Real life | 20 August 2015

If anyone wants to know why the Labour party is about to elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader then they should come and sit in my back garden in Balham.

I have just heard, while lying on a sun lounger, the most absurd and yet horribly revealing conversation between two neighbours talking to each other over the fence.

I think it is worth me giving a full transcript of the dialogue for posterity, so that history might understand why the main opposition party of the United Kingdom elected as its leader a man who signed a Commons motion looking forward to the day when an asteroid hits the earth and wipes out mankind.

It all started with the conversation catching my ear because one of the women was talking about her love of horse-riding. Both women, I must tell you, were middle class, highly educated and very well-to-do.

One of them was opining to the other that she used to be a keen rider, but had not been able to keep it up since moving to the city where she and her husband worked. She now had children and thought it would be wonderful if one day her family could move out of London to live somewhere nice in the countryside with a paddock where they might keep a pony for the kids.

Just an everyday, middle-of-the-road conversation, taking place between two middle-aged, middle-class aspirational mothers, sitting in the gardens of their fairly expensive properties in a south London suburb.

‘I used to be raaaahly into horse-riding. I even did some eventing,’ said the one woman to the other, in a posh voice. ‘Wow! How amaaazing!’ said the other. ‘Yes, but you know how life is? Things took over. I haven’t ridden for ages.