But the cadaverous Corbyn is already being eclipsed by the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who also hails from the far Left, but is well aware of what is needed to woo middle-class voters who have much to lose by penal taxation and are deterred by socialist slogans. The fact that Khan has associated himself with 57 varieties of Islamist extremist does not preclude him from following Tony Blair’s electoral playbook. It may be hard to imagine Jeremy Corbyn entering Downing Street as Britain’s first Marxist Prime Minister; it is not at all hard to imagine Sadiq Khan there as our first Muslim one. He has successfully rewritten the narrative of how he won the mayoralty: by a broad appeal to Londoners of all ethnic and religious stripes, defeating a vicious Islamophobic campaign by the Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, who highlighted Khan’s Islamist links. The truth is rather different. The Conservative vote held up well, falling by only 60,000 compared to Boris Johnson’s winning total of 970,000 in 2012. But Sadiq Khan hugely increased the Labour vote by more than quarter of a million to 1,150,000. Given the high turnout in certain districts, it is reasonable to conclude that Khan won mainly because London’s Muslims voted en bloc to elect their first mayor in any Western capital. Evidently Muslim voters were not deterred from supporting Khan by the fact that he had shared platforms with radical Islamists, represented them in court, or otherwise associated himself with them and their views. Once elected, Khan reassured his core supporters by picking a fight over Islam with Donald Trump, who hasn’t even held office yet. One may well agree with Khan’s view of Trump, probably the most hated man in the Muslim world, but should alienating a US presidential candidate really be the top priority for a new mayor of London?

More worrying still, the mayoral election coincided with the anti-Semitism scandal in the Labour Party. It was set off by the former London mayor and Labour national executive member Ken Livingstone who, by claiming that Hitler had colluded with Zionists and shared their goal of a Jewish state, deliberately stoked up hatred of Israel and smeared Jews by extension. The resulting outcry put pressure on Corbyn, whose views on Zionism are indistinguishable from Livingstone’s and who has shared platforms with Hamas and Hezbollah. The Labour Party announced an “independent” inquiry into anti-Semitism within its ranks, but Corbyn made sure that it was chaired by a human rights activist, Shami Chakrabarti, who is not only a party member but has no expertise in anti-Semitism and appears to want the scope of the inquiry to be broadened to include Islamophobia. The only Jew involved is an anti-Zionist academic. Sadiq Khan distanced himself from Livingstone’s incendiary remarks, but given that polls suggest that up to half the Muslim community holds anti-Semitic views, the row may well have helped get him elected. Once Khan was home and dry, he had himself photographed with the Chief Rabbi and attended a Holocaust memorial ceremony. The truth is that Corbyn, Livingstone and Khan — like the rest of the Left — are all implacably hostile to Israel. Given that for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism is part of their identity, the denial of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state inevitably puts the Left on a collision course not only with Israelis but also with the diaspora.