Corbyn is the de facto leader of the EU referendum’s Meh faction

The Labour leader appears to be addicted to his irrelevance in the Brexit debate

Corbyn appeared on comedy show, The Last Leg Friday, 10th June (Channel 4)

Is there something wrong, psychologically, with Jeremy Corbyn?

The question is frequently asked about leading politicians because they so often appear, to put it charitably, a little strange.

Mrs Thatcher is widely agreed to have succumbed to full blown megalomania in about 1988, Tony Blair seemed tragically riven by narcissistic personality disorder from the start, and tales of Gordon Brown’s eccentricities are well enough chronicled to need no reprising here. Donald Trump, of course, could busy a psychiatric convention for 30 years.

What distinguishes Corbyn from these and others who crave power is that he appears to be addicted to his own irrelevance.

With the referendum result in more mortifying doubt by the day, the Labour leader remains a staggeringly detached presence (if any presence at all) in the debate. Amid all the screeching hysteria, his tranquil, peacenik reticence strikes me as somehow more alarming than the deafening nastiness targeted at one another by the two sides.

Where democracy in the raw is supposed to be filthy, Corbyn comes across as a Howard Hughes type – a reclusive germophobe who is terrified of getting his hands dirty.

When finally he did come out of his hermit’s cave on Channel 4’s comedy chat show The Last Leg on Friday, it was among the more counterproductive in the dismal annals of politicians trying to use the telly, God bless ’em, to normalise themselves.

Corbyn’s take on being a jolly good sport saw him emerge from a Bentley wearing a black tie and tuxedo beneath a full length white fur coat. He was a few monstrously blingy rings and a flaming candelabra away from winning the coveted title Worst Liberace Tribute Act of All Time.

If the visual gag was built on him swatting away attacks for being scruffy, few viewers will have rushed off to A&E to have their sides stapled back in place. Nor was the ribcage repair kit required when Corbyn, asked to rate his passion for staying in the EU from one to 10, ponderously replied: “Seven. Seven and a half.”

It is at this point that words begin to fail. What in the name of sanity was he thinking when he outed himself as de facto leader of the referendum’s “meh” faction? Small wonder that 40 per cent of Labour supporters still have no idea which way their party wants them to vote. The leader hasn’t much clue himself.

It is fairly plain that Corbyn’s emotional attachment is, as before, to Brexit, and that he is nominally for Remain solely because his party’s preference demands it. Hence we find him trying to resolve the internal conflict by splitting difference with that uninterested “seven, seven and a half”.

When he ran for the leadership, Corbyn’s appeal was built on being that mythical beast, “a different politician”; someone who sticks rigidly to his principles, however out of vogue they may be. How better to ruin that reputation, and leave the idealistic young who most fervently supported him feeling betrayed, than by pretending for reasons of political expediency to support Remain? And in such a studiedly half-hearted manner that you assume he will be privately pleased if Brexit wins?

Until Friday’s comedic tour de force, he has secreted himself with tiny cliques of supporters rather than talking to the country via mass media. You’d have thought that someone with pretensions to replace the present Government with one of his own would have resisted the temptation to seek sanctuary among his fan club.

Perhaps even now it isn’t too late. This is the time for a man who tells us that he wants to shape the future to do everything that he can to shape the future. He is no longer a private citizen freed by a maverick backbench existence to follow his own path. He is the leader of a political movement devoted to keeping this country in Europe.

If he says he backs Remain, he must prove it by relentlessly going on TV and radio, and telling Labour voters at this 11th hour that although, like everyone else, he has severe reservations about the EU, he strongly believes their interests are best served by staying in it. The result may well turn on whether he does so. If not, and if Brexit wins by a slither, he will deserve to be held responsible for what a vast majority of the young people who elected him last September will regard as a catastrophe.

This is the wrong moment in Corbyn’s unlikely career to debut as a self-deprecating comic turn. Dementedly mistimed flippancy has a place of honour in Fawlty Towers, which he told The Last Leg was his favourite sitcom, but not here and now. Sitting on the sidelines in a flowing fur coat might work as a knowingly satirical modern art instillation, or even a dream sequence in a bad surrealist movie. It looks demented in the real world.

This is all-out destructive warfare with the clearest existential implications for the UK. It is an act of not only political suicide but certifiable lunacy for Jeremy Corbyn to continue excusing himself from battle in the guise of a conscientious objector.