Corbyn the parasite

It’s a long way from Westminster to the banks of the Zambesi. But last week, for me, they linked up. I was lolling on my bed in the Sausage Tree Safari Camp, writing up notes for a travel article. Then a single, iridescent, rather delicate green wasp buzzed into my room and settled on my mosquito net. I folded my laptop. Looked at the wasp. And I got a sudden vision of Jeremy Corbyn and the fate of the Labour party.

To explain. The reason I was able to identify the wasp so quickly — and assure myself that it was no threat — is because this wasp is one of the 200,000 species of wasp which are parasitic. And I once spent a year researching parasites for a thriller (my conceit was that religion might be a cerebral parasite).

If I’m honest, the researching of the book was more fun than the writing. Because parasites are gruesomely fascinating — from the tongue-eating louse, which drills into fishes through their gills and physically replaces the tongue, to toxoplasmosis, which apparently infects half of humanity, might cause eccentricity in women who keep cats, and is thus arguably responsible for the witch-burning craze of the 16th and 17th centuries.

It was the bizarre ‘mindbending’ parasites such as toxoplasmosis — apparently able to subvert instincts and direct thoughts — which intrigued me the most. Which brings us to the emerald jewel wasp. And Labour.

To hear the echoes of Labour’s death rattle in the sultry buzz of the jewel wasp — Ampulex compressa — you have to know more about its reproductive cycle. First researched in the 1940s, and even now not entirely understood, it is quite something.