Get Kezia Dugdale out of the jungle before she ruins Labour’s electoral chances

Scotland is so pivotal to Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of power, and the parliamentary arithmetic is so finely balanced, that even something as banal as Dugdale jumping ship for a crack at reality TV might make the difference

Labour currently has only seven MPs in Scotland - and Kezia isn't helping the situation (PA)

As the clock ticks remorselessly towards 9pm tonight, when I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! returns, a question must be asked. Could Britain’s future rest on ensuing developments 12,000 miles away in Ant’n’Dec’s Aussie jungle?

The obvious answer is: no. Life may turn on a dime, but a country’s future cannot turn on how a bunch of celebs cope with the inventive cuisine and lavish indignities prepared for them by ITV.

That is the answer I’d have given a day ago. Then came the most shocking revelation of the kind since George Galloway entered the Big Brother House.

The last celeb to be unveiled was another Scot from the Labour movement. Like George, she may not remain so (it is rumoured she will join her MSP partner in the SNP). But until three months ago, Kezia Dugdale was leader of the Scottish Labour party.

In that capacity, she was on the wrong end of an Ant’n’Dec catchphrase back in June. “The public have voted,” Scotland banded together to tell her on 8 June, “and, Kezia … it isn’t you.”

Admittedly, Labour did better in Scotland than last time, though defending a single Westminster seat from the apocalypse of 2015, it could have hardly have done worse. Septupling its haul to seven MPs looks fine out of context. In the context of the Tories having 13, it looks awful. In the context of the virtually impossibility of Labour winning a majority without recovering its traditional dominance north of the border, it looks atrocious.

Scotland is so pivotal to Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of power, and the parliamentary arithmetic is so finely balanced, that even something as banal as Dugdale jumping ship for a crack at reality TV might make the difference.

The message she is sending Scottish voters is not helpful. Political leaders do not quit, whatever they say to the contrary, when they are optimistic. Her surprise resignation in August – the very month, by eeriest coincidence, when I’m A Celeb signs up the participants – seemed an admission that she expects the SNP stranglehold (weakened though it was in June) to continue at the expense of a real Labour revival.

Her official reason for quitting was that a terminally ill friend had taught her “how precious and short life [is], and never to waste a moment.” How true. No one could confuse sitting on a log for 14 hours a day, talking to that Hollyoaks guy about what Rebekah Vardy told Amir Khan when the woman from Corrie puked up the fish eyes, with wasting a moment of this short and precious life. How better to serve your constituents – Dugdale remains a Member of the Scottish Parliament – than by rerunning the flat back four vs three man defence debate with Denis Wise?

"You do have personal sacrifice – it is public service – but I do it for a reason,” she said on succeeding Jim Murphy (another inspired choice, as a rabidly Blairite teetotal vegan, to lead Scottish Labour) in 2015. Now we know which personal sacrifice she had in mind: listening to Stanley Johnson, Boris’ meganarcissist father, plumb the ocean bed of sub-sub-sub-sub-Wodehousian drivel.

In August, when Dugdale quit refusing to take press conference questions for reasons more apparent now than then, she insisted: “I remain in awe of all those party activists who devote their time to this movement without pay or reward.” Of course. Awesomely, she promises to forego “a portion” of her MSP pay while she’s cavorting in glass tanks with baby crocodiles. If she hasn’t yet pledged to donate her reward from ITV (probably around £100,000) to charity, she’s probably saving the announcement for a discussion about altruism during a supper of lightly seared marsupial anus.

If she can’t find any thrillingly novel justifications for abandoning the voters of Lothian, one old chestnut she could roast on the camp fire is: “By coming on this show, I really feel I can reach so many more people with my ideas”. Quite right. If there’s one thing ITV would never edit out of a prime time ratings banker, it’s a politician sharing her political philosophy with soap stars and lairy little bleeders who played for Chelsea when they were crap.

So all the luck in the world to her, even if I won’t be voting to keep her there myself. Apart from the Independent’s loyalties being with our colleague Shappi Khorsandi, no good can come from Dugdale’s presence.

It’s one thing for a deranged self-publicist like Nadine Dorries, with less chance of a front bench career than inheriting the Chrysanthemum throne to become Empress of Japan, to choose I’m A Celeb over doing her job.

It’s quite another to make the choice as a front line politician in a part of the country that might decide who rules Britain in an election that could come at any moment. If the Westminster maths remains as tight as last time, irritatingly even a tiny proportion of Scottish voters could cost Labour the few seats that make the difference between being able and unable to form a government.

So if ITV reveals unusual voting patterns in the Holyrood vicinity, check the hands of Richard Leonard. In a cute metaphor for the reality tellyfication of politics, his election as Labour’s new leader in Scotland was overshadowed yesterday by the news about his predecessor. If the Corbyn-leaning Yorkshireman suddenly develops arthritis in his fingers, put that down to a personal self-sacrifice we can all get behind.

The advice, unless you happen to be a Tory, is to join him in ensuring that Kezia Dugdale’s jungle idyll is as short and anonymous as possible. Get her out of there before she has the chance to alter the course of political history.