What do you call the man who defined that socialist government for us? And who phoned En Contacto Con Maduro in 2014 to fawn on-air about President Maduro’s great achievements? Who has subsequently had nothing to say, as Venezuela reaches the endpoint of all seriously socialist states (increasingly random and increasingly brutal acts of violence; hopelessness; starvation)? History has given us a name for Jeremy Corbyn: “useful idiot”.

Silence from the useful idiot about Venezuela’s predicable and predicted calamities. Instead we must turn to the lesser fleas, who hop self-importantly around the strangely immobile features of British socialism; not so much the useful idiots, as the useless ones, injecting their own toxins into socialism’s impassive godhead and bringing the rest of us out in a nasty rash.