SO implacable has been the onslaught against Jeremy Corbyn by the right and so deep its hatred of him that you wonder if a form of madness has not now befallen it. Even back in 2015 when thoughts of Mr Corbyn becoming leader of the UK Labour Party began seriously to form it was noticeable that the criticism of him carried a visceral, almost feral intensity.

You wondered too at the curious dissonance at play amongst the more rabid of the right-wing commentators. If Mr Corbyn was as hopeless a politician as they all assured us he was and such a gift to the Conservatives, why the need to disparage him so venomously and so personally?

Surely they ought to have been hanging out the bunting for him and toasting his good health in their seedy little Presidents Clubs? It was as if they had all suddenly been confronted with something primeval; something that was spoken of in hushed tones and only after the men had retired to the parlour for brandy and cigars and the ladies had been dispatched to the kitchen. Hadn’t they all been assured that the old spectre had been laid, never again to stalk the nightmares of capitalists and their free market wet dreams? Hadn’t they been assured that socialism had been safely deactivated by nice Mr Kinnock and nice Mr Blair and their docile successors Mr Brown and the other one with the frightened smile?

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Three years after his landslide victory in the Labour leadership election Mr Corbyn has never looked stronger and the forces ranged against him have never seemed more desperate and more sinister. He has overcome several failed plots from within his own party hatched by unprincipled Labour careerists who sought the easy parliamentary life. In this they would agree never to back anything that might upset the accepted order in return for ermine and some gilded position in the City. I give you their Lordships and Barons Darling, Robertson, Foulkes and the afore-mentioned Mr Brown.

In the 2017 general election I witnessed on a daily basis the subtle and pernicious bias deployed by the BBC to undermine Mr Corbyn and his message. The state broadcaster had decided that Labour’s manifesto was “red in tooth and claw” and that Mr Corbyn was an “insurgent” rather than merely the challenger. Then the tide began to turn and at last we understood why the establishment and the elites at its heart had all been howling at the moon at the mere mention of Mr Corbyn’s name.

He had begun to deliver a message about being for the many and not the few and it was beginning to resonate across generations and classes. “The people who run Britain have taken this country for a ride. They’ve rigged the economy and business to line the pockets of their friends. They’ve slashed taxes for the richest and cut pay and vital services for the rest. They’ve sold off our country’s assets and handed over public services to be built by tax-dodgers. The system simply doesn’t work for most people.”

Many of those people duly voted for him. Who knows what might have happened if the backstabbers in his own party (including most of its Scottish chiefs) had been loyal to him instead of selling title-tattle for the price of a lunch on the expense account of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

The latest attempt to smear Mr Corbyn is the most hideously desperate yet. Almost as soon as the story that he was a Czech spy began to run it unravelled as former Eastern Bloc intelligence sources heaped ridicule on it. Yet it was taken up with some enthusiasm by senior Conservatives anxious to locate any safe port amidst their Brexit chaos. The story was so ridiculous that support for Mr Corbyn began to pour in from unlikely sources topped off by a masterclass in political interrogation by Andrew Neil of the hapless Brexit Minister, Steve Baker.

Predictably, they came again for Mr Corbyn yesterday over his pledge to make the City of London a servant of industry. The Labour leader had also pledged to stand up to Big Money and be the first prime minister in 40 years to do so. “There can be no rebalancing of our distorted, sluggish and unequal economy without taking on the unfettered power of finance: its dominance over industry, obvious and destructive; its control of politics, pernicious and undemocratic.”

This led to the claim by one City financier that Mr Corbyn was seeking to “turn London into the last Soviet-era capital west of Pyong-yang”. Well, he would wouldn’t he?

The timing of Mr Corbyn’s challenge to the banks was impeccable. On the same day Westminster’s Treasury Select Committee issued a report which laid bare the rotten and greedy heart of the Royal Bank of Scotland in its attitude to small business owners as it tried desperately to recover from its role in bringing the economy to its knees in 2008. In a six-year period from then it tried to stitch up almost 6,000 small businesses which had been duped into thinking that the bank was reaching out to help them through its Global Restructuring Group. That’s ‘help’ in the great white shark sense of the word.

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These firms, their employees; their families and their futures were simply regarded as easy prey by RBS executives. Was anyone really surprised? No convictions had followed the banks’ role in the collapse of the economy and still the huge bonuses kept rolling in. Perhaps there comes a point when you feel you are so far above the law that you can continue to behave with impunity to those whom you consider to be easy targets.

The hard right in this country, (a phrase which post-Brexit has come to define the mainstream of the Conservative Party), is behaving like a hooded vigilante group. It is aided by those sections of the state broadcaster run by old Oxbridge chums and the tax-avoiding owners of the right-wing press as it seeks to portray socialism as the biggest danger to the security of the realm and to its prosperity.

Yet it has been from among the ranks of the privileged elite that the UK’s enemies, ranging from the Nazis to the KGB, have found most encouragement. And it was these same anointed few who almost brought this country to its knees. Will they do it again if they feel their riches and power is imperilled? I’d bank on it.