But of that, another time.

For now, consider that, if the current trend lasted another couple of days, then the number of new members of the Labour Party under Corbyn would have exceeded the total number of members of UKIP, which was last published as 47,000, although that was before the 50 per cent reduction in UKIP's already meagre Commons representation.

A few more days at the same rate of growth, which is less likely but by no means impossible, and the people who had joined Labour specifically because of Corbyn would be larger than the total membership (61,456), this time published after the General Election meltdown, of the party the then Leader of which was the Deputy Prime Minister only five months ago.

At those prices, the new recruits are going to be at every meeting. They are going to be pounding the pavements. Many a figure who has been drawing councillors' allowances for 20, 30 and even 40 years in order to act as an unpaid consultant to property developers, will be in for a very rude awakening.

And the boundary changes with which the Government is determined to press ahead, despite having won without them, will mean that every Commons seat is going to be a new seat, necessitating the activation of the selection process everywhere, without any exception.

Jez We Did, and Jez We Can again.