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Since the election, Jeremy Corbyn has been parading himself as prime-minister-in-waiting. ‘Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome,’ he tweeted this week, ‘especially after his attack on London’s Mayor and withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal.’ The message was clear: unlike ‘Theresa the appeaser’, Jeremy is willing and able to tell that climate change-denying Islamophobe across the water to get stuffed. Jez we can, Jez we can.

There may be another reason why Corbyn is glad to think that Trump might not come to these shores, and that’s because the more the British see of the dreaded Donald, the more they might recognise how much he and the Labour leader have in common. For Labour voters, the unpalatable truth is that the British equivalent of Trump is not Brexit, as everyone says: it’s Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn, 68, and Trump, 70, are both anti-establishment insurgents who have been married three times. They both like dictators and dislike Nato. They both have embarrassing pasts which should disqualify them from high office. When they were elected to lead their parties, Trump and Corbyn were both dismissed as jokes. Their emergence was seen as a sign that their parties had gone mad — but it turned out the electorate was just as mad, and the laughing stopped. Both men then got lucky: they stood against seemingly invincible women who took victory for granted and turned voters against them with their arrogance.

Until recently, the British prided ourselves on how sensible our politics was
compared to the populism ravaging so much of the developed world. Look, we said, Ukip is perishing; the BNP is all but dead. We’d never fall for a rabble-rouser like Trump. But this analysis missed a rather important point: Corbyn was the torchbearer of British populism, and his politics is staggeringly popular. He has increased Labour’s share of the vote by more than any other leader since Clement Attlee in 1945.