Sketch: The European Union is anti-democratic aberration and that's why Jeremy Corbyn loves it

Forced into having to find a kind word for the EU, the Labour leader praised it for stopping the democratically elected Tories doing what they liked

Jeremy Corbyn speaks to state Labour's case for staying in the European Union (Getty Images)

In a room full of specially selected University of London students staringly lovingly on in their jeans and Converses, their adoring questions all pre-submitted, Jeremy Corbyn was in his safe space.

There were – trigger warning – some members of the media there, but don’t worry. There would only be time for a couple of questions from them, and anyone from Core Group Hostile had been no-platformed in advance.

With barely a factory, office, student union, wedding, birthday or Bar Mitzvah anywhere in the land yet to hear David Cameron's standard issue EU Referendum speech, this was to be, finally, Jeremy Corbyn's first speech on the matter.

Pat Glass, MP for Durham was on hand to introduce Alan Johnson to introduce Jeremy Corbyn, Johnson being, she said, “The man who will be heading up the Labour IN campaign.”

He has in fact been heading it up for the last four and a half months, since he officially launched it in on an empty concourse of an unopened Conference Centre in Birmingham, but Ms Glass can certainly be forgiven for not knowing about that. I didn’t either and I was there.

“I’m delighted to be here in Senate House,” Corbyn began, once the clapping had subsided, of which a chap in his mid fifties in John Lennon glasses, a scarf and a wide range of ‘No to TTIP’ badges had been joining in with particular enthusiasm. “Of course, this is where George Orwell based his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This building was the Ministry of Truth. Let us see.”

It was, in his defence, a clever way to begin a speech in support of the European Union, an institution he powerfully loathes and is well into his fifth decade of attacking.

“It’s perfectly possible to be critical and still remain a member,” he said, a noble sentiment he might wish to share with the Momentum activists currently hounding Labour councillors out of their seats.

“I’ve had a few problems with the direction the Labour Party has taken over the last few years, as some people may have noticed.” he continued. “I’ve led the Labour Party in a new direction, which I’m very happy about.” They laughed. They clapped. Most of the audience would have been too young to remember but yes, there had once been a time when the Labour Party tried to win elections.

There are those who have suggested Corbyn’s sudden support for the EU could be considered inconsistent, but that’s not the case. Yes, in the mid-1990s, he might have described it to a television interviewer as “a European bureaucracy totally unaccountable to anybody, [taking] power away from national parliaments”, but this is no bad thing.

Now, it is something to be celebrated. “The Tories would like to cut back on EU workplace rights if they could,” he said. He gave thanks to “regulations in Europe that have improved beaches and waterways and air pollution”, while the “Tory government have cut regulatory burdens on fracking and increased them on onshore wind”,

If it weren’t for the EU, the democratically elected Tories would be able to do whatever they bloody wanted. Where would we be without a European bureaucracy, totally unaccountable to anybody, taking power away from national parliaments?

How they loved it. It was unfortunate at the end, that a pre-approved question was – trigger warning again – interrupted by a heckler who turned out to be a member of Labour Leave, who had voted Tory in 2015 “to get a referendum” and had been creative with the truth on the event media accreditation so he could half pose as a cameraman entirely for the purposes of haranguing Jeremy.

“This is the kinder politics,” the Labour leader told him, as he tried his best to answer a pre-approved question from the head of the King’s College Labour Club.

He had his chance to make his point later, when the Core Group Hostile journalists surrounded him to listen to a five minute peroration on the perils of Europe, punctuated by Corbyn’s staff saying his name aloud and tapping it into their phones with as much menace as they could manage, all the while shouting “No one’s interested, No one’s interested.” You might like to say it was like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but that would be too obvious.